Participants in the virtual session proposed interweaving life stories as a common thread to reflect on Afro-Caribbean maroon aesthetics.
Dixie Edit – Red Semlac.- The contribution of black and mestizo women to history, culture and the production of scientific and intellectual knowledge in Cuba has yet to be studied and made visible, speakers agreed at the virtual meeting that on July 25 closed the Day for the International Day of Afro-descendant Women in the Caribbean nation.
Under the title “Maroon aesthetics and spirituality in an Afropolitical key”, the panel held on virtual platforms and with direct transmission on Facebook Live took as a common thread the “epistemicides” around Afro-descendant women in our region.
Defined as the systematic destruction of the knowledge system of an ethnic group to assimilate it to the European worldview, in the case of Afro-descendant women “epistemicide is also the annulment, death, invisibility, the discarding of that woman who thinks and contributes from science and academia”, defined the sociologist Kezia Zabrina Henry Knight, from the Office of the Historian of the City of Camagüey, some 500 kilometers from Havana.
“Arriving at the university at the beginning of the 19th century was an act of maroonage, of rebellion,” said Henry Knight, who added that even today seeing black women contributing from critical and social academic thought is still something almost punitive.
With this starting point, Henry Knight called for the rescue of the history of many women who, since the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, have contributed to this invisible social critical thought and that is still heir to a colonial legacy.
Meanwhile, Maydi Estrada Bayona, from the University of Havana, reflected on the contributions of mother Africa and the European or Asian to that “cultural synthesis” that marks us as a country and as a region, in the words of the late anthropologist and Cuban researcher Fernando Ortiz.
“However, the hegemonic logics of the coloniality of power and being have not allowed the rest of the narratives to enter into a fruitful dialogue to be able to get closer to what we are today,” explained the philosopher and researcher.
For this reason, this panel wanted to propose a diverse analysis “based on the logic of epistemicides, on those most significant issues based on African spirituality and how they are reflected in one’s own daily life,” he specified.
Participants in the Maroon Aesthetics Colloquium and Spirituality in an Afropolitical Key. Photo: SEMlacCuba
For Estrada Bayona, one of the elements of analysis to understand these contributions is the relationship between magic, power and person.
“This is a very significant relationship in the African universe, because although the European worldview speaks of the condition of the subject, the African world speaks of people and this is the condition that has been denied us since the colonization processes and until today. ”, reflected the academic.
Dory Castillo Garriga, museologist at the Pinar del Río Heritage Center, about 160 kilometers from the capital, advocated the rescue of women in the history of marooning and documented their presence in the western part of the Caribbean nation.
“Cuban history does not record the name of either the first or the last Maroon woman, but this is not the most important thing. The transcendental thing is that there have been very few studies on the presence of women in maroonage in the country”, Castillo Garriga valued.
Since the 16th century, in Cuba the presence of women in the slave resistance to the Spanish colonial conquest can be traced, but it is usually a story that is little investigated and disclosed, explained the researcher.
A song like the son “La Ma Teodora”, for example, which speaks of a woman who “is splitting the firewood”, is a “symbol to resume slave resistance in a feminine key, “which cannot be severed from historical research because an important part of the history of slavery is lost,” Castillo Garriga said.
The specialist called for “studies on female maroons to be extended to the entire island.”
It is urgent to make visible the historical contributions of black and mestizo women