The Ambivalence of Pilgrimage in Marilyn Nelson’s
Cachoeira Tales
Todd Edmondson
REA: A Journal of Religion, Education and the Arts, Issue 6, 2009, http://rea.materdei.ie/
As an icon of the religious life, the pilgrim has always been a liminal figure, not
to mention an ambivalent one.
Pilgrims maintain a powerful grasp on the
spiritual imagination, primarily because of the way they move through the world,
neither divorcing themselves from the mundane, nor wholly immersing
themselves in the temporal-spatial realm of a this-worldly present. Rather, by
simultaneously undertaking a journey toward God and a journey toward some
geographically concrete destination, pilgrims occupy a border space between this
world and another.
They embody and enact the conversational interplay
between the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the immanent, and in
this way come to represent in their vocation a sacramental response toward the
world.
As artists who push language to its limits, or who explore new literary
worlds in search of truth and meaning, poets are often pilgrims in their own
right. While Geoffrey Chaucer gave the English-speaking world its most famous
example of the poetry of pilgrimage in his Canterbury Tales, other poets, from
William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Denise Levertov and Wendell
Berry, have followed suit, evincing a holy wonder toward creation and
demonstrating in their works the affinity that exists between the practice of
pilgrimage and the work of poetry. The best of these poets, like Chaucer, exhibit
a playful approach to poetic introspection that belies the sacredness of their
pursuits. Marilyn Nelson is such a poet and such a pilgrim. Her work in volumes
such as For the Body, The Homeplace, Magnificat, and most recently, The
Cachoeira Tales, is laden with religious conviction, as she examines subjects like
family, love,
history, justice, and nature, creating a body of work that
encompasses many of the „big questions‟ that humans have always aspired to
ask. Her experiences as an African-American and a woman have shaped her
approach to handling these questions.
But so have her experiences as a
traveler. As the child of an air force officer, as a student activist, and as a young
woman doing missionary work under the auspices of the Lutheran Church,
Nelson has covered a lot of ground in her lifetime. In her engagement with
some of life‟s biggest issues, therefore, she has often presented herself as a
poetic pilgrim on a quest for meaning.
At the same time, her courage in
addressing themes of great import is matched by an underlying playfulness, or
even a subtle irreverence, that constantly challenges attempts to figure her work
out, or to limit it. Even as readers might want to question her, she beats them
to the punch.
ponderous.
What results is poetry that may be weighty but is never
It is a poetry that is just as much about the journey as the
destination, a poetry that is just as much about the process of discovery as it is
about any truth waiting for her at the end. It is an embodied, and therefore an
ambivalent, poetry. It is a poetry that thrives on shocking juxtaposition and on
underlying tensions—a poetry of pilgrimage.
For Nelson, the key to establishing such a voice seems to be her skill - a
skill well suited to the practice of pilgrimage - for bringing divergent elements
within various traditions into conversation with one another and letting them
have it out. Rather than forcibly or artificially trying to unify these disparate
themes and perspectives, Nelson allows them to coexist and mingle freely, and
invites her readers to wonder at the results.
Her poems thus represent the
complexities of tradition by allowing uneasy tensions to stand together in a
coalescence that may not always be tidy, but which is certainly revelatory.
Instead of framing the religious nature of her work with skepticism, the constant
presence of doubt only affirms her role as a pilgrim. Indeed, she stands in a
long line of religious wanderers who have more questions than answers, and
2
whose relationship to faith, truth, and tradition has historically been ambiguous.
It is in this context that I will examine Nelson‟s poetry. After looking briefly at
some examples of playful ambivalence and purposeful juxtaposition between the
sacred and the profane in her earlier work, I will locate The Cachoeira Tales both
within the continuum of her poetry and within the tradition of pilgrimage,
specifically Christian pilgrimage. While a brief overview will be inadequate for
engaging deeply with this traditional discipline, it should help to illuminate some
of the tensions and ambiguities that have defined this Christian practice for
nearly two thousand years, and which have played an equally prominent role in
shaping Nelson‟s poetry. I will examine some of the ways in which the poems in
Nelson‟s Cachoeira Tales enter into dialogue with historical pilgrimage, and
finally, how these poems challenge the tradition to present something new.
Nelson‟s
practice
of
engaging
traditional
subject
matter
while
simultaneously creating surprising combinations of images and poetic narratives
consistently reminds her readers (and most likely, the poet herself) of literature‟s
ability to defy expectations. This characteristic has helped to define her work for
more than thirty years. Not content to rehearse ad infinitum time-worn points of
view, she has long evinced a skill for teasing out contradictions within
longstanding perspectives. Thus, a poem like „Old Bibles,‟ from For the Body,
balances comfortable or nostalgic images of „Old Bibles, with pages missing/or
scribbled by children/and black covers chewed by puppies,‟ that the speaker
can‟t bear to throw away, with the unexpected idea that Bibles „maybe have
souls/like little birds fluttering/over the dump/when the wind blows their pages‟
(Nelson 1978, 48).
In a later poem from the same volume, „Baptizing the
Penguins,‟ she places a familiar Christian ritual in a decidedly unfamiliar context:
„formal penguins/bowing/as they bless the saint…they are white/they are/an
army of saints/with fish dreams‟ (Nelson 1978, 61-62).
A later collection, 1990‟s The Homeplace, combines poetry, genealogy,
and religious devotion. Nelson borrows stories from her own family history and
presents them in word-pictures taken from the gospel of Luke, so that aunts and
3
uncles from her own family tree mingle with angels, shepherds, and the virgin
mother.
In „Aunt Annie‟s Prayer,‟ she takes the ancient, Lukan story of the
prophetess Anna, among those who saw the infant Jesus on the day of his
presentation in the temple at Jerusalem, and uses it as an opportunity to explore
the modern history of her own people:
As you shared our enslavement, Lord,
through your son Jesus:
when we were heartdead;
when we were woebegotten, bleeding, and whipped:
Be with us again (Nelson 1990, 29).
In this poem, as in others contained in this volume, Nelson juxtaposes the
language and the concerns of first-century Israel with those of twentieth-century
African-Americans, without drawing any hard and fast distinctions between the
two.
Rather than resolving any differences or tensions between the two
contexts, she allows them to stand. She thereby creates a liminal poetry, striking
a balance between the personal and the transcendent, and inviting her readers
to join her as she finds her voice somewhere in that tenuous balance.
In her 1994 volume, Magnificat, Nelson once again uses imagery from
Luke‟s gospel, this time to narrate a journey to a monastery to visit a man with
whom she had once been in love, before he left the secular world in favor of the
cloister and became „Abba Jacob‟. By playing with both romantic and religious
narratives, Nelson presents in Magnificat a collection of Psalms like „Gloria,‟ which
are at the same time hymns of adoration and love songs to the ordinary, in
which someone can sing
I praise your name, Lord,
for postal efficiency.
By your gracious hand
Mail is forwarded
to the correct local address.
I praise you,
Lord of surprise and elation,
For a telegraph message
of nine perfect words (Nelson 1994, 20).
4
Throughout this volume, Nelson creates a context of religious devotion in which
baseball caps „remind us to live‟ (Nelson 1994, 36), „miracles happen all the time‟
(Nelson 1994, 26), and the „highest spiritual virtue‟ is „Humor,‟ but „not seriously,
of course‟ (Nelson 1994, 28).
The effect is neither wholly transcendent nor
wholly mundane, but some wonderful mixture of the two. One critic has said of
Nelson‟s work that „her light and heavy elements often sap each other‟ (Tracy
2006, 165). While that danger is always there, Nelson nonetheless seems to
balance the two in an effective, albeit playful, way.
Thus, the juxtapositions revealed in Nelson‟s work, of the familiar and the
surprising, the ancient and modern, the sacred and the profane, simultaneously
celebrate the traditions we share and invite the reader to challenge any
preconceptions as to what tradition is all about. These are concerns that are not
unfamiliar to the practice of pilgrimage, and they are perhaps most evident in
2005‟s The Cachoeira Tales.
This volume about a postmodern pilgrimage of the
black diaspora is a collection of poems that displays a complex understanding of
the traditional practice of Christian pilgrimage, that belongs neither to the
ancient way of undertaking this discipline, nor to a later, modern perspective.
Rather, Nelson brings ancient and modern points of view together, creating a
literature of pilgrimage that belongs to its time, a new millennium in which the
faithful are responding to the strangeness of the contemporary world not by
retreating into the past, or by fleeing the realities of this world, but by bringing
the religious discourse of the past into conversation with a very tangible present
and listening to what both might have to say.
The collection‟s opening lines, „When April rains had drenched the root/of
what March headlines had foreseen as drought‟ (Nelson 2005, 11) selfconsciously emulate Geoffrey Chaucer‟s „Whan that Aprille with his shoures
sote/the droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote‟ (Chaucer 1960, 1). By using
the late fourteenth-century‟s Canterbury Tales as a starting point for this volume,
Nelson tackles both formal and thematic traditions from the very beginning.
Formally, she employs techniques that might be unfamiliar to contemporary
5
readers accustomed to the free-verse lyric.
Her use of rhyming couplets in
iambic pentameter gives her work a centuries-old form, even as she narrates a
contemporary story. This formal re-working is appropriate for this volume, as
Nelson also adopts an ancient thematic concern, the religious practice of
pilgrimage, and adapts it to her modern purposes.
While pilgrimage is a discipline practiced by adherents of nearly every
major world religion, it is most closely associated in the West with the three
monotheistic, Abrahamic traditions—Judaism, Islam, and especially Christianity.
While Nelson‟s appropriation of Chaucer intimates that her own tales will come
from within the Christian tradition, it also hints that, like Chaucer, she will
maintain a playful stance toward that tradition. Indeed, the casual reader of
Nelson‟s poems might wonder if this is „religious‟ poetry at all. This is probably
fitting, as Christianity has always had an unsettled relationship to the discipline of
pilgrimage. In the early days of the Church, advocates and opponents of the
practice could both be found in abundance. Even prominent Church fathers like
Gregory of Nyssa and Jerome could be found to disagree on the significance and
validity of this practice. So while Gregory thought that pilgrimage posed a grave
moral danger to all those who would set off for a place like Jerusalem, a city full
of enough temptation to outweigh its spiritual import (Coleman and Elsner 1995,
80), Jerome would go on to praise, with little or no reservation, those who would
put themselves in a position to see with the eyes of faith, in the places where
they transpired, the holy events of the Christian salvation history (Coleman and
Elsner 1995, 82). As centuries passed, the critical posture of the pilgrim toward
the practice would only become more pronounced, especially as, in the Modern
world, accounts of secular journeys sought to supplant those of religious
pilgrimage accounts as the preferred mode of travel literature (Wethered 1947,
59). The Modern journey, even to a site like Jerusalem, came to represent a
demonstration of freedom, rather than an act of pious sacrifice (Tomasi 2002,
14), and Nelson, as a postmodern pilgrim, cannot shelve an awareness of this
perspective, but must come to terms with it in the course of her own pilgrimage.
6
While Nelson‟s work, and her questions, are very much her own, she
nevertheless stands within a tradition of ambivalence toward pilgrimage that
stretches back to the time of the Church‟s infancy. The poems included in The
Cachoeira Tales explore pilgrimage both from within a perspective of ancient
piety and from within a more modern tradition of cautious critique. Throughout
the work, Nelson self-consciously establishes herself as a poet/pilgrim by
exploring three elements of the pilgrim‟s journey that any religious seeker,
ancient or modern, would find familiar: holy places, holy relics, and the holy
community on the way. In this manner, Nelson reminds us of how the journey
of pilgrimage can invest three otherwise mundane realities - space, matter, and
people - with a sanctity that is at once a work of grace and a discovery hardwon.
Perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of the discipline of
pilgrimage, indeed, its very reason for existence, is the notion of holy or sacred
space.
Within the Christian tradition, the belief that certain spaces were
particularly holy became part of the popular faith. As Christians began to draw
connections between specific works of God and the location of their unfolding,
and between the deaths of the martyrs and the cities or towns in which they
died, Christianity began to acquire a sacred geography to complement its sacred
history (Markus 1990, 89). Churches sprang up around the graves of the saints,
providing fixed and permanent meeting places where the pious laity could
encounter the divine. In the early days of the pilgrimage tradition, the two most
significant pilgrimage sites were Jerusalem and Rome. Jerusalem was, of course,
important because of the events surrounding the death of Christ; Rome was a
place of particular interest because of its association with the martyrdoms of
Saints Peter and Paul, both of whom were traditionally executed in the seat of
the Empire.
Throughout the Middle Ages, even after the fall of Rome, as
Christianity spread and believers found themselves living thousands of miles from
the ancient pilgrimage sites, new sacred places continued to emerge, with
7
Santiago de Compostela in Spain and Canterbury in England becoming hugely
popular sites for the faithful.
When Marilyn Nelson decides to use her fellowship money to invite her
extended family on „some kind of pilgrimage‟ (Nelson 2005, 11), she faces the
same sort of choices that would have confronted pilgrims hundreds of years ago,
most significantly, where to go. While it is clear from the beginning that Nelson
and her companions will not be embarking on a trip to any of the traditional
Christian pilgrimage sites, this does not mean that this trip will not be a religious
experience. Just as Christian pilgrims sought out places of spiritual and historical
importance, Nelson also attests that she is seeking „some place sanctified by the
Negro soul‟ (Nelson 2005, 11).
After facing some of the same financial and
logistical concerns that have always plagued religious pilgrims (Southern 1953,
51), she settles on Bahia, a city in Salvador, Brazil, significant because of its
unique religious heritage - it was once the seat of Brazilian Catholicism (it was
once known as „Black Rome‟), it was „sacred to followers of Candomble‟ (Nelson
2005, 12) - and the city played an important role in the slave trade. This will be
a pilgrimage of the Black Diaspora, an opportunity for Nelson and her fellow
travelers to connect with their own troubled heritage.
Just as it would be
impossible to overestimate the role that the suffering of previous generations
played in the practice of ancient and Medieval pilgrimage - from sites related to
Christ‟s passion to the martyrdom of Thomas a‟ Becket in the Canterbury
Cathedral - so will suffering be significant for Nelson and her companions. In
much the same way that earlier Christian pilgrims journeyed to martyrs‟ graves,
Nelson and her companions would visit the site of oppression for thousands upon
thousands of unnamed martyrs of the New World‟s dark and bloody past.
In addition to investing particular places with sacredness, the historical
discipline of pilgrimage also attributes holiness to the material, physical stuff of
history, through its veneration of relics. A sixth-century guidebook to Jerusalem,
the Breviarus, listed for visitors to the holy city the spots where all the most
important relics could be found. These included the True Cross, the lance which
8
pierced Christ‟s side, the plate on which John the Baptist‟s head was carried, the
crown of thorns, and the actual rocks used in the stoning of Stephen, the first
Christian martyr (Coleman and Elsner 1995, 85). In the Middle Ages, holy relics,
especially those connected with the death of a saint, were a hot commodity in
churches, inspiring heated rivalry, widespread covetousness, and sometimes
brazen theft between parishes (Kee et. al. 1998, 199). In addition, enterprising
merchants in Jerusalem and elsewhere made a decent living off of hawking such
items as Jordan River water, earth from a sacred tomb, bracelets and amulets
from a significant location, or statuettes of the Virgin Mary or other assorted
saints (Coleman and Elsner 1995, 85-87). Beyond engendering such sinful
responses or creating an opportunity for commerce, however, relics were more
important for giving a pilgrimage a central, material focal point. The practice of
honoring relics reminded Christians that their faith was not simply an
otherworldly ideal, but that Christian belief and practice, like everything else in
life, had an earthly component.
Nelson‟s pilgrimage to Cachoeira may not involve a stop at an apostle‟s
grave, or the veneration of a lock of hair or lost tooth of a long-dead saint. In
both her journey and her narration of that journey, however, Nelson manages to
effect within the material world around her a transformation from the mundane
to the holy.
There are a few relics of historical significance, both real and
imagined, mentioned in the poem: her memory of the blood of slaves flowing
down cobblestone streets evokes the same sort of emotion that the bones of a
saint might have held for the Christian faithful (Nelson 2005, 19); likewise, the
company‟s visit to the large statue of Christ in All Saints‟ Bay provokes a religious
conversation among the pilgrims (Nelson 2005, 37). Of more interest, however,
are the common items, mentioned in passing, that are invested with significance
because they, no less than a statue or a historical site, are a part of the journey.
Like ancient and medieval pilgrims before her, Nelson finds sacred significance in
the „baroque bric-a-brac‟ of the souvenir stand, and the ribbons that street
vendors tie on the tourists‟ wrists (Nelson 2005, 19). She also pauses to reflect
9
on the food that the travelers eat off of styrofoam plates in a shopping mall
(Nelson 2005, 25), and even the supermarket tabloids (Nelson 2005, 33), all of
which become much more than the sum of their parts. In the manner of a true
pilgrim, Nelson is able to infuse her meditations on these everyday realities with
spiritual significance, so that even if there are no „official,‟ Church-sanctioned
relics to be found, this does not mean that the stuff that Nelson picks up, the
stuff she uses, the stuff she takes into her body, and the stuff she shares with
others, does not somehow function in much the way that a „real‟ relic would opening up a gateway into a deeper, richer awareness than would otherwise be
possible.
Finally, an element of pilgrimage that is sometimes overlooked, but which
is nonetheless crucial to an understanding of the discipline, is the group of fellow
travelers that joins the pilgrim on the way. Just as the site serves to make space
holy, and the relic serve to make matter holy, the relationships among pilgrims,
and also between the pilgrims and those they meet on the road, serve to make
the kind of community that religious-minded people have always viewed as a
context of sacredness. The Canterbury Tales, perhaps the definitive work about
Christian pilgrimage in all of Western literature, is at its heart nothing more or
less than the story of an ad hoc community of travelers, „Wel nyne and twenty in
a companye/of sundry folk, by aventure y-falle/In fellowshipe, and pilgrims were
they alle‟ (Chaucer 1960, 2-3) united by a common purpose and journeying
toward a common goal. Otherwise diverse types like the monk, the knight, the
miller, and the wife of Bath, bond over a shared experience, and open their lives
to one another, in the form of the stories they tell on the way. Like Chaucer,
Nelson introduces her readers to a motley crew of pilgrims who accompany her
to Bahia, the „friends who went/ together and the friends we met en route/
simplifying each to a major attribute‟ (Nelson 2005, 12). There is the Director,
the Jazz Musician, the Pilot, and the AIDS Activist, all joining the poet on her
journey. Over the course of the work, the reader comes to understand that for
Nelson, these fellow pilgrims are far more than just the „interesting people who
10
went with me‟ (Nelson 2005, 15). They are as much a part of the pilgrimage as
anything else; without them, one cannot imagine the journey unfolding as it did.
In addition to those who traveled the length of the pilgrimage road
together, there were also a number of souls on the way, with whom the pilgrims
might come into contact, and from whose hospitality and kindness they might
benefit. Monasteries, especially, became contexts of new friendship, as monks
would open their doors to travelers and welcome them as Christian brothers and
sisters. In ancient accounts of pilgrimage, like that of the fourth century traveler
Egeria, monks function as guides, hosts, and companions on the journey
(Coleman and Elsner 1995, 90). In other accounts, the holy men who occupy
religious orders near places of pilgrimage become just as much a part of the
destination as the place or the relics are (Coleman and Elsner 1995, 91). These
men were far more than simple curiosities; they were fonts of holy wisdom for
those committed enough to seek their counsel. As hotels offering more profane
amenities sprouted up along main thoroughfares in early Modern times, the
practice of lodging at monasteries, where one might be insulated from the
secular world (if only for a night), waned. Interestingly, in a sign of how much
things have changed over the course of centuries, Nelson originally considers the
option of lodging at a monastery in Africa as a possibility for her own pilgrimage,
before finding that the practice of hospitality, while still in existence, has evolved
to keep up with the technological and economic developments in the culture at
large: „Maybe the monks would put us up gratis…/I checked their website. Well
so much for that!‟ (Nelson 2005, 12).
Even without the presence of monastic interlocutors, Nelson‟s band of
pilgrims could still count on building community among other travelers they met
along the way. As R.W. Southern says of Medieval pilgrimage, „on their way, the
pilgrims met many interesting people‟ (Southern 1953, 52).
Nelson
and
her
fellow
pilgrims,
Southern‟s
observation
In the case of
is
a
definite
understatement. Nelson populates these poems with a host of colorful, recurring
characters who become an integral part of the pilgrimage experience. Among
11
the most memorable of these are Harmonia and Moreen, two sisters from the
United States who are in the midst of their own retracing of the African Diaspora.
They have already visited West Africa, and will later go to Haiti and Jamaica.
They embody Moreen‟s own observation: „You know black people always been
wanderers‟ (Nelson 2005, 21). While in Brazil, they meet up with Nelson and her
companions and are effortlessly woven into the narrative.
They exchange
colorful jokes and trickster tales, injecting a spirit of robust fellowship into
Nelson‟s pilgrimage, even beyond what was already there.
The locals in Bahia, likewise, become an important part of the journey for
Nelson‟s group.
This is most evident in the poem titled „Da Blues,‟ which
recounts a party that Nelson threw both for her fellow pilgrims and for new
friends they had met along the way: „the Brazilians who mattered the most‟ to
her son, a collection of professors, friends, musicians, and fellow students, who
are shaped into a community by the food, the music, and the poetry that is
shared over the course of the evening (Nelson 2005, 39-40). This is especially
evident when the house band, which „had perfected a sound/we knew from
grocery store Muzak;/pretty, but lacking passion, too laid-back‟ leaves the stage
and Nelson‟s brother, backed by his own crew of musicians, takes his place
before the audience. Instead of Muzak, this new group launches „one Blues after
another, with the raunch/of a nightclub on Chicago‟s South Side/in the fifties.‟
Far from laid back or dispassionate, Nelson‟s brother „closed his eyes/burned up
the keys, and sang like one possessed/by Maceo Merryweather or Leroy Carr‟.
Nelson describes the transition between songs as „Tunes melt[ing] into new
tunes‟ (Nelson 2005, 41), and the gathered crowd of devotees responds to all
this fire. Harmonia, especially, embraces the moment with the fervor of either a
Holy-Roller or a tribal prophetess, or perhaps some fusion of the two.
She
„jumped up and threw her hands into the air./Wiggling her large, orange-clad
derriere/she danced like a bride‟s mother in Ghana‟ (Nelson 2005, 42). Even the
kitchen staff is swept up in this holy swirl:
Few
12
managed to sit out the cyclone of joy
contained in the music of black despair.
Few managed not to moan, or to shout YES!
to the recitation of the ills the flesh
is heir to, which makes your feet go one way
and your backside another. Do we pray
when we dance with our hands over our heads? (Nelson 2005, 42).
In this moment of sacramental collision, where joy and despair, past and
present, transcendent and immanent, raunchy and Pentecostal, even wait-staff
and customer, all merge, the jazz club, like the monasteries of Medieval Europe,
is transformed into a sacred space.
And lest one think that such reckless
abandon and unhinged piety has little place in the context of religious devotion,
historians of pilgrimage assure us that this kind of celebration has always been
part and parcel of the sacred journey (Voye 2002, 132). Pilgrims, unlike their
critics, would have been loath to draw hard and fast distinctions between the
„spiritual‟ and the „festive,‟ but would allow the two not only to coexist, but to
feed each other and to create sacred community among religious travelers.
Despite these points of contact, both expected and surprising, with the
ancient and medieval traditions of pilgrimage, Nelson‟s work itself is not without
a spirit of critique.
She is no innocent abroad.
Like most pilgrims of late
modernity, she has been compelled to adjust to the times, and to fashion
pilgrimage in a different, albeit wholly recognizable, form (Tomasi 2002, 18).
While she is obviously indebted to the perspectives of the distant past, she has
also inherited, as part of modernity‟s legacy, a posture that questions both
herself as a pilgrim and the pilgrimage that she has undertaken.
For Nelson, the journey toward some sanctified site not only serves to
bring her into contact with the transcendent or even historical other; it also
provides her with an opportunity for self-reflection - that is, reflection on the self
she brought from home (or left behind there) and on that self‟s place in the
larger world.
Throughout the work, Nelson is increasingly aware of the
problematic relationship of her twenty-first century, North American self to the
places, the relics, and the communities with which she comes into contact. This
13
makes her total immersion into the experience, a total immersion for which she
hungers, difficult. Chief among her obstacles is the economic distance between
herself and those she passes on the streets, in the market, and elsewhere on her
journey. During her trip to the mall, she muses:
And we couldn‟t believe the low prices:
It was like holding a handful of aces!
The dollar towered over the real
like a gun-toting Hollywood cowboy.
The rich must feel like this, spending money
like fountains of beneficence (Nelson 2005, 25).
The image of the American currency towering over the local real, like John
Wayne sent to subdue some native savages, is a powerful one. It prompts all
sorts of questions about cultural imperialism, about the spirit of (ugly) American
exceptionalism in the world, and about where the pilgrim might fit into all of this,
or indeed, if pilgrimage in such a world is even possible at all. A later encounter,
which Nelson describes in terms allusive to Wordsworth, further drives home the
feeling of melancholy that accompanies the poet and her companions on their
journey, the nagging presence of a great distance between those who have the
means to travel and those who exist seemingly (like the slaves of centuries past)
only to serve those more fortunate:
We sat a long time, watching the wide waves.
Little fish and big fish, have-nots and haves.
We bought American canned sodas from
a burdened woman who opened them with her thumb
and handed them to us with humble thanks.
She stood aside waiting as we drank,
then took our empties. The world was too much
with us. We rose and walked back down the beach (Nelson 2005, 37).
Beyond the questions accompanying the perception of cultural or
economic imperialism that this volume presents, there is also the constant
presence, in both the poet‟s mind and the news headlines, of imminent violence.
The unholy matrimony between pilgrimage as a devotional exercise and war as a
military one, both of which were allegedly performed for the glory of God and
the advance of the heavenly kingdom, stretches back at least to the time of the
14
Crusades. Because the campaigns to Jerusalem were sanctioned by the pontiff,
participation in the holy wars to reclaim Palestine was often seen as an act of
pilgrimage. Remission for sins was offered as a reward to those who enlisted,
and popular religious sentiment was largely bound up with the prevailing
militaristic fervor.
That this medieval perspective has affected modern Christianity to an
enormous degree is evident in the way that Western Christians continue to view
their place in the world. Centuries later, Christians still struggle with the tension
between piety and carnage. While some will unreservedly and uncritically throw
in their lot with the military might of the kingdoms of this world, it has become
impossible for Christians like Nelson, upon journeying outside U.S. borders, not
to engage the „paradox of combining piety and war‟ described by Coleman and
Elsner in their account of the first crusade of 1099:
Before the final assault the crusaders fasted. They walked barefoot round the
city following their priests, who carried holy relics and preached sermons on the
Mount of Olives. On the day of conquest, a week later, having stormed the city
they massacred the Muslim and Jewish population, man, woman, and child
(Coleman and Elsner 1995, 96).
While Nelson does not seem to be implying that anything as overtly
contradictory as the Christian crusades is currently underway, she does speak to
the tension that she feels as a traveling representative of a „Christian‟ nation, a
nation that, in the spring of 2003, stood on the brink of war. She gives voice to
this tension in the volume‟s closing poem, „A Igreja do Nostra Senhor do Bonfim‟.
After a taxi ride through the streets of Bahia, into „the neighborhoods where
tourists seldom go,‟ Nelson and her companions arrive at a place of worship
dedicated to the Lord of Bonfim, who in the syncretistic manner of the region
represents both Christ and Oxala, „a long-ago king in West Africa‟. According to
legend, Oxala long ago disguised himself as one of the impoverished masses and
entered into their world, in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of how
they lived. Emerging from his experiment years later, he declares,
I have learned with my flesh and bones
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the conditions under which my people live.
The waters which bathed me are going to give
comfort to those who suffer, and to quench
the fires of greed, injustice, and violence (Nelson 2005, 54).
Because of Oxala‟s epiphany, and because of the wisdom and justice with which
he ruled from that day forward, it does not seem a stretch to his devotees to
honor him as a twin of Christ, and to herald both as „Lords of the Good End‟
(Nelson 2005, 54). This psalm of praise to a benevolent leader only serves to
heighten the open-ended anxiety of the poem‟s final couplet: „Our pilgrimage
ended, we left Salvador/Meanwhile, our President cheered us toward war--‟
(Nelson 2005, 54).
The reader, like the poet, returns from the journey of
pilgrimage to the world of cold reality - a world in which the fires of violence,
greed, and injustice are more often fanned into flame than quenched - only to
realize that, even on the road, even in Brazil, this world was never far away.
From the earliest days of the Church, through Chaucer‟s Middle Ages,
when a heightened sense of Christian identity ruled the West, and into modern
times, when that identity has been relegated to the heap of dusty tradition,
religious pilgrimage has always been a practice shot through with ambivalence.
The pilgrim‟s place in the world has never been firmly settled, as he or she
moves, both literally and figuratively, from place to place, always carrying relics
and stories of what has been left behind. Pilgrimage is a context in which the
sacred and profane, the transcendent and the immanent, the past and the
present, mingle freely. The poetry of Marilyn Nelson, from 1978‟s For the Body
to 2005‟s The Cachoeira Tales, has also been a context where tensions and
juxtapositions thrive, summoning holiness out of the things of this world, but
always maintaining a playfully critical posture toward the journey and toward
those who wish to make the journey their own.
Todd Edmondson teaches world religions at the University of Louisville in Kentucky,
where he is a Ph.D. student in the Humanities department. His interests are in religion
and literature, particularly the development of a reading perspective informed by
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sacramental theology. He is also the pastor/preaching minister of Lincoln Trail Christian
Church in Irvington, Kentucky.
Works Cited
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales: An Interlinear Translation.
ed. Vincent
Hopper. Great Neck, New York: Barron‟s, 1960.
Coleman, Simon, and John Elsner. Pilgrimage: Past and Present in the World
Religions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Kee, Howard Clark, Emily Albu, Carter Lindberg, J. William Frost, Dana L. Robert,
eds. Christianity: A Social and Cultural History. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1998.
Markus, Robert. „From Rome to the Barbarian Kingdoms‟. In John McManners,
ed. The Oxford History of Christianity, 70-100. Oxford: University Press,
1990.
Nelson (Waniek), Marilyn. The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Nelson (Waniek), Marilyn.The Homeplace.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1990.
Nelson (Waniek), Marilyn. Magnificat. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1994.
Southern, R.W. The Making of the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale, 1953.
Tomasi, Luigi.
„Homo Viator: From Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism via the
Journey‟. In William H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi, eds. From Medieval
Pilgrimage toReligious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of
Piety, 1-24. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Tracy, D.H. „The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems‟ (Review). Poetry May 2006.
Vol. 188, Issue 2: 164-166.
Voye, Liliane. “Popular Religion and Pilgrimages in Western Europe”. In William
H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi, eds. From Medieval Pilgrimage to
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Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, 115-136.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Wethered, H. Newton. The Four Paths of Pilgrimage. London: Muller, 1947.
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