Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?

Abstract

This essay explores how, within the framework of African Indigenous Religions, Western notions of sex, gender and sexuality, and social and subjective constructions of identity are destabilized, when read against non-European onto-epistemologies that prioritize the realm of the spiritual and the sacred. My analyses of Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018); Black Bull, Ancestors and Me. My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (2008), by Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, and Flora Nwapa’s The Lake Goddess (1995), mostly undertaken in dialogue with black and African literary critics and theorists, also reveal the dynamism and intrinsic heterogeneity of contemporary African wo/men’s lives, texts and bodies. Outdoing (Eurocentric) accepted dichotomies between “tradition” and “modernity,” the “sacred” and the “secular,” the “human” and the “non-human,” or the “male” and the “female,” these texts invite us to think beyond an assumedly global discursive economy and to bring to the forefront the multiple possibilities of knowing and living in our transmodern pluriverse.