Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas

Conclusion: The Response: Reflections in the Mirror

163 Ñ conclusion Ò The Response Reflections in the Mirror No deberías renunciar al placer de ser tú misma. —Oshún, in Casa de juegos Chaviano’s reminder about never renouncing the pleasure of one’s self is an important call to her audience. For women authors across the Americas, the spiritual entity known alternatively as Oshún, or Oxum, is representative not only of pleasure itself, sexual or otherwise, but indeed calls for recognition of all of the aspects of one’s self. In her study of this entity, Deidre Badejo highlights that balance is the aim of life, according to the Yorùbá worldview (68). She writes: “Since balance within and between the cosmic and human realms is a primary cosmological objective, a breach or imbalance within or among those realms violates the Yorùbá concept of order. Immorality results from imbalance” (68). We have seen in each of these works each narrative/ poetic voice attempt to restore balance to her life by calling upon spiritual entities associated with African diasporic religions. In her poem “Ocha,” Sandra María Esteves posits that undergoing ceremony in this religious tradition is equivalent to personal liberation. Using the metaphor of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly, she writes: “a ritual guided, / pulled forward through a slight crack / like beacon barely sighted over a stormy sea” (Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo 86, lines 14–16). In each of these works, the protagonist attempts 164 O S H U N ’ S D A U G H T E R ’ S to make sense of circumstances beyond her control, challenges from both the political and personal realms. Each writer reveals personal uncertainties about being a woman; this is most directly revealed in the characters’ personal relationships, as each struggles with her family and with making sense of herself in relation to her family. Who are they if stripped of relationships such as “daughter of” / “wife of” / “mother of”? All of the protagonists of these works reveal their discontent in idealized visions of womanhood that have been created by the Western patriarchal imaginary. Rather than limited binaries dictated by woman’s sexual practices (virgin, whore, wife, mother), they search for fuller representations of womanhood. They look to religious systems that allow for a fuller sense of womanhood, ones that celebrate both body and mind, both sacred and secular. These novelists are but a small sample of a number of women writers in the Americas who try to amplify the vision of the Female as they search for wholeness against a patriarchal imaginary. This study has focused on the varied manifestations of the pursuit for a sense of completeness on the part of the female protagonists of these novels and poems. It is not a coincidence that I have chosen texts that women have authored: for the last several decades, women in the Americas have consciously attempted to map the self in the mode of fiction and poetry. I am in agreement with Gerhild Reisner, who writes: “The strategies of self-figuration manifest themselves in the rewriting of traditional icons of the female.…Questioning conventional views of woman and women writers, they often weave into their textual fabric the more or less fantasized perceptions others may have of them” (218). Reisner concludes that by actively incorporating socially constructed images in their works, the artists have the opportunity to systematically challenge them, in what he calls a “mode of defiance” (218). The study moves from the United States to Cuba to Brazil, where there is a marked shift in terms of the representation of these systems. Whereas the writers of the United States often allude obliquely to these spiritual systems, the writers of Cuba and Brazil include them by name in their works. This highlights a critical difference between the United States on one hand and Brazil and Cuba on the other with regard to the survival of African diasporic religious beliefs, namely, that in the latter two countries, those belief systems exist in the public sphere in a way that they do not in the United States. Tourists can visit Havana and Salvador and find dancers of different racial composition Conclusion 165 who re-create sacred dances under the guise of folklore. The Virgin of Charity of Cobre (la Santa Caridad de Cobre) and Our Lady of the Appeared Conception (Nossa Senhora de Conceição Aparecida), the syncretized forms of Oshun in Cuba and...