Julius Caesar Tituba Sacrifice

Tituba similarly sees her sacrifice of “Milk! Blood!... the essential liquids plus the docile flesh of the sacrificial victims?” as a means to gain the favor of her ancestors. (139) We find her viewing the sudden appearance of a bird emerging from the “motionless cinders” which rises, “straight up into the sun” as a sign of her supplication being answered. (139) Yet Tituba is powerless on her own for even if her sacrifice is answered with the death of a sailor pointing to the spirits demanding further sacrifice. As a mediator between the dead and the spirits and as a healer, we see Tituba’s limitations as well as her triumphs. She is able to cure the “fever and sicknesses” on board the ship with her remedies administering “scalding hot potions’
and rubbing the “sweating, feverish bodies with knots of straw.” (138) Her folk practices and rituals allow Tituba to develop her healing abilities further healing even foreign diseases.
Her instinct to do good is mocked by the maroons and the obeah men of Barbados.
Returning to Barbados Tituba extends her “exploration and healing”. Tituba learns to heal cholera, smallpox and yaws. She is able to treat “open festering wounds” and mend broken bones with the assistance of her “invisible spirits”. (156) Reviving a dying Iphigene may be the greatest accomplishment of Tituba as a healer. Through her Hoodoo remedies she is able to heal him. She devises poultices and plaster for his wounds and counters the festering wounds with animal liver and lowers his fever with cold compresses. One may find in Tituba’s remedies a medicinal technique and a bearing of science. She exists to heal wounds and hurts with her rituals as well as her compassionate nature. Back in Barbados Tituba brings, “back to life a little baby girl who was hardly out of her mother’s womb. She hadn’t yet stepped through death’s door…” (152) She proves she is capable of only doing good to heal and love. Scarboro asserts, “It is because of her dedication to the ways of her ancestors - and the use of her healing powers to help the women of the family that owns her – that she becomes a target of the witch hunt.” (Foreword xiii) Even if the label of ‘witch’ follows her everywhere she never gives in to those who goad her to do evil. Even in the act of avenging the tortures she received by the hands of the Puritans ministers she is unable to malign the innocent. She addresses the reader
directly;
“… you must be wondering who this witch is devoid of hatred, who is mislead each time by the wickedness in men’s heart. For the nth time I made up my mind to be different and fight it out tooth and nail. But how to work a change in my heart and coat it lining with snake venom? How to make it a vessel for bitter and violent feelings? To get it to love evil? Instead I could only feel tenderness and compassion for the disinherited and a sense of revolt against injustice.” (151)
It is clear that Tituba is a spiritual healer not a witch.
For even priests invoke their unseen God for aid and healing. The priest too is a spiritual healer who after listening to a confession has the power to absolve man of his sins clearly declaring a connection of the material with the spiritual. As a spiritual healer Tituba relies on nature as her lifelong ally. She exults in the natural elements which liberate her and become her arsenal in countering the imperialist and the patriarch. Tituba narrative even as she is demeaned as a witch and a woman of color we must factor in the agency nature allows women against oppression. Conde focuses on a metafictional excavation and rewriting of Tituba’s historically lost narrative illustrating how even after subverting history, imperialism and patriarchy impact a creole woman. Conde deftly intertwines racial and gender discrimination juxtaposing it against the theme of healing, female sexuality and agency. We also find the metaphor of motherhood closely connected to nature. It shows how through the lens of ecofeminism nature acts as a retreat as well as the repertoire to Tituba’s powers of healing. As a healer Tituba’s relation with nature is deeper than the other slaves of her community. She has a symbiotic relationship with nature and its elements. Greta Gaard in Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature
postulates:
…ecofeminism's basic premise is that the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature. Ecofeminism calls for an end to all oppressions, arguing that no attempt to liberate women (or any other oppressed group) will be successful without an equal attempt to liberate nature. (1)
According to Gaard women have a greater affinity with nature as it allows the oppressed a voice. Ecofeminism allows us to view the oppressor and the oppressed on various levels within diverse relationships. Women through nature are able to connect and create a collective meaning and identity. They are able to mediate and create harmony between the binaries and alterities created by the imperialist and patriarch. These binaries are the self and the other, witch or healer, man and woman and black and white. According to Gaard men have “a sense of self as separate is more common in men, while an interconnected sense of self is more common in women. (2)