In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava

pleasurable, and ravishing these sounds must have seemed to their priggish ears. And similar aspersions were cast on Afro-Latin music. The term diablo was in fact a synonym for the mambo. (The word “mambo” derives from Congo religion, where it referred to the concluding chants of a spirit-possession ceremony.) In its secular incarnations, mambo came to mean the final section of a musical or dance performance, when the artist was given free rein to improvise and let loose with an “anarchy in tempo,” a la diabla.¹⁶ In these moments the artist was permitted to be unruly, excessive, and profligate in his flow and tempo, as if he, too, were suddenly possessed by wild spirits. Gustavo Perez Firmat writes, “The name connotes excess, outrageousness, lack of decorum. A mambo mouth is a loud mouth, someone with a loose tongue, someone who doesn’t abide by rules of propriety. The mambo is nothing if not uncouth, improper, its musical improprieties sometimes even bordering on the improperio, the vulgar or offensive outburst.”¹⁷

      In the spirit of these uncouth flurries of emotion, I explore some of the creative possibilities of the music of the profane in this study. One might say that the consideration of soul in this book follows the passage from the sanctified soul of gospel music to the devil’s music of the blues, R & B, soul, and rap, the route from sacred to profane manifestations. The specific genre “soul music” (a term that originated in the late 1950s along with terms like “soul brother” and “soul food”) is an example of the bridge between the two: it was seeded by gospel music but watered and fertilized by the brazen sexual electricity of the blues and R & B.¹⁸ The grooves of Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Jackie Wilson, and Otis Redding muddied the stylistic, harmonic, and lyrical distinctions between gospel and R & B, making for soul sermons that were unlike anything heard before. These artists were, in the words of bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, “crying sanctified.”¹⁹

      Although I defend this crossroads, it should be clear that I am not arguing that we skirt or run around modernity. While I want to preserve classic Jewish and Christian beliefs on the soul, I also contend that the modern milieu of secularism enabled a degree of creative freedom and artistic inventiveness on this theme, specifically in its forbearing of cultural and musical revelries outside the churches, in the rowdy, disorderly, and bawdy underground of society, in juke joints, chitlin’ circuits, and the like. The blues, R & B, funk, and hip-hop all have sacred influences and motifs, but they also challenge the monopoly of grace claimed by the churches and assume, á la Meister Eckhart, that one cannot muffle God and confine him to a church.²⁰ And the same holds for the literary and cultural creations of Ralph Ellison and Federico García Lorca, both of whom dress up their ideas of soul with a prodigal mixture of the sacred and profane. They surely would have conceded the intuition of John Keats when he defended the poet’s freedom in exploring the darkness as much as the light, the mean as much as the elevated: “What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [sic] poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one. . . . It enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be it foul and fair, high and low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.”²¹

      On the matter of soul, then, I follow the intuitions of poets and mystics in their daring exploration of the fair and foul, high and low, light and shade, shocking as it might be for the virtuous philosopher or theologian. This Keatsian formulation, it seems to me, has inspired a wide variety of contemporary hip-hop intellectuals, such as Michael Dyson, Cornel West, Anthony Pinn, Imani Perry, Adilifu Nama, Paul Gilroy, and Adam Bradley, as well as numerous others. “Historically,” Paul Gilroy writes, “black political culture’s most powerful notions of agency have been figured through the sacred. They can also get figured through the profane, and there, a different idea of worldly redemption can be observed. Both of these possibilities come together for me in the traditions of musical performance that culminates in hip hop.”²² Or take another example, from Adilifu Nama: “To hip hop’s credit, this sensibility has lessened the artificial and often idealized separations between ‘the good, bad, and ugly’ aspects of the black and brown experience. Consequently, stringent and bifurcated notions of the sacred and profane have been jettisoned for a messy and fluid assessment of right and wrong.”²³ In my exploration of the black and brown conceptions of soul, I thus follow the lead of these scholars but with a special focus on the crossroads between African American and Latin traditions in religion, literature, and music. Since Christianity proved decisive in the understanding of soul in these traditions, the yeast that allowed it to rise, I begin my study with the problem of definition, specifically how the idea of the soul was named and interpreted in Christian thought, before moving on to the profane unfolding of soul.

      THEOLOGICAL SOUL: IN PLACE OF THE MODERN SELF

      Soul as Imago Dei, Icon of Divine Presence and Transcendence

      To distinguish theological versions of soul from the modern self, I begin with the fundamental assumption that the human soul is made in the image of God, that it is an icon of both divine presence and transcendence. By virtue of an analogical likeness (similarity in difference), the soul participates in the beauty and goodness of God, though it remains infinitely other than God, weighed down by its heavy mortal coil. By the force of the soul’s temporal condition, the soul is divided and dispersed, conflicted and distracted, twisted and distorted (distentio animi in Augustine’s terms), but it forever remains an image of God, shot through with beauty, wild with divinity, the imago Dei distorted but not destroyed. The soul may be, as William Butler Yeats says about the human heart, a “foul rag and bone shop,” but it still participates in the splendor of divine infinity and reflects the charged grandeur of God, the deep down otherness of God.²⁴

      So yes, the soul is an icon of divine presence, of the grace that fills and yet exceeds the soul. Insofar as the soul mirrors the divine in its infinite mystery and resplendence, however, it also shares in the nocturnal depths of God; the soul is also an icon of divine transcendence. While the soul is holy like God, sacred and precious, of infinite worth and dignity (a fact that was revolutionary for slaves throughout the Americas), it is also shrouded by a cloud of unknowing like the G-d of Exodus. Unlike idolatrous portraits of the self, which leave no room for the Other and crowd out the presence of wonder, the soul is an icon of the Other, a portrait that is filled with light and shade like a chiaroscuro painting of the Renaissance. In the space of a unique singular person, the soul is an aura or trace of the infinite.²⁵

      In Gregory of Nyssa’s portrait of the soul, for example, the metaphor of icon is explicitly invoked: “The icon is perfectly an icon only so long as it is missing nothing of what is known in the archetype. Now, since incomprehensibility of essence is found in what we see in the divine nature, it must necessarily be that every icon keeps in it too a likeness with its archetype.”²⁶ Since the soul is an icon of divine incomprehensibility, the argument goes, the soul shares in this incomprehensibility and formlessness, in that which is without shape or semblance. The soul resembles “nothing”; it is denuded of all graven images, indeterminate and strange. What pertains to God—namelessness—also pertains to humankind. “Man remains unimaginable,” writes Jean-Luc Marion, “since formed in the image of He who admits none, incomprehensible because formed in the likeness of He who admits no comprehension.”²⁷

      Augustine’s consideration of the conundrum of memory only deepens this via negativa of theological anthropology. As he wanders through the hinterlands of the human psyche, his language gropes for metaphors and images that intensify, rather than eliminate, our perplexity and surprise. For Augustine, to put it plainly, the soul is an enigma, and the human person is an “immense abyss.”²⁸ In his winding, circuitous path into the soul, Augustine never discovers an unchanging ground of identity or any essence of subjectivity in the center of the soul’s labyrinth. If anything, his discovery entails the dizzying, vertiginous realization of an infinite panorama within, one whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. As for self-knowledge, he can only concede that he knows that he is, but not what he is; his existence is not in doubt, but his essence confounds him enough for him to say that he has become a great question to himself.²⁹ When considering the great mysteries of memory in particular, he tells us that he is suddenly lost in astonishment, and a great stupor seizes him.³⁰ Like any poet addressing