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Chapter 2 Yemayá’s Duck
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43 Chapter 2 Yemayá’s Duck Irony, Ambivalence, and the Effeminate Male Subject in Cuban Santería Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús The Duck, pepeyé or kuékueue, is sacrificed exclusively to Yemayá and Olokun. The duck is the elder bird sacrificed to Yemayá and is accompanied by the rooster. He is blindfolded when he is about to be sacrificed, and whoever plucks him must cover her nose and mouth with a handkerchief so as to not sully him with her breath. During this process, one must be silent. If he is plucked poorly, Omi Tomi believed that the life of the Iyalocha [priestess], or one of her family members, who plucked him would be in danger. Yemayá counts the feathers and is unforgiving if there is one missing. There are many stories that partially explain why Yemayá eats the duck. She hates him to the point that when he is sacrificed to her, he is covered with a blue cloth so she does not have to see him. . . . However, at the same time, Yemayá needs and desires him. —Adapted from Yemayá y Ochún by Lydia Cabrera, an ethnographer and literature writer on Afro-Cuban religions.1 Introduction The ethnographer is a writer who composes nonfiction prose, a process that James Clifford and George Marcus describe as the convergence of the poetic and the political.2 The politics of the poetic links and fixes discursive momentums, competing ambiguous meanings that situ- 44 Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús ate and define parodies of self. African diaspora anthropology done by relatively elite North Americans3 might be characterized as a series of efforts to splice and unify, to salvage and vindicate “the African” as an ingenious transformer and cultural porter who left her mark within transculturated ,4 colonial, nationalist modernities.5 This chapter, however, is concerned with cynical optimisms situated within decades-long legacies of racialized religious-nationalistic homophobias—counternarratives of marginalized colonial heteronormativities, which, I argue, emerge within and through expressions of Santería masculinized nationalisms. My protagonist in this parody is the “effeminate male”6 santero or “el pato”7 —not an actual person or real community, but rather the discursive religious subject—and his role in producing religious difference . I am intrigued and disturbed by the comedic reprieve and defensive tactic this masculine effeminate performs in everyday religious life. Homophobic discourses trouble understandings of religion and sex that engage in fixing affirmations. These discourses are mobile and in flux. They disrupt naturalizations even as they fix sexed and gendered subjects. Indeed, homophobic affirmations also perform declarations of truth. I focus on a few of the complex relations between productions of religious truths: the coming together of masculinity, nationalisms, and dillogún (Cuban cowry-shell divination) “signs” that form Santería scripts of human nature. By engaging these on a grid of mutual intelligibility ,8 this chapter explores religious acts of understanding self and other and the ways these afflictive and satirical solutions simultaneously (and often unconsciously) fix humans into naturalized sexiological positionalities.9 I feel a bit contrary in fastening my gaze on Yemayá’s duck as a counterdiscourse—an entry into the sexual nationalisms that emerge in Santería relations of power. These ambiguous discursivities, like the Oricha Yemayá herself, compose and abate, like the lapping of waves on the shore. El Pato is as Miguelón, an obá oriaté (Santería officiator ) from Havana described to me, a “cursed creature,” one who as it has been told, had access to the secrets at the bottom of the sea. Yet, because he was a gossip (chismoso) who betrayed Yemayá, the duck was punished with a cacophonous quack and uncertain wobble and marked for his indiscretions with webbed feet. When sacrificed, the esophagus is cut out and blown on to remove curses. “Pato” and “bird” (pájaro) are also degrading aphorisms for an effeminate homosexual male in Cuba.10 Indeed, the duck that is sacrificed to Yemayá is always white, an interesting relationality that highlights how homosexuality is envisioned in African diaspora practices as a “white, male” North American deviance from traditionality.11 Seen as similarly “marked” by a sway of [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:44 GMT) 45 Yemayá’s Duck hip or feminized mannerism, the homosexual santero is simultaneously imagined as both a cursed and necessary subject in Afro-Cuban Santería. In this chapter, I briefly examine the power of Santería masculine religiosities through the imperious female ocean...