Read: Mirrors, Snakes,
Sirens + Tsunamis:
A Mami Wata Scholarly Personal Narrative by Amanda Seigel
“The Offering/A Ofrenda” by Andre Hora
I: INTRODUCTION
As someone with African ancestry who has never resonated with any type of JudeoChristian teachings, I am a firm believer that there are spirits that we are emotionally, spiritually and physically drawn to because it’s where we come from. In what some African traditional religious practitioners call your “spiritual court”, you have ancestors, guides, angels, archangels and various other spiritual protective energies that inform your life and walk with you. In certain African cosmologies, with specific reference to my ancestral lands of West and Central Africa, linear time and space doesn’t exist but is a colonial imposition upon our reality.
Time, as well as life changes are all seen as cyclical, ever-present and connected to each other throughout time, space and place. Given that viewpoint, where there is no line between the physical and the spiritual in the present, past or future, it’s safe to say that I am and also descend directly from Mami Wata.
Mami Wata is a collective manifestation of an original, primordial energy. Mami Wata is the darkness of death, of breakdown into new creation, and the dark depths of the unexplored ocean. She is the darkness in space as well as the water on Mars and the blackness of the womb space, and the melanated skin of African people.
You may ask, what or who is Mami Wata? Her name, simply translated, comes out to “Mother Water” in the King’s stifling English.
Mami Wata is a vodoun diety venerated in Benin, the home of vodou in other parts of West Africa that practice it as well. Mami wata also, to me, refers to the collective African water spirits on this side of the Kalunga line as well as those on the other. Mami wata refers to the ever changing, constantly fluid manifestations of water spirits throughout Africa, despite the religious and originating differences between the groups. In Benin, vodou is a tool to honor, pay and keep in power the local monarchies. The mami wata priestess there are a part of this fold. In Haitian voodoo however, the focus is on the opposite end, of liberation for the people from monarchical rule.
In this essay I will introduce you to the true history of Mami Wata, as a sole deity and also as an umbrella term for African water spirits, clustered or singular entities within themselves, tied to death and watery bodies. I happen to hail from both.
My ancestry,
in a non-exhaustive list, using colonial labels based on borders, artificial tribe names and territories include, from most recent to most ancient: Jamaican maroons,the Yoruba,the Igbo,the Bantu,and the San people.
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Amanda’s essay
(PDF)!
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