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

Notes

167 Ñ * Ò Notes Introduction: The Call 1. Regla de Ocha means the “Order of Ocha” [orichas]; Lucumí is an approximation of a Yoruba phrase (oluku mi), meaning “my friend” (Thompson 17); Santería means “the way of the santos [saints].” 2. Nancy Morejón and David Frye, “Cuba and Its Deep Africanity,” Callaloo 28:4 (2005): 933–51, 938. 3. Dominique Zahan, “Some Reflections on African Spirituality,” in African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions, ed. Jacob Olupona (New York: Herder and Herder, 2000), 3–25, 4. 4. Zahan 3–4. 5. This is not to imply that patriarchy has not left an imprint on Western Africa or indeed various societies throughout the continent; on the contrary, there are various indicators that highlight abuse of women and children under the guise of traditional African thought. Oyěwùmí’s study, subtitled The Invention of Gender, examines language in precolonial Western Africa, tracing the alteration of words under colonial influence. 6. In some works under consideration in this study, the authors do not name specifically the presences with whom their characters are communicating, instead preferring to label the metaphysical presence as Spirit. In addition, there are several characters (Celia and Pilar of Dreaming in Cuban and Aurelia and Iliana in Geographies of Home) that have telepathic abilities. The writers themselves do not attempt to 168 Notes identify the origin of this skill, nor categorize them into one specific religious tradition; this analysis follows that precedent. 7. The spelling in the title of this study is an approximation of its Yoruba rendering as well as a variation of the name in Spanish. 8. The first book of Fernando Ortiz, known as the Father of Afro-Cuban Studies, bears testimony to the discrimination faced by practitioners of these religions: Hampa afro-cubana: Los negros brujos (apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal) / Afro-Cuban Underworld: Black Witches (Notes for a Study of Criminal Ethnology) (1906). For an overview of this historical moment as well as an analysis of this text, see Jerome Branche, Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature (2006). For a discussion of this persecution in Brazil, see Abdias do Nascimento, Brazil, Mixture or Massacre? (1979). 9. While the orishas mentioned are syncretized with Catholic saints, they do not appear as such in the works analyzed here; when the writers address Oshun/Ochún/Oxum, they use that name and not La Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre (patron saint of Cuba) or Nossa Senhora de Conceição Aparecida (patron saint of Brazil). Consequently, these syncretized identities are not included in this introduction. 10. Solimar Otero studies the migration of Yoruba peoples from Cuba to Nigeria in Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World (U of Rochester P, 2010); essays about Brazilian Yorubas who returned to Nigeria can be found in the following edited collections: Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic, ed. Ana Lucia Araujo (Cambria, 2010); Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic, ed. Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David H. Treece (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Transatlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, ed. Paul H. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman (Continuum, 2003); Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of the Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil, ed. Kristin Mann and Edna B. Gay (Frank Cass, 2001). 11. In her study A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba (1997), Catherine Davies offers a thorough overview of the status of women in Cuba throughout the twentieth century, beginning in the years immediately following the conclusion of the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which Spain lost Cuba to the United States. 12. Here I follow the denomination that William Luis establishes in his study Dance between Two Cultures (1997), when he distinguishes Notes 169 between Puerto Rican authors of the Island and those of the mainland by adding “American” to the latter. Though it is a designation that has not received popular support, perhaps because it is redundant (to be Puerto Rican is to be American), nevertheless it is useful to distinguish those writers who were either born or raised primarily in the United States from those who were born or raised primarily on the Island. In the context of this study, Sandra Maria Esteves was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. Chapter 1. Diasporic Revelation 1. Cuban exiles who migrated to the...