Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520256840
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520256842
- Pub. Date:
- 10/28/2010
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520256840
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520256842
- Pub. Date:
- 10/28/2010
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520256842 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/28/2010 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Sales rank: | 685,512 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Society of the Dead
Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba
By Todd Ramón Ochoa
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25684-2
CHAPTER 1
Isidra
There was hardly an exchange between us that didn't turn to the dead. As Isidra and I got to know one another, the dead appeared more often. She was pleased that a scholar from New York would take an interest in her reflections, which she considered outside the notice of academic inquiry. It's not that Isidra was unfamiliar with researchers and universities. She was sixteen when the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, and among the children in her tiny town she was chosen to become part of the Revolution's first university class. She was proud to have a degree, and she considered herself more than conversant with university people like me.
Isidra was also familiar with social science and anthropology. In her understanding, however, anthropology had little to do with African-inspired life and practice in Cuba. As she understood it, African inspirations like Palo and Ocha/Santo were in the realm of folklore studies. The Soviet-style anthropology she had learned in college, with its counting and charting, had little room for what she had to say, so she was very interested that I would take time to listen to her interpretations of Palo and Ocha/Santo. Isidra was retired from her longtime job as a dance instructor and when I met her was a part-time volunteer organizer for the Union of Retired Employees of the Ministry of Culture. She seemed to thrive on the hours I spent with her and the slow pace of our conversations.
Isidra was soon an active interlocutor in my research, driven as much by her own curiosity and keen intellect as by my many questions. I was disoriented by the complexity of Palo and Ocha/Santo, by their productive crosspollinations as much as by their obvious differences, and by the fact that a person can practice both Palo and Ocha/Santo (as Isidra did). In such cases, which are hardly rare, those who practice both take care to sustain the hierarchy that divides them and insists on the exclusivity of their feasts, initiations, and ritual languages. Having lived her whole life within Cuba's African inspirations, Isidra felt that to understand the conjunctions and incongruities of Palo and Ocha/Santo one had better understand the dead. The dead were terribly important to her, yet they seemed to have such a faint influence on Palo and Ocha/Santo that they were altogether unrecognizable to a novice.
What she said about the dead was often contradictory or confusing. She had several names for the dead, and the most important were Kalunga, el muerto, and eggun. At times she spoke about the dead in terms that were familiar to me, like when she attributed to the dead the individuality of an ancestor she had known. "It can be your teachers and friends," she said. "It doesn't have to be a relative." But she would just as often refer to the dead as something else, something akin to a writhing, boundless mass, impersonal and anonymous. Isidra's interpretations also attributed to the dead material forms, and she refused most of my attempts to classify and distinguish them. In fact, for weeks it was difficult for me to attribute to such an incongruous theme the importance Isidra did. Compared to Palo's crafts of sorcery and prenda-keeping, the dead seemed inconsequential. In this I annoyed and frustrated her greatly. Yet Isidra was forever referring back to the dead and many of her comments about Palo seemed to rest on what was for me an elusive understanding of the dead. I tried to delineate an image of the dead from what Isidra had to say but she was hardly straightforward, and I was left to cull her thoughts on this topic from anecdotes, comments in passing, and childhood yarns, which I would pursue into subsequent conversations, always referring back, looking for clarification.
On any normal day I would arrive at Isidra's house, which occupied half of the first floor of a five-story apartment building in the El Cerro district of Havana. El Cerro is an enormous section of Havana, like Brooklyn is to New York City, or East LA to Los Angeles. Her neighborhood was, in her words, behind the bus station, away from the print shops, and just around the corner from the pre de economía—the preparatory secondary school for economics.
El Cerro has lived many lives, and its neighborhoods are unique reflections of its history. Some of its neighborhoods are famous, like those painted by René Portocarrero along the Calzada del Cerro. The Calzada is the principal avenue running from Habana Vieja to the Cuatro Caminos market, then beyond through the neglected sections of El Pilar, Atarés, El Carraguau, and El Canal, which meet at the famous corner known as la esquina de tejas. From there it snakes toward the outlying sections of Nuevo Vedado, Pogolotti, and La Lisa. It is lined by giant neocolonial houses dating to the nineteenth century, when much of Havana's petite bourgeoisie hungered for out-of-the-way retreats near running water and high ground. Today the Calzada is plied by resurrected Chevrolets, Dodges, and Oldsmobiles that coast and creak their hard-winding way along the Capitolio–La Lisa corridor, carrying those who can pay the hefty fare.
Isidra's neighborhood was neither high-end nor destitute—although these days the two are the same. Her section dated to after the Second World War, when El Cerro expanded north and west toward the avenues of Carlos III and Ayestarán. Hers was a section defined not by dilapidated columns and disintegrating neocolonial balconies and portals but by hardscrabble modern industrial buildings, service garages, delivery ramps, and the backsides of uninspired office buildings built by the Communist Party. Her building was like so many others on her street and in the surrounding blocks—a streamlined modern design built in the fifties of cement and lots of glass. She was not too far from the Plaza de la Revolución, where the Cuban state has arranged its principal bureaucracies around the concentrated trio of state power: the headquarters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the offices of the state newspaper Granma, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. Sharing the plaza with these, albeit in a peripheral position, was Cuba's decidedly modernist national library, named after the inspired poet and independence leader José Martí. A few blocks from her house in another direction was Havana's beloved baseball stadium, the Latinoamericano.
Knocking on Isidra's door was a matter of making oneself heard down the long hall of her apartment, where most of the sound from the street died on its way to the back. She was usually at the rear of the house working in the kitchen or the tiny outside patio. During blackouts, which were common day and night, there was no way for a caller to know the bell wasn't ringing at the back of the house. In the beginning we missed one another many times because of this, until her son, who was fourteen at the time, showed me the trick of rapping on the glass panes of the front door with a key or a coin. The severe strikes rang rudely through the apartment, but their stridence was made softer by the fact that anyone knocking thus was a friend.
Isidra would come forward, and we would talk in the sunroom that acted as a parlor at the front of her house, up the hall from the dining and sleeping rooms. Its high walls of opaque glass set into a painted iron grid were the modernist ideal for Havana's modest winters, but in the summer it became unbearably hot with the afternoon trapped inside. There were windows, but her years of healing people through Palo made her wary of them. Her work, like the work of healers in many places, had earned her the enmity of many and she preferred not to leave her house open to sorcery or other ill will. The shades, with their twisted slats, frayed cords, and covering of dust, didn't appear to have been lowered in years. Isidra disliked the heat and knew her guests did too; she was always ready with a glass of cold water or a clean cloth to wipe away the sweat.
In the bright, diffuse light of this room her brown face showed burned orange and took on dandelion hues. She had a smile of bright teeth that captivated most people with its ready generosity. The rest of her face spiraled around her mouth, coming forth and fading back, one feature more prominent than the next depending on the emotion she evoked or the stress she sought to lend a point. Her face was her principal device for creating an atmosphere of consequence in which her ever-repeating words weighed with self-evident importance. Her eyes were attentive just as they were unyielding in their scrutiny and concentration, and she was practiced at breaking the back of a lie with her stare. These eyes were distorted as she blinked past gold-framed glasses that magnified them as she looked around her into a world she saw clearly but that evaded me altogether. That was the world of the dead, which she inhabited in forms I would be long in learning.
Isidra was an athletic woman for her age. Lithe muscles defined her slender arms, and she was likely to jump to her feet to stress a thought or to take off down the hall to rescue a pressure cooker she had forgotten amid the turns of conversation. She usually wore donation jeans and a tattered T-shirt, and sandals out of which curled her bony toes. She kept her head covered with a light blue scarf. This was obeisance paid to Yemayá, the Ocha/Santo sovereign of maternity and of the sea, to whom she was pledged. She wrapped the scarf haphazardly, and corners of it were forever poking out at angles never quite settled. As we talked she would sit on the very edge of her blue sofa, her elbows on her knees with her head sunk between her shoulders, her whole body supporting her words and in ready state to receive whatever might be my reply.
With her powerful attention and physical strength fully engaged, Isidra came to the conclusion that I was not paying enough attention to the dead in my research. Much of her energy in our first conversations was spent trying to get me to focus on the topic. She was quick to notice when lines of conversation departed from the dead or didn't refer to the dead with sufficient acumen. She considered such tangents indicative of ignorance in matters of African inspiration. Her insistence could be tedious, and I wondered early in my work if I would continue with Isidra as my principal interlocutor in matters of Palo.
Isidra discerned the dead around her constantly. She saw the dead as synonymous with what was noteworthy in the everyday. To her the dead was the series of never-ending happenings that emerged out of life's routines, prosaic though these could be. All through the first decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dead were to be found inhabiting moments of grace and despair as the food and electricity shortages drew ever longer and more severe. The dead were behind much of the creativity the crisis spurred; the dead were the genius behind the new tricks for getting by in the shattered economy. As people caught on to each trick, the dead permeated the gossip on the block. And as the gossip spread, the dead infused her work as a healer of people forlorn and anxious because of the economic collapse.
About her doubts concerning the role of the Revolution in the economic crisis, Isidra had little to say. Where others were accustomed to complaining unrelentingly about the corruption of the Communist Party, Isidra chose indifference and preferred to spend her thinking time otherwise. She took for granted the dishonesty of the butchers, bakers, and ration distributors [bodegueros], as well as the shameless malfeasance of the middle managers in Cuba's extraordinary commodity distribution apparatus. She did not share in the irritated chatter most people spent the better part of their day in. Neither did Isidra think much of the network of illicit contacts she cultivated for her acquisition of everything from rice to toothpaste, to sugar and coffee. She lived in apparent immediacy with this network, in the same way consumers in market economies live in reified relation to their commodities and social lives. These micro-networks of wandering, clandestine salespeople whom Isidra had known for years supplied her with what the state failed to provide, either on time or at all. The underground runners in her neighborhood were mostly men and women her age, walking from house to house in their flip-flops with unassuming bags loaded with powdered milk, cheese, sweets, and bread made secretly at home, as well as with medicines, including drugs such as Valium, chlordiazepoxide, and painkillers like codeine. Isidra esteemed these people greatly and was forever detaining them from their rounds with questions about their lives and their families.
It was not surprising, then, that some of the pensioners and homemakers who supplied her were also her clients. So were some of her neighbors. As I would meet them Isidra would include me in conversations with them, and as we gained confidence she would share worries specific to cases of affliction she was attending. There was a lot Isidra knew about the problems of her clients that she kept from me, and she tended to limit what she said about her healing to personal doubts she was having about her approach to a case. More importantly, Isidra sought as often as she could to turn conversations about her healing practices into lessons about the dead, because it was the dead that did the bulk of the work in her attempts to revalue lives and fates.
* * *
I arrived one morning at Isidra's and she drew me immediately through the door. She was agitated and thinking fast and she sat me down to listen. This was not rare, and I settled in to follow her and listened carefully to her words.
"There is little I can do," she said. "Everything I try either doesn't work, or the dead [Kalunga] warns me off. I promised Lucy that I would have a solution to her problems at work at the Ministry of Agriculture, the maneuverings of her enemies; they're working Palo against her, but I'm frozen. I've tried a couple of things, but they haven't given her the result she's looking for, and she's dissatisfied and losing confidence. I told her to come by this afternoon, and you can imagine, I couldn't sleep last night. I was up in the middle of the night; you should have seen me, sitting on the edge of my bed and pacing up and down the hall. It was one of those nights where I just move through the house, without thinking. I can't sleep, so I get out of bed and wander around. But it's not me that chooses to get up. It is my dead [mis muertos] that have me, they who pull me. Then I was sitting on the edge of this couch, here in the sunroom. The dead [Kalunga] led me here last night, where the only light was from the blue streetlight outside. You know my lamp burned out a week ago, don't you? You said you'd bring a bulb. It doesn't matter. I'm never on this couch at night, lamp or not, you know that; you know I like to be in the kitchen, but to this couch they brought me in the darkness and the streetlight, and I sat here. Everything was blue from the light outside, blue like shadows in the sea. Did you hear that? Like shadows in the sea. And you know what? The solution came to me. It did, suddenly, just like that. It was the dead [Kalunga], the dead that woke me and brought me here to think, and my dead [mis muertos] that hinted at the answer to Lucy's problem, so that she would be convinced."
Isidra paused for a second, looking at me sternly to make sure she had my complete attention. For such a stare there was no response except a hurried nod of assent, after which she continued. "You know, I don't choose to get up. It is my dead [mis muertos] that have me, they who pull me. Then I was sitting on the edge of this couch, here in the sunroom. The dead [Kalunga] led me here last night, where the only light was from the blue streetlight outside. You know my lamp burned out a week ago, don't you? I'm never on this couch at night, lamp or not, you know that; you know I like to be in the kitchen, but to this couch they brought me in the darkness and the streetlight, and I sat here. Everything was blue from the light outside, blue like shadows in the sea [Kalunga]. Did you hear that? Like the shadows of Kalunga. And you know what? The solution came to me. It did, suddenly, just like that. It was the dead [Kalunga], the dead [Kalunga] that woke me and brought me here to think, and my dead [mis muertos] that hinted at the answer to Lucy's problem, so that she will be convinced."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Society of the Dead by Todd Ramón Ochoa. Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction Part One. The Dead 1. Isidra 2. Kalunga, the Ambient Dead 3. Little Corners 4. Responsive Dead Part Two. Palo Society 5. Emilio O’Farril 6. Teodoro 7. Palo Society 8. Decay 9. A Feast Awry 10. Virtudes Part Three. Prendas-Ngangas-Enquisos 11. Lucero Mundo 12. The Cauldron 13. Reckoning with the Dead 14. Nfumbe 15. Insinuation and Artifice Part Four. Palo Craft 16. Struggle Is Praise 17. Cristianas 18. Judías 19. Tormenta Ndoki 20. Storms of Lent Conclusion Notes Bibliography IndexWhat People are Saying About This
"[Ochea's] work is unlikely to be superseded. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice