Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 117

Popular Culture as Religion

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finally learning to cook for myself some of the Creole and Cajun foods
I love. As it turned out, however, no matter how good a roux and
gumbo 1 learned to make, no matter how tasty my beans a nd rice, how
fine my own shrimp creole, these dishes away from home were just
good favorite food. And no matter how often 1 played my audio
collection of home music, or how often New Orleans performers came
to play live in Manhattan clubs, there it was just great music. Even in
the wrong place, though, the best of its foods and music were enough
to let my bones know and my blood taste again "what it's like to miss
New Orleans."
So it was that my practices changed, and with change of praxis
came new understanding. For the next several years in a row, instead
of the usual vacations, 1 made annual trips back home. Though my
crises had passed and 1 was no longer hurting, the trips were somehow
still about healing, or at least about wholeness. Though often in their
comjjany, 1 was not visiting my actual family so much as the intensely
local/insular culture and physical reality of New Orleans.^® So
also, 1 have learned, does the classic African tribal member, who
ordinarily lives and works far away in the modem capital, sometime
need to return to his tribe and his family "crawl." He returns
sometimes for healing, sometimes for guidance, but all times for
wholeness.^ ^ We may rightly interpret this as getting flesh-andblood reconnected to one's source. What it feels like, back home in
one's own air and water, earth and ways is that finally one can
breathe . . . . Deep and fully relaxed, with no need to confront or
calculate, one can fully just b e ___ And so 1 finally came to understand
that my home place's powerfully unique context functions for me as
primal place and tribe always have. As Ron Eyre put it in Africa,
"primal religion is not available for export." "The man or woman
"who leaves the tribal land goes into ceremonial exile." She and he
cannot again participate in their primal reality until they return.^ ^
This is because A e primal individual is no full self, save as she or
he is in, with, and of the tribe and its ways. And the tribe is really
itself only as it is physically in, of, and at one with its land. Thus
the restorative goodness, for an exile, of any return to New Orleans. It
is very much a matter of enjoying the same food or music in the same
old-wood or stuccoed rooms, sharing the same ceiling-fanned ambience
with other natives (none of whom you may know). It's very much
that you consciously "live, move, and have [your] being" physically