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Chapter 8 What the Water Brings and Takes Away
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Chapter 8 What the Water Brings and Takes Away The Work of María Magdalena Campos Pons Alan West-Durán The ancestor speaks, it is the ocean. —E. Glissant1 Cubans have an intimate, loving, and troubled relationship with the sea. As an island, we have little choice except to know it, embrace it, and reckon with it. The ocean has been a constant inspiration for romantic poets and a grim historical warning as an aquatic graveyard during the Middle Passage and, more recently, for rafters traversing the Florida straits. Whether one agrees with Virgilio Piñera in his landmark poem, “Esa maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes” (“That accursed circumstance of water all around us”) or with José Lezama Lima’s more celebratory and poetic definition of island ontology, “La mar violeta añora el nacimiento de los dioses/ ya que nacer aquí es una fiesta innombrable ” (“The violet sea longs for the birth of the gods/ since to be born here is an ineffable celebration”), the sea speaks eloquently to the island’s diasporic history.2 María Magdalena Campos-Pons (1959– ) was born in Matanzas, and she is now living in Boston. Campos-Pons is an artist who embraces Virgilio and Lezama by way of Yemayá and Ochún. She literally embodies multiple diasporas, using technology, memory, and spirituality to ask difficult questions about art, identity, history, and race through her work in different media (photography, painting, installation, and video).3 197 198 Alan West-Durán Yemayá: The Water Speaks In a telling phrase, Gaston Bachelard writes, “Thus water will appear to us as complete being with body, soul, and voice.”4 In Campos-Pons’s early work, water and liquids feature prominently: two pieces from 1989, one called “Isla,” which features a body-island from an aerial view, and a second photograph of the artist holding two little statues.5 The statue in Campos-Pons’s left hand is Ochún or the Virgin of Charity, and in her right hand is Yemayá or the Virgin of Regla, both of which are associated with water. Each statue covers her naked breasts. They are two of the most venerated orishas in Cuba, and both evoke many aspects of female power. Ochún (Virgin of Charity) is linked to sensuality, childbirth, fertility, enjoyment, celebration, fine things (such as jewelry, beads, and the like), and fresh water. Yemayá (in Cuba the Virgin of Regla, a port city near Havana). is the orisha of all waters, and particularly the ocean. Lydia Cabrera writes, “Yemayá is the Universal Queen because she is Water, fresh and salty, the Sea, the Mother of all that is created. She nourishes all, since the World is earth and sea, earth and all that lives on earth, and thanks to Her the earth is nourished. Without water, animals, humans, plants would all die”6 Yemayá is one of the most knowledgeable orishas, possessing the wisdom not only of motherhood but, when called upon, of the Ifá divination system as well. In many of her works, Campos-Pons draws upon the imagery and spiritual energy of these two powerful female orishas who are central to the Cuban cultural imaginary. Campos-Pons’ aesthetic concerns are deeply imbued with the aquatic and cosmological qualities of Yemayá and Ochún: more directly in works such as “I am a Fountain” (1990), “The Seven Powers” (1992), “The Seven Powers Come by the Sea” (1992), “When I’m Not Here/Estoy Allá” (1994), “When I’m Not Here/Estoy Allá” (1997), “Susurro” (1997), “Spoken Softly with Mama” (1998), “Replenishing” (2001), and “Elevata” (2002), and indirectly in others.7 In both versions of “The Seven Powers,” she draws on the memory of the Middle Passage and builds upon “Tra . . .” (1991), a work from the previous year, with its triple word association (travesía, trata, tragedia ; traversing, trade [as in slave trade], and tragedy).8 This phase of her work delves into diasporic memory, and Campos-Pons historicizes Yemayá: she becomes a welcoming and grieving mother who embraces her dead children in the watery depths of the Atlantic as well as being a witness to those who traverse the seas under conditions of unspeakable suffering. This work seems to echo Walcott’s famous poem “Sea Is History,” with its haunting evocations of the Middle Passage.9 On wooden boards that evoke drawings of slave ships with their human [54.157.61.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:23 GMT) 199 What...