Santeria: A Practical Guide to Afro-Caribbean Magic, and: Santeria Stories (review)

Luis Manuel Núñez’s Santeria Stories offers twenty pages of information about Santeria deities and some instructions on divination and offerings, but is largely a retelling of oral stories gleaned from “many followers of the religion” (Santeria Stories 393–94). It is not a scholarly work per se; it uses no citations and offers a truncated bibliography of four authors. But neither is it folkloric in Lydia Cabrera’s sense of reporting fieldwork; Núñez takes the literary liberties of a storyteller. His earlier Santeria: A Practical Guide to Afro-Caribbean Magic is a “how-to” book that utilizes the work of four additional authors. They therefore raise interesting questions about the relationship between orality and scholarship. Read together, they bookend a troubled syncretic site where racialized, sexualized perceptions of a controversial diaspora religion meet up with would-be practitioners who seek quick-fixes and thrills rather than guidance from elders.

The name Santeria denotes a group of religions, originally developed by West Africans enslaved in Cuba, which has spread as many variant branches throughout the world. The travails of slavery and continued migration help account for diverse theology and praxes. With familial similarities derived from Yoruba indigenous religion, divergent branches began with, and tend to be more or less rooted in, the need for “survival by way of resistance to a dominant culture” (De la Torre 845). Questions appropriate to books about this cluster of religions therefore include “in what ways is the work grounded in the history of slavery and accompanying dominant belief systems, in scholarship about and/or experience of Yoruba philosophy and the development of diverse diaspora beliefs and praxes?”; “what registrations of which shifts and resistance does it analyze or reference?”; and “where is it coming from, and who is it written for?”

Michael Ventura provides a well-researched five page Introduction to A Practical Guide which offers minimal context. According to Ventura it is written for “you and I,” not to encourage us to “start killing chickens” but to “remind us that [in Yoruba] the sacred is” neither “dead” nor predicated on the “Cartesian mind-body split.” He also argues that the Yoruba concept of sacrifice is a necessary challenge to “an economics [ . . . ] which rewards selfishness” (viii) and offers remedy to the sacrifice of “the very ecology of the planet,” (vi) of “huge segments of the population to poverty” (ix). This promising beginning is followed by four pages of Historical Notes in which Núñez provides his sense of context and also invites us all: “neither skin color nor language is a barrier” (Santeria 1). This book, then, is ostensibly written for everyone. But Núñez never delivers the remedy that Ventura promises. Instead he describes a religion of “throbbing” drums and adds his own promise to tell us about “blood, and sex” (Santeria 1). This he delivers in abundance in Stories.

Stories begins with two pages explaining that Yoruba religion and Cuban Catholicendorsed mutual aid societies converged as Santeria, while A Practical Guide encapsulates Núñez’s sense of the intimate side of history: “nannies croon African Apatakis. White babies fall asleep, the stories of the gods in their ears. The babies grow up. [ . . . ] They believe [ . . . ] white men have black lovers. Beautiful black women bite their ears. They learn to respect Chango” (Santeria 4). These kinds of problematic tropes of African women as seminal mothers and as fiercely seductive lovers have been exhaustively chronicled, for example in books such as Janell Hobson’s Venus in the Dark (2005). In this too familiar vein, according to Núñez’s version of Santeria, Africa has been seductively transmitted to Spaniards in the most intimate settings, and, like Joe in Sankofa, is born as their conflicted child. The rest of A Practical Guide is concerned with the specific praxes of a particular branch of Santeria, while Stories delivers an oral literature that is, in a sense, Joe’s version of his parents...