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This essay investigates different kinds of storytelling found in Afro-Cuban religions. The term "interorality" describes how narrators and audiences interact, collaborate, and help construct the meaning of narratives. The piece uses fieldwork and ethnographic writing to illustrate how Afro-Cuban religious storytelling allows for the fluid interpretation of gender, race, and sexuality by different members of the religious community. Storytelling here also affords opportunities where Cuba's cultural and historical frictions are negotiated through moments of religious affect.
Keywords
AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: Narrative, folk religion, audiences, identity
It would be impossible to talk about Yemayá in the island of Cuba by silencing and separating her from the popular Ochún, with whom she shares dominion over the waters.
-Lydia Cabrera, Yemayá y Ochún (1980:55)1
It is my contention that the doing that matters most and the performance that seems most crucial are nothing short of the actual making of worlds.
-José Estaban Muñoz, Disidentifications (1999:200; emphasis in original)
AFRO-CUBAN RELIGIONS RECONSTITUTE THEMSELVES through narration and practice in ways that reveal how creative agency may be found in everyday, albeit liminal, spaces. These in-between spaces can be found in many sites of symbolic and cultural production: between geographical boundaries, devotion to deities, personal subjectivities, kinds of storytelling, and genres of writing. The distinct traditions of Santería,2 Espiritismo, and Palo cross each other's boundaries in vernacular religious performances in ways that question diasporic paradigms of authenticity within the broader scope of Afro-Atlantic religious cultures (Cabrera 1980:16; Romberg 2005:179-80; Matory 2005:289-90; Brown 2003:18, 86-91,130; Perez Mena 1998; Viarnés 2007:143; Otero 2013:101). With this in mind, exploring the relationship between Santería's sea divinity, Yemayá, and river divinity, Ochún, provides a useful allegory with which to understand the important role that crossing boundaries plays in fostering religious creativity in Cuba.3
Las hija/os de las dos aguas4 (daughters/sons of the two waters) is an open designation given to devotees of both deities, or orichas, that signifies a fluid relationship between the two divinities that is expressed in ritual knowledge and the performance of religious history through storytelling. This set of relationships serves as a model for how to understand discourses of incorporation within practitioners' religious work that focuses on boundary play.5 The close mythological and ritual connection between these two entities reveals a...