Religion in the Kitchen by Pérez Elizabeth;

Author:Pérez, Elizabeth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL000000 Religion / General
Publisher: New York University Press

The [presenting] complaints [later] become stories, personal testimonials, that are repeated through song-dances within the ngoma cell composed of the sufferer-novice’s therapist-teacher and all of his or her novices. . . . In repeated ngoma sessions the individual develops a song-story that interprets and culturally legitimates his understanding of the world.66

Most enslaved people brought to Cuba between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries were Central African. The influx of ethnic groups soon thereafter to be called Yorùbá arrived in the nineteenth century. Kongo-inspired variants of Palo Monte crystallized long before Yorùbá-based Lucumí in Cuba, and it is quite possible that, as multiple initiatory commitments among practitioners became normative, Lucumí incorporated and operationalized aspects of the ngoma song-story. Scholars have speculated that one iteration of ngoma, the Lemba healing society, may have traveled with enslaved peoples and spread throughout the New World.67 Although the relation of Lucumí initiates’ stories has not been accompanied by music or formally ritualized otherwise, their narrative contents and stylistic features—including the chronotopic invocation of paths and the emplotment of autobiography as metamorphosis—would reward comparison with those gathered from ngoma practitioners.68

The most obvious point of convergence between such drums and Afro-Cuban traditions is their galvanization of the afflicted in ceremonial action that “re-stories” suffering as a godsend. Many if not most Lucumí priests are initiated into Palo Monte before making ocha, and these traditions cooperate to instill in practitioners a sense of indebtedness to their contrapuntally structured ritual complexes. Those initiated into either, or both, as a result of infirmity have presented almost identical symptoms in oral histories, and cast themselves in the mold of the “wounded surgeon.”69 The folklorist and ethnologist Eoghan Ballard writes,

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