EU/MEUS ORIXÁS! Or what Afrobrazilian Candomblé can teach us about being multiple

First research notes, of my performative research project carried out in Salvador de Bahia, during February and March 2024, in collaboration with Universidade Federal da Bahia, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Uiversité Nice-Cote d’Azur, and supported by the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media/International Cultural Exchange. See the growing project page here.

Casa de Iemanja, Salvador de Bahia, in the night of 1 to 2 February 2024: ritual offerings of flowers made to Iemanja, the goddess of the sea and fertility, which are carried out to the sea by boat.

I started out this project with the initution that Candomble (and other religions of incorporation of African origin) has a unique relation between sex and gender which may be leveraged to deconstruct Western binary sex/gender ideologies justifying hegemonic masculinity (power of men over women) and suppression/prosecution/exclusion of any biological sex, gender identity and expression that does not fit the binary mould of the masculine male and the feminine female.

I’ve started doing interviews in different Candomble terreiros (independent temples led by a Iyalorisha (woman) or Babalorisha (man), asking about transgender incorporation (the fact of “having” an Orixa that is of the opposite sex and being incorporated by him or her during transe. The responses I got led me to review my initial hypotheses… for how can we talk of transgenderness since what characterizes trance is that a human body and a divinity conjoin. It is not that our mind is „possessed“ by a spiritual entity, it is rather that the Orixas are always-already present, only manifesting when then body is ready. And the „ori“, usually translated as „head“ is much more than that: it includes our relation with the divine as well as with the material world.

While in gender theory form the 1980s upward the sex/gender correlation was undone in the sense that gender was deconstructed as a socially, culturally, construted role sexual identity remained unquestioned. In recent decades, transsexual and now transgender identities are tackling another correlation, that of biological sex/sexual identity which may or may not correlate, leading to cis and transgender identities, and, increasingly, non-binary identities. While earlier trans discourse revendicated the „alignment“ of one’s body with one’s felt sexual identity, thus perpetuating the binary ideology, nonbinay discourse refuses any correlation of sexual organs and sexual identity.

Now while the complex debate on transgenderness and transgender identity politics is not my theme here, I want to mention the fact that the definition of gender seems to have changed in a significant way: while in the wake of Judith Butler’s argument of the performativity of gender (social which in turn is performative of sexual assignation (vgl. Ayouch, 2018) the vulgarisation of gender theory had it that while our bodies are biologically determined (male/female/intersex) our gender is historically and socially constructed and can thus be undone: to speak with Simone de Bouvoir: we are not born women, we become women! Today, gender is something else: it is how we intimately feel and identify ourselves: as a man, as a woman, as both, as none.

While gender roles are still seen as historically and socially constructed, gender identity, in today’s trans identity discourse, seems to be a personal choice rather than a compound of societal and parental values and (unconscious) projections. It seems that we can freely choose our gender, and then choose whether we want to adjust our bodies in the case it does not correspond with our gender. I do not wish to discredit anyone suffering from gender dysphoria, and wanting to be at peace with how they feel and how the society reads them. But transition also involves pain, and being marginalized since read as a transitioned body and thus, likely to suffer stigmatisation. And, despite of hormone treatment and genital reconstruction, a transitioned body can never be a completely functional male or female in terms of sexual and reproductive capacity. Why subjecting ourselves to the pharmacological industry? Can’t we be trans anyway? Wouldn’t the solution lie in the revendication of a nonbinary society, where we can be „ourselves“ no matter what genitals and secondary sexual traits we have, no matter how we dress, speak, and relate to the world?

In Candomble, what we have is a curious combination of a human body which during transe is unconscious and “acted” by his or her Orixa with the body entering an intra-perceptive state (eyes closed, insensitive to fire, freezing of body functions like urinating, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure). But every adept has several Orixas, which can be “at front” at times or hiding at others. While Candomble mythology based on Westafrican mythology posits a duality of the female and male principle and of female and male bodies, in the state of divination (as well as after initiation and spiritual rebirth) the human body is com-posing with a multiplicity of Orixas, which themselves carry a multiplicity of characteristics according to their age and mythical story.

How could we define this multiplicity, which is not ourselves? How does it relate to our bodies, apart form the fact that these are receiving and expressing it? Isn’t ordinary sense of self an incorporation, too, only that we think it is the bedrock of our personal identity? Isn’t it a constrictive, stifling imposition of a homogenous self that renegates the heterogeneous and heterogenerative (in the sense of being generated or engendered by the other) multiplicity that we are? Can Candomble teach me (us) how to embrace multiplicity?

As my research advances, I need to abandon my concept of personal (gender) identity in order to learn from the inside, from what the people of Candomble say, and how they live with their Orixas, during transe, in social life in the temples and ordinary life. It is not that I am another; I am many!