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Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure....that wept, sighed, trembled.
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Hear more often things than beings
the voice of the fire listening,
hear the voice of the water.
Hear in the wind
the bushes sobbing,
it is the sigh of our forebears.
Those who are dead are never gone....
they are in the tree that rustles...
they are in the water that sleeps...
the dead are not dead.
Those who are dead are never wrong,
they are in the breast of the woman,
they are in the child who is wailing
and in the firebrand that flames.
The preceding poem, by the Senegambian poet Birago Diop, appears in Jahnheinz Jahn's famous study of neo-African culture, Muntu, published in English in 1961 (108). The poem, like the study itself, demonstrates the predominantly spiritual nature of West African culture's belief in nommo, the magic power of the word to call things into being, to give life to things through the unity of word, water, seed, and blood. Within African philosophy, argues Jahn, muntu is a category of existence that includes human beings, both living and dead, who exercise, like the poet above, the efficacy of the word in bringing all things to life.(1) The sacred act of naming is integral to becoming muntu, such that babies who die before they have been given a name are not even mourned, because they are kintu, that category of things that only the power of nommo can restore and animate, make actual and real.(2) While Diop's "voice" of the fire and water and the "sobbing" of the bushes might strike a Western reader as examples of the pathetic fallacy, these seeming personifications are, from a West African viewpoint, literal and performative. Similarly, "the sigh of our forebears" is not simply a tropic analogue to these sounds in nature: they are unified and made real, in West African thought, through the power of the poet's magic word, through nommo. Just as things in nature and human life find a forceful unity through the word, so do the dead find life in the newly born: this is the spiritually unified quality of African art and thought that Jahn's...