Rituals of Restorative Resistance:
Healing Cultural Trauma and Cultural Amnesia through Cultural Anamnesis and Collective Memory

JEAN DERRICOTTE-MURPHY

Using a womanist auto-ethnographic approach, this essay presents an anamnestic remedy for healing cultural trauma and cultural amnesia within the African American community. The essay narrates the creation then infusion of rituals of restorative resistance into the liturgy of a traditional, urban black Baptist Church as a means of resistance, resilience, and restoration. By commemorating the sacrifices of Jesus and enslaved African ancestors in eucharist rituals that are enhanced with sacred songs, readings, and symbols, the liturgy expands the meaning of “Do This in Remembrance of Me” (1 Corinthians 11:24) to “Re-Member Me.” Drawing especially on work of Engelbert Mveng, Delores S. Williams, Barbara A. Holmes, Linda E. Thomas, and JoAnne Marie Terrell, and combining theology and anthropology, the essay describes a hermeneutic of healing within the community. It argues (1) that participation in enactment of rituals of restorative resistance decolonizes minds and deconstructs negative Western characterizations of black and brown bodies and (2) that ritualistic inversion and transformation of painful histories and traumatic stories into narratives and symbols of endurance and faith can re-invent, re-construct, and re-member individuals and communities into whole and healed entities.

Introduction

The late Cameroonian Jesuit priest Engelbert Mveng’s “theory of anthropological poverty” holds that the effects of European colonialism in Africa led to the near total destruction of indigenous cosmology, values, ritualistic practices, artistic expression, and religious beliefs throughout the continent and the African Diaspora. Mveng’s theory posits that the “depersonalization of the African … under the colonial regime was a discounting of all he was, all he had, everything he did, and a reduction to a state of indigence and misery we call the state of Anthropological Poverty.”¹ This European invasion and influence not only inflicted anthropological poverty upon millions of black and brown bodies but also brought with it an arrogance that only recognized Europe as the main source of culture; this has resulted in historic and present-day cultural trauma and cultural amnesia² within the African American community.

I hold that chattel enslavement of Africans in America and the lingering oppressive systemic racism are sources of anthropological poverty. Can this form of anthropological poverty be reversed? Can the resulting cultural trauma and cultural amnesia of African Americans be healed through ritual? I further hold that recognition, reclamation, and retrieval of cultural codes, art forms, rituals, ways of being, spirituality, and faith traditions (stolen and lost as a result of American anthropological poverty and cultural amnesia) will require a concerted retrieving of collective memory or collective anamnesis. This will help remember the painful past and begin the process of developing new rituals to bring about healing of the collective African American psyche.³

Methodological and Theoretical Foundations

This research examines the efficacy of creating and implementing supplemental Afrocentric communion rituals within a traditional urban black Baptist Church as a tool for healing anthropological poverty. As a womanist preacher ordained in the Baptist tradition (who also is a teacher and member of the congregation where this enhanced ritual is enacted), I build on Linda Thomas’ proposal of developing a theological and anthropological approach that counter-culturally reconstructs the dominant methods of knowledge production to empower black women and men to excavate, unearth, and convey the cultural and spiritual traditions of our ancestors⁴ as ethnographic sources within our own communities. Incorporating black feminist Cheryl Rodriguez’s concept of “Native Anthropology”⁵ with African anthropologist Mwenda Ntarangwi’s stance as a participant/observer,⁶ I assert agency as the researcher conducting auto-ethnographic research within my own society and culture. As a native participant/observer my “personal history, self-identity …, ethnicity, kinship, social class (and) gender”⁷ organically inform this project. Childhood memories of sacred communion rituals officiated in the black Baptist churches pastored by my grandfather and father take center stage as personal reflections of communion moments undergird and inform the research. From his pulpit, my grandfather sang songs of liberation and reverence – “I Know It Was the Blood,” “I’m Bound for the Promised Land,” “Don’t You See How They Done My Lord.”⁸ Similarly, my father sang “Calvary” or “Were You There?”⁹ as he stood behind the communion table. I now continue their legacy, officiating the sacred ritual as the first ordained woman in this family line of preachers, serving as an assistant minister in an urban black Baptist church. Remembering the impact this ritual and music had on me as a child, watching how the bread, the cup, and the gilded gold cross were treated as sacred objects representing the sacrifice, body and blood of Jesus, and remembering the songs of crucifixion and resurrection all bring me to this table in reverence and awe. “Sometimes it causes me to tremble”¹⁰ when I examine where the Divine has placed me and when I consider the untapped power embedded within this ritual. Hence, augmenting the Eucharist ritual in 2021 to help undo the damage inflicted on African Americans’ souls and psyches by American anthropological poverty becomes part of the legacy I wish to bequeath to generations following.

Collective Memory: What influence might collective memory wield in healing and reversing damage done to descendants of formerly enslaved and colonized people by anthropological poverty? In the context of my research, “collective memory” is the shared recollections of a group’s historic past and identity, shaped and passed down through oral and written narratives, artifacts, and artistic expressions. It is shared knowledge, wisdom, information, and memories of a social or ethnic group. I posit that in retrieving these memories, African American identity can be culled by persons and communities suffering still from inhumane atrocities perpetrated against them by those who profited from the systemic radical evil of colonization, slavery, and present day institutional systemic racism.

Cultural Trauma: When an individual has been subjected to a horrific event resulting in physical or psychological wounding, that individual has experienced trauma. Cultural trauma happens when members of a community have been subjected to heinous events that deeply scar their collective memory and consciousness, “marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”¹¹ The profound evil of slavery left indelible marks on the psyches and hearts of black Americans, even after emancipation. Many formerly enslaved people kept stories of hardship and abuse to themselves. Often, formerly enslaved persons determined it was easier to forget the atrocities perpetrated against them rather than to dwell on their traumatic past. For the newly emancipated this entailed the keeping of secrets and untold stories “too painful to talk about.”¹² Numerous ethnic groups the world over have historically experienced and, even today, continue to experience cultural trauma. This paper does not negate widespread experiences of trauma, but, rather, chooses to focus specifically on the documented and undocumented generational cultural traumas inflicted upon African American people since the bringing of the first Africans to this land in August 1619. How do African Americans heal from over 400 years of trauma continually inflicted upon individuals and the whole community because of the melanin of our skin? How do African Americans heal from continual traumas caused to this day by what Marsha Foster Boyd has identified as “cascading violence”?¹³ What and who can affect healing for both psychological and spiritual traumas so deep that they may no longer be recognized by some within the community as trauma but instead are seen and accepted by some as a modern way of being, or just the way things are?

Cultural Amnesia: Amnesia is the partial or total loss of memory. In Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church,¹⁴ Barbara A. Holmes describes cultural trauma as the precursor to cultural amnesia. Cultural amnesia occurs as the result of a cultural, ethnic, or social group intentionally or unintentionally forgetting their past because it is too difficult and painful to remember.¹⁵ I believe that another cause for cultural amnesia is the deliberate forgetting and denial of one’s ethnic and cultural traditions and ways of being in the attempt to assimilate into the dominant culture. Holmes says that this type of forgetting also creates cultural malignancy.¹⁶ When a people forget their past and do not teach it to future generations, this malignancy festers and weakens the self-image of the community. This type of amnesia and malignancy can only be healed through memory, the retrieval and re-creation of stories that, though painful, are necessary to tell and re-enact with the intention of healing collective trauma.¹⁷ In her paper “Remember and Re-Member,” Linda E. Thomas suggests that the act of remembering:

pushes us toward recognizing the hurt and pain of the African-American community and other oppressed people. Remembering forces us to recognize old realities as well as present social and systemic patterns that have been advantageous for some and restrictive for others.¹⁸

Thomas asserts that to re-member is not only to recognize these realities, but also to decide to begin behaving in new ways despite and because of them. I further define re-member as the act of putting fractured and wounded individuals and communities back together as a whole and healed people.

Cultural Anamnesis: In agreement with Holmes and Thomas’ recognition of memory and remembering as tools of healing is JoAnne Marie Terrell’s understanding of cultural anamnesis, which she discusses in her book Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience.¹⁹ In medical terms anamnesis is the retrieval of memory through oral and written sources that may or may not be painful. This type of memory retrieval is beneficial in emotional, psychological, and medical healing. Recognizing that descendants of enslaved Africans in America still experience embedded cultural trauma, Terrell holds that a complete and honest anamnesis, or a thorough looking at the source of the problem, is required for healing the wounded psyches of the entire community. Terrell establishes that anamnesis is the “retrieval of experience that is painful, yet necessary, for the healing/wholeness of the psyche.”²⁰ She further explains, “Collective anamnesis requires thoroughgoing honesty about the ways in which black women and their families have been disempowered by the social sins of racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, and classism.”²¹ Womanist anamnesis, or a womanist approach to memory retrieval, looks carefully at the multiple traumas inflicted upon black women and the entire black community with the intention of re-creating memories that may be painful yet necessary for healing; it is committed to seeking and promoting the wholeness of the entire black community. Terrell asserts that the retrieval of anamnestic memory can be evoked by the telling of personal and communal stories through literature (fiction or nonfiction), artistic performances, visual arts, and music.²² I suggest the same retrieval of anamnestic memory can also be initiated through religious and spiritual practices. Therefore, womanist cultural anamnesis may serve as theological reflection which includes personal and communal “experiences and insights”²³ in the healing of cultural traumas and cultural amnesia. Terrell writes that womanist cultural anamnesis

recognizes reflection upon personal and collective experience as discrete sources in the construction of theological statements. … of liberation … [and also] affirms the didactic value of ‘intergenerational dialogue’ with their predecessors – the slave women who first articulated the meaning of African-American women’s struggle to come to faith – as well as the families and constituencies to which womanists belong and from which they derive theological insight.²⁴

Stephanie Crumpton interprets Marsha Foster Boyd’s concept of WomanistCare²⁵ in a way that easily aligns with Terrell’s womanist anamnesis. Though her work is primarily centered on women survivors of sexual trauma, Crumpton recognizes the need for “ritual… as a congregational-based communal act of care.”²⁶ To this end, an intentionally planned ritual that offers anamnestic moments within the worship liturgies of the black church can become a means to develop “therapeutic space for black women (and men) to experience care and affirmation”²⁷ that create a place for healing cultural amnesia. In study of Jewish Holocaust survivors’ communal traumatic reality, Crumpton noted that some survivors in group therapeutic sessions “dealt with the pain and suffering of genocide” by remembering and telling “stories of rescue and spiritual resistance.” She identifies this not as an attempt to redeem the suffering and trauma, but a means of crafting a narrative that acknowledged their experience, created restorative resistance, and facilitated the recovery of whole and healed individuals.²⁸ Following Crumpton’s pastoral care method and recognizing that stories play a part in psychological healing, I recommend recreating a similar setting in the black church for African American congregants. Referring to the women she interviewed for her work Crumpton writes:

Ritual in the lives of these women prompts me to consider how organizing communal rituals for women in congregational settings might likewise offer safe and affirming voices, space, symbols, and images that maintain life-giving connections with God, self, and others.… Through symbols and language, ritual acknowledges … ‘important occurrences while pointing to transformation and future change.’ … Rituals provide a method and practice for bringing the individual and community together to acknowledge the unrecognized traumatic transitions that occur in women’s faith lives.²⁹

Taking an active part in a communion ritual intended to correct the negative narratives around bodies of black men and women gives space for sharing personal stories of hardships, resilience, survival, and faith that may affect a similar response from participants.

Exploring the Potential of Black Church Rituals for Healing and Well-Being

Where and how do we begin the process of cultural healing through memory and anamnesis? Here, I turn to the church as an institution within the black community that once was a place not only of worship but also a place of refuge and hope where black Americans would gather to find a balm in Gilead for their troubled and traumatized souls. Historical black mainline denominational churches (such as Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal congregations) were sources of strength, resistance, and resilience for the whole community, especially during the eras of reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. The black church was reminded of its history and mission in 2015 by President Barack Obama in his eulogy for the Honorable Rev. Clementa Pinckney, brutally murdered with eight other members of the Mother Emanuel AME Church by a white supremacist. President Obama offered this sentiment:

The church is and always has been the center of African American life, a place to call our own in a too-often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships. Over the course of centuries, black churches served as hush harbors, where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses, where their free descendants could gather and shout ‘Hallelujah,’ … rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad, bunkers for the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement. They have been and continue to be community centers, where we organize for jobs and justice, places of scholarship and network, places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harm’s way and told that they are beautiful and smart and taught that they matter. That’s what happens in church. That’s what the black church means. Our beating heart, the place where our dignity as a people is inviolate.³⁰

But in some instances, the church does not seem to have the same influence within the black community as it once had. Many factors have contributed to this (that will not be addressed in this paper), but in response to President Obama’s description of the black church, some questions I pose are these: Is the mainline denominational church as important a pillar within the black community as it once was? Has the mainline denominational black church in the 21^st Century forgotten its history, its mission, and its rituals? If so, what must the church remember and reclaim? Can the cultural trauma and cultural amnesia of African Americans be healed through collective memory retrieved through sacred ritual enactment in the church?

The ritual practices of the black church have helped to sustain and keep alive a community under siege while members have always been in a liminal place –between full citizenship and equality, living with laws, rules, and the harsh reality of trying to survive in an oppressive, racist, separatist atmosphere. For too many churches, this idea of community that was maintained by enslaved and newly emancipated people to create a space where dignity and humanity could be asserted and inserted into daily life is no longer maintained. This type of spiritual community is once again called for to promote healing and wholeness of individuals and the community alike.

Delores S. Williams has expressed concern about the future of the African American church and community. In her paper “Rituals of Resistance in Womanist Worship,”³¹ Williams argues that neither will thrive or survive because the history of our endurance, our faith traditions, the stories of the heroes/sheroes who played a role in the struggle for African American liberation are not being celebrated or remembered and will soon be forgotten. In Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Williams recommends that mainline denominational churches institute what she calls a “womanist hermeneutic of identification-ascertainment.”³² This hermeneutic empowers black women and men to see what once was invisible in the biblical text hidden behind Eurocentric interpretations to personally identify with scripture and biblical characters. A hermeneutic of identification-ascertainment begins to deconstruct the patriarchal and androcentric structures inherited from Eurocentric Christianity that still exists within some African American denominational churches. Williams’ hermeneutic of identification-ascertainment includes three elements, 1) personal faith stories, 2) biblical faith stories, and 3) stories of community action and faith that incorporate “doctrines of resistance” and “resistance rituals”³³ that are based on the experiences of African Americans in dialogue with biblical resistance stories, i.e., the Hagar paradigm,³⁴ or the Exodus event that “conjure up, stimulate, and encourage memory”³⁵ that can promote healing.

In agreement with Williams, I believe that a womanist re-reading of select scriptural passages with the experience and viewpoint of black women at the center will shift the focus from a dominant cultural understanding to the perspective of the black parishioners. Through retrieval of the stories of our enslaved ancestors passed down in oral histories, slave narratives, and intuited within our emotional spaces, anamnestic memory can be evoked, massaged, and nuanced by the telling and hearing of personal and communal accounts through storytelling, literature, artistic performances, visual arts, and music.³⁶ Williams believes that rituals must assist the African American church in remembering its mission and answering the question, “Who do you say God is?” She argues that the black Church must create “liberating womanist liturgy [and] … develop resistance rituals to remember and commemorate its own history of faith and struggle … [or] the black church and black people will remain in bondage.”³⁷ To do this she calls for the creation of womanist liturgy that includes “resistance rituals.” She calls for the use of symbols such as an overturned pot to commemorate worship by enslaved persons in the hush arbor.³⁸ Williams suggests that the creation of rituals of remembrance and symbols of commemoration should be enacted in worship services and activities to resurrect, reconstruct, reinstate, and re-member African American people.

Holmes also recognizes the importance of enacting sacred rituals within the black church. She believes that traditional contemplative ritual practices and styles of worship are being replaced by a more charismatic style of worship based on a Eurocentric evangelical model. This model replaces, supplants, and forgets the faith traditions, songs, and worship styles of the religion of enslaved persons that was born out of hush arbors which creates another layer of cultural amnesia. Holmes holds that there is room for both worship styles, but that the African American church must be the repository and disseminator of the faith traditions of our ancestors, traditions that tell how a people, together with their God, struggled for freedom and liberation. When dominant Eurocentric religious practices subsume the history, rituals, worship styles, and stories of African American faith traditions, when black church leaders support and advocate such because its more “contemporary” style appeals to younger worshipers, cultural amnesia is intentionally or unintentionally the result.³⁹

To heal this amnesia and malignancy, Holmes calls for the creation of rituals that will combat cultural amnesia in the African American community. Though the history is painful, she feels that it is necessary to remember through ritual enactment to “avoid … leaving a crumbling cultural and spiritual inheritance for future generations.”⁴⁰ Recognizing that “for captured Africans, the only safe space for freedom and selfhood was in the mysteries evoked by worship,”⁴¹ Holmes asserts:

When events fracture the wholeness of body and soul, the unspoken things, if remembered and reenacted through ritual and liturgy, can become the repository of personal and communal memory. Through ritual, the things that were survived are offered to God in the unspoken belief that reflective and evocative faith practices create a healing space for broken hearts and resilient spirits.⁴²

Holmes further recommends re-instituting the practice of contemplative ritual within the worship services of the black Church. Contemplative does not mean withdrawing from the world, but rather it requires creating a quiet introspective space that inspires prayer, communal participation, and social resistance. Holmes and Williams both argue that it is necessary to remember, restore, re-create, and re-enact scenes from the African American past. Holmes also calls for the use of artifacts of enslavement, such as chains and shackles to commemorate survival. Using such symbols alongside biblical stories tears down the effects of cultural amnesia and creates sacred memory that has the ability to heal collective trauma.⁴³

Williams and Holmes both call for the reinstatement and enactment of rituals of remembrance within the African American worship experience. Both Holmes and Thomas hold that ritual inversion grows into an important part of the worship experience. Ritual inversion is the ability to symbolically divest power from the oppressor’s intention to discourage and instill fear. Being able to invert and indigenize the intended meaning of oppressive and denigrating Western symbols (Christian or secular) through new, shared, sacred rituals of healing and restoration, turns them into symbols of resistance and liberation. Such ritual inversion empowers the community through transformation of the original racist connotations into reinvented and reconstructed symbols of endurance and faith.

Thomas describes the enacted ritual as cultural communication that expresses the values of a community which is a ceremonial act that can create order in an otherwise chaotic world. Ritual enactment becomes a tool of remembering as well as a technique of reversal and inversion. During her fieldwork in post-apartheid South Africa, Thomas found that ritual and faith went hand-in-hand.⁴⁴ Enacted rituals were necessary components of the life of the church and the community of people who had not yet recovered from the cultural trauma of apartheid. It was in the practice of rituals that the people were able to gain a sense of order out of the evil, chaotic and oppressive world imposed upon them by apartheid. Through the enactment of sacred ritual, members of the South African church she studied were able to create a supportive community that allowed healing of their bodies, spirits, and psyches, recognized their humanity, and enabled them to express their faith as they saw fit without Afrikaner influence. Ritual presented opportunities for the South Africans to “remember and re-member.” The act of remembering allowed them to recognize their history and present-day realities that still were painful, yet through ritual inversion remembering led to a re-membering, or the putting back together of healthy and whole individuals and communities.

There is a striking similarity between the cultural traumas of African Americans and black South Africans. The intentional enactment of sacred ritual within the African American church may offer the same or similar results of restoration, healing, and wholeness within the African American community. Williams, Thomas, Holmes, and Terrell all agree that collective memory is key to the recovery, health, and life of the black church and community, and they all agree that ritual enactment is the key to remembering. Each of these scholars affirms the necessity of the creation of sacred space for retelling the African American story, particularly that of the African American woman, alongside the biblical story as an element of creating healing rituals for African Americans.

Moreover, such healing rituals are not limited to being enacted within black churches. Performance arts scholar Soyica Diggs Colbert recognizes commonalities of the ritualistic performative components within the oral traditions of black theater and the black church. For Colbert, rituals enacted through theatrical performances draw on “social, cultural, and political … conditions ... prompting African American artists to create what she calls “rituals of repair,”⁴⁵ or the ability to reproduce, recuperate, reenact, and resist the oppressions imposed by the dominant society. She argues that rituals enacted through theatrical performance can create “rites of repair ... as acts of redress and social justice.”⁴⁶ Staged theatrical rituals also have the potential to symbolically re-order the social and political hierarchy, shifting emphasis from traumatic experiences to “reinstate … sovereignty or political authority”⁴⁷ within the black community.

Theater creates individual and shared experiences from a “symbolic ordering”⁴⁸ through narrative – speech, song, music. The enactment of sacred ritual, or “rites of repair”⁴⁹ in the black church during a worship service can produce similar individual and shared experiences. Identifying our oral traditions as healing literary texts can redress, reorder and reinstate our sense of humanity and self-worth. Colbert reminds us that:

American literary traditions of black performance traditions [are] expressed in … preaching, … rituals, … and singing of blues and gospel. These performance traditions create the ‘performative ground’ of African American literary texts … [that] deploy performances to resituate black people in time and space … as acts of recuperation and restoration, creating sites that have potential to repair the damage slavery and its aftermath have caused.⁵⁰

Creating Rituals of Restorative Resistance

Building upon the works of these womanist and black feminist scholars, I propose a model for the creation and enactment of rituals of restorative resistance for the healing of cultural trauma and cultural amnesia within the African American church and community. In creating rituals of restorative resistance, I implement Williams’ doctrine of resistance, Holmes’ call for contemplative ritual, and Terrell’s anamnestic approach to memory, into which I weave Colbert’s understanding of rituals of repair, Thomas’s concept of enacting sacred healing rituals in the faith community and Crumpton’s understanding of rituals as life-giving connections with the Divine. I propose that the black church, with its close association to black theatricality, is the place where all of these scholars’ ideas can be carried out. Damage done to the black community by cultural trauma and cultural amnesia can be healed through the intentional enactment of sacred rituals as rituals of restorative resistance.

Acts of resistance are familiar, but these rituals simultaneously resist oppression and restore wholeness to individuals and the community. The rituals become political, artistic, and spiritual signifiers of resistance to and within a hostile environment. The purpose of these rituals is to liberate a community that does not recognize the malaise that cultural amnesia has had upon it by creating a safe sacred space in which participants will sense the historical link to their African origins, history, and heritage and their connection with the Divine. These rituals are necessary in order to build and strengthen the community that no longer operates as “the village” but has become a more individualistic replication of the dominant society.

Rituals of restorative resistance institute a paradigm shift from memorializing death to celebrating life, from focusing on violent destructive acts intended to steal, kill, and destroy, to centering the resurrection or the coming to life again of individuals and communities who were not intended to thrive or survive. Rituals of restorative resistance instill a sense of pride in African American history even before 1619. For such rituals to be performed there must be tools and symbols that set the stage for into entering sacred space. Because the symbols will be portals into the ritual activity, it is important that the chosen symbols for these rituals primarily include West African and African American images and representations of important historic events. In addition to symbols, the reconstruction and reclamation of primal rituals, rituals of enslaved persons, and invisible church rituals are used to create liturgy for the twenty-first century which can be useful for the restoration of wholeness and as a remedy to cultural amnesia. These rituals are created to promote healing, restoration, and community through sacred memory within a liturgy that brings back to mind and commemorates the life, suffering, and sacrifice of Jesus and enslaved African ancestors. Through sacred memory, we are no longer stuck at the cross but moved toward resurrection, resistance, resilience, and new life.

Implements for rituals of restorative resistance include renderings and facsimiles of ships that transported enslaved persons, as well as whips and shackles to spark our collective memory and be reminders of the strength and resilience of our ancestors. Water will symbolize the middle passage, the circle of life, healing, and tranquility. Libations will be poured as acts of honoring our ancestors. Literature for rituals of restorative resistance includes the use of West African Adinkra symbols as reminders of ancient West African languages and understandings of who God is and of a way of talking about the attributes of God in African languages that we may not speak, but are languages which we know enslaved people spoke in the bowels of ships during the Middle Passage. Storytelling, songs, and drums will pass on our history in the oral tradition. New griots will be recruited and trained as keepers of our story. Other symbolic items, such as musical instruments, colors, fire, and fabrics, will be incorporated into the worship liturgies. Sacred symbols, remnants from enslaved persons lives and invisible church rituals, historic and contemporary stories, and artistic expression are included within the liturgy and worship experience to supplement the traditional communion ritual.

Liturgies that accompany traditional Christian rituals, such as baptism, communion, prayer services, and funerals will be rewritten to reflect the needs and concerns of the community from an African and African American perspective. As much as there is a need for ecstatic expressions in worship, there is also a need for creation of quiet contemplative spaces. The inclusion of sacred circles (i.e. prayer circles, ring shout circles, labyrinths, and creation of new circles) will be reminders of the unity and continuity, which allows for the “centering of spirit and soul.”⁵¹ Creating rituals of restorative resistance that empower the community, offer survival strategies, and provide a meaningful worship experience within the African American church may lead to the creation of a more meaningful Christianity that will be authentic and a source of healing within a community that is still “betwixt and between.”

The creation of these cultural rituals as a healing paradigm shifts focus away from the dominant culture’s gaze through incorporating cultural norms of the black experience to bring healing and restoration to communities of disenfranchised and marginalized people negatively impacted by Western colonization and anthropological poverty. In shifting the gaze, these rituals resist the ideology of whiteness to intentionally restore and return all humanity to existing under the “Gaze of God.”⁵² To resist racism and xenophobia while simultaneously restoring and healing the psyches of generations of traumatized communities, rituals of restorative resistance require physical and spiritual activity that are also a critique and correction of American theological anthropology. The nine tenets of rituals of restorative resistance apply Williams’ hermeneutic of identification-ascertainment in creating resistance rituals while invoking collective memory to become anamnestic tools. Through these tools, cultural amnesia and cultural trauma begin to be healed as persons ruminate, remember, reclaim, repudiate, resist, reframe, restore, refresh, and reconnect.

Tenets of Rituals of Restorative Resistance

1. Ruminate: Participants reflectively observe and question their present position, recalling and meditating on the systems and circumstances that brought you/us to this place.

2. Remember: Participants allow memories or re-memory to come forth; they call to mind personal or historic communal past experiences.

3. Reclaim: With a sense of pride, participants take back possession of ancestral cultural identity, including language, art forms, music, religions, spirituality, cosmology and ways of being.

4. Repudiate: Participants call out and reject the demonic forces that have systematically denigrated indigenous cultures, stripping people of their lands, resources, and dignity; the purpose is to diminish the power these forces have attempted to exert over people, cultures, and nations.

5. Resist: The rituals oppose and confront racist and segregationist ideologies that have consigned Black and brown people to the balconies of American society.

6. Reframe: Participants challenge the status quo and present history from the viewpoint of the colonized and enslaved (not as a revisionist history, but as a corrective history); the purpose of reframing is to correct false and misleading narratives around the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness.

7. Restore: The rituals instill a sense of pride in individuals and communities that have withstood the effects of systemic injustices. Storytelling, such as opera, is one avenue of restoration.

8. Refresh: The rituals offer a quiet space where participants are able to reflect on and through the process of restoration.

9. Reconnect: The rituals encourage participants to communicate with others seeking to restore spiritual and emotional well-being to individuals and communities who have survived and thrived despite the sociopolitical and socio-historic conditions inflicted by the residuals of anthropological poverty.

The central connecting component that allows the creation and enactment of rituals of restorative resistance is the ability to remember. Even the memories “too painful to remember”⁵³ must be excavated in order to move to a place of healing.

Auto-ethnographic Reflection

Following these nine tenets of rituals of restorative resistance and recognizing that many in the congregation would be hesitant and resistant to changing their traditional communion service, I designed and implemented a supplemental communion ritual with the pastor and a small intergenerational group of parishioners in the Baptist church where I serve. To distinguish it from the traditional communion ritual I named this ceremony “Re-Member Me.”

First, I must acknowledge my need to come to this table as a participant/observer seeking to be re-membered. When standing on the stage as a chorus member at the Detroit Opera House in 2005 and 2008 portraying an un-named enslaved African woman in America, performing the opera Margaret Garner, my spirit began to sense the haunting traumas of ancestors unknown. While performing in this opera created a sense of pride in the fortitude and resilience of the enslaved, it also opened a space of unspoken and unaddressed anger – mine and my ancestors’. How could this anger be abated and this space be healed? This subdued anger and discontent revived a personal quest to reconnect with my ancestral West African roots, hoping to heal my own disconnected self. The Margaret Garner performances rekindled a long-held desire to place my feet on the soil of the Mother Land. In 2013 a pilgrimage to Ghana began to assuage my restless spirit and provide answers to my questions. Since then, two African pilgrimages, multiple stage enactments of enslaved African women, childhood memories, ritual studies, and my own faith tradition and practices have converged into a dynamic intersection bringing me to explore ritual as a space for healing and reconnection and an answer to my own question, thus birthing Rituals of Restorative Resistance. 

On my first arrival in Accra, I was greeted with “Akwabba,” a welcome or welcome home, the first step to my reconnection. During my time there I visited the Ancestral River Park where I held in my hands a preserved remnant of an actual ball and chain that may have been used to enslave my ancestors’ bodies before or during the Middle Passage to American chattel slavery (see photo). Their minds and spirits would have longed for freedom. As I held these artifacts in my hands, I sensed my ancestors’ resolve to survive despite the unknown evils that awaited. Many generations later I am a descendent of these women and men. Telling my experience at the Re-Member Me table brings this part of our history into perspective and becomes an anamnestic moment as I guide participants through the emotion of this ritual with words and photos.

I also find myself critiquing much of my foundational religious teaching through womanist theological interpretations. Having discontent with commentaries, teaching material, and sermons promoting Western patriarchal theology in the Black church, similar to Williams, I fear the demise of the church I love because the testimonies and the songs telling “how I got over” are being forgotten. The somewhat startling recognition that I am now an elder, entrusted and charged with the task, responsibility, and privilege of preserving and passing on our story to present and future generations, compels me to ensure continuation of the history and memories of our people. I must be about the work of deconstructing the colonizing, patriarchal, hegemonic, racist and xenophobic structures within the church by preserving our personal and communal faith stories and reading biblical faith stories through a womanist perspective as Williams’ womanist hermeneutic of identification-ascertainment suggests.⁵⁴

Communion rituals of my childhood were quiet solemn occasions. No one spoke except the preacher or the deacons offering prayer. The choir or soloist lifted a mournful song. We sat silently, having been asked to reflect on the death of Jesus. It was an intentionally sad occasion, one that moved many to tears. Our Re-Member Me communion ritual remains solemn but not silent, reflective but not sad. Participants were invited to share stories and testimonies, pray, raise a song, read poetry, prose, or Scripture. We incorporated “doctrines of resistance and resistance rituals”⁵⁵ into our traditional black Baptist communion ritual and liturgy by replicating a hush arbor moment with participants seated silently in a circle around the specially set communion table. I began the ritual by softly singing the African American spiritual “Remember Me” as a centering moment. The participants joined in, humming or singing in harmony. The intention was to invoke collective memory in a contemplative anamnestic moment through song where the participants turn African American and personal history into sacred, precious memory. Our service is described below; however, specific written liturgy is intentionally not included in this paper, giving space for creative replication based on the needs of any congregation seeking to insert supplemental rituals into their worship experience.

A scripture reading from our traditional Baptist communion service might be First Corinthians 11:23b-26 (NRSV):

^23bThe Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, ²⁴ and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” ²⁵ In the same way, he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 

Participating in the communion ritual or taking the Lord’s Supper was changed as “do this in remembrance of me”⁵⁶ became “re-member me.” This enhanced ritual received new sacred symbols and meanings. Our table was draped in African fabric to represent the Motherland. The cross was paired with photos⁵⁷ taken of me holding actual chains of enslavement during my Ghanaian pilgrimage attesting that the lives, sacrifices, resilience, and survival of unnamed Africans in America are never forgotten, reminding participants that chains intended to enslave and keep humans in perpetual bondage were never strong enough to contain the human spirit and resolve for freedom.

Our elders were acknowledged, and libation was poured into a live plant while calling out and remembering the names of ancestors gone before and African Americans slain in historic and modern-day lynchings. The bread and cup were paired with a whip and a noose so the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus and of murdered African Americans will “Never Lose Its Power.”⁵⁸ Remembering events such as the Tulsa (Oklahoma) and Elaine (Arkansas) massacres and the Red Summer of 1919 are painful anamnestic moments, but necessary to remind and re-member the community and resurrected strength of survival and resilience passed on to us. This also occurs in the telling and hearing of parishioner’s stories about themselves or their ancestors and family members who migrated out of the Jim Crow South to escape being lynched or the terror of the KKK or whose lands were stolen. They transplanted themselves into new places to begin again and became the keepers of our stories and the pillars of our communities. In my congregation, we still can listen to our nonagenarians recount their childhood memories of 1928 fire bombings by whites attempting to intimidate and force the congregation to abandon its building. They remember as if it were yesterday.

Read alongside the crucifixion story were extra-biblical sacred texts – poems such as Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”⁵⁹ – as reminders that those who speak truth to power and stand boldly in the face of injustice may become martyred heroes. Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”⁶⁰ was read to remind us that no matter what the oppressor thinks or does, our spirits have the resolve to survive and thrive in spite of obstacles placed in our paths. There also may be reading of transcribed sacred texts,⁶¹ those oral histories, stories, and testimonies told by African American women and men about how God has led, spoken to, protected, guided, and delivered.

One such sacred living text in my congregation is a gentleman who recounted stories of his childhood and youth in Selma, Alabama: his participation in sit-ins at lunch counters, being beaten by angry white mobs and watching his friend be beaten to death by the infamous bigoted Sheriff Jim Clark. Telling his story gave him release as he testified about how God has kept him and brought him this far. Other sacred living texts remember how imminent domain destroyed their African American neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, building highways through long established communities, forcing their families to sell homes at pennies on the dollar and move to parts of the city devoid of black-owned businesses, grocery stores or adequate schools. Yet they survived, would not and could not be broken, attesting to God’s divine protection despite government attempts to destroy their communities.

West African artifacts and symbols are incorporated throughout the ritual. The drum is used to represent the beat of our hearts and the rhythm of our souls; the pouring of water libations are the representation of life. Other artifacts also are included. The Gye Nyame⁶² symbol represents the name of the Creator in a language other than that of the colonizer. The Sankofa⁶³ bird tells us to remember our history and to keep it before us and teach it to future generations. The Ashanti stool represents community and always having a place in the family and at the table. The three-figure unity carving and bowl represent the gathering of the community and family in unity and strength. The photo⁶⁴ below is the set communion table we used to incorporate the artifacts and symbols for rituals of restorative resistance within traditional observance rites.

Rituals of restorative resistance may become a womanist systematic approach to healing the collective trauma and amnesia of the African American community. Deliberate anamnestic Sankofa moments address and reverse the negative residuals of anthropological poverty by creating safe, sacred spaces for telling survival stories, the how I got over moments that empower both the teller and listener. The enactment of Re-Member Me offers rites of repair in a therapeutic space where the act of re-remembering individuals and communities happens in a theatrical yet sacred moment of contemplative worship. Re-Member Me brings people to the table, seated in the present, reaching to the past, while moving forward into the future with hope and faith.

Collective memory, therefore, is an anamnestic remedy to cultural trauma and cultural amnesia. Collective memory becomes the tool that infuses liturgical rituals into the black church that will decolonize and deconstruct negative Western narratives that crept into and still are prevalent in many mainline traditional black denominational churches. Rituals of restorative resistance can affect the transformation of negative narratives into re-membered,⁶⁵ re-invented, and re-constructed stories of endurance and faith through ritual practice. As President Obama reminded us, the black church is the place where the dignity of our people is inviolate. Rituals of restorative resistance remind us that though the oppressor has placed many obstacles in our paths for over 400 years, still we rise and remain a people who are proud, unbroken, unchanged, unspoiled, powerful, resilient, whole, and unstoppable.

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