Afro-Cuban poetics and the question of gender

Victor Turner reminds us that ritual

However, Turner's nostalgia for a preindustrialized Third World in which the sacred is still embedded in everyday life is arguably politically suspicious and anthropologically unnerving. Taking Eugenio Hernández Espinosa's María Antonia (1967), a play from Cuba (a country not listed by Turner), I aim to examine how the ritual of santería appears in conflict with the secular discourses of Revolutionary Cuba. If our aim is to reverse or dismantle the hegemonic ideations governing dark female and male bodies, how far can Afro-Caribbean religions help us? Or, in the final analysis, is ritual a liberating process? By mobilizing and yet at the same time frustrating the experience of possession that is central to santería, Hernández Espinosa's María Antonia portrays the ritualized, spiritual presence of the gods in everyday Cuban life in a way that ultimately, I shall argue, upholds rather than dismantles dominant patterns of class, gender and race.

Briefly, as a means of contextualizing the gender and performance concerns of this article, I need to introduce the idea of the possessed subject. Many Afro-Caribbean religions conceive of the world as a system of mediations that promote constant contact between the human and the spiritual through the experience of trance. Yoruban religion acknowledges a hierarchical system (the god or oricha occupies a level superior to that of plants or animals), but all the elements of the cosmos function together as parts of one another by means of a common energy that encompasses them all: aché. During a trance in santería, the possessed subject does not completely lose his or her own identity. Possession is a giving over of one's self to the god, not as a substitutive act, but rather as one of cohabitation, one that, moreover, does not imply a loss of control. The possessed person may, for instance, carry out a series of carefully calculated ritual operations, without which the nexus between the human and the divine could not be made manifest.

I.M. Lewis has called attention to the fact that anthropology has tended to privilege the dramatic aspect of ceremonies of possession above their sociological repercussions.Footnote ² While some authors affirm that trance solidifies the dominant ideological links that provide coherence within a community, others stress the disruptive potential of a ritual that suspends, temporarily, feelings of guilt or inhibition. Perhaps the arena in which we may most clearly detect this conflicted conjuncture is in the evident gender demarcations that structure the cults of possession. While a woman may be possessed by a masculine spirit, the opposite – a man possessed by a feminine deity – is less common. ‘In Haiti the retreat is also sometimes conceptualized as a marriage between the candidate (most often a woman) and the spirit for whom the initiation is undergone’, explains Erika Bourguignon. ‘She must buy a trousseau, a white dress and shirt – new sheets to lie on the ground on a mat, and acquire a vodú necklace which is likened to a wedding ring. The spirits call women initiates “my wife”.’Footnote ³ At root, this hetero-normative imaginary also explains the fact that, during the celebration of candomblé in Bahía, homosexuals participate in the trance alongside the women, not the men. Although a substantial number of the devotees of santería and voodoo are women, men still monopolize the role of priest. As a socializing force, possession provides women with an opportunity to expand their circle of influence while also reinforcing the status quo: ‘The possessed is one who, from the moment he or she falls or is mounted, begins to acquire a hierarchy, a power, is distinguished, chosen. And there is the tendency to maintain this power, at all costs, as something permanent’.Footnote ⁴ In a possession ceremony, a person identifies his or her oricha through the sound of the batá drums, revealing a previously sanctioned mimetic code. Once the possession is under way, the possessed subject is carried to the house-temple in order to gather the ‘attributes’ of the oricha (clothes, objects). This change of clothing is, to a certain degree, already one enactment within another. Possession thus acquires greater religious relevance, in proportion to the level of theatricality that denotes it.

In a possession ceremony, theatricality acts as an indicator of its authenticity. Theatricality, in this case, marks the site for a deeper sense of self; but in order to recognize that theatricality, the possessed subject also needs to sanction a social practice that carries a very specific set of social and gender values. If during a possession we are actually observing an individual overtaken by Otherness, to what extent does that body, now mediated by the presence of the sacred, challenge the hegemonic parameters of the society that frames it? How truly elastic is the time of possession when it intersects with dominant gender configurations?

This issue affects not only believers of santería, but also the scholars and anthropologists who study the different expressions of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian religions. J. Lorand Matory claims that our understanding of Afro-Brazilian practices has been informed by a tension between those who (like Ruth Landus) argue that candomblé is a matriarchal faith, and those who (like Édison Carneiro) are particularly invested in covering up the fact that a number of priests engage in what many Brazilians classify as homosexual patterns of behaviour. Oyeronke Oyewuni goes as far as to claim that Yoruba culture before the Middle Passage was devoid of fixed gender categories,Footnote ⁵ while Mary Ann Clark presents a more nuanced account, arguing that although santería is certainly embedded in a patriarchal environment, ‘both men and women must sometimes take on the roles commonly attributed to the other anatomical sex while not repudiating their own anatomy (or, for that matter) their sexual orientation, which is another issue’.Footnote ⁶ Nonetheless, what is irrefutable is that the fundamental intimacy between god and human proclaimed by santería and candomblé creates a depolarizing pull that, sooner or later – without entirely cancelling them – challenges the presumed stability of naturalized gender boundaries.

States of possession

Performances that engage with the search for the synchronization of the diverse that nourishes the value system of santería have frequented the Cuban stage. Eugenio Hernández Espinosa's María Antonia ranks as one of the best productions of ritual Caribbean theatre, a genre ‘where mythological elements from a rich oral tradition are blended with scenic expression’.Footnote ⁷ The play was produced for the first time in 1967 by the Grupo Taller Dramático and the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional. Both Hilda Oates – the original María Antonia – and Roberto Blanco – the original director – won awards for their work when the play was restaged almost two decades later. The play's premiere coincided with the first decade of the Cuban Revolution, which culturally looked to establish a new artistic canon for the country, and mobilized a revalorization of Cuba's African heritage. That said, during the 1970s artistic expressions of Afro-Cuban culture came under close scrutiny. According to Christine Ayorinde, the Revolution's priority was to ensure that santería remained within the ideological parameters of the socialist state, that its African origins would never overshadow or threaten Cuban nationalism.Footnote ⁸ The Revolution increasingly integrated santería into its political agenda by sponsoring theatre groups, administrative institutions and museums. Cuba was also involved in the anticolonial efforts of several African nations: Zaire and the Congo (1965); Guinea-Bissau (1966–74) and Angola (1975–6).Footnote ⁹ In the 1990s, during the crisis produced on the island by the dismantling of the Soviet Union – also known in Cuba as the ‘Special Period’ – many santería temple-houses collaborated with the government in the development of new networks for health care and other forms of social aid.Footnote ¹⁰ Today santería is a highly successful commodity in the markets of local and international tourism.

At the time of its premiere, María Antonia was seen both as gesturing to Afro-Cuban pride and as an uncomfortable disclosure of santería's secrets. The plot of María Antonia is easily summarized. María Antonia, an attractive, independent black woman, is obsessively in love with the black boxer Julián. Although she could settle for a quiet, conventional life with Carlos, a black student, María Antonia insists upon staying with Julián. Motivated by jealously, María Antonia poisons Julián, and Carlos, subsequently, stabs her to death. In the Yoruban world view, the tragic might mean a transformative, but not necessarily definitive, moment: everything, in the end, flows in multiple directions at the same time. María Antonia is not merely a tragedy with an Afro-Caribbean setting or denouement. What distinguishes the protagonist is her persistent reluctance to recognize the authority of religion to determine her erotic drives or to demand her acquiescence as a believer. For María Antonia, passion is a form of dissent.

On the one hand, María Antonia occasionally turns the chauvinistic standards that society imposes on her to her own advantage; on the other hand, she violently rejects the imperatives of santería. Both acts of resistance are interwoven with her obsessive passion for the boxer Julián. In the play María Antonia uses santería only for erotic purposes, not for libertarian ones. Her erotic fixation introduces elements of another theatrical genre, melodrama, whose influence on Spanish and Latin American theatre goes back to the nineteenth century. The hyperbolic nature of melodrama lends María Antonia a histrionic intensity that accentuates its already evident theatricality. A Cuban audience would also see in these characters a rewriting of certain archetypes of local comedic theatre: the attractive mulatta, the funny black man, the rough Spaniard. From 1868, Cuban actors introduced the stock characters of the bufo or comic theatre. Bufo entertainment relied on political lampoon, social satire, cross-dressing, and blackface make-up.Footnote ¹¹ After the 1900s, the Alhambra theatre in Havana specialized in producing bufo shows for an all-male audience, and the impact of these performances could be found in the emergent genre of Cuban zarzuela, one that became extraordinarily popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Two of the main examples of the zarzuela – Ernesto Lecuona's María la O (1930) and Gonzalo Roig's Cecilia Valdés (1931) – highlighted the mulatta woman as a character in conflict with the racial and economic strictures of Cuban society (though in general black women were marginal figures in zarzuela).Footnote ¹²

The play thus attempts to synchronize a series of intertextual materials that, when juxtaposed, invite us to participate in a genealogical synthesis of Cuban theatre (Europe, Africa and the burlesque miscegenation of Creole or vernacular theater). María Antonia's body performs a constellation of literary genres. The problematic relationship that María Antonia establishes vis-à-vis all of these performative variants defines her as a contestatory character, an entity in aggressive confrontation with the narratives that have previously been presented to her. This is not to say that we should read the text as though it were an allegory for the Cuban Revolution; this would be too easy and perhaps untrue. But it is crucial to keep in mind that María Antonia's dilemma is not devoid of political nuance. The character attempts to draft her story from within herself; the oricha that possesses her is her own carnality. The possessed female body is presented in the play as a nodal point where the conflicts between agency and autonomy are allegorized through the materiality of gender.

The play opens with a prologue set in the home of the babalao (the supreme priest of Santería) Batelio. María Antonia's godmother asks the babalao to help María Antonia honor her aché (life force), ‘before her body and head split apart’.Footnote ¹³ The liturgical prayers in the Yoruban language mix with invocations in Spanish while the Iyalochas (priestesses), the akpwón (lead singer in santería rituals) and the godmother try in vain to get María Antonia to participate voluntarily in the ceremony. What follows is a sequence of thirteen micro-scenes, edited with cinematic speed: several young people smoking marijuana, a mother berating her son for his lack of manliness, a woman screaming in a room, a theft, a praying woman who loses patience with Our Lady of Loreto, a pregnant woman chasing after a man, a group of boys abusing a mentally ill street person, a girl defying her mother, guaguancó dancing, poor people looking through the trash in search of food, a child forcing another child to surrender, a policeman giving orders to a woman. When María Antonia enters, the sequence halts abruptly. The fragmentary unfolding of these various snippets of everyday Cuban life serves not only to provide, in a hasty synthesis, the social context in which the plot develops (drugs, machismo, poverty, the time period prior to the Revolution), but also to stage the synchronous temporality postulated by Yoruban religion. In the next scene, María Antonia is enticed by people from the market to dance a guaguancó and the ease with which María Antonia joins in this improvised party contrasts with her earlier refusal to participate in santería.

Since María Antonia instantiates a polarized locus between secular and liturgical uses of the female body, this potential impasse has to be tackled by producers, actors and audiences every time the play is staged. Inasmuch as santería is here used theatrically, Hernández Espinosa has privileged a profane representation of Afro-Cuban rituals. However, the pulsing of the drums that serve as a counterpoint throughout the play overlays its staging with a ritualistic potential of which the audience cannot help but be aware. Since the staging does not attempt to become a ceremony, the elements of santería highlight the drama of the piece at the cost of repressing its religious ramifications.

In 1984, almost two decades after it first opened, María Antonia reappeared on the Cuban stages as part of the Havana Theatre Festival. Armando Correa commented at the time that the production ‘does not transgress the imprecise border from the popular to populism, in that it uses truly artistic means to express the authenticity and interests of the masses’.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet Gerardo Mosquera was not afraid to point out that the new production demonstrated a ‘certain inclination towards cheapening, as manifested in the inadequate emphasis placed on humour and on the substitution of a pleasant picturesque staging for the thirteen nerve-wracking images from the first act’.Footnote ¹⁵ As we have already noted, the thirteen scenes from the first act dramatize the coeval temporalities contained by the Yoruban world view. The fact that these thirteen scenes were replaced in 1984 with a more typically folkloric and colourful tableau indicates that the play's attachment to an Afro-Caribbean axiology was somehow reduced during that production in order to emphasize the sentimental and entertaining elements of its plot. In brief, like María Antonia's body, the play itself inhabits a liminal space in which secular and sacred values are both performed and wrestled with.

The fact that María Antonia is actually a black woman – and not the expected mulatta – implies that the play is also resisting the semiotic dominance of mestizaje as a trope for Cuban nationalistic self-fashioning. As a black woman, living within a community permeated by the rituals of santería, María Antonia is already located in a social milieu that traumatizes the hegemonic discourses of Cuban neocolonialism. It is important to recall here that, during the Republican years (1902–59), santería was seen by many Cubans as a catalyst for delinquency. The Republic criminalized santería as a ploy to justify racialized class segregations, re-encoding the growing inequalities between white elites and black workers in terms of a rift between atavistic forces and civilized managers. Misnamed hechicería or brujería (witchcraft), santería was recast as a source of moral deviance, urban violence and class resentment.Footnote ¹⁶ But María Antonia also shakes and shocks the claims of santería to overdetermine her existence. A signifier that refuses to signify on cue, in accordance with the semiotic system that contains it, María Antonia becomes the signature of a radical deferral. When María Antonia decides not to be possessed by the gods, she is clearly also defying her African ancestry. Her acts are a series of dilatory tactics that intentionally postpone her compliance with the will of the orichas. The ironic twist in this daring equation is that María Antonia's rebellion remains subservient to her obsessive attachment to Julián. While her body incites her to fight back, the same body also derails her – and her flesh seems to be the only signature that never fails to inflect her meaning. This creates a conflict between two modes of historicizing desire and pleasure: one as a narrative of resistance based on personal agency, the other as a counternarrative in which autonomy is presented as a utopian condition.

María Antonia's men

María Antonia's personal agency collapses when confronted with her utopian quest for absolute autonomy. History constantly intersects with María Antonia's body: she is always being possessed by something else. While the male characters (Julián and Carlos) strive to participate in the immediate history of their country, be it through boxing or chemistry, María Antonia voluntarily resists participation. For María Antonia, both religion and economics have been equally insufficient to fulfil her desire. Towards the middle of the play she retreats to the manigua, a thick area of mangroves and swamps whose political connotations would not be lost on a Cuban audience: it is to the manigua that many of the island's rebels, those who fought for its independence, have fled in the past. In the manigua, María Antonia remembers how she reacted when her godmother took her out of school:

At that point, the community began to punish María Antonia in the same way she had abused the cats: ‘I was a daughter of Ochún, but people started to look at me sideways. My happiness bothered them. They denounced me. Even bars closed their doors to me; the women threw water into the street and performed cleansings of their husbands’.Footnote ¹⁷ If it is true that María Antonia renounces most of the discourses that define her, it is equally true that none of them saves her from becoming an outsider.

It is essential to reiterate here that, in santería, one's relationship with the gods and protective spirits allows for the possibility of influencing the future; the Yoruban value system is not closed or impermeable to negotiation and change. To reincarnate is considered a reward, not a punishment. María Antonia recognizes the urgency of transforming her life, but she declares herself incapable of doing it on her own. Julián's situation is very different. As a member of the all-male Abakuá Society, Julián finds in his religion a manifest source of empowerment and social solidarity. As David H. Brown documents, the various Abakuá groups were very influential among stevedores, transport workers and local manufacturing labourers, and they maintained a system of mutual support through the cultivation of traditions brought to Cuba from Nigeria. Brown alleges that Abakuá males were particularly invested in ‘gender restriction, homophobia, labor assertion, and sometimes displays of violence and revenge’ in ways that served to feminize the rest of the community: ‘women, children, mothers, non-initiates, homosexuals, as well as the police, the colonial government, and the corporate officials of large enterprises, such as cargo lines’ were expected to respect and to dread the superior strength and smartness of the okobios (lodge brothers).Footnote ¹⁸ In scenes vi and viii we witness Julián's ambition of becoming a famous boxer abroad, and his interaction, by turns both festive and angered, with an American–Usonian sailor called Johnny. The quarrel between Julián and Johnny could be seen as a commentary on the neocolonial relations between Cuba and the United States, but the fact that the boxer reconciles with the Usonian sailor by sharing some of his women with him also denotes how Julián objectifies the female body, turning it into a bartering object that seals a machista agreement with the foreign man.

Carlos – María Antonia's other lover – aspires to be an inventor, but his feelings of inferiority come to the fore when he notes that ‘a black man wearing glasses is always an interesting person’.Footnote ¹⁹ Carlos is a student, insecure about his masculinity, who dreams of patenting a special cement that will make him wealthy, and whose scientific vision of things excludes the supernatural. What Carlos and María Antonia have in common is the recourse to the manigua as a place in which they can protect themselves from the social constraints of their gender positions. Carlos was bullied at school, and his father only becomes proud of him when he kills another man – a triumph his father rewards by promoting Carlos's sexual initiation. Carlos's fulfilment of the rules of masculine reputation is compared to a ritual ceremony and is reversed with fatal consequences when, in scene viii, María Antonia demotes him in front of the community, mocking him. When Julián knocks Carlos to the floor, his defeat is immediately homologized with a rape by the people witnessing the fight. This double feminization – a woman repels him, and another man literally kicks his arse – implies that Carlos is now marked as a lesser male, an ostracized subject condemned to live in abjection. Carlos's humiliation demonstrates that machismo provides María Antonia with the ultimate weapon: she has the power to destroy the reputation of a male, thus activating a chain of events that leads to her own death.

The rituals of machismo and the rituals of santería finally come together in the last scene of the play. Carlos stabs María Antonia by inserting his knife in her vagina, and it is only then that Ochún actually possesses her. María Antonia's death confirms the rules of machismo as a form of social capital that circulates through exchanges of blood, sex, sweat and other violent accreditations. But it is only when she dies that María Antonia's oricha claims her at last. Hernández Espinosa places María Antonia's possession at a point in which her own volition is at its most ambiguous – is this a choice that María Antonia embraces willingly, or is she being possessed by default? In santería, the orichas are defined as disembodied clusters of intensified attributes; a god is a bundle of linked desires and characteristics that seeks a corporeal shape. Is María Antonia offering Ochún a magnificent gift only for a few seconds, or is she becoming part of the god's energy? In other words, is María Antonia being absorbed into the general pulsations of aché, or is she experiencing a last-minute redemption, a final confirmation of the right of santería to guide her camino or path? One thing is clear: María Antonia's death enacts a double act of reintegration. Carlos kills her in order to reinstate his masculinity, and Ochún possesses her, thus reasserting the fact that she is her spiritual daughter. By the end of the play, the codes of machismo and santería have both been paid their dues. The fight for María Antonia's body is now over – her flesh has been appeased. Without a body of her own, María Antonia's resistance ceases.

Fighting for the flesh

María Antonia's belligerent attitude towards santería uncovers a protest against what Catherine Bell would describe as the ritual density of her environment.Footnote ²⁰ A substantial amount of María Antonia's experience has been pre-charted by Afro-Caribbean orthopraxy: as a daughter of Ochún, her religious responsibilities are – or should be – quite transparent. Her resistance traverses several oppositional tactics. While in some cases she is perfectly capable of utilizing santería to manipulate men, she also scorns some of its rituals. Perhaps María Antonia's intentional twisting of the rituals of santería finds its most disturbing angle in the play's focus on human death over animal sacrifice. When María Antonia serves a ram for Julián, the boxer compares her to his food: ‘I like you much more than I like this ram, you know? But I can do to this food what I can't do to you: to tear out from it every piece of meat’.Footnote ²¹ Georges Bataille argues that the reduction of the human body to its most animalistic qualities – meat instead of flesh – enables the practice of sacrifice by regarding the human body as expendable, an object available for consumption.Footnote ²² By equating her to the ram, Julián re-enforces María Antonia's own image of herself as a lesser link in the Cuban nutritional chain, a piece of food being ground for the sake of other people's pleasure: ‘What are we, but the leftovers from a feast, that only know how to dance, sing, laugh, and fool around?’Footnote ²³ To the extent that her relationship with Julián resembles either a bartering of goods or an act of psychological discharge, María Antonia is willingly collaborating with the operations of an economic system in which black flesh is still treated as a transactional token and a form of capital. The play seems to suggest that the dispossessed body of María Antonia is always being repossessed and recycled by external forces.

Alongside this violence against the loved or desired body, Hernández Espinosa localizes the power of the state, represented here by the police and the prison system. Even when Julián is having sex with one of his many partners the audience is able to hear offstage how the police follow a black man who is being accused of stealing a woman's purse. María Antonia herself went to jail to protect Julián and his drug dealings. María Antonia's community is presented as a cocooned space, and most characters are uncannily isolated from direct contact with the white population of the island; even explicit references to Catholicism are not particularly abundant in the play. This outer world makes itself felt through the omnipresent concern shown by many characters about being surveyed by the authorities. The play illustrates Cuba during the Batista dictatorship as a claustrophobic locus in which the characters’ volition is revealed to be an insufficient or misplaced resource. The play could be understood as a critical look at the Republican past, a look that moves from María Antonia's tragic resignation towards a more urgent understanding of a need for change that foreshadows the Revolution: ‘This life is not enough for me, I don't want it. I need another world. Where is it? Let them come look for me, they'll find me happy and mouth-watering. I will remain true to myself until the end’.Footnote ²⁴ For María Antonia, being true to herself implies a commitment to her body and its compulsions; she never subscribes to any political agenda that is not connected to her libidinal drives.

But from the outset Hernández Espinosa's aesthetic stylization of the rituals of santería was a potentially problematic stance under Castro's regime. George Brandon reminds us that

In a country where the separation between the sacred and the political is a volatile topic, a country in which Obatalá's dove perched for hours on Fidel Castro's shoulder during one of his most famous speeches, the Revolution's efforts to secularize the socialist state were and still are nothing less than controversial.Footnote ²⁶ In such a context, the play manages to sabotage both civil society and religious communitas. ‘We're undone by each other,’ claims Judith Butler. Neither sexuality nor gender

Butler's implicit definition of ecstasy – to be outside of ourselves – does not necessarily operate in the realm of santería, where possession is an event that sets aside the selfhood of the subject without expelling it from his or her body, but it does provide an alternative approach to María Antonia's situation. If by aspiring to the autonomy of her body María Antonia is accepting the presence of an Other that challenges and circumscribes that autonomy, she is already giving up as much as she is asserting. María Antonia is becoming dispossessed precisely as a result of her attempt to possess her own flesh. María Antonia's power to break the rules of santería is short-circuited by her equally passionate reluctance to suspend or replace the gender norms that ground them.

The limits of ritual

María Antonia's only choice is to speak out against the social and emotional shackles that constrain her. Ultimately, María Antonia is wholly responsible for her own decisions, as are Julián and Carlos, and yet it is impossible to ignore that Hernández Espinosa posits the existence of an Afro-Cuban discourse in which the joys of santería do not drastically question the social hierarchies that limit or influence the ‘paths’ of his characters. It has been suggested that, upon being crowned by her god, María Antonia subverts the tragic ending of the play.Footnote ²⁸ While it is true that María Antonia is possessed by Ochún in the moment of her death – at last going to that ‘other world’ that she has demanded – this ending could equally be read as something both tragic and anti-tragic. In santería, the subject has the freedom to influence or transform his or her destiny, but some questions remain. What is the political imprint of the Yoruban world view? How liberating has santería been for María Antonia? What good does possession do her if her culture's hegemonic standards remain intact? How effective is santería in counteracting the structures of sexual, racial and economic domination that are imposed on María Antonia, Carlos and Julián?

María Antonia's Gordian knot is threefold: as a black woman critical of santería, she is placing herself in an adversarial position vis-à-vis her own historical roots; as a woman who is also black (and not a mulatta) she is already a controversial subject within Republican discourses of Cuban nationalism; and as a woman who claims for herself an extreme degree of libidinal circulation that was considered morally unacceptable to most women (black, white or mulatta) she is abrogating for herself a privilege usually reserved for men (black, white or mulatto). In the third scene of the play she is close to being possessed, but she manages to escape. Rómulo Lachateñeré underlines the fact that not everybody welcomes possession; some people play tricks on the gods to evade it, marking a cross under their feet or the soles of their shoes, and dancing as far from the drums as possible.Footnote ²⁹ Possession can be a traumatic and physically excruciating experience.

It is evident that María Antonia is not afraid of pain; her priority is to keep her body for herself, to negate the god's right to borrow it. Martiatu Terry states that many santeros recommend that long-term associations between Ochún (María Antonia) and Shangó (Julián) should be prohibited. Hernández Espinosa himself told her that, in his opinion, Ochún and Shangó are one oricha divided in two because, in spite of their different genders, they share the same basic characteristics.Footnote ³⁰ The failure of María Antonia's and Julián's relationship is thus pre-scripted or relatively predetermined by their respective gods. But this apparent conflation of María Antonia's and Julián's spiritual profiles does not erase the fact that, as a boxer, Julián earns the option of leaving the island and the admiration of his community, while María Antonia becomes increasingly ostracized from it. What María Antonia truly denies is the efficacy of rituals to change this disparity; possession, for her, does not compensate for the dispossession in which both her colour and her gender have placed her.

According to Lévi-Strauss, the function of rituals – as opposed to games, which are competitive – is to heal social asymmetry by producing a feeling of communion, of togetherness.Footnote ³¹ María Antonia embraces a radical poetics of refusal that keeps her apart from her group; she prefers to listen to the demands of her own body over the ritual duties of her religion. The play is a long flashback that returns to the prologue's setting for its last scene. This circular motion finds a final line of flight in its presentation of María Antonia's body becoming possessed while Carlos penetrates her with his knife. This ending – or is it a beginning? – can be read both as María Antonia being rescued from a world that she is unable to inhabit and as the definitive defeat of her body, a body possessed by her oricha only when she has no choice but to relinquish it.

Herbert Blau asks us to consider the fact that

Is the sacred in María Antonia a conservative mode of interpellation that ends up sanctioning traditional gender roles? Yes – but not exactly. Clearly, we must not disregard santería's function as a form of resistance, its importance as a mode of surviving the heartbreak of slavery and the vigilance of the state, both during and after the Spanish colonial regime and the Revolution itself. It is not coincidental that ritual theatre occupies a subgenre within Cuban literature, a uniquely marked dramaturgy that has established an extensive canon. Lázara Menéndez emphasizes that a perusal of the rich oral historiography of santería reveals that transgressions and ritual adjustments are very much at work in the religion; it is only in the written records, not in the memory of the practitioners themselves, that stabilized prescriptions are assumed to be the norm.Footnote ³³ But María Antonia's tragedy is not a problem produced only by the archive, oral or otherwise; her rebellion – if we can call it so – deploys a critique of the restrictive effects of the repertoire.Footnote ³⁴ What María Antonia wants is to control and subvert the gestural and biosocial expectations that frame her black skin; if she is going to live like a dog, she states without hesitation that she is ‘a furious bitch, which is not the same thing’.Footnote ³⁵María Antonia introduces us to the agonic idea that both the possessed body and the body that rejects possession are still anchored to a conceptual slippage – a double bind that conflates the experience of the sacred and a heterosexist axiology of gender. María Antonia is a play about the shortcomings of those rituals that, while providing a repertoire for the survival of a marginal Other, are also prone to tighten a patriarchal node around the female body. The gods are shown to be, after all, only human – all too human.