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Chapter 3 Yemayá y Ochún
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85 Chapter 3 Yemayá y Ochún Queering the Vernacular Logics of the Waters Solimar Otero Sería imposible al hablar de Yemayá en la Isla de Cuba, silenciar y menos separar de ella, a la popularísima Ochún, con quien comparte el dominio de las aguas. It would be impossible to talk about Yemayá in the island of Cuba by silencing and separating her from the popular Ochún, with whom she shares dominion over the waters. —Lydia Cabrera, Yemayá y Ochún.1 Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954) is one of the queerest books ever written by a Cuban author. —José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire.2 The above quotes by Cabrera and Quiroga serve as useful points of entry to consider the queer nature of the performance of spiritual identities in the contexts of Afro-Cuban religious cultures. They relate how representations of Afro-Cuban religion can occur in contexts where the order of the binary is subverted by their performance. In this piece, I want to use fieldwork done with practitioners of Santería to investigate how vernacular discourses about gender, embodiment, and the past reorder these very categories. In the same vein, I want to reread Lydia Cabrera’s work Yemayá y Ochún: Kariocha, Iyalorichas y Olorichas in a queer man- 86 Solimar Otero ner that will also open up these categories to broader interpretations.3 As Cabrera merges ethnography with fiction and reported speech within a form of play that troubles the authorial voice, her writing is an invitation to question how we think about what we know about Afro-Cuban religious culture. This is especially true in her representations of the water deities Yemayá and Ochún, and it is the case in how practitioners describe these deities and their relationship to them. In both instances, we see that crossing boundaries and borderlands, especially in terms of kinds of water (salty/sweet), is reinscribed with a kind of play that challenges fixed notions of subjectivity. Thus, the relationship between Yemayá and Ochún, as demonstrated in the idea of a devotee being a “child of both waters / hijo/a de las dos aguas” exists as an insider category that is open, multifaceted, and not fixed. As a folklorist, I offer this noted vernacular relationship between especially women and their female deities as a productive place to start thinking about the spaces in between categories of subjectivity that entail gender, race, nation, and embodiment. In using the terms “women” and “female deities,” I also am suggesting that both Cabrera and my collaborators in the field provoke a more complicated reading of gender and embodiment than the accepted binaries surrounding these subjects. The way that Afro-Cuban religion reconstitutes itself—through writing and praxis—makes us understand that certain kinds of agency are found in liminal spaces. These in-between spaces can be found in many sites of symbolic and cultural production: between waters, deities, subjectivities, and genres of writing. How these domains meet and merge in Cuban Santería also expands our thinking about the nature of Afro-Atlantic religious cultures, their temporality, as well as how we perceive diasporic paradigms of religious performance like song, dance, divination, patakí (a traditional mythological narrative), and so on. This piece, then, asks us to think about the relationship between Yemayá and Ochún as providing a template for understanding the intersectional practices that Afro-Cuban religious discourse performs. Of course, the ritual, mythological, and discursive creativity surrounding Yemayá and Ochún that I am exploring in Afro-Cuban religious cultures has parallel expressions in Africa and other parts of the African Diaspora. For example, in Nigerian Aladura churches, where ritual creativity and co-penetration exists between Yoruba traditional religion (esin ibile) and Christianity, it is believed that Olorun (God) divided the waters in two: into the salty and sweet water realms of Yemoja (Yemayá) and Osún (Ochún), respectively.4 Also, according to R. C. Abraham’s classic Modern Dictionary of Yoruba, variations exist in Yoruba mythology, ritual, and belief as to whether it is Yemoja (Yemayá) [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:30 GMT) 87 Yemayá y Ochún who gives birth to Osún (Ochún) or if it is Osún (Ochún) who gives birth to Yemoja (Yemayá).5 In Brazil, there is also a good deal of creativity and fluidity in how the relationship between Yemanjá (Yemayá) and Oxum (Ochún) is described, understood...