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

Chapter 1 Nobody’s Mammy

9 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 politi- 10 Elizabeth Pérez cal 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 11 Nobody’s Mammy 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...