Writing Orisha Music: Text, Tradition, and Creativity in Afro-Cuban Liturgy

Abstract

This essay examines the flow of music associated with orisha—anthropomorphic deities—across networks defined variously by art, scholarship, folklore, and religion, all of which overlap and nourish each other. Transmitted via oral tradition, written texts, and multimedia technologies, a handful of orisha-themed songs are analyzed as case studies in the subtle nexus of liturgy and cultural authenticity. Taken together, the songs shed light on a broader phenomenon in which creatively-minded, ostensibly-secular iterations of culture play a significant role in the dissemination and ongoing codification of ritual orthodoxy. Orisha music traditions are analyzed as a fertile ground for a multitude of devotional and/or artistic expressions, many of which have a particularly ambiguous relationship to the concept of religion. In this context, the fluid movements of orisha music between ostensibly sacred and secular contexts can be usefully understood as not only common, but as a conspicuous and characteristic aspect of the tradition. The essay’s structure and rhetorical strategies offer distinct layers of cultural and historical commentary, reflecting a multi-vocal tradition of exchanges among orisha music scholars, artists, and ritual experts. The essay’s historical analysis of orisha music further suggests that a host of subtle, seldom-discussed phenomena—multilingualism, liturgical ambiguity, and transmission via multimedia technologies—are not necessarily aberrant or irregular, but rather vital themes which have resonated clearly across the Afro-Atlantic for at least a century. By obligating us to attend to both musical meaning and cultural context, the essay’s case studies of orisha music shed light on the mingling and synthesis of elements from varied historical sources, languages, and cultural idioms, each of which represent distinct notions of tradition, creativity, religiosity, and secularism.

1. Introduction

Multiple generations of scholars and artists have studied Afro-Cuban cultural traditions as a quintessential example of the transnational network known variously as the Afro-Atlantic, the Black Atlantic, or the African diaspora.1 Depending on one’s perspective, historical narratives of Afro-Cuban traditions might illustrate African retentions and survivals in the Americas, cultural adaptation and mixing, and/or transnational identities which resist the ruptures of slavery and modernity. More narrowly, Afro-Cuban traditions associated with orisha—anthropomorphic deities—have attained a singular prominence, effectively representing the entirety of African heritage, not only in Cuba, but throughout the Americas.2

This essay examines a few lesser-known aspects of music associated with orisha as it flows—via oral tradition, written texts, and/or multimedia—across networks variously defined by art, scholarship, folklore, and religion, all of which overlap and nourish each other. While orisha music traditions are generally regarded in terms of the historical preservation of African tradition, what follows engages an extensive interdisciplinary body of literature on the roles of artistic creativity and professional scholarship in orisha traditions and the Afro-Atlantic more broadly.3 Rather than invariably representing heritage directly tied to an African past, orisha songs are continually adapted and transformed from one generation to the next.

The heart of the essay lies in a relatively obscure historical narrative: the story of a single orisha song becoming liturgy, from its composition—in the vein of art at the edge of tradition—for a secular folkloric setting, then quickly making its way into ritual settings, its origins obscured in various ways in the process. Using a single song as its nucleus, the essay extends its analysis to numerous other case studies. In this sense, the essay invites readers to discern ways orisha liturgy moves within a composite network of people and ideas, all of which are liable to appear artificially suspended in time and space—as if fixed in stasis—by means of inorganic multimedia like books, photographs, audio recordings, or moving images. Orisha songs are also sometimes (if somewhat rarely) composed by various means, and (also rarely, but with increasing frequency) transfigured from creative work to ritual liturgy.

Similarly, the essay revolves around a relatively modest bit of data: a brief fragment of an interview—an excerpt from a much more extensive set of ethnographic conversations “on the record”—with Juan García Fernández (aka Odufora).4 According to the AfroCubaWeb database:

Juan García is a choreographer and an ethnologist.5 His work is based in a life spent as an artist working with the major folkloric groups. He was director of the Conjuto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba (CFN), Cuba’s premier national dance and music group, from 2000 to 2004. Prior to that he was the Asesor Folklórico of the Conjunto, the person who verifies the authenticity of the folkloric material.6

García is also—significantly, in the context of my analysis—not only an official arbiter of Cuban folklore, but also an actor, dancer, and an orisha priest (olorisha and oriate). Like many Afro-Cuban artist-priests, he is a polymath who engages orisha traditions as a cultural triumvirate—art, scholarship, and religion.

While it may seem like a truism that artists and/or priests often function as scholars (and vice versa), García’s account offers an extraordinarily fine-grained iteration of the ways the “translocal” dimensions of Afro-Atlantic religious traditions are “exemplary rather than unique” (Matory 2009, p. 232).7 Taken together, the following case studies—small bits of orisha music history—offer novel insights into the dynamic synthesis of intra- and international liturgical traditions. More importantly, they also exemplify a seldom-discussed confluence of ritual orthodoxy, critical scholarship, and artistic experimentation in orisha music. I argue that this confluence exemplifies a broader phenomenon in which creatively-minded, ostensibly-secular iterations of culture play a significant role in the dissemination and ongoing codification of ritual orthodoxy. These confluences, which I describe here and elsewhere as art at the edge of tradition, suggest that orisha music traditions provide fertile ground for a multitude of devotional and/or artistic expressions, many of which have a particularly ambiguous relationship to the concept of religion.

In this context, the flow of orisha music between ostensibly sacred and secular contexts can be understood as not only common, but conspicuous and characteristic. A historical view of orisha music further suggests that liturgical ambiguity, multilingualism, and transmission of liturgy via multimedia are not necessarily aberrant or irregular phenomena, but rather vital themes which resonate clearly across the Afro-Atlantic. Liturgical ambiguity in orisha music thereby obligates scholars, artists, and devotees alike to adopt a layered, critical approach to history. By forcing us to attend to both meaning and context, the essay’s case studies of orisha music trace the mingling and synthesis of elements from varied historical sources, languages, and cultural idioms, each of which represent distinct notions of tradition, creativity, religiosity, and secularism. The essay’s structure and rhetorical strategies offer distinct layers of cultural and historical commentary, reflecting a multi-vocal tradition of exchanges among orisha music scholars, artists, and ritual experts.

In light of Cuba’s complex relationship to religiosity and secularism, it is worth considering orisha music in the dual contexts of Afro-Latin music as a form of “secular devotion” (Brennan 2008). On a related note, Schmidt suggests that Afro-Cuban traditions can be understood as an “ethno-business” steeped in paradox:

Afro-Cuban popular religions—long admired by the nation’s intellectual and artistic avant-garde as subaltern cultural rebuttals of dominant Cuban bourgeois opinion and U.S. economic pressures alike—are now promoted and consumed in a manner that conforms to neoliberal logic. The Cuban state confronts the challenges of late socialism with the methods of late capitalism. To some extent, the commodification of Afro-Cuban religions acts to fortify and extend revolutionary cultural policy.

(Schmidt 2016, p. 163)

Broadening our historical scope beyond late 20th- and early 21st-century Cuba, then, orisha music can be regarded variously as: ritual liturgy; royal or imperial music; folk music; a cultural relic; and/or fine art. Therefore—historically, in Cuba, Nigeria, or elsewhere—orisha music is often only ostensibly “religious” in nature.8

2. Orisha Music as Art at the Edge of Tradition

Orisha are spiritual beings or deities with origins in West Africa (present-day “Yorubaland” in the nation-states of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo). For devotees, they are understood as mediators between humans, an ancestral spiritual realm, the forces of nature, and—often—a more abstract supreme God.9 Each orisha is identified by a variety of idiosyncratic qualities (personalities, domains, virtues, imperfections, and so on) and relationships among themselves, amounting to a pantheon of deities and archetypes which is akin to Hindu cosmology. Often associated with forces of nature, places, colors, and symbolism, orisha possess both human and divine qualities, and they are simultaneously ancestral and primordial. For example, the quintessentially male Eshu (aka `Ẹṣù, Elegbara, Elegua, etc.) can be anthropomorphized as a child, an old man, or a phallic stone. Likewise, the feminine aquatic orisha Yemaya (aka Yemọja, Yemanjá, etc.) can be embodied as a river, a lagoon, the shining surface or dark depths of the ocean, or a shoreline.

Orisha liturgy is a perennial wellspring of inspiration for devotees, scholars, and artists alike. In practice, instances of orisha-themed cultural expression might be celebrated (as respectful, “orisha-inspired” creativity) or critiqued (as unorthodox, insipid, disrespectful, or even blasphemous). In a tradition which prioritizes collective the critical expertise (and judgment) of ritual elders, the fact that theological and political discourses on orisha are generally decentralized is significant to my argument: in a social-cum-religious network with no dominant central authority, the cultural ecosystem for orisha-themed religious liturgy tends to be both diverse and local. In this context, the increasingly ubiquitous role of multimedia technology in orisha liturgy plays a paradoxical role, simultaneously reinforcing conservatism and encouraging innovation.

Now, in the early-21st century, orisha traditions have become an Afro-centric lingua franca.10 The word ashe (aché/axe/àṣe) is analogous to amen, a generic affirmation whose every nuance in pronunciation might suggest both exquisitely complex lineages and an additive, unitary, Afro-centric identity. Paradoxically (again), orisha traditions have become increasingly prominent emblems of national identity in Cuba, yet they have also been transplanted from Cuba to the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere, making Cuba—in cultural, historical, and musical terms—a central hub in the Afro-Atlantic. (See Delgado 2009; Daniel 2010; Schmidt 2016, among others.) In this global context, orisha liturgy has played a particular, significant role in the Afro-Atlantic throughout the late-20th and early-21st centuries. As a result, multilingual and transnational Afro-Cuban orisha traditions abound in absurdly ornate paradoxes. For example: devotees drumming and singing the praises of a deified African emperor (Shango) in an aggressively secular nation (Cuba) throughout a half-century-long “anti-imperialist” war. Or: beseeching “Black gods” in gatherings, which may or may not include anyone born in Cuba, or even a single Black person, in an Afro-Cuban idiom, thousands of miles from either Africa or Cuba, and singing songs whose literal meanings are often profoundly—if, perhaps, also tantalizingly—obscure to their singers.

In Cuba, orisha music has become a pan-ethnic, pan-African liturgical tradition while also, paradoxically, reinforcing much more narrowly-bounded—arguably, tribal—identities based on religious affiliation, ethnicity, or family ancestry. The relationship between orisha traditions and Cuban national identity is dynamic, and Afro-Cuban music and religion have played a particularly complicated role in the post-Soviet era of austerity and tourism on the island, constituting what Anastasios Panagiotopoulos calls “a secular religion within an atheist state” (Panagiotopoulos 2017). Since the mid-1990s, previously stigmatized orisha traditions have become an increasingly prominent facet of the Cuban nation-state’s international “brand,” which, in some cases, has constituted a significant (if relatively modest) source of income for ritual experts and artists alike.11 In this historical context, Cuban orisha liturgy has proliferated in both discrete ritual spaces and public popular culture, becoming an increasingly prominent and multifaceted symbol of both African-ness and Cuban-ness. While “capital-B” Blackness and organized religions are both political categories the Cuban state often prefers to avoid, orisha traditions function as both official and unofficial cultural symbols, occupying niches for Black and religious identities.

In one emblematic example, the Cuban government issued a series of postage stamps to commemorate its premiere folkloric ensemble—the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (CFN), which García directed between 2001 and 2004—on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2012 (see Figure 1). Each stamp in the series depicted a different orisha, as they might be costumed and/or embodied in the course of ritual possession trance or staged folkloric performance. In a similarly ecumenical space for popular music (and public culture) in Cuba, the group Orishas (whose name speaks for itself) became the best-known exponents of Cuban rap in the 1990s. More recently, a 2016 music video by El Chacal (aka Ramón Lavado Martínez)—likewise, unambiguously titled “Shangó,” in honor of the virile orisha of thunder, drumming, and dancing—includes a montage of the artist performing devotional rituals, filmed and edited in the glossy, polished style of a documentary reenactment.

Outside of Cuba, visible references to orisha are often encoded more subtly or ambiguously. For example: In a vivid cinematic portrait, the artist-scholar Milford Graves gestures to his father’s metal tools, arranged as an altar-memorial-sculpture in the lush monte (igbo) behind his Brooklyn home, as he says, “That’s Ogun … You’ve got to have the spirits, man” (Graves 2018). Caricatures of Afro-Atlantic identity and ritual tradition like the 1987 feature film The Believers amount to refractions of the Afro-Atlantic in popular culture, often saturated by racial and religious stigma. More recently, Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” practically overflows with references to orisha (Tsang 2019), and we might add a great many other examples of orisha in creative popular music, from Celia Cruz to Ibeyi.12 In short, while references to orisha are generally inseparable from Afro-Atlantic religious ritual, orisha music moves in a cultural feedback circuit which extends well beyond discreet ritual spaces. The remainder of this essay offers a case study of ways orisha music sometimes oscillates between public, artistic, and secular settings.

3. Juan García, Afro-Cuban Cosmopolitan

In Cuba, orisha music traditions are often divided into two regional branches or lineages: Havana and Matanzas. As the nation’s capital and its largest metropole, Havana is generally considered the epitome of modern urbanity, and its orisha music traditions are—likewise—often characterized as sophisticated and virtuosic.13 Meanwhile, orisha music in Matanzas—immediately east of Havana along the island’s northern coast—often connotes a more provincial, rural sensibility. The contrast suggests a narrative in which Matanzas’ orisha traditions are particularly old-fashioned, African, and—therefore—authentic. Matanzas’ mystique as a “cradle” (cuna) or “source” (fuente) of Afro-Cuban tradition has been continually inscribed and re-inscribed by insiders and outsiders alike, including English-language writers. In 1941, Harold Courlander referred to “Matanzas Province, where the Lucumi [i.e., orisha] and Abakwa [cults] are particularly strong” (461). Likewise, Lydia Cabrera reportedly wrote that traveling from metropolitan Havana to provincial Matanzas in the mid-1950s “was like passing back to the 19th century” (Marks 2001, p. 7).14

Within a historical network of regional Afro-Cuban orisha traditions, Juan García is a rare sort of cosmopolitan. He has lived and worked in both Havana and Matanzas for many years, moving back and forth between the two locations constantly, just as he has moved within and between diverse cultural networks, mediating between secular folklore and religious ritual. His work within Cuba’s official cultural apparatus, in particular, has afforded García unusual cultural authority and mobility, including the relatively rare privilege of traveling in and out of the country.15 He is a cosmopolitan in a philosophical sense: “a citizen of the cosmos” who is both familiar and strange, regardless of locale (Appiah 2006). The composite effect of these roles makes García a frequent interlocutor for foreign visitors, ethnographic and otherwise. Indeed, he offers a uniquely valuable perspective on a nearly century-long process by which Matanzas has become a mecca for Afro-Atlantic arts and ritual. Both the text and context of our conversations are grounded firmly in García’s scholarly role as a consultant for numerous other visiting scholars and documentarians, which—as he makes clear—is inseparable from his ritual and creative work.16 García’s mobility and cosmopolitan identity—as a quasi-matancero priest-scholar working at the heart of Cuba’s official cultural-political apparatus—inform his first-hand account of the composition of an orisha song, written on the road, literally, in transit between Havana and Matanzas.

4. “Here Comes the Storm”: Composing Orisha Songs

The following sections revolve around fragments of a long interview with Juan García, framed and annotated by commentary. The interview was conducted in April 2008, at García’s home in the Lawton neighborhood of Havana, in collaboration with my friend and researcher partner Kenneth Schweitzer.

In this section, García narrates the process by which he composed an orisha song and responds to subtle questions regarding cultural authenticity. Specifically, he was asked to discuss the nature of musical fundamento (i.e., “foundational” or legitimate liturgical repertoire) and inventos (i.e., creative “inventions” whose dubious provenance typically precludes them from liturgical legitimacy). Having explored numerous bits and pieces of “invented” orisha liturgy (both vocal and instrumental), I asked García about a particular song, associated with Oya, feminine orisha of wind and storms (Gleason [1987] 1992, 2000). I had heard the song in question regularly since at least the late 1990s, in ritual settings, and in both Cuba and the United States, when several colleagues intimated that García had composed it song for the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (CFN) in the 1990s. In other words, it was rumored García had codified a novel orisha-themed song by an act of creative composition—writing—for a secular theatrical production. Remarkably, the song was then quickly absorbed into religious practice, effectively becoming canonical Afro-Atlantic liturgy.

The story of the song illustrates two complex religious and musical processes: one by which orisha music was composed (rather than inherited from a literal African antecedent), and another by which a novel creation for a secular setting became canon fit for religious ritual. García confirmed the story, then—in the excerpts of the interview transcribed and annotated below—offered an exquisitely crafted thesis on the nature of Afro-Cuban liturgy (see Figure 2).

Inevitably, difficult questions arise. Is this a “song” or a “chant”? In everyday English, “chanting” might suggest primordial sacredness or heightened speech, or something primitive and simple, regardless of its cultural idiom. Even in a very simple call-and-response song, the paradox and ambiguity of liturgical forms invites us to think in terms that are simultaneously both poetic and literal, and any single “utterance” deserves multiple interpretations.17 In this sense, the Lukumi language, associated intimately and intrinsically with Afro-Cuban orisha traditions, is roughly analogous to Latin, Sanskrit, and other esoteric liturgical languages which are regularly spoken, chanted, or sung without necessarily conveying clear, consistent, literal meanings. For devotees, the poetic, social, and mystical power of the liturgy is intrinsic. However, the liturgy’s textual depth and ambiguity also lend themselves to the elaboration of consummately worldly issues such as identity, power, race, religion, and secularism. Because the authority to interpret liturgy—that is, to determine the meaning and significance of sacred and/or ritual sound—is intrinsically contested and constantly shifting, García’s dual role as an arbiter of folkloric authenticity and ritual orthodoxy is especially noteworthy.

The following transcribed, translated excerpts of García’s words are annotated in footnotes indicated by distinct typesetting and bracketed ellipses.18

Asked to narrate and contextualize the story of the orisha song he had written, García began with a long pause, sitting very still for nearly a minute as he gathered his thoughts in silence.

 

[…]

 

• Well …
   
• There’s a song that I know, which could be similar. It says “waye waye akuko,” and that is sung.19 But the song that’s become so popular was [composed] for the theatrical production “Odebí, The Hunter” by Eugenio Hernández Espinosa. It premiered [in 1992] at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba (CFN), and it includes a scene in which Odebi did everything in his power to overcome the obstacles which akuaro, destiny, tried to put in his way to stop him from defeating Eyigongo …20
   
• Eugenio [Hernández Espinosa] gave us the freedom to create songs attending to the atmosphere of each scene. Because I was teaching classes in Matanzas, I used the hour and a half during the trip to study the bits of the script, while also searching among the Yoruba words we know, (or) which have come to us in the present by means of tradition, looking for the most logical connections.21
   
• And that’s how the song came about, for a scene. Looking for … If I summoned the rain, I brought the wind, I attracted the storm, as a [natural] element, an obstacle, so Odebi would be unable to defeat him. To divert him, so he would be unable to achieve his goal. So, I started thinking: wa is to come, to enter; aye is world, life; oyouro is rain; and afefe is wind.
   
• And that’s how I composed:22
  •  
    [solo]
  • waye waye oyo uro
  • waye waye afefe
  • waye waye oyo uro
  • waye waye afefe
  • oyo uro
     
  • [chorus/solo]
  • waye waye afefe/oyo uro
•  
  Well, I sang that in Matanzas, in a class, and it was immediately accepted by all of the dancers, who thought it was a song sung here in Havana. But at 3 p.m. that same day, I sang that same song at a folkore class at the Conjunto [in Havana]. And Felipe Alfonso, one of the principal singers at that time, and Lázaro Ros, said to me, “Hey, you’re really going to town in Matanzas … That stuff you’re bringing back from Matanzas is the last word (es lo último).”23
•  
  Logically, I knew perfectly well that I couldn’t say that I had made it up.24 Because if they knew I had made it up, they wouldn’t afford it the same merit, so I let them think so.
•  
  Until one day, it occurred to me to use it in a [theatrical] work. It was for a different scene. It was a scene that showed Odebi’s stubbornness and capriciousness. I hadn’t introduced that song in a class yet, but I had come up with it, the way I explained (see Figure 3).25 And the song said:
  •  
    Odebi leri ota, Odebi ota leri26
  • Odebi leri ota, Odebi ota leri
  • Omo lowo ochanigbwe27
  • Omo lowo obanigbwe
  • Omo lowo leri ota …
• That is to say:
  •  
    Odebi leri ota …
  • Odebi, your head is [made of] stone
  • Odebi, the stone is your head
  • With your own hands, Odebi leri ota …
•  
  And I, in the scene, would be down on the floor, hitting the stage, saying:
  •  
    Odebi leri ota, Odebi ota leri
  • Odebi leri ota, Odebi ota leri
  • Omo lowo obanigbwe
  • [gestures, putting the palms of his hands on his head]
  • Omo lowo obanigbwe
  • Omo lowo leri ota …
•  
  That is valid, so long as the collective accepts it.

[…]

 

Several years after conducting the interview with García, I was able to trace the song’s movement between secular and sacred realms first-hand, during a funerary ritual in honor of a deceased orisha priest in Miami. In that consummately sacred musical setting, a very well-known Cuban orisha priest sang García’s composition (waye waye afefe), word-for-word. During a break in the music, I asked the singer—discreetly, one-on-one—if he, too, had heard that García had composed the song for a CFN performance. In other words, I asked, was the song he had just intoned the very definition of a recent invento? He claimed to be aware of the song’s backstory and suggested—casually and simply—that the song had become well-known and accepted. “Sí, eso pasa,” he said. (“Yes, that happens.”)

The song has since been recorded and published various times, including on a track—“Oya”—from Roman Díaz’s 2015 album L’ó dá fún Bàtá. As in many other published orisha music recordings, the track is designated simply by the name of the orisha. This generic naming convention for orisha music recordings, in which innumerable tracks from different albums and ensembles are titled generically according to the names of orisha, creates a strange effect in music databases. A search for “oya” in internet databases or discographies yields a flood of recordings, effectively obscuring a liturgical core (fundamento). The particular iteration of the song (waye waye afefe/oyo uro) on L’ó dá fún Bàtá is followed by the very-similar-but-distinct song which García cites as a precedent for his composition (waye waye akuko/omi o yansa). Significantly, a single melody is shared between the chorus/refrain of both songs (see Figure 4).

It remains to be seen how García’s account of another novel composition (Odebi leri ota) might be reiterated in other settings.

5. Writing Orisha Music: Transcriptions, Ritual Authority, and Dreams

[…]

•  
  I know people [who compose orisha songs]. For example, Osvaldo Villamil—one of the most famous obases from Matanzas, from the Villamil family—created a number of songs, and they are learned by his entire family collective, his cabildo.28

[…]

 

Here, García describes another way novel orisha repertoire might be introduced via ritual experts, citing the specific example of Osvaldo Villamil. To the best of my knowledge, the only other published account of the composition of an Afro-Cuban orisha song is found in María Teresa Velez’s Drumming for the Gods (Vélez 2000), an intimate portrait of the polymath virtuoso Felipe García-Villamil. NB, Felipe García-Villamil and Osvaldo Villamil are cousins and fellow members of the same family-based cabildo in Matanzas, an institution which is widely regarded as a paragon of Afro-Cuban tradition (Mason 1992).

In short, García and Vélez both describe the introduction of novel orisha liturgy as a more-or-less established tradition within the Villamil family cabildo. The text uses two different iterations of the term orisha (oricha, ocha) and, like this essay, shifts from Velez’s context (in roman text) to García-Villamil’s own account (in italics), and the transliteration of a song (in roman text).

 

[…]

 

Felipe [García-Villamil] made [a set of] bembé drum[s] and dedicated it to Osain [orisha of plants and herbalism]. When he finished the work, he had a dream in which the words and music of a chant to Osain were given to him. This was the chant that was used to dedicate the new drum to this oricha.

• I was sleeping, you see? And this chant came to me in a dream. I woke up at around two o’ clock in the morning: “Valeria, Valeria, write this down for me, the way I’m putting it”—and I had the music in my mind and everything. Look:
  •  
    ewe ayé osain babamí
  • ewe ayé osain babamí
  • osain alámofinye ‘ra ewe iyá mi
  • tiwi tiwi
  • kukurú kukurú
  • tiwi tiwi
  • kukurú kukurú
  • tiwi tiwi alámofinye ‘ra29
•  
  Osain is my father, and without him, ocha cannot be made. The chant talks about ocha, you see? From seven plants on, there is already a spirituality. Osain is the spirit of the plants, that is why you say: Osain alámofinye ‘ra, because you are calling the spirituality, the spirituality of the herbs, to come and accomplish something for you. Osain’s personality is reflected in the chant—Osain is an oricha that is missing a foot, an eye, an ear, an arm. “Well, I’m an imperfect person but I come to do good to humanity. I have one eye, I have one nose, one ear only, one arm only, but I come to do good to humanity, so that the world may be perfect, so that it’s not like me.”

(Vélez 2000, p. 128)

[…]

 

Taken together, the accounts of novel orisha songs introduced (i.e., created and/or dreamt, etc.) by Osvaldo Villamil and Felipe García-Villamil reflect a family tradition which functions primarily (if not exclusively) as liturgy for their specific, immediate ritual communities. These accounts contrast with the much more secular-minded process described by Juan García, who is neither a direct relative nor a member of the García-Villamil cabildo.

Notably, narratives of the introduction of novel songs by Osvaldo Villamil and Felipe García-Villamil (as told by Juan García and María Teresa Vélez, respectively) emphasize ritual authority—via reputation, seniority, and ancestral inheritance—as an implicit pre-condition for the introduction of novel orisha liturgy, while also identifying a creative impulse woven into the Villamil cabildo’s traditions.

6. “Eshu baba e …”: Orisha Songs, Transnational Networks, and Multimedia

[…]

 

• That’s what keeps folklore alive. Not just songs maintained as tradition, but also the ones that arise. Now, these days, the young people have created a fair amount of songs.
   
• And even adapting [African orisha] songs conserved in Brazil, adapting them here [in Cuba]. I’ll give you an example. The song from Alfredo [Calvo]’s cabildo, Tina [Gallagher]’s godfather’s house. I don’t know the song, but it’s on the first record, that song is on there. In Havana, today, a drumming ceremony where that song isn’t sung two or three times is [considered] middling, abridged. Because [songs] come into fashion, and when they’re not sung, people seem to miss them.
   
• One fine day, my son said to me, “Dad, you brought that. You brought that song [to Cuba] from Brazil.” “Me? No.” “Dad! Yes, you did! When you went to Brazil, you brought that song back.” He played a cassette [tape recording], and sure enough, the song is in Brazil. I brought that in 1990.
   
• [How did you find the cassette?]
   
• My son found it. Son cosas de ida y vuelta …30
   
• Miguel did an interesting project, the Bata Ketu album. He uses [orisha] songs from Nigeria, Cuba, and Brazil. It gets to a point where you don’t know [where the song is from].31 The same song, with light variations. I think sometimes the lyrics vary, but the melody is what most endures.
   
• En esto hay de todo …32

[…]

 

Without identifying any particular ensemble or individual by name (“the young people”), García acknowledges that the creation of orisha liturgy is an ongoing and increasingly common phenomenon. Axiomatically, within a larger framework of cultural tradition, any such creative impulse is necessarily evaluated collectively, according to creators’ perceived depth of knowledge, authority, artistry, and/or inspiration. Implicitly, but clearly and more provocatively, García suggests the possibility that orisha repertoire might be introduced disingenuously: the sources of novel orisha repertoire—i.e., liturgy composed recently rather than inherited directly from Africa and/or time immemorial via elders—might be obscured or falsified. As a narrator and analyst, then, García acknowledges the inherent, organic messiness of the process he is narrating. He also offers a formula for liturgical authenticity: roughly speaking, the collective owners of the heritage are the arbiters of authentic repertoire, and the prerogative to approach orisha liturgy creatively (i.e., to compose and adapt ritual repertoire) correlates directly to ritual authority (including seniority and familial inheritance). García’s story about the song he composed thereby becomes more meaningful than the song itself.

He then complements the story of the song he composed with another, which offers his historical analysis (and narrates his inadvertent role) in the movement of another orisha song between three nodes in the African diaspora: Cuba, Brazil, and West Africa. The movement, in this instance, is traced via written and multimedia technologies: notes and audio recordings on cassette tapes; and a recording by. Specifically, García refers to a song performed by the late orisha priest Alfredo Calvo on the 2007 CD Batá y Bembé de Matanzas. The CD was produced and published independently by Tina Gallagher via Kabiosile Productions (“afro cuban music from the source”).33

Feigning to not know the song (perhaps somewhat disingenuously or theatrically), García asserts, clearly--yet-implicitly, that Calvo incorporated the song into his liturgical repertoire via recordings of Brazilian (i.e., not Cuban) orisha music. In other words, García offers a parallel case study to the song he composed: another orisha song, adapted from Brazilian sources by Alfredo Calvo via a recording, which has indeed become liturgical canon far beyond Matanzas. As a footnote in the historical record of Afro-Cuban music, García asserts that the song was imported into Matanzas from Brazil in the late-20th century, not inherited and preserved in Matanzas from 19th-century Africa. More symbolically, the song’s story represents another vivid example of orisha music as art at the edge of tradition—a confluence of ritual authority, multilingual transnational networks, artistic creativity, and multimedia technology.

The lyrics of the song can be transliterated as:

 

[solo]

ero na ti awa na ni

 

[chorus]

Eshu baba e, e iye

Eshu babawona

 

In fact, a recording of Calvo singing the same song had already been published several years earlier, via the 2003 video DVD Vamos al tambor: Presentations in Matanzas, Cuba.

While a fulsome comparison of Calvo’s published iterations of the song and its Brazilian and/or African analogs remains beyond the scope of this essay, Vamos al tambor is particularly noteworthy as the first video depiction of orisha possession trance published commercially for a general public. In the video, a single, stationary video camera presents a continuous sequence without narration. The medium insists on a voyeuristic disposition, regardless of a viewer’s attitude, but the document itself is framed—visibly, literally, and unambiguously—as a ritual, quite distinct from a staged folklore. Although filming orisha initiates, particularly in the throes of possession trance, has historically been regarded as a sort of desecration by many priests, Vamos al tambor was produced in close collaboration with Calvo (see Figure 5).

Beyond the fact that recording technology has become increasingly commonplace in orisha ritual, the publication of Vamos al tambor relied on Calvo’s assertion of ritual authority: introductory text presents the film “with the blessings of our Elders and Orishas,” indicating that discussion within the religious community and divination were conducted in order to establish the project’s legitimacy. Kabiosile Productions’ multimedia publications—videos, audio recordings, written texts, (including musical transcriptions) published independently by Tina Gallagher —shift, rather clearly and categorically, between liturgical and didactic functions. Gallagher’s long-term, intimate involvement with Calvo constitutes an exemplary collaborative approach (arguably in the spirit of applied ethnomusicology or participatory action research), as well as offering an important precedent for more recent Matanzas-based multimedia productions by the El Almacén collective.34

Vamos al tambos documents a ritual in which three new initiates (iyawo) are presented to the community and consecrated drums. Calvo leads the singing, accompanied by a batá drum ensemble and large chorus of devotees. In a climactic sequence, Calvo’s voice is closer to speech than song, and he lights up the room with a clear vocabulary and theatrical intention. At one especially dramatic moment, Calvo proclaims—in rapid-fire Lukumi, which the anthropologist William Bascom might have described as “complete sentences” (see Appendix B)—that he has initiated these iyawo with words from his own mouth and the edge of his own knife, then proceeds to list the sacrifices offered to the orisha on their behalf. At one point he growls “ekun!” (“leopard!”) as he reaps the air like the fierce mascot of Shango. In an interview, conducted by Gallagher and published in conjunction with Vamos al tambor, Calvo himself narrates the sequence in a way that combines translation and commentary on his own liturgical repertoire.35

It is difficult to overstate the cultural influence and thorny implications of Vamos al tambor and other multimedia publications by Kabiosile Productions’ earnest, celebratory approach to authenticity and orisha possession trance in Matanzas. In the age of ubiquitous YouTube and Facebook videos, Vamos al tambor’s use of multimedia technologies to document discreet and intrinsically intimate moments of orisha initiation and possession trance straddles a historical divide between analog and digital eras. In the mid- and late-20th century (the analog era), for example, two of Lydia Cabrera’s classic books included photographs of iyawos (Cabrera [1954] 2022, first published in 1954) and possession trance (Cabrera [1973] 1993, first published in 1973). Now, in the 21st century (the digital era), possession trance and all manner of orisha ritual are documented—and effectively published, like this essay—via the internet.

7. Conclusions

The rhetoric and discourses surrounding sacred music in Cuba abound in paradox and ambiguity. Here, there, and elsewhere, it is hard to know where lines might be drawn around religion, musically or otherwise. Regardless of whether it is regarded as sacred and secular, the high stakes of the matter can rightly be described as cultural memory, or—perhaps more simply—reverence. Certainly, in the combustible mix of Afro-diasporic heritage and religiosity, the stakes of desecration are potentially, always, incalculably high.

Clearly, numerous profound questions remain, just under the surface of García’s testimony and beyond the scope of this essay. How have orisha music specialists—members of “African cults in Cuba”—navigated the vagaries of religious repression and stigmatization under various regimes? Or the hyper-connected, internet-based, 21st-century multimedia ecosystem?36 Historically, the deeply transnational nature of orisha traditions and their fluid relationship to political power both suggest a flexible, adaptable relationship to the notion of religion, arguably as a protective measure against colonial, Jim Crow-style, and communist iterations of state authority. This flexibility—which amounts to a quasi-religious approach to cultural tradition, including music—is often in tension with more conservative schemes and notions of authenticity, as a well as a tendency toward hierarchical orthodoxy. In this context, orisha traditions offer an alternative to bounded, mutually-exclusive identities based on nation or religion.

As this essay makes clear, the cultural significance of García’s contribution is best understood within a vast multilingual body of orisha-related liturgy—that is, as a religious-artistic-scholarly tradition which overflows the boundaries of nation-states, historical eras, and genres. More narrowly, this essay ascribes a significant historical role to a few seldom-discussed dimensions of Afro-Cuban orisha liturgy, namely: creativity (i.e., writing as composition, rather than reproduction) and multimedia technology (e.g., writing as transcription and recording). García’s account clearly illustrates not only how an orisha song might be composed, but also how a book or a sound recording might transmit an orisha song across time and space. Meanwhile, as bits of linguistic and historical data (and regardless of whether it is understood as being folkloric and/or religious in nature), Afro-Cuban orisha music—like Afro-diasporic cultural tradition generally, and human DNA mapping—represents a bridge across an abysmal historical divide.

How might we account for the largely-implicit role of creativity in Afro-Cuban orisha liturgy? Or, much more broadly, Afro-Atlantic cultural traditions? García’s reflections offer a rich set of antecedents to a much more recent explosion of published recordings of Cuban orisha music—a massive corpus, any or all of which is liable to flow in and out of liturgical settings. Our conversation identified several ways orisha music might become liturgical canon, including:

 

• historical inheritance from an African antecedent via the transatlantic slave trade (i.e., oral tradition)
• adoption (and/or adaptation) from distinct lineages of orisha tradition outside of Cuba (e.g., Brazil, Nigeria, the U.S., etc.)
• adoption (and/or adaptation) from distinct regional lineages of Cuban orisha tradition (e.g., Matanzas to Havana, Villa Clara to Miami, vice versa, etc.)
• adoption (and/or adaptation) from other distinct lineages of African tradition in Cuba (e.g., Arará, Palo, etc.)
• creation (and/or adaptation) by novel juxtapositions of antecedent repertoire (e.g., combining songs and rhythms in unprecedented ways, setting spoken or written texts to music, etc.)
• creation by mystical and/or discreet processes (e.g., dreams, possession trance, etc.)
• creation by conscious composition (in ritual and/or secular settings)

In practice, all of these processes of canonization can involve multimedia technologies, and the dynamic relationships between the various processes make detailed analyses of the provenance of Afro-Cuban orisha liturgy forbiddingly complex. As Marcuzzi notes, “Most Yoruba religious texts traverse numerous sacrosocial precincts, appearing in various forms and contexts, which makes the establishment of origins very problematic” (Marcuzzi 2008, p. 113). Even a priest’s musical dreams of new liturgy—however consciously or not—are presumably informed by an encyclopedic corpus of antecedent and deeply-ingrained liturgical canon. New songs—regardless of whether they are “received” mystically and/or “composed” consciously—are relatively rare within the massive corpus of Cuban orisha liturgy, yet they constitute an important and meaningful dimension of the tradition. Not only are novel and esoteric orisha liturgy continually more intertwined (and less easily distinguished from one another), but they offer insight into the manifold processes by which Afro-Atlantic tradition is transmitted, transformed, and created.

Bearers of orisha tradition like García are acutely aware of the subtleties of inheriting, reiterating, and transmitting spoken and musical liturgy, and García’s account provides especially nuanced insights on the relationship between cultural authenticity and liturgy, and—more ambiguously and implicitly—on the nature of sacred and secular modes of culture. Paradoxically, García’s testimony might delegitimize the song he composed and chronicled; given its demonstrably recent and secular provenance, the “collective” might now consider the song unfit for ritual, effectively demoting it from its recently-acquired liturgical status.37 As a case study, the conversation with García offers broader insights into ways liturgy moves in the historical Afro-Atlantic: between various communities, languages, times, and places, and—recently and increasingly—via multimedia technologies. Ideally, exchanges like those written into this essay will extend beyond narrow notions of orthodoxy, nourishing a deeper, increasingly nuanced, and critically-minded conversation which both includes and extends beyond orisha traditions.