Sylvia Wynter’s only novel, The Hills of Hebron, offers a key to understanding the roles that religion and secularization play in Wynter’s thought. This is because The Hills of Hebron both anticipates and allegorically actualizes Wynter’s theoretical objectives.
The novel could be read as a concrete attempt to find the “ceremony,” as the later Wynter puts it, that can solve the problem of the modern “aporia of the secular” – the fact that modern secularization processes simultaneously involve liberation for some and domination for others. Which is to say that the novel envisions a specific rite or praxis that will, at last, unite the two opposing strands of secular modernity: the emancipating epistemologies of Man, on the one hand, and the “demonic” perspectives of those subjects upon whom the modern/colonial order has been built in the first place, on the other.
Such a “ceremony found” entails a certain postsecular and always-already postreligious decolonizing praxis with the potential to radically over-write the modern/colonial wor(l)d of Man—and I say “always-already” because, as we know well, the modern category of “the religious” is co-constitutive of its mirror “secular” counterpart.
The Hills of Hebron unfolds in the colonial Jamaica of the 1940s and 1950s, the years of social and political pressure that culminate in Jamaica’s formal political independence from the United Kingdom. The novel focuses on a small, rural, and marginalized religious community, Hebron, which is composed of a close-knit group of neo-maroons, exiles from the island’s urban ghettos. Once guided to the hills by their charismatic leader, Moses, in search of freedom and tranquility, the community now finds itself at the height of a crisis that has put in question the very survival of the community.
My reading of Hills challenges secularist conceptions of Wynter’s literary praxis found in much of the critical commentary on Wynter’s work. In particular, I focus on one of the novel’s concluding scenes: the moment when Obadiah, one of the main characters, “stumble[s] upon God” while consciously carving a wooden doll. I argue that this scene illustrates the workings of one of the central components of Wynter’s theoretical corpus: how being human entails a self-making synthesis of material autopoiesis (bios) and spiritual autopoetics (mythos). What is crucial in this scene is that, having found himself expelled from the religious community of Hebron, Obadiah “stumble[s] upon God” through a poietic praxis of material creation (carving) that opens up to the realm of the poetic (artistic) creation.
To express it in the more technical terms of Wynter’s later work, my argument is that Obadiah’s conversion embodies the “transformative mutation” that represents the “symbolic birth” or “re-birth” of humanity, the entrance into our “Second Emergence” as fully emancipated beings beyond the “opacity” of our “genre-specific orders of consciousness.” Obadiah’s awareness of the agency contained in the praxis of his manual labor signifies here nothing less than the praxis of the “Autopoetic Turn/Overturn” that triggers the Second Emergence; which is to say, the very mechanism through which the “ceremony” that we were searching for is found.
I understand this whole endeavor in postsecular terms because the spirituality that transpires in such a Turn/Overturn escapes the proper domains of the “secular” and the “religious” as commonly understood in the modern/colonial register. And because such spiritual autopoetics are arrived at through the Word, through the “artful image,” as the theologian Mark Lewis Taylor would put it, we can likewise speak of a postreligious horizon in which the orthodox language of doctrine is no longer the hegemonic path to finding spiritual meaning. Obadiah’s new vision thus no longer deceptively benefits from the “overrepresentation” and “occultation” of how modern/colonial modes of autopoiesis/autopoetics function—as Moses’s false vision once did. Instead, as a cognitively emancipated self-consciousness recursively self-conscious of its own self-observation, Obadiah understands that the human being is nothing but “self-inscripting and inscripted flesh.”
With this insight, Man’s secular-religious complex vanishes to make way for “new continents of the spirit” and new “planets of the imagination,” as the novel itself concludes.
