Books in heaven: dreams, texts and conspicuous circulation.

Hofmeyr, Isabel

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomenon of miraculous literacy in which the ability to read and write is conferred through divine revelation. In such revelations, it is clear that texts circulate between heaven and earth. This paper considers examples of miraculous literacy drawn both from African Christianity and the Protestant evangelical world more generally. It demonstrates that a magical idea of textuality in which religious texts are circulated unaided by human agency is common across many different spheres and forms a central strand in popular Christian thinking. The paper concludes by examining the broader significance of such circulation and probes the kind of imagined community that is being brought into being through such textual circuits.

Towards the end of his book on African Initiated Churches, Bengt Sundkler turns to discuss dreams and dreaming in religious life. He gives a number of examples of dreams reported to him (Sundkler 1961:270). In one dream, a leader of a sect saw a blackboard descending from heaven. On it was written a hymn that the man subsequently wrote down. In another dream, a man found himself in heaven where he observed a large, slowly rotating wheel on which were engraved seven prayers. In yet another dream, someone saw a geometrical plan of heaven. On waking, he copied out his vision.

These stories of miraculous literacy in which texts are revealed in visions or dreams are common across much of the continent. In southern Africa, for example, the legendary Xhosa prophet Ntsikana discovered hymns on the inside of his cloak. Texts were also revealed to him on his cows (Hodgson 1980:9,11). Walter Matita, a prophet from Lesotho who founded the Church of Moshoeshoe, learned to read from an angel in heaven (Martin 1964:118).

In West Africa, such instances of divine literacy are also apparent. In the 1930s in south-eastern Nigeria, the Holy Spirit revealed a language to the leader of a sect. The language came to be known as Oberi Okaime, taking its name from the sect to which it was revealed. The language was used in religious services and schooling for a few years before it disappeared (Adams 1947; Dalby 1968, 1969; Hau 1961). This script forms one of several examples in West Africa of divine linguistic revelation in which syllabaries or alphabets for existing languages, or at times for invented languages, are made apparent, most characteristically in a dream or vision (Dalby 1968, 1969; Probst 1989).

This phenomenon of miraculous literacy has been noted in other times and places, most notably medieval Europe (Bynum 1991) and amongst North American slaves (Cornelius 1991). There are of course numerous ways to analyse this phenomenon. In some cases, the emphasis falls on understanding these revelations as emerging amongst those who acquire literacy outside formal institutions. Often on the margins of religious organisations, like women in medieval society or slaves in the New World, they use revelations to authorise themselves and to gain spiritual authority. In his analysis of mysticism, Michel de Certeau (1992:21-26) portrays the phenomenon as emerging in response to the early modern professionalising and clericising of the church in Europe. Those left behind in this process insist on the power of the prophetic voice and vision as a form of religious authority.

Such analyses stress the role of dreams as a sign of powerlessness. In many parts of Africa, however, dreams are less about powerlessness and more a routine technique of religious life where they are generally considered to be oracular messages from heaven, or from the ancestors, or both. In many churches, both African Initiated and mainstream denominational, dreams are conscripted for different religious ends. Some dreams authorize the founding of new churches while others ratify membership of a particular sect. Dreams often feature as an important strategy in healing (Curley 1983; Kiernan 1985), or as a form of testimony in services, while call dreams summon people to special roles of prophecy or healing (Charsley 1992). Dreams also play a major role in Islam in Africa. With a long-standing presence in both Islam and African 'traditional' religions, dreams, as Fisher (1979) has suggested, become a site for experimenting with religious interaction, in turn often a prelude to conversion.

These forms of analysis are important and illuminate aspects of dreaming as a spiritual technique in religious life. My concern with these dreams of miraculous literacy is, however, somewhat different: I am interested in these dreams as sites in which material texts are generated. In each of the examples outlined above, the dream generates a material text. The man who sees the hymn on the blackboard writes it down. The prophet who sees the plan of heaven copies it onto a sheet of paper. Ntsikana's hymns, although initially not written down, subsequently make their way into print and still appear widely in hymn books. The leader of the Oberi Okaime receives a language which in turn produces a range of documents used in church and school.

There are numerous other examples which could be cited. Visions very often produce hymns. Believers often generate dream journals. Elizabeth Gunner's work on the South African prophet Isaiah Shembe reveals how the dreams of religious leaders come to be written down and constitute a major corpus of texts in the life of the church (Gunner 2002).

My interest in dreams as a site of textual production forms part of a bigger endeavour, namely that of the history of the book. I am currently working on a project which seeks to tell the story of textual production in the domain of the nineteenth-century Protestant mission as a way of attempting to think about the book transnationally. The mission realm provides an exemplary instance for understanding these processes: after all, within the mission empire, texts are made by a vast cast of players operating in many different parts of the globe. Their number has included prophets like Ntsikana generating miraculous texts in the southern African subcontinent; publishers in Paternoster Row in London; Bible auxiliaries in Bangalore; congregations in northern England raising funds to pay for the translation of a text in Central Africa; missionaries and African Christians undertaking such translations and producing hymns and so on. British publishing in the first half of the nineteenth century is dominated by Protestant evangelical book production. This key part of British publishing history needs to be reinserted into the vast transnational public on behalf of which book production was so fervently pursued. In order to come to grips with this transnational public, we need to understand the plethora of textual and reading practices of its various players and how these interact.

However, inserting these concerns into the field of book history is by no means straightforward. The study of book history has emerged over the past five decades and today constitutes a discrete and coherent field. In the words of one of its most prominent practitioners, Roger Chartier (1989:161), the field has a three-fold focus: on the text, on the object that conveys the text and on the act which grasps it. These domains have produced a range of important work on numerous aspects of the history of print culture and publishing, reading and reception. The focus of this work has, however, mainly been national in orientation. There have of course been studies which track the export and circulation of texts from Europe to other parts of the world, mainly the USA and Australia, but these have paid little attention to what such exports might mean for the metropole from which they come. One signal exception has been Priya Joshi's recent work on Indian consumption of print culture and the ways in which Indian popular taste has shaped the profile of the publishing company Macmillan (Joshi 2002).

A second problem with book history is that it takes a relatively narrow view of the book as an object. There has of course been outstanding scholarship on the material production and manufacture of the book, which examines everything from the history of paper, ink and binding materials to the development of typography and design. At the same time, however, this work focuses insistently on the material form of texts. What of the dreams we have been discussing? These are sites from which material texts emanate; how might they be factored into a history of the book?

Roger Chartier provides us with some suggestions which, if interpreted broadly, offer a route forward. He proposes that the field of book history also concerns itself with "all the objects and forms that carry out the circulation of writing" (2002:48). From the evidence we have seen so far, certain dreams are clearly forms that circulate writing and in this respect they can be factored analytically into the history of the book. The remainder of this paper attempts to explore this proposition and to insert dreams into a history of the book, understood not in a national frame but in a broad arena that crosses national boundaries and combines heaven and earth. In doing so, I ask what such a set of procedures might mean for our understanding of books and texts more generally and the publics that these constitute.

In his study of two independent or Aladura churches in western Nigeria, John Peel quotes a Yoruba pamphlet produced in the 1930s which records a vision revealed to a non-literate member of the Church of Seraphim and Cherubim. One of the instructions to the person experiencing the vision was: "Print [this vision] in books, effect complete circulation, and I will make you a holy Apostle for the whole world!" (1968:115).

This sentence admirably captures three recurring aspects of many textual dreams. Firstly, the dream must be given material textual form, in this case print; secondly this printed matter must be widely circulated ("effect complete circulation"); and thirdly, the combination of the first and second steps will confer power on the person experiencing the vision. Thus the three key terms are print, circulation and spiritual power. Together they constitute a familiar pattern in which two key aspects of modernity, namely print culture and publicity or circulation, are used towards regional or ethnic ends. In this instance these ends are characteristically Yoruba and involve the enhancement of power, simultaneously spiritual and temporal.

This triad of print, circulation and power characterises the working of many Christian organisations. Let us consider a particularly ambitious vision of miraculous literacy, this time from the British and Foreign Bible Society. The organisation was set up 1804 and for several decades its policy was guided by the belief that the Bible, unaided by human agency, would circulate to all corners of the globe and effect the conversion of those encountering it. In a form of discourse that Kipling was subsequently to characterise as 'palm and pine', this particular genre pivoted on the idea that the Bible would circulate to many different societies and climes, and through its circulation would confer Protestant uniformity on them and erase differences of time, place and culture.

 The Eskimo reads it on the margin of the polar ice-cap; the Kaffir
 child spells it under the pear-tree in the Clough of the Baboons.
 The Red Indian carries it in his breast as he threads the forest
 or paddles on the Great Lakes; the Negro learns it by heart on the
 plantations; on the Russian steppe it is in the hands of moujik and
 the wandering herdsman. It has reached the Brahmin and the Sudra;
 the Chinaman ponders over it, and burns his idols of rice-paper.
 Armed frigates, merchantmen, convict-ships, bear it over the seas
 of the world. (Canton 1904:317)

This form of discourse was to sustain countless publications and was to be applied to other texts, most notably The Pilgrim's Progress as it was translated by Protestant mission agents into 200 languages worldwide. Often figured as a mini-bible, this book was likewise presented as uniting and homogenizing different landscapes and people by its circulation (Hofmeyr 2004).

The idea of textuality embedded in this discourse is a magical one and pivots on two related ideas: the first sees texts as emanating from a divine source and the second sees print culture as a force that transcends human agency. It was these theories of textuality that came to underpin most Protestant evangelical ideas of books and book production and drove the extraordinary nineteenth-century outpouring of Protestant textual production, as billions of texts were sent out into the world.

The origins of this evangelical theory of textuality are complex and currently little understood. However, one initial way to explain them is via the lower-class provenance of most evangelical supporters whose spiritual traditions were despised by the Anglican upper-class establishment. These practices were often labelled as 'enthusiastic', an eighteenth-century term of insult which carried the meaning of being 'superstitious', 'irrational' and characterized by forms of spiritual excess like possession, dreams and revelations (Tucker 1972, Knox 1950). The enthusiastic habits of those in England were often likened to 'savages' far away. Hence in 1791, Methodists in England were likened to Obeah people in Dominica, both practising 'enthusiasm' or 'voodoo' (Tucker 1972:54).

Numbered amongst such 'enthusiastic' practices were magical ideas of reading and print in which religious books were at times used for forms of divination or in which texts were seen to have their own agency. Much of the extensive industry of tract production and distribution was based on ideas like these, namely that texts were mini-missionaries which could travel by themselves and seize those they encountered and transform them utterly.

As much research has demonstrated, evangelical Protestants effectively used the nineteenth-century mission project to add value to their political cause and address their social disabilities at home (Thorne 1999). Much the same story could be told for the reading and textual practices of Evangelicals. As Vanessa Smith (1998:1-7) has demonstrated in her book Literary Culture and the Pacific, mission organisations, in portraying their work out in the mission field back to a metropolitan audience, invariably distinguished between true and false readers. False readers were those who demonstrated excessive, over-enthusiastic strategies of reading like using texts as magical talismans or reciting letters as incantations. True readers were those who demonstrated 'real', 'internal' reading which had played a part in their conversion and had equipped them with the ability to grasp and interpret the scriptures. Reading in this latter sense was recognisably evangelical and showed the capacity of text to seize and transform those it encountered. In this strategy, the excesses of enthusiastic reading are projected onto 'primitive savages' while the core of evangelical reading, namely the ability of text to internally transform believers, is salvaged and, by comparison, made to appear respectable, mild and uplifting.

As we have seen, in many instances these reading strategies in the mission empire, whether of the true or false variety, had evolved out of intellectual and spiritual resources already existing in the society. As Peel has argued for the Yoruba case, print became embedded in existing practices of inscription, most notably that of Ifa divination and its practices of tracing signs in powder. Likewise, magical uses of writing in Islam also shaped the way print was understood. As Peel indicates, "the stage was set for a view of the written word as offering direct access to other kinds of power" (2000:223). Together, these circumstances produced ideas of writing as a force that could transcend human agency and could offer preferential access to spiritual worlds. It was a view of reading and writing that at least superficially resembled those held by Protestant missionaries. As so often happened in the mission empire, different agendas could be pursued under the umbrella of an apparently shared purpose.

Yet, however these reading and writing practices varied, they all shared one feature, namely a strong investment in the idea of circulation. Indeed, much of the Protestant mission project can in fact be read as an exercise in conspicuous circulation, a concern that sits at the centre of every activity or document produced. Let me give a few examples. The first is an image from the British and Foreign Bible Society which summarises the history of the organisation. It comprises two ovals, united above by an image of a dove (the Holy Spirit) and below by a strip of explanatory text: "In 1540, in the reign of Henry VIII, six Bibles were chained in St Paul's Cathedral, that the people of London might read the Holy Scriptures; but during the past year the British and Foreign Bible Society issues, from its various Depositories, 944 000 copies." In the left oval ("The Bible in 1540"), a group of the London poor, ragged and destitute, cluster around a chained Bible while one member of the group reads to the others. In the right oval ("The Bible in 1845"), we are given a glimpse into a placid and ordered domestic scene. The father of the house is reading from what we assume is the Bible. His wife, with a toddler on her lap, sits alongside him. Around them, their three older children are also reading and can we assume either that they are following their father's reading in their own Bibles or that they are reading books of an uplifting character. The scene is lighted both by a fire and by a gas reading lamp (and metaphorically by the Bible itself).

This before and after scenario represent a series of shifts: from public to private; from social poverty and chaos to the ordered world of the nuclear family; from 'backwardness' to technological progress (the gas lamp plus other fashionable commodities); from constraint to freedom. The instrument that has achieved this transformation is the Bible itself. Freed from its chained position (a standard sixteenth-century method for storing books (Petroski 1999:55-73) but presented here through the overtones of slavery and abolitionism), it can circulate freely and bring social order in its wake. If inserted into its correct milieu--the nuclear family--each of the 944 000 Bibles can bring a mini social order into being. Put together, these mini social orders add up to a social totality conjured into existence not only by the Bible, but by its simultaneous circulation across time and space.

This stress on circulation can also be seen in the numerous and sometimes extraordinary vehicles invented by the mission movement to effect and dramatize circulation. An early example is the floating church or chapel. In some cases, these were converted ships, in others, literally floating churches. In yet other cases, churches were made to resemble ships. These attempts at maritime mission formed part of a consistent and early focus on evangelizing amongst sailors (Kverndal nd). In some sense, this focus on seamen was understandable: they were often the most destitute and unchurched members of society and became something of a niche market for many philanthropic and evangelical organisations. The ship also became a crucial site for dramatising circulation. All large mission societies had seagoing vessels and these often featured in spectacles of farewell at which crowds would gather to see missionaries departing for distant climes. At times, these ceremonies included the missionaries bidding heartwrenching farewells to their children who stayed behind (Hofmeyr 2004:52). With regard to sailors on ships, their conversion held out several attractions: sailors were generally resistant to religion and any conversion meant that one had cracked a tough nut. It also meant that one had put into circulation a series of bodies who would travel and in turn convert others. Much of the very earliest mission effort went into maritime and waterside mission: the possibilities that these sites held out for dramatizing circulation provides one way to explain the energy that went into these ventures.

Other agents of circulation were the colporteurs, travelling salesmen or women who became a focus of much mission attention not only because they could reach into outlying, remote areas or areas prohibited to European missionaries, but also because they dramatized the idea of circulation itself.

These agents and contraptions of circulation were endlessly featured in mission publicity material and functioned as prosthetic extensions of missionaries: as James Rennie, a Scottish colporteur commented, "I am the legs of John Bunyan ..." (Rennie nd:36). Another comment comes from Charles Waters, the head of the International Bible Reading Association set up in the 1880s in a belated recognition that circulation of Bibles alone seldom produced converts. He notes that the IBRA and its programme of co-ordinated reading established "communications more thrilling than any wireless telegraphy ... between heart and heart, sundered by oceans and hemispheres" (cited in Latimer nd:53).

However one chooses to analyse this textual work, it is clear that collectively these efforts are intended to dramatise and sustain the idea that texts reached a universal audience. Yet, interestingly in official Protestant mission discourse, this circulation, while seen as divinely inspired, exists in the temporal world. Texts travel to all corners of the world but they never appear to travel to heaven. Put in simple terms, they appear to travel horizontally, but never vertically.

For those involved in demotic forms of Christianity, by contrast, vertical circulation was normal. For groups of African Christians, for spiritualists in Europe and the US, for Mormons, texts routinely travel between heaven and earth. Yet, for late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Protestants practising more elite and denominationally packaged versions of Christianity, the idea that material texts might move between heaven and earth was one that they seldom contemplated.

Let me illustrate this point with an example drawn from an African translation of The Pilgrim's Progress produced in 1902, in present-day Zimbabwe. The final illustration of the edition shows a well-known scene from the end of the first part of the book. The hero of the text called Christian has made his way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. He is accompanied by his friend Hopeful and together they arrive at the gates of heaven where they have to hand over the certificates that had been given to them earlier in the journey. The certificates indicate that they are of the elect and can be admitted to heaven. Another character, Ignorance, has no certificate: when he arrives at the gates of heaven, he is cast down into hell.

The book was a nineteenth-century best-seller and was widely used by Protestants in Europe and North America. In the thousands and thousands of editions produced, this scene was nearly always illustrated and we see Christian and Hopeful making their way into heaven by every conceivable conveyance: they walk, they crawl, they are lifted up by angels, they are transported in heavenly chariots. Yet, we never see them carrying any documents: evidently to nineteenth-century European and North American Protestants, the idea of entering heaven was absurd, despite the fact that this is exactly what the story recounts. By contrast, this scene of entering heaven by means of a ticket was to become an important trope in popular versions of Christianity in Africa and the diaspora (Hofmeyr 2004:137-150).

As we have seen, for many believers this vertical circulation exists. What conclusions might we then draw from these dreams in which texts do routinely circulate between heaven and earth? What kind of public sphere is being brought into being? Briefly put, one answer has to do with addressivity: texts that travel between heaven and earth offer multiple modes of address to their users, or, put in slightly different form, these texts are always multivalent.

Recent work by Gunner (2002), Muller (1999) and Maxwell (2001) on the texts of African Christianity captures much of this multivalency. These are popular religious texts which self-consciously position themselves between media: between the spoken and the printed; between image and word; between song, speech and print; between performance and writing; between photograph and dream image. Each text then is porous, opening simultaneously to these media and allowing users to imaginatively address themselves in multiple directions.

These texts also function as popular archives which, in Gunner's phrase, "diariz[e] the holy" (2002:16). These writings form part of the tradition of sub-elite textual production that Karin Barber's work has done so much to bring to light. These dream-inspired archives often take up a self-conscious orientation to eternity. They seek to fill all time and space, both literally and in their mode of address. Meshack Radebe, whose life story forms an important document in Nazarite history, talks of his own dream-inspired writing in these terms: "If I were to write any more about the deeds that I have seen accomplished by that Lord, I would write a Bible the size of a house, and it would be bigger than all those other ones that have ever existed" (cited in Gunner 2002:197). "[A] Bible the size of a house": this formulation points to the work that dream-inspired texts must do, they must translate the infinite whilst also seeking to fill the huge realm of the eternal. In order to undertake their sacred work, such archives must necessarily be able to circulate in every conceivable direction and dimension.

Warner's ideas on circulation are helpful in this regard. In his discussion of the relation of text and public, circulation forms a key part of the equation (Warner 2002), and publics are best understood by examining the ways in which the circulation of texts is imagined or, in his words, how texts dramatise the limits of their circulation.

The dream-initiated texts we have studied persistently offer us a view of documents that circulate between heaven and earth. What kind of public is being called into being by this particular mode of circulation? Let me hazard some answers. The first would be that this particular way of imaging texts retrospectively signs up the ancestors via the medium of print culture. Rather as Mormons draw up family trees so as to sign up their dead ancestors for late entry to heaven, so in this circulation of texts between heaven and earth, the dead can retrospectively be included in modernity. A second answer is that the circulation of texts between worlds opens up possibilities for imagining the self that speak to realms other than the national, particularly in the situation of dealing with the colonial state.

Such texts allow their users to identify under the state (often in ethnicity) and over it by identifying with the transnational Protestant public brought into being by the circulation of texts, but most importantly it allows them to speak as well to the next world. Let me give you a quick example, again from the work I have done on The Pilgrim's Progress. A photograph was taken in the early 1920s in a Baptist mission station in northern Angola. It illustrates a scene from The Pilgrim's Progress where the character Evangelist points the way for the hero Christian. The person playing the role of Evangelist was a leading member of the mission station, Miguel Nekaka. The politics surrounding the mission and the converts on it was complex: they were Protestants in a Catholic country; Kikongo speakers as opposed to the coastal Creole elite who spoke Portuguese; commoners and slaves in a society where the Kikongo king and his court still held significant forms of authority; black subjects in a white colonial order. At the same time, Evangelist Nekaka takes up a pose in a pageant well known to Protestant readers of The Pilgrim's Progress and projects himself and his complex political identities into a broader transnational domain (Hofmeyr 2004:181-184).

The example of Nekaka exemplifies a by now familiar concatenation of cultural processes in which local micro-politics, enacted through public performance, is projected via global idioms into a global arena, often over or around a nation state. It is a story that one can read in many contemporary academic texts like, for example, Congo-Paris by McGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga (2000) which examines the transnational worlds of Congo traders. Another book is Nadine Dolby's Constructing Race, a riveting ethnography of a Durban school, which narrates how students negotiate older discourses of race through global flows of music, fashion and style, a transaction in which the nation state ceases to be a vital point of reference. The global mechanics of these formations which confront us so powerfully today are not dissimilar from those which Nekaka confronted and likewise used to project or distribute a self well beyond his immediate horizons.

At the same time, however, we need to note that Nekaka projects himself not only to the temporal world but also to a spiritual realm. In the photograph, he speaks to heaven and addresses himself to eternity. It is a form of address that is more than subnational or transnational, it is transworldly and transglobal.

And it is this point which really constitutes the take-away message of this paper. In questions of popular culture it is this transworldliness or transglobality that we need to capture. With regard to my own project, namely that of writing a history of the book, the message is clear: I need to construct a story that is more horizontal, that is more transnational and wordly, but also more vertical and other-worldly.

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