Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley (review)

In the vodou pantheon, Ezili has many meanings. In Ezili's Mirrors, the different meanings of this lwa become a reflection of the heterogeneity of black queer genders in the African diaspora. Tinsley asks her reader to "read this book like a song." Three voices, each distinguished by a different font in the text, explore Ezili's meanings through academic close reading, historical narrative, and descriptions of contemporary manifestations of Ezili. What unfolds across the chapters is an analysis of the lwa's multitudes: the flowery, perfumed, hyperfeminine Ezili Freda; the fierce, maternal, woman-loving Ezili Danto; the "cosmic dominatrix," Ezili Je Wouj. Tinsley's work resists "the persistent masculinization of black lesbians." It does so by drawing on a range of texts, including The Salt Roads by novelist Nalo Hopkinson, the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant in nineteenth-century San Francisco, and the website of Domina Erzulie, a contemporary Montreal-based dominatrix. Tinsley examines how each of the manifestations of Ezili in the works of Caribbean and black women artists allows these artists to resist narrow and restrictive notions of gender and express more expansive visions of black queer genders.