Vestida de Pena
Embodied Experiences of Afro-Spiritual Knowledge in Mayra Santos-Febres and Rita Indiana
Eyo Olokun masquerades at the Teslim Balogun Stadium in Lagos. Eyo Olokun are connected with Olokun, the Yoruba orisha of the sea.
In this paper I analyze embodied experiences of Afro-Spiritual knowledge in Sirena Selena vestida de pena (Santos-Febres, 2000) and La mucama de Omicunlé (Indiana, 2015). Affirming the body and its potential, these literary works participate in “Black Atlantic” cultures and political economies—in transoceanic networks prompted by practices that claim African American traditions. Applying an interdisciplinary methodology, I entwine anthropology of Afro-diasporic religions with performative strategies—parodic imitation and repetition that challenge the hegemonic heterosexual regime—in literature to show how spiritual knowledge drives political positions.
Santos-Febres’ and Indiana’s works appeal to Afro religions’ relationships of personhood and the divine, making reference to Yorùbá or Santería practices in which the link between spirit possession, divination, and healing plays a central role. Their protagonists in the novels speak from their place of proximity to the divine to critique issues that, while set in the Caribbean, are global. The strong statements against classism and racism come from the gendered and sexualized position in which the characters are immersed.
In dialogue with Afro-Spirituality, Santos-Febres’ narrative uses Caribbean musical pathos to complicate the relationship between past and present. Memory in Sirena Selena is an act of remembrance and also a query into individual/collective existence, which reclaims the power of Afro-spirituality and gender variance to confront social hierarchies. Indiana explicitly calls for the recognition of Haiti as a historic, spiritual, and political point of convergence for the recuperation of Black legacy in the Americas. In her work, she contests negative generalizations and distortions of racial and spiritual denigration to intervene in concrete political conflicts, such as the border with the Dominican Republic, and to propose new meanings of Afro-religion knowledge. Santos-Febres’ and Indiana’s endeavors show hegemonic forms of permanence, inserting Caribbean experiences into concrete situations of economic exploitation grounded on prevalent racism, sexism, and homophobia. The body, and more specifically, the racialized, gendered, and sexualized and abused body, simultaneously challenges the status quo and calls for the transformation of individual and collective lives through sociopolitical engagement.
Santos-Febres’ main character, the gender-fluid performer Selena/Sirenito, introduces her first-person narrative voice praying to “María Piedra de Imán,” a magnetic stone whose worship promises to bring luck and good fortune to its believers. In her monologue, Selena yearns to be guided “in the opposite path from the one of working in the streets,” and to be able “to sing as if nothing had ever happened” to her (7). As a fifteen-year-old drag “boy,” Selena is the result of many transitions: the collective displacement of Puerto Ricans from the countryside to the city; from family tutelage to the streets, queer circles, and show business; from the adolescent androgynous to the highly produced femme fatale body; and from the affective voice to the diva expression who uses performance as a weapon. Sirena’s journey transforms her physical and spiritual self.
In the novel, Selena is endowed with a divine aura related to Caribbean trademarks, “from the gods you came, sweet Selena, succulent siren of the glistening beaches” (1). The narrator intertwines generic references to Afro-spiritual traditions (e.g. Yorùbá/Santería relationship with nature and its evocation of priestess), to the recollection of Latin American bolero. Selena’s narrative shows the pervasiveness of global dynamics of body exhaustion through show business and prostitution. However, far from victimizing its subject, the novel turns the body that is supposed to be consumed as merchandise into one that devours its clients. This is achieved through the power of Selena’s voice and triumphal gestures which impulse the bonding of memory, fantasy, and immediate perception. During her crowning performance at the mansion of Hugo Graubel III, Selena’s affective expression via bolero overwhelms its spectators. Astonished, they contemplate their memories, fantasies, and desires and reexamine the reality of themselves. Selena subverts her objectification, conquering the respect of the audience which now is under her spell.
Dripping in strenuous memory, “the witnesses” (the audience) feel uncomfortable, are nearly fainting, and clutch their chests and stomachs—suffering and enjoying the heaviness of transformative pleasure. Sunk in his “choking” desire, Hugo, Selena’s contractor and lover, desperately confesses his love for her. When he says that Selena is the only woman that he truly loved, he puts in check dominant ideas of gender realness and the “natural” conception of womanhood. According to Judith Butler, to be a woman is not an identification that plainly follows a given and supposed anatomy: A “coherent identification” has to be cultivated, policed, and enforced (“The Body You Want”). Gender variant, Selena can be a woman since she is acting like one.
During her performance, Selena bonds the private and the social. Moved by her, the spectators take off their normative masks and reveal their true selves, via memory, fantasy, or embodied perception, as people who are embedded in homoaffective desire. Selena’s voice, “a hunger, a tumor of hunger, and a wanton of abandon, …steals the light and the eyes from those who adore her” (261). The audiences who pay to really feel the weight of her existence incarnates her experiences of pleasure and suffering.
In Sirena Selena, general references to Afro-spirituality in its transoceanic circulations emphasize its immersion in conflictive relations of power and economic profit. Transnational, experiences insert “‘Africanness’ as practices and interested claims” into concrete situations of queer lives (Matory 15). Selena’s relation to a “black transatlantic conceptualization of corporeality” (Strongman 3), converts the body in this narrative in an open vessel temporarily occupied by a variety of hosts (4). More than a simple individual, Selena is a connecting thread. Her story, lived through queer-of-color multiple voices and narrated from a variety of Caribbean countries, is also the space for the subversion of dominant social constructions. She is the community, and she is the audience who, at least temporarily, needs to feel alive. Via Selena both “the dragas” and high class, white, and influent people are finally comfortable in their own skin.
From Puerto Rico, the Dominican writer and musician Rita Indiana contests widespread anti-Blackness by responding to US-televangelist Pat Robertson’s declarations about the causal relationship between the earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010, and the pact with the devil “through which the founders of the Caribbean nation achieved independence” (“Magia Negra”). Remembering colonial and contemporary attacks against the Haitian population, Indiana confronts misunderstandings of Afro-spiritual religions and remarks on the concrete politics of state plundering as reason for catastrophic conditions after the earthquake.
Hinting at the same topic, Indiana’s novel La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) displays the experience of subjects in a world post the destruction that ensues from rising levels of the Caribbean sea. The phenomenon swallows up entire cities and super viruses consume neighborhoods. Exposing the fear of contamination of the citizens of a super-technological Dominican Republic, in the novel, Haitians who cross the border are killed with a laser beam. Attuned to the call to transcend the physical body in the struggle against commodification, Indiana evokes the power of women’s embodiment—as an ambivalent experience of oppression and agency—in intrinsic relation to the sacred. The spiritual appears as a place of knowledge and transmutation of bodies of pain into bodies that remember their existential purpose (Alexander 329).
In this sense, the main character, Alcide (Olokun), while telling stories of gendered violence and economic disruption, is in connection with non-material forms capable of transcending the “real” horror. This challenge happens via an incisive questioning of political, religious, and cultural hegemonies. Alcide wants to change her sex and to fully embody his being as a man. Without his knowledge, he is the incarnation of “Olokun” (a maritime deity), and his transgenderism is attached to Afro-Spirituality when the injection for sex change is the same that allows him to impersonate the Yorùbá divinity. Physically and spiritually empowered, Alcide is the only one who can come back in time and prevent the ecological disaster. Nevertheless, his attachment to his individual identity induces La Mucama’s tragic end and propels its urgent call for the recovery of an absent level of consciousness in benefit of Caribbean conditions of life.
In Santos-Febres’ and Indiana’s works, the recuperation of ancestry occurs through bodily and immaterial transformations which disrupt racialized sexual consumption and dislocate constrictions forced by spatial and political borders. The Afro-spiritual, “as a place of intellectual, physical, and spiritual nourishment” (Strongman 1), is the link between forms of knowledge that are very much alive and harbors the potential of embodiment “in which the ego, soul, and anima exists in an outward orientation vis-à-vis the physical body” (Strongman 2). Well-known aspects of African-diasporic religious traditions are lived as concrete experiences when its participants and observers undergo everyday life events.
By means of her influential novel, Mayra Santos-Febres prompts activism, casting Selena as a metaphoric representation of the whole Caribbean, and her narration as a call to conquer what is still left to fix in the advancement of civil rights. Correspondingly, Indiana intervenes in the political, socioeconomic, and cultural reality of the Caribbean, connecting it to pressing debates of the contemporary world. Questioning the triumphalist discourse of modernity and neoliberalism, these novels expose the contradictions of their promises of “development.” Showing precarious conditions of life and bodies in their shock with economic and technological means in Caribbean scenarios, these works reexamine the separation between past and present when they reread problematic (neo)colonial legacies and its effects in contemporary realities.
By being relentless, Selena and Alcides transfigure their marginal places, making use of spiritual knowledge to subvert regulatory structures of normativity and to speak for Caribbean communities as a whole. They reveal how interlocked systems of oppression are incarnated by people’s experiences and feelings of distress. Singularly, the characters signal the precarity of current conditions of life and the threat of nothing less than human annihilation. Their performativity of the intimate functions as a social call for common and multiple modes of identification and ways of insurgency that, while present, are oftentimes unheard.
About the Author
Renata Pontes (M.A., Spanish and Latin American Literatures, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ph.D., Literature, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) is an ABD in Spanish at Temple University, where she pursued a Certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her present work addresses Caribbean, Afro-Diasporic (US-based), and Latinx literature and performance.
Works Cited
Alexander, M. Jacqui. “Pedagogies of the Sacred: Making the Invisible Tangible.” Pedagogies of Crossing. Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Duke University Press, 2005, pp.287-332.
Butler, Judith. “The Body You Want: An Interview with Judith Butler,” Artforum, printed in 1992. Available online: www.artforum.com/print/199209/the-body-you-want-an-inteview-with-judith-butler-33505.
Indiana, Rita. La mucama de ominculé. Periferica, 2015.
---. “Magia Negra.” El País, 10 October 2013 www.elpais.com/internacional/2013/10/09/actualidad/1381345925_372245.html
Matory, Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion. Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Santos-Febres, Mayra. Sirena Selena. Translated by Stephen A. Lytle. Picador, 2001.
---. Sirena Selena vestida de pena. Edición Debra A. Castillo, 2008.
Strongman, Roberto. Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou. Duke University Press, 2019.