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This essay is a meditation on the notions of spirit and spirituality with regard to the Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella's distinguished epic novel of the diaspora of Africans in the Americas, Chango, el gran Putas.1 Complex in itself, these notions are further complicated by the novel's translation as "Chango, the Baddest Dude" into English, an activity I finished some five years ago, although, as the manuscript still lies unpublished, that process cannot yet be declared completed. This reflection arises from a previous study I recently carried out on lateral movement and lateral thinking in and around the novel. As I hunted for evidence and illustrations of laterality, with which the text is rife, I kept coming upon features pertaining to matters spiritual. I found those matters to be powerfully formulated, to be sure. But beyond their impact, they existed in a tantalizing tension that both defied and required explanation. The thickness of the novel's spiritual dimension also reminded me of conversations and correspondence I have had over the years with the author. Certain statements of his made no sense to me, unless they were to be taken less than literally, as language games or comments made in jest. Later I found that those utterances had a common spiritual quality that, when considered together, suggested a worldview-an ideology, if you will, that was neither strictly Western nor strictly rational. I finally became convinced that spirit and spirituality are so central to the novel that I should devote an entire study to those concepts.
Definitions of spirit, spirituality, or related terms abound. In addition to recognizing the etymological value of spirit as "breath" (that which we respire, inspire and expire, and which is thus the stuff of life), I use "spirit" here within parameters envisaged between spirit and several concepts with which it stands in opposition. These are the spiritual versus the corporeal (sensuality, sexuality, desire, eros, etc.); spirit versus matter (skeptical belief only in the tangible, the physical, that which can be perceived by the five senses); spirit versus rationality (experimental science, mathematics, Western philosophy since Socrates and consolidated by the Enlightenment); spirit versus materialism (greed, selfishness, egoism, capitalism); and spirit versus the Church (official ecclesiastical power structure, dogma, the Inquisition and Holy Office, denunciations of...