MEDIUM: A Meditation for Diaspora Daughters
(c) Lorelei Williams. Originally written in 2005.
Published in Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora (University of Houston Arte Público Press) 2012.
“The ancestors brought you here a reason: you had something to give and something to receive.” This was how a Cuban mentor summarized my life in Brazil as we overlooked the glittering Bay of All Saints from his balcony. It was almost one year after my initiation to Oxum in the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé and three months after the launch of POMPA, a youth program I’d co-founded in Salvador da Bahia.
During that time and the years that followed in Brazil, my identity changed profoundly. I grew to see myself as a daughter of Bahia, a phrase I humbly echoed when Brazilian friends and colleagues first said so. I came to know this land intimately, from its street children to its high priestesses and elected officials, from its jails to its universities. POMPA has since trained forty-two Afro-Brazilian youth for public service careers, connecting them to jobs in places like the State Legislative Assembly of Bahia, where afro-descendents have traditionally been excluded. And I recently celebrated three years as a daughter of Oxum, strong in faith, but separated by an ocean from the spiritual family I grew to love.
From 2001 – 2005, Brazil was at the forefront of my identity; its rhythms, religion, politics and language became an integral part of my life and work. Brazil was also a catalyst for my own development as a medium; it was the place where my capacities were most fully manifested and where they were tested to their greatest limits.
When some people think of the word medium, it conjures images of Whoopi Goldberg channeling Patrick Swayze’s spirit to Demi Moore in the movie Ghost or Patricia Arquette solving crimes through dreams in the popular ABC miniseries, Medium. My understanding of what it means to be a medium is more nuanced; it is a profound spiritual function, but it is also a political and deeply personal act. To be a medium means allowing one’s body to be used as a bridge, a conduit between the spiritual and human worlds. In my experience, it has also meant being an intermediary between two cultures, two languages and Black freedom movements on two continents.
Over the past three decades, feminist and womanist scholars, like Kimberle Crenshaw, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Carole Boyce Davies, Gloria Anzaldua, Alice Walker, Leilá Gonzales, Sueli Carneiro, and others have articulated a theory of intersectionality to explain the unique vantage point, challenges and opportunities that Black women and women of the Diaspora hold as a result of the convergence of race, class and gender in their lives – and the bridge function they are often called to fulfill. Other authors have spoken of an intersectionality informed by language, ethnicity, religion and other facets of identity, but the essence is the same: the greater number of marginalized identities that intersect within you, the greater your capacity for insight and for injury.
In the work of Congolese philosopher FuKiau Bunseki, intersectionality can be seen as a spiritual concept; a connecting point between the material and divine worlds. In his African Book with no Name, FuKiau explains the Congolese cosmological symbol of the dikenga. It is a cross with arms of equal length that symbolizes the movement of the sun and of the human soul through the four phases of life: conception (musoni), birth (luvemba), the zenith of life (tukula), and death (kala). The horizontal line in the cross, known as the “kalunga line,” divides the spiritual and physical worlds. It is often represented as water. The vertical line is the power line where human and ancestral powers are aligned. At the center each of these worlds and each of these powers intersect. Standing at this cross is to stand in the center of an eternal life force which provides healing and equilibrium.
I felt the full force of both kinds of intersectionality during my years in Bahia. As a Jamaican-American woman, daughter of Oxum and director of an affirmative action project for Afro-Brazilian youth, my body and my body of work placed me in the middle of a privileged but perilous intersection. I stood not only at the crossroads of race, gender, class, culture, language and nation – but also at a spiritual crossroads. This essay is about my experiences and lessons negotiating that middle ground during the past five years in Brazil. And because Black women of the Americas, “diaspora daughters,” often live and work on this same cardinal point, this is not just my story, but is our story. I offer it as a representation of our lessons, our resilience, and our promise, born and bearing us, at the crossroads.
I. The River’s Daughter: A Brazilian Baptism
Enslaved Africans from the Yoruba, Dahomey and Kongo kingdoms and other ancient African societies carried their religions across the Middle Passage to the plantations and cities of northeast Brazil. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these traditions merged, were influenced by Catholicism and Amerindian elements, and became known as candomblé. Within the candomblé tradition today there are three principle nations: the Nagô (rooted in Yoruba culture), Jejê (Dahomey) and Angola (Kongo). Uniting them is a common cosmology which emphasizes the sacred connections between humans, nature and the divine. Candomblé practitioners believe that God’s (Olodumaré’s) power is manifested through various forces of nature, represented by the orixás. We worship sixteen principle orixás. Among the most popular are Exú (keeper of the crossroads), Ogum (who represents metal, war, strength and technology), Xangô (justice, fire, thunder), Oxum (love, rivers, healing, creativity) and Oxalá (peace and wisdom), among others. Throughout Brazil, conservative government estimates count more than 300,000 terreiros or houses of worship. From slavery to the present, candomblé terreiros have been a traditional mainstay of Black resistance. Candomblé’s food, music, dance and spiritual beliefs form the staples of Brazilian culture and identity. Salvador da Bahia, one of the largest slave ports in the Americas, is known as the birthplace of candomblé, a “Black Rome.” It is also the site of my own birth as a daughter of Oxum.
My terreiro[1] is descended from one of the first terrreiros in Brazil and was founded in 1889. It is located in Engenho Velho da Federação, a neighborhood renowned for the high density of candomblé houses in the same way that Harlem is known for its historic and abundant churches. In 2000, when I first visited a ceremony there as a tourist, I had no idea of the role this terreiro would eventually play in my life.
* * *
The red and white striped taxi pulled to a stop in front of a wrought iron gate. My twin sister and I fumbled with the strangely colored money and paid the driver. Dozens of people moved up and down the main street, some barefoot in halter tops and shorts, others wearing button-down shirts and slacks despite the heat. Down the hills on either side of the main street, shanties dotted the landscape. Houses piled closely on top of each other were lit like fireflies in the Brazilian night. It was a Saturday night and samba music was blaring from an open-air bar on the corner.
The white stone building behind the gate sat in quiet contrast to the street. Colorful banners fluttered like birds in a breeze that blew gently as we opened the gate. My sister and I, in our identical white dresses, followed our tour guide to the building entrance. Inside the large square shaped room, there were already a number of people gathered, including several tourists. The clay floor was covered in a carpet of crisp dark green leaves. Streams of small flags hung from the rafters. In the center of the room a red stone pillar was surrounded by exquisitely carved wooden thrones that pointed in the cardinal directions. Opposite the door were three drums of varying sizes, dressed with yellow bows.
Eventually, three teenaged boys took their places at the drums and began to play using their hands and thin wooden sticks. A stately woman, dressed in what looked like a nineteenth century hoop skirt and a white head wrap sat down in another throne-like chair opposite the center pole and another woman sat on her left. She held a gilded double bell in her elegant hand. Her head poised and expectant, the priestess looked towards a curtain that was opening across from her.
A long line of brown women began to file out from behind the curtain, dancing solemnly. Each wore variations of embroidered white blouses with pleated cuffs, a piece of intricately patterned cloth wrapped around their upper bodies, and tied in place with a large bow. Their dress was exquisite: intricately rendered patterns on lace, silk and cotton. The women’s feet were bare. They filed into a circle around the pole, singing. As they circled, each saluted the priestess and other elders by prostrating themselves on the floor or kissing the elders’ hands. Their steps were slow and measured; mostly small variations of a two step, moving with arms at angles to their waists, moving in and out away from their bodies. The movements would vary into complex sequences then return to a simple step. Whenever the drums stopped, the women would also pause, some sat halfway on the ground. Seconds later, as a new song began the women would salute the earth, some prostrating fully and others reaching their fingertips to the floor, then touching their foreheads.
The women were beautiful varying shades of brown from my mother’s light skinned olive color to my aunt’s deep chocolate brown. They ranged greatly in age from an older dark-skinned woman with corn-rowed white hair to a statuesque teenager with a halo of an afro. There was a hypnotic quality to their dance. Although they were so distinct, and their movements personalized, it was as if they moved with one body. The drummers seemed to be only an extension of the drums. The whole room rocked in the steady wave of sound, one boat traveling together towards the heavens, every wave a higher level.
The pace of the drumming began to quicken and the songs changed from a somber tone to one of pure joy. The emotion in their voices reminded me of a gospel choir; it was infectious. The drums became louder, faster, more insistent. And then the orixás came down. I remembered seeing a Masai boy catch the spirit like this in Kenya years ago. I remembered this scene, the sudden quickening of the spirit making human contact, countless other times in my Harlem church. One by one, these women made the transition between human and divine, receiving the power of their orixás into their bodies. Each woman became a dancing altar. Some would bend suddenly at the waist, shoulders trembling, a wave passing through their bodies. One quietly cried as she danced, swaying out of balance, overwhelmed. Then just as quickly, she took on a peaceful and purposeful stride. The worshippers beside me sang louder, shouting names I did not know. One by one, almost all the women in the line caught the spirit.
Attending women that didn’t catch the spirit wiped the perspiration from the dancer’s faces and attended to them with a palpable love and devotion. When the music stopped, the women were led back through the same curtain they had come through. After a long pause, the drumming started up again, but this time the women who came through the curtain were unrecognizable. They wore even more ornate and gorgeous dresses, and carried silver and brass ornaments in their hands or flowers. Many wore veils made of satin and tiny beads that matched the color of their dresses. The tourists in the room, myself included, let out an audible gasp. They were breathtaking.
I noticed that as the orixás danced around the pole this time, the surrounding community put up their hands in the direction of the dancer’s bodies. I understood why. As one woman passed, the air around her seemed electrically charged, like a mini thunderstorm. It raised the hairs on my arm and sent a feeling like light through me.
Sometimes the orixás would dance out of the circle to embrace people in the crowd. This embrace, as I watched it, was familiar to me somehow. They hugged slowly and firmly, first on the left and then on the right side. Some of the people in the room were also catching the spirit. Sometimes they would be half-carried behind the curtain and other times, one of the women would drape them in a white cloth until the trembling stopped. The orixás continued the embrace and dance long into the night.
Towards the end of the ceremony, a group of young women began bringing heaping plates of food from another doorway and people began to eat. These foods, I was told, were typical “Bahian” food, each dish consecrated to a specific orixá. While we ate, the drums slowed to a final stop. The women and the orixás returned behind the lace curtain. It was 2000. When I returned home to New York City, I drew everything in my journal from memory. I had never felt or seen anything like this and yet it felt deeply familiar. I wanted to remember.
In three years time, I would learn the names of these women; they would become my irmãs-do-santo, my god-sisters. The majestic woman that called them from behind the curtain became my mãe-do-santo, my god-mother. That house became my house. The sacred circle widened to accept me. And Oxum opened her arms and made me her daughter.
* * *
You do not choose initiation; it chooses you. But early on something in you knows. Throughout my adolescence, I was aware of the protection and presence of spirit, though I did not have a name for it. My family was not a religious one. I found my way to church and to the Bible as a teenager and both continue to be a mainstay of my faith practice. But I always felt that something in my spirit was not always addressed; there was a place that the words of the preacher or the lyrics of the gospel songs I loved did not attend to. I felt the urge before I could name it. The first sign came with my grandmother’s visits. She died one month before my twin sister and I were born, but often visited offering her comfort and guidance. On a trip to Louisiana at fifteen, I felt her with a strength I’d never known, walking through a field of wildflowers alone, their scent and her presence were in the air with me. I wrote something down that day. I came to know the divine was much closer than I had thought. Early visits to Cuban bembés with friends confirmed this. When the spirits danced, the insistent pull and comfort of the drum felt deeply familiar. However, I never felt drawn to join one of the many communities in New York. Some special connection existed in Brazil though. In Bahia all of my spiritual awareness, spiritual fluency, and ancestral connections manifested more powerfully than they ever had in my life.
There are few words to describe the intimacy and the power of my experiences in candomblé; it is not a journey easily transformed into language. Certain details are too sacred to share; others are simply beyond my linguistic capacity. The theology of candomblé is not captured in any one sacred text, like a Bible, Torah or Koran. The oral tradition is the primary vehicle for preserving the teachings of the religion. Candomblé’s most instructive wisdom is inscribed in leaves, shells, drum beats and bodies, in my head and in the instructive music of my heartbeat. It is an inner knowing that arrives wordless, as wind, as breath.
If I had to articulate the meaning of my experiences in candomblé though, it would be about healing power of nature, of the sacred circle (the roda) of family, of cellular instruction, of rebirth. I learned that my body is a bridge. I learned that a special combination of dance, drum, and prayer can turn you into a living altar. I learned that not all knowledge is passed through the word. I learned that the ancestor’s desires have always been our own. I learned that alignment with the orixás walking with and in me could give me power to fulfill whatever I dared or dreamed. I learned about flight without ever leaving the ground. I found a place I felt I belonged to before birth and returned to it; a part of my soul came home. I felt a peace that I had not known in such consistency. My life felt aligned, in proper order. In the circle of dance, I understood the importance of diversity in unity. We each brought our individuality to the dance, informed by our orixá, but we ultimately danced the same dance within one same circle. Even when I was not in the circle, my place in it remained. This connection to community was profoundly healing. I found myself in the midst of a sacred second family. In the circle I have a place and a responsibility, as both student and eventually as a teacher. Above all, I have a duty, an “obrigação” to my orixá, as a conduit of her energy. And through this obligation, I am aligned to the spirit of my head, to my higher self, and to my destiny.
My path in candomblé has held as much challenge as beauty. In the early months as an abian[2] having recently arrived from New York, my Portuguese did not allow me to understand the nuances of the little that was explained to me about the various rituals of the house. By definition, you do not ask questions and yet I had always been educated to question; it is my nature. Even on the days I dared to ask, I could not always understand the answers. Beyond language difficulty and the inability to ask for explanation, I struggled with losing control of my body. Many times I was unconscious of the shift, many others, I was conscious of a beautiful light intensifying within me and the cellular sermons that followed. At times, like my god-sisters, I was frustrated by the idea of not controlling the way I spent my time. I had to become accustomed to new foods, like acarajé, the bean pies sacred to Iansá and amalá, the okra dish consecrated to Xango that I now enjoy. In the beginning, my back ached and my fingers cramped from long hours of sorting beans, chopping okra and preparing shrimp for our public ceremonies attended by over a hundred people. In the end, I grew to appreciate the meditative cleansing repetition and stillness of it in the loving company of my spiritual family. Being American, it was assumed I did not know how to wash clothes and sweep the floors. There were stereotypes about privilege that did not mesh with my reality as a native of the South Bronx and Harlem. In the beginning, I had few intimate conversations with my god-mother, but she and I grew to talking hours in her kitchen as she cooked my favorite dishes. She threw a birthday party for me (during my first birthday ever separate from my twin sister) and supported me in my other work-related projects in Bahia. My respect and love for her has deepened over the years as our relationship has grown. In my house, I have been at once an outsider and a daughter, at times on the border of understanding and being understood, but also loved, intimately known and generously provided for.
Another major challenge has been distance. To this day, I wonder why it was Brazil, why so far away, where I was called to Oxum – and not New York City. What do you do when your spirit finds a home that it has been seeking and you have to leave it behind? After initiation, I had believed that somehow I would be able to remain tied to my spiritual community in the same intensity as I did while I lived in Brazil. But it has not been the case. The short two-week trips I am able to make now in no way compare to experience of living there and attending the full cycle of spiritual ceremonies of my terreiro. Returning home to New York, I felt like a lost a vital part of myself. I became disillusioned that something that had become an intrinsic part of my life has been reduced to five days visits once or twice a year. A whole world that had opened to me that was now only available in my dreams, brief visits, and my own individual devotions.
I am learning that living with these mysteries is also a part of my path as a medium. My function is to be led, to be an instrument, a bridge, to surrender to the spirit, not to control or analyze it. To trust. I walk now, not always in understanding, but in faith, knowing I am kept and guided. On whatever side of the Atlantic, I find myself, I know Oxum is walking with me. In her love, healing, creativity, beauty and sensuality – in the mirror of Her river – I see a glimpse of my own possibilities and the gifts she has passed on to me. It is an uncommon healing and communion. And when I can, I cherish the visits I am able to make to attend one of my terrreiro’s festas.
Last year, the first of three trips back to Brazil, I returned for the festa de Xangô, the first in our cycle of almost ten public ceremonies during the year. The night before the festa, my irmãs and irmões-do-santo, the ekedis, ogans and abians[3] began the food preparations, talking, laughing, gossiping until eventually we spread our esteiras (straw mats) on the floor of the barracão[4]. Some thirty or forty of us set up our bedding in huddles of four or five and we drifted off, amidst giggles and snores, to sleep.
At four in the morning, the head ekedi woke us gently, tapping, as is custom on the soles of our feet. The roosters outside crowed in monotone and the house began to stir. We bathed and dressed in our “ropa da ração,” usually cotton skirts, an embroidered white camisole, wrapping our upper bodies in wide cloth tied with another thin piece of fabric. Most of the morning was spent attending to sacred ritual duties, prayers and obligations. Later we decorated the barracão in Xangô’s colors and then performed the careful task of ironing and preparing our intricately sewn clothes, braiding each other’s hair, borrowing each other’s earrings, perfume and bobby-pins. It was time for a second bath and then the lengthy process of getting dressed for the festa.
This time, I am one of some thirty-five women who file into the barracão. This time I will dance. Slowly, the line moves forward as we sing for Exû, owner of the crossroads. One by one, we salute our head priestess, the iyalorixá, and our elders. Now I know the steps by heart, my bare feet move in step with my sisters. As the drum patterns change, their rhythms are familiar to me and I know the orixás they correspond to. The atmosphere is one of somber introspection and reverence, but inside I cannot stop smiling. It feels good to be back home to my spiritual house, however briefly.
II. POMPA: A Trans-Atlantic Freedom Route
Candomblé endowed me with spiritual resources to be an intermediary in another capacity, as co-founder and director of “Projeto Mentes e Portas Abertas,” (POMPA)[5] in Bahia. I served as a bridge between the Afro-Brazilian and African American movements for racial equality; between Brazil’s excluded youth and its most elite public institutions; and between the dreams of these youth and their creation of a new reality.
I launched POMPA during a Fulbright fellowship in Bahia, in partnership with the Steve Biko Cultural Institute. The Biko Institute, founded in 1992, is one of the premier college prep programs for afro-descendent youth in Brazil. To date, the Institute has placed over 800 students in Salvador’s public and private colleges. Over 2,000 youth have participated in the Institute’s additional science & technology, human rights, professional development and community service programs.
POMPA’s mission is to prepare low-income Afro-Brazilian college students for careers in public service and social entrepreneurship. Its vision is to build the capacity of Afro-Brazilian youth to be effective advocates for their communities and to increase the number of Afro-Brazilian professionals in Salvador’s public sector. At its founding, POMPA moved beyond the predominant goal of affirmative action advocacy in Brazil of getting Black students into university – to thinking of the opportunities needed after graduation.
The program was created because of the severe crises facing Afro-Brazilians and youth in particular. Brazil has the second-largest Black population in the world. Salvador da Bahia, one of Brazil's oldest, largest and poorest cities, has the highest percentage of Afro-Brazilians in Brazil. Despite their numerical majority strength, Afro-Brazilians consistently occupy the lowest positions in national indicators ranging from income, health, literacy, housing quality, mortality, and education. Two-thirds of all Afro-Brazilians live below the poverty line. Fewer than seven percent of all public elected officials in Brazil are Afro-Brazilian. Only five percent of the 1.4 million students admitted to universities in Brazil at the time when the program was launched was Afro-Brazilian. On average, Afro-Brazilians earn less than 40 percent of salary of their white counterparts and are 5.3 percent less likely than whites to be employed in professional occupations.[6] In his acceptance speech in 2001, Brazilian Finance Minister Antônio Palocci made an historic declaration that, “In Brazil, poverty has a color and an age. It is black and young.”
Despite common knowledge of these problems, little was being done to reverse the exclusion of Black youth from the city’s power structure. In the early part of my 2003 research, I asked the question, “How are Black youth being prepared for leadership positions in their communities and country?” In response, I often head many outbursts of laughter, with the emphatic reply, “They aren’t!” My field work revealed that there was a serious gap in the opportunities offered to teenagers and young adults. The majority of programs focused on engaging youth through arts and culture, offering limited income earning potential. Few programs offered opportunities for entry into professional careers in the public or private sector, and especially not into leadership or management positions in those careers. Many of the youth programs in Salvador were meeting important service provision needs, but there seemed to be no model that would make a sustainable change in the distribution of power and wealth in this majority-black city.
At the time, I was already teaching, mentoring and volunteering at Biko as an organizational development consultant. I began talking with staff and students to learn more about the issues they faced. Several months into my research, I introduced a model based on my experiences in US leadership programs. We worked together to adapt it to a Brazilian context and POMPA was born. We joke that POMPA had an African American mother and Brazilian fathers: Biko’s Director, Silvio Humberto and Durval Azevedo, POMPA’s Assistant Coordinator. It was a family affair, at once successful, challenging and life changing for us all.
POMPA students are typically residents of Salvador’s poorest, most violent neighborhoods whose families earn an average of US$ 2,034 a year. In spite of tremendous obstacles, they have managed to become part of the first significant generation of Afro-Brazilian college students in the country. POMPA’s pilot year students were in various semesters of study in college, from freshman to senior. They represented a diversity of majors such as law, business, international relations, journalism, engineering and others. Qualitatively, these students represented the vanguard of Salvador’s young leaders.
Before POMPA’s first anniversary, eight of twenty-one students were offered permanent positions in the organizations where they interned, such as the Municipal Secretary of Environmental Resources, the State Legislative Assembly of Bahia, the Municipal Secretary of Education, the Clemento Mariani Foundation, TVE Bahia - a local television station, and several not-for-profit organizations. Of the eight students offered a full time job after their internships, at least three doubled their salary or that of their families, typically moving from 1-2 minimum salaries to between 3 – 5 minimum salaries. Several others have launched their own organizations as a result of their POMPA experience and are laying the groundwork to form their own not-for-profit organizations or local businesses. Two students are currently on POMPA’s core administrative team, working with POMPA’s second class that is funded in part by the Kellogg Foundation.
Two years after its launch, POMPA has proven to be an effective and unique strategy for youth empowerment in Brazil. POMPA’s site visits in Salvador and Brasilia gave our students a chance to enter and engage with institutions that have traditionally excluded Black youth. POMPA’s curriculum offered students a unique look at issues affecting their community, increased their understanding of Brazil’s domestic and foreign policies and raised their self-confidence. POMPA’s Internship Program is the first ever internship program routing Afro-Brazilian youth into jobs in the city’s key public and private institutions. Before POMPA, Black leaders in Bahia’s political, legal, business, and media fields had no formal mechanism to mentor Afro-Brazilian youth about their professional goals.
What many students distinguished as most important was that POMPA was the first time any of them had been asked “what do you dream?” and then given them the resources to realize those dreams. “I always knew we needed to have more Afro-Brazilians in the State Assembly, but I never knew it could be me,” said one student. Based on their final evaluation forms, 80% of the students said that POMPA had “significantly changed their personal and professional trajectories.”
In spite of our achievements during that pilot year, POMPA’s path has also been full of public, administrative and personal challenges.
Public reaction to the program was overwhelmingly positive. POMPA was cited in over fourteen Brazilian media outlets its pilot year, including three national newspapers. In the community and amongst public sector leaders, POMPA students were regarded as an exceptional group of young leaders. The program itself was widely supported. However, we did face criticism from some members of the Black movement because of our focus on institutional integration and on a population that was already privileged in many eyes: college students. In public and private conversations, I emphasized my belief that as a car needs more than one wheel to move forward, so Black people need a diversity of tactics to achieve socio-economic equality; POMPA was only one in many worthwhile strategies. We debated about having the students wear suits, having them work in “the master’s house, to learn the master’s tools.” We debated about the promise and the peril of integration in the African-American and Afro-Brazilian contexts. There was never real resolution and at times I stood on both sides of the debate. What was most important was that the dialogue took place and it continues.
The majority of our challenges came as a bi-national administrative team. Since POMPA is the creation of Brazilian and American partners, specifically the leaders and youth of the Steve Biko Institute and me, we often needed to make adjustments for each other’s different work rhythms, strategies and expectations. This international “marriage” is what makes POMPA so unique, but it is also our greatest difficulty. For example, I wanted to cap the class size at fifteen students, the number I had raised money for; they wanted twenty-one, a number that signified blessing in Afro-Brazilian culture, even though they had no new prospects for funds. I emphasized strategy and they maintained the importance of also relying on intuition in our planning sessions. I thought we should also include the private sector as a route for student jobs and they were opposed. I was meticulous about program evaluation and they were not as reliant on strict measurements like “key metrics.” I wanted to dock the students if they turned in late assignments without a formal excuse, they argued it was unjust given the students’ financial status. But we both believed that black youth should have a greater voice and place in Brazilian society – and be trained to hold strategic leadership positions to advocate for their communities’ rights. Standing on this fundamental understanding, having a profound respect for each other, and knowing how to have fun in the process enabled us to work together successfully.
On a personal level as the Program Director and principle fundraiser that first year, I pushed to meet the expectations of American donors, Brazilian partners and our students, leading a staff entirely in Portuguese. My friends, especially my boyfriend at the time were concerned about the level of attention I gave POMPA, warning, “you are not POMPA, you are its founder, but it is not you. It is only a part of who you are.” I moved between exhilaration and exhaustion frequently in the course of the day.
This was the greatest professional challenge of my life mostly because my heart was sewn so deeply into it; but I was constantly aware that I did not work alone. Beyond the camaraderie and solidarity of my Brazilian team, I understood and felt the presence of my orixás and my ancestors. Even during the most intense days, I was able to give all I had to give and then a lot more I didn’t even know. The spiritual energy that surrounded me was like a great pool that I was diving in, a beautiful force that constantly revived and strengthened me. I knew that my capacity to run this program and to stand at that middle ground was a gift from my ancestors. I grew to understand, as they ministered to me, that I had been recruited to play my own small part to build on their work in forging a path to freedom for my own generation. The awareness of this accompaniment as I worked was one of the greatest blessings I received. I was working through a strength that was not my own, a force beyond me that opened the path for POMPA to progress.
POMPA itself overcome the public, administrative and personal challenges it faced. According to Dr. Silvio Humberto Passos, Biko’s Executive Director:
“POMPA has opened an important and ample space for Afro-Diasporic collaboration. We’ve had the opportunity to live in practice the Afro-Brazilian and African American way to manage people, resources and the imponderable. Our partnership is marked by unity of action, planning, flexibility, intuition and also objectivity, creativity, commitment and the capacity to overcome obstacles. The result has been very successful: an unforgettable experience for all involved, principally our 21 POMPA students whose horizons were broadened, whose posture was changed, whose self-esteem was raised and whose commitment to their community was strengthened.”
The program is now led completely by a Brazilian staff. I am moving onto another phase in my professional life, but continue to travel to Brazil to teach the flagship seminar on leadership and public management. I still keep in touch with the students and staff via email and just recently heard from a second-year student named Suéde that POMPA has been a “divisor das águas," a dividing water between “the life she had and the life she wants to create for herself and her community.”
III. Implications for Diaspora Daughters:
The stories I shared above about my experiences with POMPA and candomblé represent only one thread of a communal narrative about our identities and capacities as Black women of the Americas; as mediums between cultures, identities, freedom movements, and spiritual planes.
My five years in Brazil blessed, stretched, tested and changed me profoundly. Up until a month ago, I had been unable to process it all. I felt overwhelmed by all of my conflicting emotions. I missed my spiritual family, my friends, my POMPA students and team, my neighborhood, and the way of life I loved and had become accustomed to. Finally, one year after my return to New York, I can make some sense of it all. In stillness, the lessons have made themselves clear:
Standing at the crossroads is both a privileged and precarious position. You run the risk of being crushed in the collision of communities, identities, responsibilities, self and spirit. In embracing one world, you may lose your ties to another. In fact, you could lose connection with your own self. Those who learn to master the middle, however, have an insight to give each of the roads that meet in them. The vantage point at the middle is clairvoyant. It is a place of creativity, innovation, negotiation, and transformation. It is the place where weakness becomes strength, where impossibility becomes possibility, and where your vulnerability opens you to unfathomable power.
Standing at the crossroads requires great humility and also great self-confidence. As a medium or intermediary, you are only a channel; you are the means but not the end. Yet you also have to believe in your abilities, your own worth, and your own sight in the midst of the intersecting worlds. You cannot get lost in translation. This requires balance. It requires rest. It requires love. It requires deep reservoirs of faith. It requires community. It requires a belief in and knowledge of your destiny. It requires a belief in the indestructibility of your soul.
This is how you survive. This is how you walk your part of the road between the ancestors and the children. This is how you live out the meaning of your birth.
In Brazil, some days I felt stranded in the traffic jam of worlds and identities, and on others my passage was clear and powerful. Directing POMPA, the intersections of race, nation, language, sex, class and political ideology collided within me. At my best, however, I was able to pull the common threads together to help create a new strategy that is slowly changing the balance of racial and generational power in the city. The precise reason that POMPA worked was because it was born at the cross. It was created in the intersections of the American and Brazilian conceptions of race and anti-racist strategies, being led by a woman on an all-male team in a male-dominated society, directing a team in a language that was not my mother tongue, advocating for institutional integration and grassroots organizing in the midst of a movement that favored only grassroots organizing strategies, and standing at a place of privilege in the midst of great poverty. The meeting of Brazilian, African, Caribbean and African-American ancestors in my life imparted me with strength, insight and energy to do this. On the path leading to my initiation in candomblé, the limits of my physical body, mind and faith were tested in ways they never had been, but I received and became a conduit for a power I had never known in such intensity. I received access to resources, to healing, and to guidance that enabled me to fulfill a vital part of my destiny and in my own small way, that of our people.
What inspires me now? A deep and proven knowledge of crossroads power. It is available wherever identities and spiritual planes intersect. I thrive in the middle ground; I love the bridge role even as I navigate its difficult and unpredictable contours. Brazil taught me the most about this power that springs from the place where the horizontal line of the Atlantic Ocean meets the ladder between heaven and earth, connecting the ancestors to the youth. I believe that is where the greatest power is concentrated. I believe it needs to be nurtured in order for us all to be healed, to truly achieve mental, spiritual and socio-economic freedom.
I invest my energy at both ends of the bridge. In the spiritual, I pay homage to God, to my ancestors and to my orixás with ebo’s of prayer, song, food, and ritual attention. [7] I am grateful for their enabling power in my life and I feed it as it feeds me. In the secular world, I turn my attention always to our children. I believe young Black women in particular have a special capacity that needs to be nurtured. Youth and women have a strong capacity to be mediums because of their natural proximity to the spiritual world. The added ancestral inheritance of Africa deepens that capacity. It is coded in the DNA of all young Black women, but they often do not know how to access it.
Too often, the youngest diaspora daughters get caught in the crossfire of tongues, dollars, color, sex, and green cards; they never get to know their own power. They often lack the tools to negotiate a life out of poverty, self-hatred, sexism, racism and xenophobia. The right tools can come from secular and spiritual education, from love and community. They come from domestic and international policies that promote equality of resources, voice and opportunity. These tools also come from sharing our collective stories.
Over the past fifteen years, I have often focused on the secular education of young women (and men), helping to provide training in basic education, community organizing, policy advocacy and professional development.
These days, I am more concerned with spiritual education. I have learned that when a woman is aligned with her spirit, she is like a river flowing, able to surpass any obstacle, any border. This doesn’t mean that everyone must get initiated or even practice an African religion, but there are ways to teach anyone to touch, know and cultivate their own spirit, their own life force – and that is the most important work for our future. Spiritual power enables all other power.
Certain principles from the religion can equip diaspora daughters to fulfill their full potential, such as the concept of “iwa pele” (good character), the “roda,” or ring of community in which everyone has an important place and role; the value for personal responsibility and hard work; the mentoring relationship between adoxós and their mãe-pequenas (a practice of pairing an older god-sister with a new initiate as a source of support and instruction). There is the idea of the “benção,” which like the Sanskrit greeting “namaste,” acknowledges the divinity in each of us and also symbolizes respect for our elders. An important concept is that each person has a special “caminho” or destiny to fulfill in life, and how to align with that path. They need to know about the “axé,” the spiritual power, they possess, which is the creative, life-giving power of God. Of all these, it is most important that diaspora daughters receive the knowledge that they never walk alone. They need to know that each person has a spiritual force within them and surrounding them that they can access for guidance, comfort and protection. These are the lessons we need to pass on to young women as strategies for wholeness, fulfillment and freedom. These tools give us resources to deal with the trauma of being black and female in the Americas. They give us power to resist injustice. They inform our ability to create something new out of nothing, just as they did for our foremothers and forefathers.
In many ways, the dreams of youth are a continuation of the ancestors’ dreams and desires. It has always been youth – with the presence of the ancestors known or unknown – at the helm of the world’s most powerful freedom movements. As it was in Soweto and Selma, it is now in Salvador da Bahia. Young people, unlike most adults, have the energy, time, candor, faith and will required for resistance and social change, if they are properly prepared and supported. That is our job and it awaits us in urgency, on whatever side of the Atlantic we live.
Notes
[1] A terreiro is a sacred temple where candomblé is practiced.
[2] Abian: non-initiated novice.
[3] Irmão and irmão-do-santo: god-sister and god-brother (initiates of the same god-mother); ekedi: a woman who does not receive the orixá, but cares for the initiated terriero members when their orixás arrive through trance; ogan: male leaders of a terreiro with special ritual and financial responsibilities, also seen as protectors of the community.
[4] Barracão: the public area of a terreiro where major ceremonies are held; also a principle collective space shared by members of the terreiro.
[5] Projeto Mentes e Portas Abertas translates as “The Open Minds / Open Doors Project”
[6] Sources: IBGE (Institute Brasileiro de Geográfia e Estátisticas), DIEESE (Intersindical de Estatística e Estudos Sócio-Econômicos) and UNICEF.
[7] Ebo: offering
Published in Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora (University of Houston Arte Público Press) 2012.
“The ancestors brought you here a reason: you had something to give and something to receive.” This was how a Cuban mentor summarized my life in Brazil as we overlooked the glittering Bay of All Saints from his balcony. It was almost one year after my initiation to Oxum in the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé and three months after the launch of POMPA, a youth program I’d co-founded in Salvador da Bahia.
During that time and the years that followed in Brazil, my identity changed profoundly. I grew to see myself as a daughter of Bahia, a phrase I humbly echoed when Brazilian friends and colleagues first said so. I came to know this land intimately, from its street children to its high priestesses and elected officials, from its jails to its universities. POMPA has since trained forty-two Afro-Brazilian youth for public service careers, connecting them to jobs in places like the State Legislative Assembly of Bahia, where afro-descendents have traditionally been excluded. And I recently celebrated three years as a daughter of Oxum, strong in faith, but separated by an ocean from the spiritual family I grew to love.
From 2001 – 2005, Brazil was at the forefront of my identity; its rhythms, religion, politics and language became an integral part of my life and work. Brazil was also a catalyst for my own development as a medium; it was the place where my capacities were most fully manifested and where they were tested to their greatest limits.
When some people think of the word medium, it conjures images of Whoopi Goldberg channeling Patrick Swayze’s spirit to Demi Moore in the movie Ghost or Patricia Arquette solving crimes through dreams in the popular ABC miniseries, Medium. My understanding of what it means to be a medium is more nuanced; it is a profound spiritual function, but it is also a political and deeply personal act. To be a medium means allowing one’s body to be used as a bridge, a conduit between the spiritual and human worlds. In my experience, it has also meant being an intermediary between two cultures, two languages and Black freedom movements on two continents.
Over the past three decades, feminist and womanist scholars, like Kimberle Crenshaw, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Carole Boyce Davies, Gloria Anzaldua, Alice Walker, Leilá Gonzales, Sueli Carneiro, and others have articulated a theory of intersectionality to explain the unique vantage point, challenges and opportunities that Black women and women of the Diaspora hold as a result of the convergence of race, class and gender in their lives – and the bridge function they are often called to fulfill. Other authors have spoken of an intersectionality informed by language, ethnicity, religion and other facets of identity, but the essence is the same: the greater number of marginalized identities that intersect within you, the greater your capacity for insight and for injury.
In the work of Congolese philosopher FuKiau Bunseki, intersectionality can be seen as a spiritual concept; a connecting point between the material and divine worlds. In his African Book with no Name, FuKiau explains the Congolese cosmological symbol of the dikenga. It is a cross with arms of equal length that symbolizes the movement of the sun and of the human soul through the four phases of life: conception (musoni), birth (luvemba), the zenith of life (tukula), and death (kala). The horizontal line in the cross, known as the “kalunga line,” divides the spiritual and physical worlds. It is often represented as water. The vertical line is the power line where human and ancestral powers are aligned. At the center each of these worlds and each of these powers intersect. Standing at this cross is to stand in the center of an eternal life force which provides healing and equilibrium.
I felt the full force of both kinds of intersectionality during my years in Bahia. As a Jamaican-American woman, daughter of Oxum and director of an affirmative action project for Afro-Brazilian youth, my body and my body of work placed me in the middle of a privileged but perilous intersection. I stood not only at the crossroads of race, gender, class, culture, language and nation – but also at a spiritual crossroads. This essay is about my experiences and lessons negotiating that middle ground during the past five years in Brazil. And because Black women of the Americas, “diaspora daughters,” often live and work on this same cardinal point, this is not just my story, but is our story. I offer it as a representation of our lessons, our resilience, and our promise, born and bearing us, at the crossroads.
I. The River’s Daughter: A Brazilian Baptism
Enslaved Africans from the Yoruba, Dahomey and Kongo kingdoms and other ancient African societies carried their religions across the Middle Passage to the plantations and cities of northeast Brazil. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these traditions merged, were influenced by Catholicism and Amerindian elements, and became known as candomblé. Within the candomblé tradition today there are three principle nations: the Nagô (rooted in Yoruba culture), Jejê (Dahomey) and Angola (Kongo). Uniting them is a common cosmology which emphasizes the sacred connections between humans, nature and the divine. Candomblé practitioners believe that God’s (Olodumaré’s) power is manifested through various forces of nature, represented by the orixás. We worship sixteen principle orixás. Among the most popular are Exú (keeper of the crossroads), Ogum (who represents metal, war, strength and technology), Xangô (justice, fire, thunder), Oxum (love, rivers, healing, creativity) and Oxalá (peace and wisdom), among others. Throughout Brazil, conservative government estimates count more than 300,000 terreiros or houses of worship. From slavery to the present, candomblé terreiros have been a traditional mainstay of Black resistance. Candomblé’s food, music, dance and spiritual beliefs form the staples of Brazilian culture and identity. Salvador da Bahia, one of the largest slave ports in the Americas, is known as the birthplace of candomblé, a “Black Rome.” It is also the site of my own birth as a daughter of Oxum.
My terreiro[1] is descended from one of the first terrreiros in Brazil and was founded in 1889. It is located in Engenho Velho da Federação, a neighborhood renowned for the high density of candomblé houses in the same way that Harlem is known for its historic and abundant churches. In 2000, when I first visited a ceremony there as a tourist, I had no idea of the role this terreiro would eventually play in my life.
* * *
The red and white striped taxi pulled to a stop in front of a wrought iron gate. My twin sister and I fumbled with the strangely colored money and paid the driver. Dozens of people moved up and down the main street, some barefoot in halter tops and shorts, others wearing button-down shirts and slacks despite the heat. Down the hills on either side of the main street, shanties dotted the landscape. Houses piled closely on top of each other were lit like fireflies in the Brazilian night. It was a Saturday night and samba music was blaring from an open-air bar on the corner.
The white stone building behind the gate sat in quiet contrast to the street. Colorful banners fluttered like birds in a breeze that blew gently as we opened the gate. My sister and I, in our identical white dresses, followed our tour guide to the building entrance. Inside the large square shaped room, there were already a number of people gathered, including several tourists. The clay floor was covered in a carpet of crisp dark green leaves. Streams of small flags hung from the rafters. In the center of the room a red stone pillar was surrounded by exquisitely carved wooden thrones that pointed in the cardinal directions. Opposite the door were three drums of varying sizes, dressed with yellow bows.
Eventually, three teenaged boys took their places at the drums and began to play using their hands and thin wooden sticks. A stately woman, dressed in what looked like a nineteenth century hoop skirt and a white head wrap sat down in another throne-like chair opposite the center pole and another woman sat on her left. She held a gilded double bell in her elegant hand. Her head poised and expectant, the priestess looked towards a curtain that was opening across from her.
A long line of brown women began to file out from behind the curtain, dancing solemnly. Each wore variations of embroidered white blouses with pleated cuffs, a piece of intricately patterned cloth wrapped around their upper bodies, and tied in place with a large bow. Their dress was exquisite: intricately rendered patterns on lace, silk and cotton. The women’s feet were bare. They filed into a circle around the pole, singing. As they circled, each saluted the priestess and other elders by prostrating themselves on the floor or kissing the elders’ hands. Their steps were slow and measured; mostly small variations of a two step, moving with arms at angles to their waists, moving in and out away from their bodies. The movements would vary into complex sequences then return to a simple step. Whenever the drums stopped, the women would also pause, some sat halfway on the ground. Seconds later, as a new song began the women would salute the earth, some prostrating fully and others reaching their fingertips to the floor, then touching their foreheads.
The women were beautiful varying shades of brown from my mother’s light skinned olive color to my aunt’s deep chocolate brown. They ranged greatly in age from an older dark-skinned woman with corn-rowed white hair to a statuesque teenager with a halo of an afro. There was a hypnotic quality to their dance. Although they were so distinct, and their movements personalized, it was as if they moved with one body. The drummers seemed to be only an extension of the drums. The whole room rocked in the steady wave of sound, one boat traveling together towards the heavens, every wave a higher level.
The pace of the drumming began to quicken and the songs changed from a somber tone to one of pure joy. The emotion in their voices reminded me of a gospel choir; it was infectious. The drums became louder, faster, more insistent. And then the orixás came down. I remembered seeing a Masai boy catch the spirit like this in Kenya years ago. I remembered this scene, the sudden quickening of the spirit making human contact, countless other times in my Harlem church. One by one, these women made the transition between human and divine, receiving the power of their orixás into their bodies. Each woman became a dancing altar. Some would bend suddenly at the waist, shoulders trembling, a wave passing through their bodies. One quietly cried as she danced, swaying out of balance, overwhelmed. Then just as quickly, she took on a peaceful and purposeful stride. The worshippers beside me sang louder, shouting names I did not know. One by one, almost all the women in the line caught the spirit.
Attending women that didn’t catch the spirit wiped the perspiration from the dancer’s faces and attended to them with a palpable love and devotion. When the music stopped, the women were led back through the same curtain they had come through. After a long pause, the drumming started up again, but this time the women who came through the curtain were unrecognizable. They wore even more ornate and gorgeous dresses, and carried silver and brass ornaments in their hands or flowers. Many wore veils made of satin and tiny beads that matched the color of their dresses. The tourists in the room, myself included, let out an audible gasp. They were breathtaking.
I noticed that as the orixás danced around the pole this time, the surrounding community put up their hands in the direction of the dancer’s bodies. I understood why. As one woman passed, the air around her seemed electrically charged, like a mini thunderstorm. It raised the hairs on my arm and sent a feeling like light through me.
Sometimes the orixás would dance out of the circle to embrace people in the crowd. This embrace, as I watched it, was familiar to me somehow. They hugged slowly and firmly, first on the left and then on the right side. Some of the people in the room were also catching the spirit. Sometimes they would be half-carried behind the curtain and other times, one of the women would drape them in a white cloth until the trembling stopped. The orixás continued the embrace and dance long into the night.
Towards the end of the ceremony, a group of young women began bringing heaping plates of food from another doorway and people began to eat. These foods, I was told, were typical “Bahian” food, each dish consecrated to a specific orixá. While we ate, the drums slowed to a final stop. The women and the orixás returned behind the lace curtain. It was 2000. When I returned home to New York City, I drew everything in my journal from memory. I had never felt or seen anything like this and yet it felt deeply familiar. I wanted to remember.
In three years time, I would learn the names of these women; they would become my irmãs-do-santo, my god-sisters. The majestic woman that called them from behind the curtain became my mãe-do-santo, my god-mother. That house became my house. The sacred circle widened to accept me. And Oxum opened her arms and made me her daughter.
* * *
You do not choose initiation; it chooses you. But early on something in you knows. Throughout my adolescence, I was aware of the protection and presence of spirit, though I did not have a name for it. My family was not a religious one. I found my way to church and to the Bible as a teenager and both continue to be a mainstay of my faith practice. But I always felt that something in my spirit was not always addressed; there was a place that the words of the preacher or the lyrics of the gospel songs I loved did not attend to. I felt the urge before I could name it. The first sign came with my grandmother’s visits. She died one month before my twin sister and I were born, but often visited offering her comfort and guidance. On a trip to Louisiana at fifteen, I felt her with a strength I’d never known, walking through a field of wildflowers alone, their scent and her presence were in the air with me. I wrote something down that day. I came to know the divine was much closer than I had thought. Early visits to Cuban bembés with friends confirmed this. When the spirits danced, the insistent pull and comfort of the drum felt deeply familiar. However, I never felt drawn to join one of the many communities in New York. Some special connection existed in Brazil though. In Bahia all of my spiritual awareness, spiritual fluency, and ancestral connections manifested more powerfully than they ever had in my life.
There are few words to describe the intimacy and the power of my experiences in candomblé; it is not a journey easily transformed into language. Certain details are too sacred to share; others are simply beyond my linguistic capacity. The theology of candomblé is not captured in any one sacred text, like a Bible, Torah or Koran. The oral tradition is the primary vehicle for preserving the teachings of the religion. Candomblé’s most instructive wisdom is inscribed in leaves, shells, drum beats and bodies, in my head and in the instructive music of my heartbeat. It is an inner knowing that arrives wordless, as wind, as breath.
If I had to articulate the meaning of my experiences in candomblé though, it would be about healing power of nature, of the sacred circle (the roda) of family, of cellular instruction, of rebirth. I learned that my body is a bridge. I learned that a special combination of dance, drum, and prayer can turn you into a living altar. I learned that not all knowledge is passed through the word. I learned that the ancestor’s desires have always been our own. I learned that alignment with the orixás walking with and in me could give me power to fulfill whatever I dared or dreamed. I learned about flight without ever leaving the ground. I found a place I felt I belonged to before birth and returned to it; a part of my soul came home. I felt a peace that I had not known in such consistency. My life felt aligned, in proper order. In the circle of dance, I understood the importance of diversity in unity. We each brought our individuality to the dance, informed by our orixá, but we ultimately danced the same dance within one same circle. Even when I was not in the circle, my place in it remained. This connection to community was profoundly healing. I found myself in the midst of a sacred second family. In the circle I have a place and a responsibility, as both student and eventually as a teacher. Above all, I have a duty, an “obrigação” to my orixá, as a conduit of her energy. And through this obligation, I am aligned to the spirit of my head, to my higher self, and to my destiny.
My path in candomblé has held as much challenge as beauty. In the early months as an abian[2] having recently arrived from New York, my Portuguese did not allow me to understand the nuances of the little that was explained to me about the various rituals of the house. By definition, you do not ask questions and yet I had always been educated to question; it is my nature. Even on the days I dared to ask, I could not always understand the answers. Beyond language difficulty and the inability to ask for explanation, I struggled with losing control of my body. Many times I was unconscious of the shift, many others, I was conscious of a beautiful light intensifying within me and the cellular sermons that followed. At times, like my god-sisters, I was frustrated by the idea of not controlling the way I spent my time. I had to become accustomed to new foods, like acarajé, the bean pies sacred to Iansá and amalá, the okra dish consecrated to Xango that I now enjoy. In the beginning, my back ached and my fingers cramped from long hours of sorting beans, chopping okra and preparing shrimp for our public ceremonies attended by over a hundred people. In the end, I grew to appreciate the meditative cleansing repetition and stillness of it in the loving company of my spiritual family. Being American, it was assumed I did not know how to wash clothes and sweep the floors. There were stereotypes about privilege that did not mesh with my reality as a native of the South Bronx and Harlem. In the beginning, I had few intimate conversations with my god-mother, but she and I grew to talking hours in her kitchen as she cooked my favorite dishes. She threw a birthday party for me (during my first birthday ever separate from my twin sister) and supported me in my other work-related projects in Bahia. My respect and love for her has deepened over the years as our relationship has grown. In my house, I have been at once an outsider and a daughter, at times on the border of understanding and being understood, but also loved, intimately known and generously provided for.
Another major challenge has been distance. To this day, I wonder why it was Brazil, why so far away, where I was called to Oxum – and not New York City. What do you do when your spirit finds a home that it has been seeking and you have to leave it behind? After initiation, I had believed that somehow I would be able to remain tied to my spiritual community in the same intensity as I did while I lived in Brazil. But it has not been the case. The short two-week trips I am able to make now in no way compare to experience of living there and attending the full cycle of spiritual ceremonies of my terreiro. Returning home to New York, I felt like a lost a vital part of myself. I became disillusioned that something that had become an intrinsic part of my life has been reduced to five days visits once or twice a year. A whole world that had opened to me that was now only available in my dreams, brief visits, and my own individual devotions.
I am learning that living with these mysteries is also a part of my path as a medium. My function is to be led, to be an instrument, a bridge, to surrender to the spirit, not to control or analyze it. To trust. I walk now, not always in understanding, but in faith, knowing I am kept and guided. On whatever side of the Atlantic, I find myself, I know Oxum is walking with me. In her love, healing, creativity, beauty and sensuality – in the mirror of Her river – I see a glimpse of my own possibilities and the gifts she has passed on to me. It is an uncommon healing and communion. And when I can, I cherish the visits I am able to make to attend one of my terrreiro’s festas.
Last year, the first of three trips back to Brazil, I returned for the festa de Xangô, the first in our cycle of almost ten public ceremonies during the year. The night before the festa, my irmãs and irmões-do-santo, the ekedis, ogans and abians[3] began the food preparations, talking, laughing, gossiping until eventually we spread our esteiras (straw mats) on the floor of the barracão[4]. Some thirty or forty of us set up our bedding in huddles of four or five and we drifted off, amidst giggles and snores, to sleep.
At four in the morning, the head ekedi woke us gently, tapping, as is custom on the soles of our feet. The roosters outside crowed in monotone and the house began to stir. We bathed and dressed in our “ropa da ração,” usually cotton skirts, an embroidered white camisole, wrapping our upper bodies in wide cloth tied with another thin piece of fabric. Most of the morning was spent attending to sacred ritual duties, prayers and obligations. Later we decorated the barracão in Xangô’s colors and then performed the careful task of ironing and preparing our intricately sewn clothes, braiding each other’s hair, borrowing each other’s earrings, perfume and bobby-pins. It was time for a second bath and then the lengthy process of getting dressed for the festa.
This time, I am one of some thirty-five women who file into the barracão. This time I will dance. Slowly, the line moves forward as we sing for Exû, owner of the crossroads. One by one, we salute our head priestess, the iyalorixá, and our elders. Now I know the steps by heart, my bare feet move in step with my sisters. As the drum patterns change, their rhythms are familiar to me and I know the orixás they correspond to. The atmosphere is one of somber introspection and reverence, but inside I cannot stop smiling. It feels good to be back home to my spiritual house, however briefly.
II. POMPA: A Trans-Atlantic Freedom Route
Candomblé endowed me with spiritual resources to be an intermediary in another capacity, as co-founder and director of “Projeto Mentes e Portas Abertas,” (POMPA)[5] in Bahia. I served as a bridge between the Afro-Brazilian and African American movements for racial equality; between Brazil’s excluded youth and its most elite public institutions; and between the dreams of these youth and their creation of a new reality.
I launched POMPA during a Fulbright fellowship in Bahia, in partnership with the Steve Biko Cultural Institute. The Biko Institute, founded in 1992, is one of the premier college prep programs for afro-descendent youth in Brazil. To date, the Institute has placed over 800 students in Salvador’s public and private colleges. Over 2,000 youth have participated in the Institute’s additional science & technology, human rights, professional development and community service programs.
POMPA’s mission is to prepare low-income Afro-Brazilian college students for careers in public service and social entrepreneurship. Its vision is to build the capacity of Afro-Brazilian youth to be effective advocates for their communities and to increase the number of Afro-Brazilian professionals in Salvador’s public sector. At its founding, POMPA moved beyond the predominant goal of affirmative action advocacy in Brazil of getting Black students into university – to thinking of the opportunities needed after graduation.
The program was created because of the severe crises facing Afro-Brazilians and youth in particular. Brazil has the second-largest Black population in the world. Salvador da Bahia, one of Brazil's oldest, largest and poorest cities, has the highest percentage of Afro-Brazilians in Brazil. Despite their numerical majority strength, Afro-Brazilians consistently occupy the lowest positions in national indicators ranging from income, health, literacy, housing quality, mortality, and education. Two-thirds of all Afro-Brazilians live below the poverty line. Fewer than seven percent of all public elected officials in Brazil are Afro-Brazilian. Only five percent of the 1.4 million students admitted to universities in Brazil at the time when the program was launched was Afro-Brazilian. On average, Afro-Brazilians earn less than 40 percent of salary of their white counterparts and are 5.3 percent less likely than whites to be employed in professional occupations.[6] In his acceptance speech in 2001, Brazilian Finance Minister Antônio Palocci made an historic declaration that, “In Brazil, poverty has a color and an age. It is black and young.”
Despite common knowledge of these problems, little was being done to reverse the exclusion of Black youth from the city’s power structure. In the early part of my 2003 research, I asked the question, “How are Black youth being prepared for leadership positions in their communities and country?” In response, I often head many outbursts of laughter, with the emphatic reply, “They aren’t!” My field work revealed that there was a serious gap in the opportunities offered to teenagers and young adults. The majority of programs focused on engaging youth through arts and culture, offering limited income earning potential. Few programs offered opportunities for entry into professional careers in the public or private sector, and especially not into leadership or management positions in those careers. Many of the youth programs in Salvador were meeting important service provision needs, but there seemed to be no model that would make a sustainable change in the distribution of power and wealth in this majority-black city.
At the time, I was already teaching, mentoring and volunteering at Biko as an organizational development consultant. I began talking with staff and students to learn more about the issues they faced. Several months into my research, I introduced a model based on my experiences in US leadership programs. We worked together to adapt it to a Brazilian context and POMPA was born. We joke that POMPA had an African American mother and Brazilian fathers: Biko’s Director, Silvio Humberto and Durval Azevedo, POMPA’s Assistant Coordinator. It was a family affair, at once successful, challenging and life changing for us all.
POMPA students are typically residents of Salvador’s poorest, most violent neighborhoods whose families earn an average of US$ 2,034 a year. In spite of tremendous obstacles, they have managed to become part of the first significant generation of Afro-Brazilian college students in the country. POMPA’s pilot year students were in various semesters of study in college, from freshman to senior. They represented a diversity of majors such as law, business, international relations, journalism, engineering and others. Qualitatively, these students represented the vanguard of Salvador’s young leaders.
Before POMPA’s first anniversary, eight of twenty-one students were offered permanent positions in the organizations where they interned, such as the Municipal Secretary of Environmental Resources, the State Legislative Assembly of Bahia, the Municipal Secretary of Education, the Clemento Mariani Foundation, TVE Bahia - a local television station, and several not-for-profit organizations. Of the eight students offered a full time job after their internships, at least three doubled their salary or that of their families, typically moving from 1-2 minimum salaries to between 3 – 5 minimum salaries. Several others have launched their own organizations as a result of their POMPA experience and are laying the groundwork to form their own not-for-profit organizations or local businesses. Two students are currently on POMPA’s core administrative team, working with POMPA’s second class that is funded in part by the Kellogg Foundation.
Two years after its launch, POMPA has proven to be an effective and unique strategy for youth empowerment in Brazil. POMPA’s site visits in Salvador and Brasilia gave our students a chance to enter and engage with institutions that have traditionally excluded Black youth. POMPA’s curriculum offered students a unique look at issues affecting their community, increased their understanding of Brazil’s domestic and foreign policies and raised their self-confidence. POMPA’s Internship Program is the first ever internship program routing Afro-Brazilian youth into jobs in the city’s key public and private institutions. Before POMPA, Black leaders in Bahia’s political, legal, business, and media fields had no formal mechanism to mentor Afro-Brazilian youth about their professional goals.
What many students distinguished as most important was that POMPA was the first time any of them had been asked “what do you dream?” and then given them the resources to realize those dreams. “I always knew we needed to have more Afro-Brazilians in the State Assembly, but I never knew it could be me,” said one student. Based on their final evaluation forms, 80% of the students said that POMPA had “significantly changed their personal and professional trajectories.”
In spite of our achievements during that pilot year, POMPA’s path has also been full of public, administrative and personal challenges.
Public reaction to the program was overwhelmingly positive. POMPA was cited in over fourteen Brazilian media outlets its pilot year, including three national newspapers. In the community and amongst public sector leaders, POMPA students were regarded as an exceptional group of young leaders. The program itself was widely supported. However, we did face criticism from some members of the Black movement because of our focus on institutional integration and on a population that was already privileged in many eyes: college students. In public and private conversations, I emphasized my belief that as a car needs more than one wheel to move forward, so Black people need a diversity of tactics to achieve socio-economic equality; POMPA was only one in many worthwhile strategies. We debated about having the students wear suits, having them work in “the master’s house, to learn the master’s tools.” We debated about the promise and the peril of integration in the African-American and Afro-Brazilian contexts. There was never real resolution and at times I stood on both sides of the debate. What was most important was that the dialogue took place and it continues.
The majority of our challenges came as a bi-national administrative team. Since POMPA is the creation of Brazilian and American partners, specifically the leaders and youth of the Steve Biko Institute and me, we often needed to make adjustments for each other’s different work rhythms, strategies and expectations. This international “marriage” is what makes POMPA so unique, but it is also our greatest difficulty. For example, I wanted to cap the class size at fifteen students, the number I had raised money for; they wanted twenty-one, a number that signified blessing in Afro-Brazilian culture, even though they had no new prospects for funds. I emphasized strategy and they maintained the importance of also relying on intuition in our planning sessions. I thought we should also include the private sector as a route for student jobs and they were opposed. I was meticulous about program evaluation and they were not as reliant on strict measurements like “key metrics.” I wanted to dock the students if they turned in late assignments without a formal excuse, they argued it was unjust given the students’ financial status. But we both believed that black youth should have a greater voice and place in Brazilian society – and be trained to hold strategic leadership positions to advocate for their communities’ rights. Standing on this fundamental understanding, having a profound respect for each other, and knowing how to have fun in the process enabled us to work together successfully.
On a personal level as the Program Director and principle fundraiser that first year, I pushed to meet the expectations of American donors, Brazilian partners and our students, leading a staff entirely in Portuguese. My friends, especially my boyfriend at the time were concerned about the level of attention I gave POMPA, warning, “you are not POMPA, you are its founder, but it is not you. It is only a part of who you are.” I moved between exhilaration and exhaustion frequently in the course of the day.
This was the greatest professional challenge of my life mostly because my heart was sewn so deeply into it; but I was constantly aware that I did not work alone. Beyond the camaraderie and solidarity of my Brazilian team, I understood and felt the presence of my orixás and my ancestors. Even during the most intense days, I was able to give all I had to give and then a lot more I didn’t even know. The spiritual energy that surrounded me was like a great pool that I was diving in, a beautiful force that constantly revived and strengthened me. I knew that my capacity to run this program and to stand at that middle ground was a gift from my ancestors. I grew to understand, as they ministered to me, that I had been recruited to play my own small part to build on their work in forging a path to freedom for my own generation. The awareness of this accompaniment as I worked was one of the greatest blessings I received. I was working through a strength that was not my own, a force beyond me that opened the path for POMPA to progress.
POMPA itself overcome the public, administrative and personal challenges it faced. According to Dr. Silvio Humberto Passos, Biko’s Executive Director:
“POMPA has opened an important and ample space for Afro-Diasporic collaboration. We’ve had the opportunity to live in practice the Afro-Brazilian and African American way to manage people, resources and the imponderable. Our partnership is marked by unity of action, planning, flexibility, intuition and also objectivity, creativity, commitment and the capacity to overcome obstacles. The result has been very successful: an unforgettable experience for all involved, principally our 21 POMPA students whose horizons were broadened, whose posture was changed, whose self-esteem was raised and whose commitment to their community was strengthened.”
The program is now led completely by a Brazilian staff. I am moving onto another phase in my professional life, but continue to travel to Brazil to teach the flagship seminar on leadership and public management. I still keep in touch with the students and staff via email and just recently heard from a second-year student named Suéde that POMPA has been a “divisor das águas," a dividing water between “the life she had and the life she wants to create for herself and her community.”
III. Implications for Diaspora Daughters:
The stories I shared above about my experiences with POMPA and candomblé represent only one thread of a communal narrative about our identities and capacities as Black women of the Americas; as mediums between cultures, identities, freedom movements, and spiritual planes.
My five years in Brazil blessed, stretched, tested and changed me profoundly. Up until a month ago, I had been unable to process it all. I felt overwhelmed by all of my conflicting emotions. I missed my spiritual family, my friends, my POMPA students and team, my neighborhood, and the way of life I loved and had become accustomed to. Finally, one year after my return to New York, I can make some sense of it all. In stillness, the lessons have made themselves clear:
Standing at the crossroads is both a privileged and precarious position. You run the risk of being crushed in the collision of communities, identities, responsibilities, self and spirit. In embracing one world, you may lose your ties to another. In fact, you could lose connection with your own self. Those who learn to master the middle, however, have an insight to give each of the roads that meet in them. The vantage point at the middle is clairvoyant. It is a place of creativity, innovation, negotiation, and transformation. It is the place where weakness becomes strength, where impossibility becomes possibility, and where your vulnerability opens you to unfathomable power.
Standing at the crossroads requires great humility and also great self-confidence. As a medium or intermediary, you are only a channel; you are the means but not the end. Yet you also have to believe in your abilities, your own worth, and your own sight in the midst of the intersecting worlds. You cannot get lost in translation. This requires balance. It requires rest. It requires love. It requires deep reservoirs of faith. It requires community. It requires a belief in and knowledge of your destiny. It requires a belief in the indestructibility of your soul.
This is how you survive. This is how you walk your part of the road between the ancestors and the children. This is how you live out the meaning of your birth.
In Brazil, some days I felt stranded in the traffic jam of worlds and identities, and on others my passage was clear and powerful. Directing POMPA, the intersections of race, nation, language, sex, class and political ideology collided within me. At my best, however, I was able to pull the common threads together to help create a new strategy that is slowly changing the balance of racial and generational power in the city. The precise reason that POMPA worked was because it was born at the cross. It was created in the intersections of the American and Brazilian conceptions of race and anti-racist strategies, being led by a woman on an all-male team in a male-dominated society, directing a team in a language that was not my mother tongue, advocating for institutional integration and grassroots organizing in the midst of a movement that favored only grassroots organizing strategies, and standing at a place of privilege in the midst of great poverty. The meeting of Brazilian, African, Caribbean and African-American ancestors in my life imparted me with strength, insight and energy to do this. On the path leading to my initiation in candomblé, the limits of my physical body, mind and faith were tested in ways they never had been, but I received and became a conduit for a power I had never known in such intensity. I received access to resources, to healing, and to guidance that enabled me to fulfill a vital part of my destiny and in my own small way, that of our people.
What inspires me now? A deep and proven knowledge of crossroads power. It is available wherever identities and spiritual planes intersect. I thrive in the middle ground; I love the bridge role even as I navigate its difficult and unpredictable contours. Brazil taught me the most about this power that springs from the place where the horizontal line of the Atlantic Ocean meets the ladder between heaven and earth, connecting the ancestors to the youth. I believe that is where the greatest power is concentrated. I believe it needs to be nurtured in order for us all to be healed, to truly achieve mental, spiritual and socio-economic freedom.
I invest my energy at both ends of the bridge. In the spiritual, I pay homage to God, to my ancestors and to my orixás with ebo’s of prayer, song, food, and ritual attention. [7] I am grateful for their enabling power in my life and I feed it as it feeds me. In the secular world, I turn my attention always to our children. I believe young Black women in particular have a special capacity that needs to be nurtured. Youth and women have a strong capacity to be mediums because of their natural proximity to the spiritual world. The added ancestral inheritance of Africa deepens that capacity. It is coded in the DNA of all young Black women, but they often do not know how to access it.
Too often, the youngest diaspora daughters get caught in the crossfire of tongues, dollars, color, sex, and green cards; they never get to know their own power. They often lack the tools to negotiate a life out of poverty, self-hatred, sexism, racism and xenophobia. The right tools can come from secular and spiritual education, from love and community. They come from domestic and international policies that promote equality of resources, voice and opportunity. These tools also come from sharing our collective stories.
Over the past fifteen years, I have often focused on the secular education of young women (and men), helping to provide training in basic education, community organizing, policy advocacy and professional development.
These days, I am more concerned with spiritual education. I have learned that when a woman is aligned with her spirit, she is like a river flowing, able to surpass any obstacle, any border. This doesn’t mean that everyone must get initiated or even practice an African religion, but there are ways to teach anyone to touch, know and cultivate their own spirit, their own life force – and that is the most important work for our future. Spiritual power enables all other power.
Certain principles from the religion can equip diaspora daughters to fulfill their full potential, such as the concept of “iwa pele” (good character), the “roda,” or ring of community in which everyone has an important place and role; the value for personal responsibility and hard work; the mentoring relationship between adoxós and their mãe-pequenas (a practice of pairing an older god-sister with a new initiate as a source of support and instruction). There is the idea of the “benção,” which like the Sanskrit greeting “namaste,” acknowledges the divinity in each of us and also symbolizes respect for our elders. An important concept is that each person has a special “caminho” or destiny to fulfill in life, and how to align with that path. They need to know about the “axé,” the spiritual power, they possess, which is the creative, life-giving power of God. Of all these, it is most important that diaspora daughters receive the knowledge that they never walk alone. They need to know that each person has a spiritual force within them and surrounding them that they can access for guidance, comfort and protection. These are the lessons we need to pass on to young women as strategies for wholeness, fulfillment and freedom. These tools give us resources to deal with the trauma of being black and female in the Americas. They give us power to resist injustice. They inform our ability to create something new out of nothing, just as they did for our foremothers and forefathers.
In many ways, the dreams of youth are a continuation of the ancestors’ dreams and desires. It has always been youth – with the presence of the ancestors known or unknown – at the helm of the world’s most powerful freedom movements. As it was in Soweto and Selma, it is now in Salvador da Bahia. Young people, unlike most adults, have the energy, time, candor, faith and will required for resistance and social change, if they are properly prepared and supported. That is our job and it awaits us in urgency, on whatever side of the Atlantic we live.
Notes
[1] A terreiro is a sacred temple where candomblé is practiced.
[2] Abian: non-initiated novice.
[3] Irmão and irmão-do-santo: god-sister and god-brother (initiates of the same god-mother); ekedi: a woman who does not receive the orixá, but cares for the initiated terriero members when their orixás arrive through trance; ogan: male leaders of a terreiro with special ritual and financial responsibilities, also seen as protectors of the community.
[4] Barracão: the public area of a terreiro where major ceremonies are held; also a principle collective space shared by members of the terreiro.
[5] Projeto Mentes e Portas Abertas translates as “The Open Minds / Open Doors Project”
[6] Sources: IBGE (Institute Brasileiro de Geográfia e Estátisticas), DIEESE (Intersindical de Estatística e Estudos Sócio-Econômicos) and UNICEF.
[7] Ebo: offering
