...:: Dancing Graves - What is 'Afro-Cuban?' ::...

- WHAT IS "AFROCUBAN?" -

WHAT IS ‘AFRO-CUBAN’?

‘Afro-Cuban’ refers to both persons of African descent and Cuban origin, and West and Central African-inspired religious traditions still practiced in Cuba, including Lukumí; the various Bantu-derived reglas de congo, including Palo Monte Mayombe; and Abakua.

Called Lukumí in Cuba, the West African Yorùbá accounted for a substantial majority of the island’s 850,000 to one million slaves. Most Yorùbá landed in Cuba between 1764 and 1868, although records indicate a Lucumí presence in Cuba as early as 1517. The Yorùbá brought to Cuba the memory of festivals and calendrical rites; verses of several different oracular forms, especially those of the Ifá and 16 cowries systems; facial scarifications indicating tribal membership; food taboos dispensed according to cultic prescription; and an account of a creator God’s—Olódùmarè’s—origin from a primordial energy termed ashé. Repositories of ashé, the orishas act as mediators between Olódùmarè and his creatures. Orisha can combine, in varying degrees, the attributes of human rulers with meteorological phenomena and material substances rendered anthropomorphic. The personality of an orisha may be inconsistent and fragmented, or merge with that of another. Yet one should not treat the blurriness of boundaries between orisha “as accidental and regrettable untidiness, but as central features of Yorùbá religious thought and practice.” The plasticity of West African representational modes, and the willingness of devotees to accept foreign deities as new versions of old orisha, greatly facilitated transmission of Yorùbá culture in the Americas.

This performance incorporates the dance, drumming and material culture of three Lukumí spirits:

		Oba/Obba Guardian of the hearth, first wife, of Changó, legitimate landlady of all cemeteries. Trained in the art of war, she used a machete as well as any male warrior, but was not physically attractive. According to Yoruba myth, jealous of his more beautiful wives, to guarantee Changó’s love for her and she cut off one of her ears and offered it to him in a stew. He fled their home in horror; she fled to the cemetery. She also records the life of each person in heaven.

		Yewa/Ewa According to Yoruba myth, the pristine virgin Yewá rejected Changó’s sexual advances, and also fled to the safety of the cemetery. In some myths she is seduced, and then has an abortion. In both scenarios, she vanishes, becoming the queen of the underworld, rejecting the harshness of life among men and the orishas; she is the grave itself, the earth and the insects that consume the human body after death.

		Oya Changó’s favorite wife, she left his brother, the blacksmith Ogun, after he tried to force her to work in his forge, but not before stealing his tools (customarily seen as adornments for her crown). She fights next to Changó in war, and she guards the gates to the cemetery as well as to the marketplace; she is the hurricane that destroys in order to create. Her relationship to the ancestors is indexed by the use of rainbow colors in the clothing of her initiates and in altar displays.