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Introduction: The Call: Hearing the Flow of the River
- State University of New York Press
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1 Ñ introduction Ò The Call Hearing the Flow of the River for we are all children of Eshu god of chance and the unpredictable and we each wear many changes inside of our skin. —Audre Lorde, “Between Ourselves” Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas examines the ways in which the inclusion of African diasporic religious practices serves as a transgressive tool in narrative discourses in the Americas. This study analyzes several representative novels and poems in an effort to understand contemporary representations of womanhood in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. All of these works prominently feature protagonists who engage with variations of traditional Yoruba religion, an alternate religious system that survived the African slave trade and is often marginalized in the Americas. Blended with Catholicism in the New World, it is known as Regla de Ocha, Lucumí, or Santería1 in the Spanish Caribbean and the United States, and Candomblé Nagô in Brazil. There are a number of religions that were transported to the Western Hemisphere during the four centuries of the Middle Passage. These include, but are not limited to: Vodou, the religion of the Fon people of Dahomey, now Benin, transported to Haiti; Regla de Palo Monte Mayombe, an umbrella term for the Afro-Cuban religions that derive from the Kongo religion of the Bakongo people; Obeah, the creolized practices derived from the traditional religions of the Ashanti, practiced 2 O S H U N ’ S D A U G H T E R ’ S in the British West Indies; Quimbois, the Obeah-related practice found in Martinique and Guadeloupe; and Umbanda and Macumba, creolized practices that combine Candomblé with Spiritism in Brazil. This study focuses on the representation of spiritual systems practiced by the largest group to arrive in the Spanish Caribbean and Brazil, the Yoruba (los yoruba in Spanish, iorubá or nagô in Brazilian Portuguese). This religious system, like many African spiritual practices, offers a different epistemology than that of what has been identified as European rationalism; this system of knowledge is more holistic in that it places importance on both the physical and metaphysical. There is no difference between the sacred and the secular within this system of thought, given that everything is imbued with the spirit of God. Binaries that dominate European thought (man/woman; mind/body; light/dark; good/evil) do not function in the same way within these religious systems, as the emphasis is not on extremes but on balancing these radical differences, on reconciling them. Involvement with these African diasporic religions therefore provides alternative models of womanhood that differ substantially from those found in dominant Western patriarchal culture, namely, that of virgin, asexual wife/mother, and whore. Within traditional Yoruba religion and their syncretized variations found in the Western Hemisphere, we find images of the sexual woman, who enjoys her body without any sense of shame; the mother who nurtures her children without sacrificing herself; the warrior woman who actively resists demands that she conform to one-dimensional stereotypes of womanhood. In spite of differences in age, language, and nationality, all of the writers in this study are engaged in a project that spans the entirety of the Americas: they all turn to these diasporic religions as a source of inspiration for creating more full portraits of womanhood. In her recent study Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (2012), Tracey Hucks notes: “The ways African Americans in North America and other global practitioners of Afro-Atlantic Yoruba religions create meaning is extremely diverse. Therefore, studies of the various groups (even intragroups) must always be historicized, contextualized, and localized” (4). There is no one single “correct” interpretation of these religious traditions, and no single one is more true than the other; instead, one understands that these spiritual systems have changed over the last centuries due to numerous circumstances, [44.201.94.1] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:29 GMT) Introduction 3 not the least of which include migration and persecution, both on the African continent itself as well as in the Americas. Hucks goes on to explain her inclusion of the term diasporic when referring to spiritual systems that have thrived in the Americas: From the standpoint of a religious historian, I use the categorical designator—African diasporic religious traditions—that speaks with greater precision to the historical processes of dispersed African communities and the diversity of innovative practices that attempted to localize and traditionalize throughout North America, South America, and...