| Sumario: | This article concerns medical racism and sexual trauma in Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997), but also the innovative African Diasporic healing ceremonies the novel depicts, which are key to understanding the mysterious deaths and seeming rebirth of the women who reside in the Convent and are (in theory) massacred by the men from Ruby at the end of the novel. I argue that the healing figure at the center of this novel (Consolata Sosa) creates a unique boundary-melting ceremony that ties together fragments from three different traditions of Africanist healing to create a new ritual that enables physical and spiritual rebirth. Connie draws on Nigerian Ò s ∘ u n healing rituals involving water, Afro-Brazilian practices of repair originating in Candomblé, and a configuration of feminine agency and revivification present in the Gnostic and Egyptian-influenced Christian gospel "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" and its invocation of the Egyptian goddess Isis. This last topic, in particular— Morrison's use of the Gnostic Gospel and the figure of Isis, who was thought to bring people back to life—is key to comprehension of how the novel creates an innovative ritual that facilitates (in Morrison's own words) "a resurrection that is beyond death." The healing ceremony at the heart of the novel engenders new psychic and corporeal restorations even after the "death" of the Convent women. The women can therefore return from death to repair the bonds of their communities and institute ongoing forms of reconciliation and reparative justice.
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