Yemoja

Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas

Solimar Otero, Toyin Falola, Solimar Otero, Toyin Falola

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438448015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Finalist for the 2014 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions presented by the Journal of Africana Religions This is the first collection of essays to analyze intersectional religious and cultural practices surrounding the deity Yemoja. In Afro-Atlantic traditions, Yemoja is associated with motherhood, women, the arts, and the family. This book reveals how Yemoja traditions are negotiating gender, sexuality, and cultural identities in bold ways that emphasize the shifting beliefs and cultural practices of contemporary times. Contributors come from a wide range of fields—religious studies, art history, literature, and anthropology—and focus on the central concern of how different religious communities explore issues of race, gender, and sexuality through religious practice and discourse. The volume adds the voices of religious practitioners and artists to those of scholars to engage in conversations about how Latino/a and African diaspora religions respond creatively to a history of colonization.

Part 1

Yemoja, Gender, and Sexuality

Invocación

Pedro R. Pérez-Sarduy

En busca de un amante desempleado

La Habana vive casi en penumbras
con su aire contaminado de turistas y disidentes insólitos
donde la joven oferta de un vestido ajustado
a las circunstancias de la última moda
cabalga de ironías por el malecón
entre aparentes cócteles exóticos
y la perenne indiferencia de un comisario
confuso también a la hora de persuadir.

De cualquier forma
La Habana estaba ahí,
mía y más sensual que de costumbre
asomada como siempre a sus balcones
mirando sin cansancio
hacia el mar de muchachas y muchachos en pretérito
sobre monturas de vinyl
y el reflejo de una discoteca prohibida
con aquella vertiginosa silueta oscilando la pelvis
frente a un rostro pálido improvisado y desconocido,
por supuesto, con ropas de ultramar.

Sin embargo
no hay tiempo qué perder para el pobre mendigo
que busca la ocasión propicia para el manoseo y el juego entre lenguas.

Después de todo
estamos en presencia de una época atormentada por tantas dolencias.

No hay tiempo qué perder tampoco
porque mañana por la tarde ya sería esta noche
y también otra madrugada tranquila
gratificada con una cena suntuosa
o sencillamente una cena sin atuendos importados
durante el tiempo que reine la austeridad
o una simple invitación atrevida.

En estos tiempos sólo okana
el dilogún solitario que presagia malos agüeros
ronda travieso por la tierra sedienta de tantas bondades desaprovechadas
incoherentes ofrendas y rogaciones mancilladas.

Hay escasez en la mirada
como aquella destinada a socorrer al desvalido
y tal parece que este lunes de hoy derrocha cierta soberbia
que nunca antes fue del todo racional.

Qué alegría si estuvieras conmigo ahora
O mío Reina del Mar!
Tú que te atreves de espumas a cabalgar sobre Taurus
entre ricas turquesas que adornan tu amable corona.
Tú que siempre desoyes el grito cómplice del iniciado
antes del crepúsculo y sigues de largo entre mis brazos
acompañada solamente por el sonido de cocos secos
que siempre permanecieron secos.

No volviste de la gran fiesta
y hablabas contigo misma
procurando satisfacer la frescura de la miel
en la punta de los senos
revolcando tu cuerpo fresco de aguas limpias

y así para penetrar en lo más íntimo de tu noche
allí donde el pudor se detiene asustado.

Antes de partir todas las sombras fueron ingenuas
y silenciosamente similares.

Invocation

Pedro R. Pérez Sarduy

Searching for an unemployed lover¹

Havana lives on the edge of darkness
with its air contaminated by tourists
and uncommon dissidents
where the young offer of a dress tightly fitting
the circumstances of the latest fashion trots ironically
along the sea front
among seemingly exotic cocktails
and the perennial indifference of a commissar
also confused when it comes to persuasion.

Whatever form it took
Havana was there mine and more sensual than usual
leaning out as always from her balconies
gazing tirelessly towards the sea of girls and boys of the past
dressed in lycra and the reflection of a forbidden disco
with that dizzy silhouette
facing a pale face unexpected and unknown
wearing foreign clothes, of course.

However
there is no time to lose for the poor beggar
searching for the right moment for a quick feel
and the game between tongues.
After all
we are in the presence of an age tormented by so many ailments.

There is no time to lose either
because tomorrow afternoon would already be tonight
and also another peaceful dawn
rewarded with a sumptuous supper of simply a supper
with no imported frills
for as long as the reign of austerity lasts
or just a daring invitation.

In these times only okana
the solitary African conch who predicts ill omens
restlessly roams the earth thirsting for so many kind acts
wasted
incoherent offerings and sullied pleas
something is wanting in the look
like that aimed at assisting the needy
so much that today Monday seems to exude a certain arrogance
which was never before entirely rational.

What joy if you were with me now
O mío Queen of the Sea
You who dare to ride the waves mounted on Taurus
among precious turquoise gems which adorn gentle crown
You who are always ignore the secretly agreed cry of the initiate
before dusk and you keep going in my arms
accompanied only by the sound of dry coconuts
which have always been dry.
You did not return from the grand feast
and were speaking with yourself
endeavoring to satisfy the freshness of honey
on the tips of yours breasts
your body writhing fresh with clean waters

penetrating the most intimate point of your night
there where shame halts frightened.

And before parting all the shadows
were innocent and silently similar.

Note

1. Translated by Jean Stubbs.

Chapter 1

Nobody’s Mammy

Yemayá as Fierce Foremother in Afro-Cuban Religions

Elizabeth Pérez

In the writing on Afro-Cuban religions, Yemayá has been approached as both the prototype for and the deified paragon of maternal love. According to most accounts, not only does Yemayá birth fellow orishas and raise the divine twins, the Ibeyi, as her adopted children, but she also features prominently in the mythology of her son, Changó. Dozens of publications call Yemayá “the universal mother,” implying a uniformity of ideal maternal traits across cultures; they define her sexuality primarily in terms of her desire to engender life as the “marine matrix” of the cosmos.¹ Such texts have cited the variety of creatures in the ocean—her preferred abode in Afro-Diasporic tradition—to illustrate the breadth and profundity of her generative force, as well as the vast resources available to her for supplicants’ material nurturance. With her ample bosom, hips, and abdomen embodying the “eternal feminine,” Yemayá has appeared to lend credence to “mother goddess” as a conceptual category capable of encompassing disparate figures from the Paleolithic period to the present day.²

Despite the widespread assumption that deities represent timeless, primordial essences, historical contingencies and culturally specific religious imaginaries have combined to produce the contemporary vision of Yemayá. Many of the images and narratives that dominate conventional understandings of this orisha originated in nineteenth-century Cuba, when motherhood was ineluctably shaped by local racial discourses, the practice of concubinage, and slavery as an economic, social, and political institution. Yemayá is the orisha most often depicted as Black, an identification reflected in and reinforced by her correspondence with the Virgin of Regla, the only Marian icon in Cuba considered to be of direct African descent. Mainstream portrayals of Yemayá as “de piel negrísima” and “negra como el azabache” have long cried out for analysis, especially bearing in mind that every form of Cuban popular cultural media has perpetuated the caricature of the dark-skinned, thickset “mammy.”³ Indeed, considering Yemayá’s association with both surrogacy and other physical characteristics attributed to the mammy, it is no exaggeration to say that this orisha has been caught between archetype and stereotype.⁴

While the biracial “mulatta” has not only served as the emblem of cultural hybridity for the Cuban nation, but also become something of a fetish for current scholarship, representations of the “negra”—both human and divine—have been left woefully undertheorized. At issue here is emphatically not whether certain women of color merit greater attention than others, but rather, the very fact that the orishas have been understood to occupy racialized female bodies, inhabit distinct subjectivities according to them, and privileged differentially. Following on the crucial insights of critical race theory and Black feminist and womanist thought with regard to Yemayá, I invoke Blackness as a quintessentially modern, gendered category of identity for which pigmentation and phenotype act as unstable signifiers. While underscoring Blackness as constituted within communities through shared experiences of racialization, usually entailing exposure to discriminatory practices, I also wish to emphasize the local modalities of Blackness found throughout the Afro-Atlantic world.⁵ The multiplicity and “slipperiness” of “Black” can be said to mirror that of Yemayá herself.⁶

In what follows, I argue that analyses of Yemayá in the Black Atlantic world must take more rigorously to task folkloric generalizations about this orisha and look for her in the particularity of Afro-Diasporic experience. I begin by examining Yemayá’s emergence in Cuba through her correspondence with Regla in Afro-Cuban Lucumí and Espiritismo Cruzado, as well as with her counterpart in Palo Monte, Madre Agua. I assert that the relationship between Regla and Yemayá has assisted in preserving countermemories of the Afro-Cuban past, maintained in opposition to the hegemonic “master narrative” personified by the mammy. I contend that within the transnational Afro-Atlantic context, Yemayá is best approached as a fierce “foremother figure,” and I elaborate this claim with respect to two geographically and chronologically distant urban Lucumí communities. As a historian and ethnographer, I proceed methodologically by surveying the pertinent documentary evidence concerning Afro-Cuban traditions, before drawing on several years of my own research on the South Side of Chicago. I conclude that to be acquainted with Yemayá’s fierceness is to examine her manifestation within communities as they negotiate both their transatlantic religious legacies and the meanings of her Blackness.

Yemayá and Regla in Afro-Cuban Tradition

Four Marian figures from Spain became associated with Lucumí spirits in Cuba during the colonial period: the Virgins of Mercedes (Obatalá), Candelaria (Oyá),⁷ Caridad (Ochún), and Regla (Yemayá), the only one to number among the Black Madonnas of Europe. According to legend, the original sculpture of Regla was created in Africa by none other than Augustine of Hippo, and it eventually made its way to Chipiona, near Cádiz—the port of choice for ships sailing to the Americas.⁸ Owing to her reputation among priests and sailors, this image of Regla gained followings in several Spanish possessions.⁹

In Cuba, her iconography has stayed relatively consistent for over three centuries; she carries the infant Jesus in her arms, and he grasps a flower in his hand.¹⁰ Regla’s head is covered, but the Christ Child’s is not. His face and hands are alabaster; hers are ebony. The connection between her Blackness and her power entered the historical record in the mid-eighteenth century when Bishop Pedro Augustín Morell de Santa Cruz visited her sanctuary in the ultramarine town of Regla, across the bay from Havana, built in 1692 on the property of a sugar mill.¹¹ The bishop wrote, “What distinguished this image as a prodigious effigy was that she had never accepted touch-ups with white color.”¹²

Although in calling Regla “vastantemente moreno,” Bishop Morrell employed the preferred racial term for a person with African ancestry on both sides, history does not record the precise moment at which her color (negra) became a sign of race (Negro). Nor do the archives assist us in determining precisely when Lucumí practitioners began to associate Regla with Yemayá.¹³ Yet the pairing of Virgins and orishas was presumably encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church itself, eager to organize slaves and freedmen into the ethnically differentiated religious brotherhoods cum mutual aid societies called cabildos de nación and to catechize them by foste...