Forgetting Weaponized

Forgetting is a moral-ethical problem, whether one forgets by accident, due to a memory disorder, or “on purpose,” by expending no effort to remember. For example, in numerous societies, birthday greetings observe a certain temporality such that belatedly remembering can hurt the feelings of a person expecting to be acknowledged.Footnote ⁹ Forgetting someone’s “special day” implies the calculated absence of a commemoration that should have transpired, according to convention. Forgetting on a communal scale is, additionally, a problematic, an issue with extensive conceptual intricacies.Footnote ¹⁰ In his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?,” the philologist, historian of religions, biblical scholar, and Orientalist Ernest Renan famously posited that nations are united not only by what they remember but more so by what they collectively forget. Renan said, “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.. . . The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are.”Footnote ¹¹ He further observed, “Forgetting, I would go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle] of nationality. Historical inquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of most political formations.”Footnote ¹²

Taking the contemporary nation-state to be an artifact of coloniality, Renan’s construction of forgetting as a strategically important component of modern nationalism has wide-ranging implications.Footnote ¹³ Before unpacking these, it may be useful to disaggregate memory, singular, from memories, plural. In his posthumously published 1950 work, On Collective Memory, French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs theorized that groups have memories, while individuals remember. Halbwachs distinguished between two “genres” of memory: historical memory—which individuals experience impersonally, through oral tradition, written documents, and other media, as well as periodic ritual reenactment—and autobiographical memory, acquired by individuals subjectively and sensorially, to which they add emotional associations, post-hoc reasoning, empirical observation, and affective impressions. The congeries of historical and autobiographical memories are highly variable from person to person, since memories operate within different ideological frameworks at once. For Halbwachs, remembering was not a matter of retrieving fossils from the archaeological dig of the mind, but—following Renan—of constantly recreating memories according to the needs of the present moment.Footnote ¹⁴

The modern Christian-normative nation-state was predicated on the effacement of historical memory that could mount resistance to the consolidation of political power by the forces of religious and racial domination. Omitted from official accounts of national identity, the “counter-memories” of Others’ ancestors had to be buried at least a few feet down for the notion of a homogenous polity to be built up on top of them.Footnote ¹⁵ In Spain, they belonged to the Jewish and Muslim people who could remember much farther back than 1492, when they were expelled unless they pledged to convert to Catholicism, and vast swaths of the Iberian peninsula were not España but Sepharad and al-Andalus.Footnote ¹⁶ In the Americas, the counter-memories came from a time when Cuba was Cubanacán and Hispaniola was Ayiti-Kiskeya-Bohio.Footnote ¹⁷ Coloniality weaponized forgetting as a biopolitical technique ultimately generative of such libidinal passions and phenomena as “nostalgia for empire,” white saviorism, and xenophobic “stranger danger.”Footnote ¹⁸

The “active forgetfulness” of colonial regimes and national governments, “equivalent to forgetting [their] victims,” has operated in tandem with the manufacture of memories of class and racial solidarity in which the interests of dominant groups have been conflated with those of society as a whole.Footnote ¹⁹ Notable attempts to theorize this conflation are the Marxian concept of “false consciousness” and fictive genealogies of colonized peoples (“our ancestors, the Gauls”) as repudiated by Frantz Fanon.Footnote ²⁰ Forgetting underwrites the public display of what Émile Durkheim identified as “totems” of the collectivity, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; a subnational example would be the erection of Confederate monuments in the U.S. South and Midwest that celebrate the reign of white supremacist terror despite the resounding defeat of “slave states” in the Civil War.Footnote ²¹ Institutions like municipal archives and museums collude in the silencing of the past, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot established in painstaking detail.Footnote ²² “In functioning as sites of forgetting, museums have the potential to cleanse, absolve or relieve visitors of painful, conflictual histories,” Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Aoki Eric write.Footnote ²³ By “anchor[ing] the transient character of memory,” physical things play a vital role in replacing these histories with more comforting, superficially harmonious ones: “Objects are. . . concrete fragments of the past, and thus they solidify memory, asserting that this particular past really happened; objects stand as embodied testaments to a particular memory.”Footnote ²⁴

Colonial authorities and European settlers in the Americas did not themselves forget indigenous or African ways of knowing and being, because they did not know them—and did not know what they did not know, either. While we must guard against reifying colonial regimes as “corporate persons” with agency, interiority, and subjectivity, the advent of coloniality ushered in amnesia-inducing processes that aimed to erase non-sanctioned ethnic affiliations, languages, practices, and configurations of sexuality to allow for the entrenchment of white supremacy, European linguistic hegemony, the gender binary, and cis-heteronormativity.Footnote ²⁵ Although many cultures prior to colonization would still be classified as patriarchal, the flourishing of queer and transgender people avant la lettre has been amply documented. Colonial and imperial regimes attempted to eliminate these identities and others as representative of preexisting value systems that could become zones of “fugitivity” and opposition to dispossession, European settlement, exploitation, and the radically inequitable distribution of resources.Footnote ²⁶ As philosopher Sylvia Wynter writes, Native and Black “Others” were excluded from the category of the human; “Enlightened” post-Reformation debate on the Rights of Man was a “Western[ized]” genre of speculative fiction.Footnote ²⁷

A key aspect of these Others’ dehumanization was the Enlightenment definition of African peoples as incapable of either autobiographical or historical memory. So Dutch Calvinist merchant Willem Bosman had suggested in his 1703 travelogue, translated into English as A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave and the Ivory Coasts.Footnote ²⁸ The book became a sensation, influencing both outright plagiarists (such as Charles de Brosses) and more discriminating yet nonetheless unduly influenced readers (like Immanuel Kant).Footnote ²⁹ Much has been written about G. W. F. Hegel’s 1837 The Philosophy of History, in which he averred not only that “Africa has no history,” but—with reference to the “sub-Saharan” “Dark Continent”—“In this main portion of Africa there can really be no history.. . . There is a succession of accidents and surprises. There is no goal, no state there that one can follow, no subjectivity, but only a series of subjects, who destroy each other.”Footnote ³⁰ This indictment of the mental/psychic and emotional capacities of African (and Afro-Atlantic) peoples framed them as incapable of self-rule, thus legitimizing their enslavement and future colonial projects.

The erasure of local knowledges and imaginaries within coloniality was coterminous with captivity, regional dislocation, racial segregation, internalized anti-Blackness, electoral disenfranchisement, electronic surveillance, wage labor, and the prison-industrial complex, along with other forms of violence. In “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Nelson Maldonado-Torres asserts, “The immediate effects of modernity/coloniality include: the naturalization of extermination, expropriation, domination, exploitation, early death, and conditions that are worse than death, such as torture and rape.”Footnote ³¹ With reference to Aníbal Quijano’s formulation of “modernity/coloniality” in particular, we can interpret the anti-Black ritual dismemberment, decapitation, flaying, and burning of enslaved people about which Tracey E. Hucks has movingly written not as sheer necropolitical violence alone, but as “modern” scientific dissection, surgical cauterization, and biological knowledge creation.Footnote ³² Few national histories do more than hint at the ontological and “metaphysical catastrophe” that befell people of African descent and persists in unfolding.Footnote ³³

Following Fanon, Maldonado-Torres defines “the damné” as “the subject who appears at the crux of the coloniality of power, the coloniality of knowledge, and the coloniality of being,” “the very surface of [whose] body, the skin, can serve as an immediate identifier.”Footnote ³⁴ The individuals racialized as damné did not always recollect autobiographical memories that might contribute to the compilation of counter-histories. As John M. Janzen writes, “Some scholars have identified a process common in traumatic memory of ‘voids’ where there had been cultural substance previously, or where the painful experience of slavery and oppression has been unconsciously or sometimes willfully suppressed by elders who do not wish to relieve their children and future generations of their bad memories.”Footnote ³⁵ But memories of coloniality were not only lost in “voids” and suppressed psychologically. Traumatized people embedded “mnestic traces” in foodways, verbal arts, styles of socialization, habits of hygiene, bodily comportments, and religious formations (labeled “fetishism,” “witchcraft,” or “superstition”).Footnote ³⁶ In the Afro-Atlantic world, these cultural expressions went on to be commodified and appropriated by the nation-state, but by the late-nineteenth century, they had earned the contempt of whites and upwardly mobile Black and racially mixed elites. Both white supremacist rhetoric and discourses of racial/class “uplift” encouraged formerly enslaved people and their descendants to “get over it,” “move forward,” and “make progress”—that is, to shut up about and forget the unfreedom through which they became damné.

We might well ask with Ashon T. Crawley, “What must be conceded in order to gain a sense of historical being, a sense of self, that only reiterates the western theological-philosophical sense of being, an existence that Sylvia Wynter asserts emerges from ‘coloniality’?”Footnote ³⁷ Black “self-determined, affectable” selves were supposed to “make history” by embracing a modernity that was Protestant-normative by default and “colorblind” despite its virulent anti-Blackness, unhaunted by the present’s bleeding ghosts.Footnote ³⁸ Throughout the Americas, the price of “historical being” was the surrender of autobiographical memories and cultural artifacts that bespoke both violent deeds and pre-damné pasts. Some influential religious leaders and intellectuals pleaded with people of African descent to revalorize their roots as essential to the emergence of a politically “usable archive,” in what was a rejoinder to Enlightenment philosophes’ contention that Africans had no capacity for reflection and did not act with consciousness of themselves as human subjects.Footnote ³⁹ This was the central “myth” that Melville J. Herskovits sought to repudiate in The Myth of the Negro Past;Footnote ⁴⁰ Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Price-Mars, and countless Black scholars and grandmothers labored to destroy it, to lesser fame.

In the absence of official commemoration, memories of the Afro-Atlantic past were transmitted through family customs, music, dances, recipes, sayings, local celebrations (such as Juneteenth), and storytelling. In a landmark critical essay, Barbara Christian explored the novels of Toni Morrison as “rememory,” an antidote for the “disremembering” that had contributed to the social death of enslaved people and to their descendants’ immiseration:

Morrison herself credited ancestors with divulging the knowledges that she passed on in her novels, and Christian maintained that they enabled African American readers to retrieve otherwise inaccessible memories.Footnote ⁴² Of Beloved (1987), Christian said, “By exploring the novel from the point of view of African cosmology, one sees it for what it could be in the world: a prayer, a ritual grounded in active remembering.”Footnote ⁴³

Herskovits, among others, insisted that it was in religious formations that Black peoples in the Americas “retained” the greatest degree of African cultural substance.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although the assumptions about Africanity that undergird this conjecture have been problematized in a range of studies, Black Atlantic traditions have indeed served as fonts of “active remembering” in diverse communities.Footnote ⁴⁵ This does not mean that information about the African past “survived” in stories and ceremonies in a pristine state, untouched by lacunae and prejudices. Distinct Afro-Atlantic ritual orthodoxies have been called “nations” because practitioners correlated particular deities and ceremonies with the ethnic groups responsible for consolidating them; they are also nations in the sense that forgetting accompanied their coalescence into traditions. The expurgation of “polluting” Kongo influences from Lucumí and Candomblé is perhaps the best documented case.Footnote ⁴⁶ Additionally, practitioners’ twentieth-century campaign to mold these traditions to fit within the world religions paradigm led to their sanitization according to a pronounced “politics of respectability” that has downplayed the historical role played by women, LGBTQ people, and sex workers within them.Footnote ⁴⁷

Black and (Afro-)Latine practitioners in particular have extolled the virtues of “re-membering” the African past and sought “spiritual citizenship” in the nations constituted by Afro-Diasporic religions.Footnote ⁴⁸ They have been intent on raising their own and others’ “Sankofa consciousness,” defined by Victoria Pratt Davis in a meditation on memory work, resilience, and creativity among African Americans in Chicago:

Although sankofa does not appear to have entered the popular lexicon until the foundation of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective by Black British filmmakers in 1983, the sentiment behind the term was taken up as a mandate by African American and Afro-Caribbean activists and artists during the 1970s civil rights and Black Power movements.Footnote ⁵⁰ Their Black Study advanced the understanding of “rememory” in Diaspora, alongside anthropologists, historians, and scholars in Memory Studies who have also investigated coloniality’s weaponization of forgetting.Footnote ⁵¹

Memory Metabolized

In the 1993 film Sankofa, a modern-day Black fashion model time-travels back to a West African slave fort. She is kidnapped and trafficked by enslavers, then resurfaces as one of the captives on a colonial-era plantation. There she meets a radicalized, “freedom dreaming” West Indian field worker named Shangó, named after the orisha (Yorùbá deity) of justice and thunder.Footnote ⁵² The link between the reclamation of transnational Afro-Diasporic religions and the ethos of Sankofa has only grown stronger over the last three decades.Footnote ⁵³ During one intense late-night conversation in 2006, an African American Lucumí initiate who is now my godsister, Samantha, told me, “The orishas are coming to claim their children who were denied the drum.”Footnote ⁵⁴ She was referring to the outlawing of drums throughout the American South in the eighteenth century, after slave rebellions alerted plantation owners to the use of these instruments as communicative media and incitement to revolt.Footnote ⁵⁵ For Samantha, the refusal to allow enslaved people to play drums prevented her ancestors from developing initiatory traditions analogous to Lucumí and Vodou in the United States.

In that same conversation, Samantha was advising me to get initiated, although I—as a white-passing, therefore white-privileged Cuban-American—was not among those she was describing. She was contrasting the experience of African Americans with that of Cubans, Brazilians, Jamaicans, Haitians, and other groups whose drum rhythms have been an integral part of Afro-Diasporic religious formations because they have summoned West and Central African deities to commune ritually with practitioners. Samantha saw the present moment—exemplified by the exponential growth of digital technologies and the unprecedented awareness of Afro-Atlantic religions among Black folk who had not previously viewed them as viable alternatives to Christianity or Islam—as one ripe for a shift towards Sankofa consciousness. She saw herself as returning to those drums, having accepted the widespread view among practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions that both ancestors and “spirit guides” pull individuals towards worship of African gods.

My father had died only a couple of months before we spoke. He had rapidly deteriorated from a combination of emphysema, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease after two years of general decline. He had forgotten almost everything, except who I was, and how memories from his childhood could still scare him. At the time I was getting ready to teach my first college course and reading scholars who drew on Pierre Nora’s theory of “lieux de memoire, sites of memory,” which exist in certain contexts “because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Notwithstanding many valid critiques of Nora’s approach since then, I was drawn to it—as employed, for example, by Jana Evans Braziel:

Braziel, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Colin Dayan were among the scholars who awakened me to the racialized and gendered counternarratives to be found beyond what had been set down in written texts.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was clear that, as in the case of my father, the body knows more than the tongue can tell.

Here I may be flirting with “the model of agentless collective memory” critiqued by J. Lorand Matory, although I fully concur with his assessment that, “What is often called ‘memory,’ ‘survival,’ or ‘tradition,’ in both the African Diaspora and at home is, in truth, always a function of power, negotiation and strategic re-creation” by social actors, named and unnamed.Footnote ⁵⁹ These caveats notwithstanding, in The Gut, I put forward the possibility that decolonial “gut knowledges” inhabit the “archival surplus” of Black Atlantic ritual praxis, mythologies, and folklores.Footnote ⁶⁰ I probe the abdomen as a generator of sensory mechanisms of cognition and “epistemological soundings” from Afro-Diasporic deities and ancestors in the midst of coloniality.Footnote ⁶¹ Since Christianity wrought the contours of Caribbean and Latin American coloniality, I engage with what Leonard Norman Primiano called “vernacular Catholicism,” which has emerged wherever individual Catholics have arrived at their own interpretations of tradition.Footnote ⁶²

When I say “the colon remembers,” I am using the colon—the large bowel or large intestine—as a metonym for the entire gastrointestinal tract. But I am not claiming that it preserves memories of particular episodes from the past, such as one might encounter in viewing Sankofa. Some of the scenarios made out in popular culture to be sacred Afro-Diasporic memoryscapes are in fact derived from the annals of Blackface minstrelsy. Footnote ⁶³ Figures that look like archetypes might turn out, upon closer inspection, to be stereotypes, as in the case of “mammified” images of Yemayá, Ochún as a “tragic mulatta” cum “Jezebel,” or Shangó as a womanizing dandy.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Lucumí ritual contexts, whether practitioners experience gut feelings of the orishas’ presence often depends on the degree to which those “mounted” in possession succeed in personifying their “mythic character-types,” of which trance speech is constitutive.Footnote ⁶⁵ Kristina Wirtz demonstrates that the words used by possession mounts—Yorùbá-derived terms in the Lucumí ritual language alongside “bozalisms” modeled on the linguistic patterns of enslaved people—“are at times almost electrically charged indices of chronotopes,” a Bakhtinian term that refers to spatiotemporal figurations that have organized different cultures’ perceptions and representations of reality.Footnote ⁶⁶ The sounds of the orishas’ speech “serve as forms of enregistered memory, which [Wirtz argues] is a species of embodied memory,” indexing the Afro-Cuban past in a visceral way.Footnote ⁶⁷

Even so, the gut does not express “itself” discursively, nor does it hold memories of coloniality like photo album pages hold snapshots.Footnote ⁶⁸ I would hazard that the colon remembers in the affective manner put forth by Black South African feminist scholar and activist Rozena Maart:

I quote Maart at length for the striking way that she yokes the horror of coloniality fathomed by contemplation of it to physical sensations that erode the boundaries between the self and the external world/earth.Footnote ⁷⁰ Although Maart’s essay concentrates on visualization of colonizers’ “destruction of African life,” “coloniality resides” in olfactory, auditory, haptic, kinaesthetic, and gustatory modalities as well.Footnote ⁷¹ I would surmise that subjective recollection of coloniality has not primarily entailed conscious remembrance, but the “throbbing,” “shudder,” “tremor,” and sensation of downward movement that Maart details.

In Afro-Diasporic religions, it is the very emphasis on these feelings in the stomach and intestines that is indexical of coloniality as “metaphysical catastrophe.” These religions have prioritized ethnomedical amelioration of the abdominal aches and pains of “the damné.” Without rehearsing the insights of research on Lucumí and Vodou as vernacular health care systems—or enumerating the many medicinal herbs and roots in Afro-Diasporic religious pharmacopeia that are touted as “gut healer” plants—we can observe that innumerable trabajos (“works”) and divination verses single out the abdominal region for its importance in spiritual health. The gut is a racialized sacred site because, although religious specialists since time immemorial have attended to affliction and somatic distress, initiatory Black Atlantic traditions are marked by a particular cognizance of the ills inflicted by coloniality. It is not the case that “beating drums is always and everywhere ngoma,” but we might fruitfully approach these traditions as “drums of affliction” organized into inclusive whose complaints—in some measure—derive from modernity/coloniality, of which anti-Blackness is a chief feature.Footnote ⁷²

My objective here is not to validate the interventions of “qualified healers” within such drums of affliction—the mambo, houngan, ebomin, babaláwo, olosha, tata, yayi, and buyai, among other “therapist-teachers” through whom spirits and ancestors have attended to multifarious complaints.Footnote ⁷³ I want instead to underscore that, through spirit possession speech and divination systems such as diloggún, Ifá, and cartomancy, practitioners have redescribed the stomach and intestines as sacred spaces worthy of praise and protection. They have done so partly by defining the gut as a place in which deities may be cultivated. For example, Johan Wedel writes of a Cuban interlocutor named Mercedes, “who suffered from a mental problem and chronic gastritis.”Footnote ⁷⁴ After a suicidal crisis, she was called to become initiated to Oshún through a mount possessed by this orisha at a drum ritual. Upon initiation, she “was also told [in divination] to have a doctor to examine her stomach” and take her prescription medications.Footnote ⁷⁵ She told Wedel, “I still have my stomach problem, but it is not so bad.. . . When I was ill I cried a lot, but now I laugh, instead. I laugh with a high voice, and people say I laugh like Oshún.”Footnote ⁷⁶ She credited Oshún with replacing her psychiatric symptoms and argumentativeness with “peace and a great tranquility.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Her identification with Oshún allowed her to “re-story” affliction as a transformative relationship with this orisha that came through her gut.

The gut in Black Atlantic traditions does not so much store memory as metabolize it, converting praxis into useable energies. Among these are the primordial and immanent energy called aché/axé in Lucumí and Candomblé and Vodou konesans, the sacred consciousness and intuitive, empathetic healing knowledge imparted by initiation.Footnote ⁷⁸ These energies result in part from compliance with food taboos and the ingestion of sacred cuisine that can be seen as mitigating the deleterious effects of coloniality, which impacted everything from ingredients to etiquette to “the culinary epistemology that informs food preparation and consumption,” to the perception of flavors and somatic after-effects of eating.Footnote ⁷⁹ Much scholarship has been devoted to the role of sucrose and caffeine in the Industrial Revolution, the rise of which was dependent on colonial depredation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Global capital metastasized in coloniality, like cancer in tissues exposed to radiation. It grew large on the denial of hunger in wage-laborers and enslaved peoples who were “fed” addictive, quick-energy foods that quieted the rumblings of their stomachs, and caffeinated drinks that quashed the formerly unmistakable signs of fatigue that presage physiological collapse.

Scholars such as Sidney W. Mintz, Jessica B. Harris, Stephan Palmié, and Scott Alves Barton have traced the social history of foods intimately entwined with Afro-Diasporic religions, such as sugar, red palm oil, Guinea pepper, rice, and more.Footnote ⁸¹ Numerous offerings to African deities are “heritage foods” that might not have remained in circulation in the Americas if not for their regular presentation to deities and ancestors.Footnote ⁸² Rites of passage can be viewed as offering a respite from the gut microbiome of coloniality by acquainting practitioners firsthand with the taste and texture of these foods. Conversely, initiatory divinations might forbid the consumption of foods associated with coloniality and push back against its gastronomic norms. Many a Lucumí elder has chuckled over her inability to drink “dark” beverages, like carbonated cola, coffee, and black tea, having at some point received an oracular sign like Owani Irosun, Ejila Oché, Irosun Ofún, or Ogundá Odí, in the state of osogbo (misfortune), portending ano (sickness) or ikú (death).Footnote ⁸³ The taboo (ewo) is sometimes glossed as a protection against witchcraft substances that could be concealed in dark drinks, but these beverages are also emblematic of European colonial endeavor in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

I am not insinuating that these restrictions amount to a straightforward critique. Religious food taboos long preceded Western[ized] modernity/coloniality and cannot be grasped without appreciating their irreducibly cultural and intersubjective specificity. Rather than thinking of food taboos mandated in Afro-Diasporic religions in terms of disciplinary regimes and restrictions imposed by religious authorities, they can be interpreted as making sensory sense out of coloniality and striving to “incorporate—bring into the body and, importantly, into the body of rhetoric—the hungry horde within human bodies,” as Jason Kalin and David R. Gruber put it in coining the term “gut rhetorics.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Reckoning with the histories begotten by coloniality is not a matter of consuming differently—“there is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” as the social media proverb goes—yet Afro-Diasporic religions do ritualize consumption in ways that defy the logics of coloniality. For example, in the aforementioned initiatory traditions, shared meals engender kinship that mandates mutual aid in life and death. Processed as memory, the gut feeling of this kinship creates belonging.

In The Gut, I argue that among the African knowledges suppressed by coloniality was the constant correspondence between the belly and brain such that the somatic interplay between the two produces thought.Footnote ⁸⁵ This should not be a counter-intuitive formulation; we all know what it is like to attempt to make a decision when we are “hangry”—“a portmanteau of hungry and angry”—for example, about where to go for lunch and what to eat there, because our judgment is severely impaired by our intense craving for food.Footnote ⁸⁶ But the linkages between precolonial and modern Yorùbá, Ewe-Fon, and Kongo attitudes towards the gut and those of Afro-Diasporic religions are startling and resonant. For over a century, Lucumí practitioners have said that foundational figures carried their divination tools and consecrated orishas to Cuba in their bellies.Footnote ⁸⁷ I connect these stories to the abdomen in Yorùbá ritual praxis, although I am compelled to hesitate when casting narratives and rituals about the gut as “retentions” when they were undoubtedly innovated in the Americas. Seemingly isolated data about the stomach and intestines in Black Atlantic traditions nevertheless attest to the existence of a “gut-brain axis” in close alignment with West and Central African historical precedents. The main obstacle to wider recognition of an Afro-Diasporic “gut-brain axis” that apprehends corporeally and comprehends epistemologically is the hegemonic conflation of the mind with the brain that is, in itself, a product of coloniality.

Losing Coloniality’s Head

Anatomy is cosmology in Afro-Diasporic religions. As Brendan Jamal Thornton points out, cosmology has not played a very prominent role in analyzing them, perhaps due to scholars’ reluctance to schematize and over-rationalize religious practitioners’ visions of the universe, its origins, and the “creolized architecture” of local traditions that have only begun to be approached in all of their hyperspecific complexity.Footnote ⁸⁸ In fact, the physical arrangement of the human body more than mirrors the relationships between Black Atlantic deities and ancestors that structure the phenomenal world. I say “more than” because this relationship is architectonic, such that the systematic arrangement of the body organizes the universe that it exemplifies. This much can be gleaned from the cosmograms and “anatomical cosmologies” offered by Thornton and other scholars.Footnote ⁸⁹ These have provided both valuable insight into practitioners’ embodied spatial imaginations and aids to memory for devotees consulting academic texts in pursuit of ritual competence.

A light bulb came on for me when I first saw the figures by Leah Smith and Cleveland Bellow published in Yvonne Daniel’s Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé, entitled “The Body and the Lwas,” “The Body and the Orichas,” and “The Body and the Orixás.”Footnote ⁹⁰ By labeling anatomical areas with the deities that govern them, these illustrations let readers visualize, at a glance, the manifestation of deified “hungry horde[s]” within the human body—even if the associations of divinities with parts of the body are not consistent across all Afro-Diasporic religious communities. My interlocutors had related the relationships between them in myths and divination verses, but the mapping executed by Daniel, Smith, and Bellow was eye-opening. Read in a conventional top-down manner, the figures in Dancing Wisdom reinforced height as the premier spatial metaphor for high rank, where the head occupies a preeminent cosmological position. Although the head’s stature is not in dispute, one can arrive at another realization after poring over these illustrations: the gut is at the midpoint of the body, at the core of everything.

As Jonathan Z. Smith noted long ago, the religious metaphors of altitude and centrality are topological, political, and ideological.Footnote ⁹¹ The geographical top and the center are invested with meaning through historical processes that seek to subordinate whatever—and whomever—is associated with the bottom and periphery. As David H. Brown notes, in Lucumí altar displays, “Aesthetic calibrations of height, space, and position embody authority, order, and oricha vocation.”Footnote ⁹² The eldest and most senior orisha, Obatalá, “crowns” the human head, which he also governs.Footnote ⁹³ Situated at the apex of the body, the head has assumed ever-increasing significance in Yorùbá-inspired Afro-Diasporic religions, in part due to efforts to “re-Africanize” them in Cuba and Brazil so as to purify them of ritual elements that diverge from contemporary praxis in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, despite the degree of historical change that has taken place on the African continent since the nineteenth century. Exponents of Ifá in particular have constructed veneration of orí—the essence of personal destiny as located within the physical head, sometimes portrayed as one’s “highest self”—as a symbol of Yorùbá religious authenticity.Footnote ⁹⁴

Abolitionist activist, artist, and author Patrisse Cullors spoke for many practitioners of Yorùbá-inspired traditions when she said, “Our ori is the most important orisha. It’s our god head. Connected to the collective and to Olodumare. We use our ori to make good choices. Choices that don’t just impact our destiny but also the destiny of our descendants.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Her 2023 performance Ori Whispers incorporated praise poetry (oríkì) to orí as “a celebration of the power and strength of the Black Femme Ori (one’s head and spiritual center).”Footnote ⁹⁶ The link to ancestrality and liberation from white supremacist “anatomical cosmologies” has become a key feature of orí’s political and theological appeal.Footnote ⁹⁷ Since 2014, online and brick-and-mortar religious supply stores that cater to Cuban, Puerto Rican, and other Latine customers have increasingly imported ritual objects designed to facilitate rendering obeisance to orí, such as the beaded and cowrie-encrusted portable shrines called ile orí (“house of orí”). Black American followers of Yorùbá (traditional religion) receive a version of this orí, while Lucumí practitioners now commonly consecrate a Cuban adaptation of the Candomblé igbá orí (“calabash of orí”) with plates, bowls, and a ginger jar.Footnote ⁹⁸

The burgeoning fame of orí is double-edged.Footnote ⁹⁹ Online and in trade publications, many authors have promulgated the view that “appeasing” orí was historically the sole province of babaláwos, which has conduced to a gendered “discourse of Ifa’s supremacy over other forms of divination.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This discourse has marginalized historically attested treatments of orí more reliant on diloggún (“sixteen cowries”) divination. More to this article’s argument, popular accounts of Yorùbá cosmology seldom retain the subtleties of Ifá as a holistic system that posits an embodied epistemological dialectic between orí and inu, the stomach.Footnote ¹⁰¹ As Michael O. Afoláyan writes, while orí acts as the “seat of consciousness”—rather than the mind or intellect—“inu is the custodian of knowledge,” such that,

Ogbon inu, “wisdom of the bowel/stomach,” also translates to “knowledge of the gut” and is akin to cunning, motherwit, and “clever maneuvering,” while “ogbon ori (wisdom of the head)” equates not to reason but to shrewdness and “common sense.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Oludamini Ogunnaike notes with reference to cogitation, “ ‘Thought’ and ‘thinking’ are used to translate ero and ironu, which are usually described as taking place in the ọkan (heart/mind) and/or inu.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In an ethnography of Ifá ritual praxis, Amy H. Gardner documents the role of inu in “mentation” and the disciplines performed by babaláwos to acquire “a stomach as deep as a calabash (inú t’ó jìnlè bi igbá).”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The ascendance of the sacred head above inu bears an affinity with coloniality that was decried by no less a luminary than Nigerian playwright, poet, essayist, and soon-to-be novelist Wole Soyinka in his 1962 Salutation to the Gut. In this paen to Yorùbá gastronomical sensibilities and exegesis of praise poetry, or oríkì, to the gut, Soyinka declared,

Soyinka’s capitalization was more than a rhetorical conceit. He was referring to gut’s deification as the fiery Ipin ijeun, as reported by nineteenth-century sources and reinforced by Yorùbá proverbs. Although this construal of Ipin ijeun has been criticized as taking Yorùbá figures of speech too literally, Soyinka resolutely proclaims the Stomach’s divinity.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Against its sacrality he juxtaposes the vermin-infested cult of the “Head,” the distortion of a “degenerate civilization,” a resounding indictment of coloniality.

A new generation of religious practitioners has sought to bridge the gulf between Head and Stomach by either conjoining the two or returning to an account of Ipin ijeun as first conveyed in The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa: Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Language, &c (1894), by British colonial administrator and ethnographer A. B. Ellis. In terms strongly reminiscent of Orí Eledá mí ó. . . Si mi cabeza no me vende, written by historian, ethnographer, and obá oriaté (master of ceremonies for Lucumí initiatory rituals) Miguel W. Ramos, Ayele Kumari writes, “Ipin Ijeun is the belly. This is also related to fire which brings up the metaphor of inner Fire or fire in the belly or digestive fire. . . where character or Iwa is expressed. It is also where we digest things including how we digest our lives. It is related to courage as well, and the ability to withstand and persevere.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Baba OluDaré Bernard goes further, defining Ori Inu—usually identified as the interior counterpart of the outer, physical head—as “the inner head and stomach area.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Bernard draws on his expertise as a dancer, akpuon (praise-singer), omo Anya (batá drummer), and “#RespiratoryActivist” to write, “Modern scientist[s] now understand the intestines as the ‘second brain’ of the body. It indeed is the opposite pole of Ori Eleda. When we breathe, we aim to ground ourselves with Ori Inu first so that the ‘body’s brain’ is just as involved in our daily existence as our ‘head brain.’ ”Footnote ¹¹⁰

In claiming the gut’s centrality along similar lines, I do not deny my investment in its elevation to greater prominence in scholarly discourses.Footnote ¹¹¹ If we were to grant my hypothesis that the Afro-Diasporic religious colon remembers what coloniality forgets—such as the sagacity and sacrality of the stomach—does that permit us to analyze the thinking gut as a site of decolonial praxis? Walter D. Mignolo writes that for Sylvia Wynter, “The decolonial option does not simply protest the contents of imperial coloniality; it demands a delinking of oneself from the knowledge systems we take for granted (and can profit from) and practicing epistemic disobedience [instead].”Footnote ¹¹² Myths and ritualization involving the gut in Afro-Diasporic religions bespeak a decolonial option; they delink practitioners from hegemonic epistemologies of “the so-called progressive world” and encourage them to commit acts of “epistemic disobedience” in embracing affective registers that alter the dimensions of coloniality that they still experience. That the deities presiding over the gut are endowed with acute intelligence is a case in point. For example, Ochún “owns” the vulva, vagina, uterus, and stomach in Lucumí, and the feminine wiles that she epitomizes are nothing less than counter-patriarchal tactics, employed “from below.”

Although confining thought to the brain remains a bad mistake, scholars of Afro-Diasporic religions cannot simply discard the head.Footnote ¹¹³ The eminent Cuban lawyer, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and pensador Fernando Ortiz once recounted that a Lucumí song for the orisha Oyá derives from a myth in which she agreed to prepare a meal for Olófi, the supreme being and delegator of aché. He requested amalá, a cornmeal porridge customarily made for Oyá’s husband Shangó, with the addition of a cooling ingredient, cascarilla (eggshell chalk), used to “feed” one’s orí in a ritual called rogación de cabeza. Ortiz wrote, “The hymn recalls the way Oyá ‘lost her mind’ [perdió la cabeza] and did not offer [Olófi] his food.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Ortiz ventured that practitioners remember this incident in the dance movements made during drum rituals: “That is why the dancer for Oyá puts her hands on her temples, with that gesture of universal mimicry that means ‘my memory is gone’ or ‘I lost my mind.’ When this song. . . is heard in Lucumí temples, some people usually put their hands on their heads so that the goddess, advocate of the forgetful, can preserve their good memory.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Ironically, indexing the “awful fading of her memory” became a lieux de mémoire. Footnote ¹¹⁶

I have seen this gesture in person as performed before the consecrated batá drums and in videos posted online by practitioners. I may have seen my father do it, in his final weeks. To grasp the gesture as “rememory,” it is crucial to know that Oyá is the masquerading orisha of the hurricane, the marketplace, cemetery gates, and revolution. She refused to be enslaved by her first husband, the warrior Ogún, and left him for the regal Shangó, taking Ogún’s prized tools for herself on her way out. While she preserves knowledge of egún, the ancestral dead, in an apt illustration of “Sankofa consciousness,” she also sweeps away the detritus of the past that might impede the future. To understand more fully why dancers for Oyá place their hands on their temples, not on their stomachs, we must lose the head bequeathed to us by coloniality. Only then can we recollect what might be lurking, disremembered, not-so-silently in our guts.