Roberto Strongman “Queering Black Atlantic Religions”
Chapter 4 — Lucumí Diasporic Ethnography (Fran, Cabrera, Lam)
When I peruse a museum exhibit catalog with Fran, he is captivated by the painting of Lam. I wonder why Fran has never heard of him. Some of his paintings are in Cuban Museums and certainly in New York. Fran tells me he is not the museum type. He likes to be outdoors, communing with nature.
“That is why I became a santero, to be closer to nature, to work with the plants and the animals and with everything that Is.”
* The supracephalic horned face associated with Eleguá crowns the top of the head of the feminine entranced figure. Wilfredo Lam, Un coq pour Chango ( A rooster for Shango), formerly L’Oracle et l’oiseau vert (The oracle and the green bird), 1947. Oil on burlap, 42 X 35 in. (106.68 X 88.9 cm). Photograph by Ben Blackwell.
Wilfredo Lam was born and raised in Sagua La Grande, a small town in the sugar-producing province of Villa Clara, Cuba. His father Yam Lam, was a Chinese immigrant, and his mother, Ana Serafina Lam, was born to a Kongolese former slave mother and a Cuban mulatto father. His family, like many others, practiced Catholicism alongside their African traditions. Matonica Wilson, Lam’s godmother, was a Lucumi priestess who exposed Lam to rites of the African orishas. His contact with African celebrations and spiritual practices proved to be his largest artistic influence.
In 1916, bowing to parental pressures, Lam moved to Havana to study law. During this period, he also began studying tropical plants at the botanical gardens. Disillusioned with academic teachings and paintings, he left for Madrid in the autumn of 1923 to further his art studies. As a result of the Nazi occupation of Paris, Lam left for Marseille in 1940, where he joined many intellectuals and surrealist artists and critics with whom he had been associated with since he met Andres Breton in 1939. In Marseille, Lam and Breton collaborated on the publication of Breton’s poem Fata Morgana, which was illustrated by Lam. In 1941, Breton, Lam, and Claude Leví-Strauss, accompanied by many other European intellectuals, left for Martinique, only to be imprisoned there by German-sympathizing local officials, which he reached in mid-summer 1941.
Lam rediscovered Afro-Cuban traditions upon his return to Havana. There he sought a revalorization of Cuba’s African heritage, which he felt was being undermined by discrimination and by tourism. His return to the Caribbean marked the climax of Lam’s artistic development, as it is characterized by a rapid evolution and maturation of his style. Drawing from his study of tropical plants like the externally seeded maroñon and his knowledge of Afro-Cuban culture, his paintings became characterized by the presence of the chimera, a hybrid figure composed of human, animal, and plant elements as well as other orishas. In 1946, he and Breton spent four months in Haiti, enriching his already extensive understanding and knowledge of African divinity and magic rituals through observations of Vodou ceremonies. Lam’s syncretization of surrealist and cubist approaches with imagery and symbols of Lucumí, Palo Monte, and Abakuá during this period makes him a uniquely cosmopolitan artist. In 1943, he began his most famous work, The Jungle. Reflecting his artistic pinnacle and modernism’s most controversial relationship to African art, The Jungle depicts four figures with mask-like heads, half-emerging from dense tropical vegetation. Later that year, it was shown in an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and was ultimately purchased by the Museum of Modern Art and was exhibited besides Picasso’s Guernica, to which it has been problematically compared. In 1952, Lam settled in Paris after having divided his time between Cuba, New York and other cities in France.
Lam continued his strong engagement with the Caribbean from Europe in the decades following his departure. In solidarity with Cuban popular struggles, Lam exhibited a series of paintings at Havana University in 1955, to demonstrate his support for the students’ protest against Batista’s dictatorship. Similarly, in 1965, six years after the revolution, Lam showed his loyalty to Castro and his goals of social and economic equality by painting The Third World for the presidential palace. This engagement was recognized by the artistic establishment of the time. In 1964, he was awarded the Guggenheim International Award, and between 1966 and 1967 there were many retrospectives of his work throughout Europe. After a long life as the premier Caribbean surrealist artist, Wilfredo Lam died on September 11, 1982, in Paris.
*The scissors, the moon, and the verdant scenery reveal the context of Lam’s masterpiece The Jungle as a ceremony for the orisha of herbalism, Osaín. In obsolescent Cuban Spanish Creole, La Manigua denotes the sacred natural world — the forest in particular. The dialogic nature between Lam and Cabrera’s work is evident in the analogous titles of their best-known works: Lam’s The Jungle and Cabrera’s El Monte can both be translated as “the bush” or “the brushwood” — the “igbo” of igdobu. In this painting we can appreciate the full gnosis and experience of Being achieved during the transcorporeal moment of ritual possession as the chimeric personae transcend and encompass all binarism: human/god, plant/animal, male/female. In The Jungle, we discover that “We are One.” Wilfredo Lam, The Jungle, 1943. Gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 94 ¼ X 90 ½ in. (239.4 X 229.9 cm).
Cultural critics have had difficulty understanding Lam’s work in its relation to Lucumí. In general, we can distinguish several schools of thought that exhibit some regional specificities. There is a body of work in which critics, mostly from Cuba, gloss over or display anxiety regarding Lucumí. And there is a set of critics, mostly from the United States or France, who acknowledge the role of Lucumí in the work of Lam, but do so only in passing and stop short of any deeper theoretical discussions on the subject of corporeality.
None other than Fernando Ortiz, the premier Cuban ethnographer of the twentieth century, begins the tradition of attempting to erase blackness and Lucumí in Lam and his work:
In Lam there are many influences of African expressionism even when he had nothing NEgroid in his lineage or in his Cban acculturation; it would have sufficed for him to have assimilated in France the tendencies of pictorial modernism, in which the mark of West Africa has been great, evident in Picasso and in many other artists of his time.
What is at stake in the presentation of Lam as nonblack by the most respected figure in black culture in Cuba? Why present Lam as devoid of race? Is there not an element of tokenism here that presents Lam as the exceptional negro avanzado (advanced negro) or as an honorary white?
Ortiz credits the presence of African cultural motifs to surrealism and not to Lams’s background, effectively whitewashing him for the purpose of maintaining the fiction of an exclusively European artistic elite in cuba. The erasure of Lam’s blackness functions in a manner similar to the silencing of the black santero in the film Fresa y Chocolate, discussed in chapter 3. there is a co-optation of black spirituality for the production of a national culture that relies on the evacuation of the very populations producing this discourse.
*The supracephalic Eleguá rests atop the head of the female figure in this mother-and-child composition. The idealized body of Santería/Lucumí is the physically and spiritually open and receptacular female body. Wilfredo Lam, Ibaye, 1950. Oil on canvas, 104.5 X 87.6 cm.
Influenced no doubt by this colorless view of Lam, Max-Pol Fouchet, Lam’s canonical biographer, continues this tradition of the elision of Lam’s blackness, this time by invoking a universality in Lam that erases the very black ethnic specificities that inspire his work:
Admittedly, it appears necessary for us to add that these so-called African figures do not come from that source, but rather that, through him, they rejoin a more general and more universal source. Often raised “in majesty,” they resemble the most ancient mythical and religious images, of which they are in our times of resurgence, as after a long journey into the bosom of our collective self. Profane, created by a non believer, they seem nonetheless to accompany a sacred primordial trope: Lam’s Maternities resurrect those of Akkad, of Sumer, of Ur, of European Rome, and in his nudes passes a reflection of the Cyclades, of ancient Egypt, of Polynesia, of the Greece of Kouraï. In such fashion, he has reunited the archetypal forms of a human permanence.
(Fouchet 1984, 24)
Fouchet here dismisses blackness, Africaness, and Lucumí through an invocation of the universal. Why should the transgeographical and historical links in Lam’s work function as a way to dismiss its African originary point of reference? What is the motivation behind this tendency in art criticism? Here it becomes evident how there is a certain social pressure to create a vision of Cuban high culture as Iberian. According to this dictate, while Cuban blacks might be the performers of folklore and cultural expressions deemed popular, they are not welcome into the world of high art and certainly not if this is to become the vision with which Cuba will be represented in erudite international social circles. The existence of a black Cuban artist who paints African-inspired images and is well respected abroad goes against the grain of Cuban racial hierarchies and artistic divisions of labor. To preserve these divisions, some have dismissed what appears to be very evident African religious motifs in Lam’s work: “Lam’s perception of orishas was clearly more evocative than literal” (Fletcher 1992, 185) because (Ortiz 1950, ix; Lam paints neither orishas nor sorcerers).
When the complete erasure of Lam’s blackness becomes untenable, many critics continue to display a great deal of ambivalence that forestalls any worthwhile discussion of race in Lam. For these ambivalent critics, Lam’s mixed-raced status and his membership in European artistic circles serve to diffuse African spirituality in a more global manner.
Lam’s work immediately following his return to Cuba is profoundly anthropological. Paintings such as The Jungle are at once caught in this modernist exploration of recognition and disavowal and a brilliant effort that distinguishes Afro-Cuban culture by using a “curtained” boundary or notion of a liminal space to mark the point of the exchange between secular and sacred. ( Merewether 1992, 22)
Whether it presents a definite rejection of Lam’s African ancestry or foreground cultural eclecticism at the expense of the local, the effect is the same: the elision of blackness in the work of Lam. What is clear in the work of these critics is an antiblack racism in their refusal to acknowledge and discuss the African religious aspects of Lam’s work.
*Supracephalic figurines, androgyny, and the camouflaging of the human within the plant world mark the transcorporeal body of the initiate in this painting. The displaced phallus, which here begins to evoke strongly the image of a pharaonic chin, begs to be read as Lam’s bow to a mythological and ancestral Africa. Wilfredo Lam, Le Bruit, 1943. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 105 X 84 cm.
Progress beyond this sense of denial, other critics — also mostly from Cuba — exhibit a deep sense of anxiety, ambivalence, and disavowal regarding Lucumí in the work of Lam. Michel Leiris, one of Lam’s biographers, vacillated between this denial and full acknowledgement through a highly ambivalent discourse: “A rationalist and a Marxist as well after his travels in Spain, Lam was not adept in santeria or other Afro-Cuban cults. But we cannot doubt that he remained imbued with that sense of the supernatural to which he had access during his childhood (1970, vii). There is no record of initiate status for anyone into Lucumí because this is a religion that has relied on secrecy for its survival. How can the biographer claim to know that he had never been initiated? While there exist clear rituals that make public the induction and membership of a particular individual into the religious community, in inner circles of Lucumí, initiation is often discussed as a lifelong process of growth and evolution. In this sense, it is a mistake to call Lam a noninitiate. While it is known that his godmother was a Lucumí practitioner and her influence shaped him, there is a clear attempt here to make Lam conform to the white art world by toning down black spirituality and invoking a color-blind supernatural element.
Leiris’s ambivalence has its origins in the writing of Fernando Ortiz, who is responsible for originating and perpetuating among cultural critics the erroneous idea that Lam’s work is not about Lucumí. The following passage presents how Ortiz’s denial engenders ambivalence as it is reconciled against hard evidence affirming Lucumi in Lam’s canvases:
In a similar fashion, some paintings refer to the magical and religious system of Afro-Cubans, above all the small round humanoid figure with big eyes, crowned by horns, identified with the icon of the orisha Eleguá, the Yorùbá saint in charge of opening and closing roads, of intersections. The friendship with Lydia Cabrera was decisive in this approximation. The ethnologist knew very well the myths and symbology of these cults and accompanied him to ceremonial sites. Nevertheless, his paintings do not translate fully the attributes of a deity, as neither do they recur to a precise symbology nor to an imprisoned mythology. “Lam paints neither orishas nor sorcerers”; his anti-iconic imaginary, in the words of Ortiz, was the result of an open symbolic synthesis.
Noceda agrees with Ortiz yet overcomes his strict denial regarding Lucumí in Lam. It is important to note that while Noceda cites Ortiz as saying that there are no orishas in Lam’s work, Noceda himself acknowledges the representation of at least one orishas — Eleguá- in Lam’s work. In order to explain away recurrence of this particular orisha, Léon Argeliers resorts to diminution and trivialization:
It is true that Lam utilized some of the figurines of Cuban Santería and placed them in his hirsute orchards. The images of the deity Eleguá prevail in the avatar that the initiates of the Regla de Ocha call masancío. But Lam’s interest in this figurine was more anecdotal than artistic.
Among Cuban art critics of this ambivalent perspective, there is a general deferral of responsibility to Lydia Cabrera for any Lucumí content or interpretation in Lam’s work. While the role that Lydia Cabrera played in Lam’s transcorporeal prise-de-conscience and conversion to Lucumí exhibited in the painting of his 1940s retour au pays natal is uncontroversial, the diversion of all discussions of Lucumí in Lam to Cabrera is a noteworthy rhetorical shift displaying a high degree of diffused cultural anxiety. Rojas-Jara epitomizes this discursive strategy when he argues, “Interestingly, friend and Ethnographer Lydia Cabrera titled many of Lam’s paintings that contained what she identified as Santeria references. Lam evokes these images, not literally as a devotee, but as a surrealist who associated them with the primitive” (1956, 61). While Noceda and others credit Cabrera who promoted a personal interpretation of Lam’s symbology as Lucumí. According to this rhetoric, Lam is not painting orishas, but Cabrera is seeing them in his work and promotes such a interpretation by giving certain painting Lucumí names. But in reality Cabrera was a specialist in Lucumí, and she recognized the religious images in Lam’s work to such an extent that she might have named them according to some deities.
*Transcorporeal hermaphroditism as the orisha resignifies the personality and gender of the initiate during the moments of trance possession. Wilfredo Lam, Goddess with foliage, 1942. Gouache on paper, 41.5 X 33.5 cm.
There is clearly a great deal of anxiety on the part of these Cuban critics about fully acknowledging the role of Lucumí in Lam. But these critics move beyond the mere erasure of Africanness in Lam exhibited by Ortiz. They admit the possibility of some content or possible interpretation of Lam’s work as Lucumí but with caveats and disclaimers that display a nervous desire to whiten Lam and his work. Let us take note of the usage of the word “regress” in the following explication of Lam’s Femme sur Fond Vert to see how Africanness fits into the overall work of aesthetic progress: (Medina 2002, 317; Even though the face reflects a new approach to the African masks, the background continues to be flat. It is evident that Lam regresses and that he knows it, and that this is the reason why he leaves his work incomplete). The erasure of blackness of the earlier generation yields to a reserved acknowledgment of an Africanness that is nevertheless akin to backwardness. This, troublingly, rearticulates a discourse of progressive development in which Africa represents the anterior and primal original form which all worthy endeavors should strive to distance themselves and outgrow in order to achieve completion and maturation.
*The depersonalization and psychological doubling reported by initiates during trance possessions is illustrated in this femme cheval painting. Observe the continuation of the thematic of hermaphroditism in the location of the phallus on the chin of the distinctly female horse. The extrapelvic location of male genitalia allows for the preservation of somatospiritual concavity in the initiate as androgyne. Wilfredo Lam, Satan, 1942. Gouache on paper, 41 ⅞ X 34 in.
All the while, there is a third school of thought that is characterized by an incipient acknowledgment of Lucumí in the work of Lam. While this represents a clear advancement in the revalorization of African religions, these acknowledgments stop short of a full understanding of the implications of the body in African diasporic religious cultures. The equine figure motif in Lam’s painting allows for an unequivocal presentation of African religious imagery in Lam: (Martinez 2002, 22; The peculiar combination of human beings and horse that transforms the figures in question offers a visual symbol of a state of trance, which in the Afro-Cuban cults is known as “coming down with the saint”). Cuban critic Juan Martinez remains a rare example of this interpretation of the horselike figure as an individual in trance. All the other critics who acknowledge the role of Lucumí in Lam are from the United States or France, locations from which a perspective of African continuities in Cuba might be more perceptible than in Cuba itself, given the particular racial formation of the island. Stokes Sims adds a gendered component to the equine figure when he writes:
The inscriptions of the signs of the Abakuá society are a key part of the elaborate ceremonies that culminate in the possession of a devotee- who is symbolized by the femme cheval, since the devotee is “ridden” like a horse by the various orishas who manifest themselves during the rituals. (2002, 68)
While Stokes Sim’s acknowledges of the femme cheval as a Lucumí motif is significant, he does not elaborate on the most important element he contributes to the development of the conversation: the gender of the horse. Why is the horse figure a woman? How might the woman’s gender be modulated by the symbolic masculinity of the horse? In fact, most of these critics who do acknowledge the role of Lucumí do so only in passing, barely touching on the theme of possession without asking how this half-human, half-animal figure might serve as an illustration of the uniqueness of the Afro-diasporic conceptualization of the body. For example, Julia Herzberg, who is, in my opinion, the critic who pushes the conversation of Lucumí in Lam to its furthest point, does not advance much beyond a comparison of Lam’s femme cheval to other Western artistic and mythological motifs:
Picasso’s many preparatory drawings of the horses for Guernica along with his representations of minotaurs have features that influenced Lam’s imaginative creations of this period… A phenomenon of major religious significance and long-established traditions in Afro-Cuban religions is one in which the deity (orisha/santo) takes possession of the practicant, who is referred to as the horse (caballo) … Viewed this way, Lam’s mask face is often a metaphor for the horse in the phenomenon of possession. (1987, 29–29)
What is at stake is presenting Lam as derivative of Picasso and his hybrid figures as iterations of Greek mythological chimeras? Why insist on the Europeaness — the Spanishness, the Greekness — of an African religious phenomenon? Is there not an erasure of blackness that paradoxically co-occurs with an acknowledgment of this very concealed blackness? Continuing along these lines, Taillandier sees in the figure of the femme cheval yet another Lucumí idea. Beyond the idea of possession, this hybrid figure is the representation of syncretism: (Taillander 1970, 11; But above all, the androgynous character of the figure in the shape of a question mark would be a remainder of the androgyny that results from the mixture of personalities of the femme Catholic saint and the black god).
*The motif of the female horse becomes more evident in this painting, which also shows the androgynous ideal of Lam, who places the phallus and scrotum on the chin of the woman so as to preserve the openness required for sexual-spiritual possession. Wilfredo Lam, Zambezia, Zambezia, 1950. Oil on canvas, 49 ⅜ X 43 ⅝ in.
The femme chaval is then the point of articulation for the phenomenon of trance possession and also for the system of correspondences between Catholic saints and orishas in the imagery of Lucumí. But couldn’t we also go beyond this analysis and say that the chimera is Lam represent the unity in all of the cosmos as it represents the fusion of orisha and initiate- in its masculine and feminine genders- as well as the animal and plant world? Lam’s femme cheval, in particular those in which the equine figure bears an Eleguá on her head, mirrors the idea of the body in an externally located spirit essence, emblematized by the cashew pear and its outer seed. This chimera operates as a meeting point of the secular and the sacred, modernism and Africanness, a liminal figure revealing the greater unity of Being. Taillander elaborates further on the androgynous quality of the femmer cheval figure when he says:
What is the meaning of this silhouette in the form of a question mark? I have pondered this interrogative form a lot. The question mark is backwards and right-side up. This is a small matter. At the bottom there is a woman’s shoulder and a mammary gland. The neck is a giraffe’s neck or that long neck of Cuban dancers. At the end of this neck, there is a head that is sometimes triangular. In this instance, she bears one or several horns. More often, even very often, the head is the head of an old man, a little devilish, because it is mounted by two satanic horns, horselike in their length and supervirilized: the intermediary space between the mouth and the chin appears to be an erect penis; the two curves of the chin, seperated by a dimple, resemble the double globes of the testicles in some, a beard in others.
Taillander sees the femme cheval a question that he tries to answer. His animalization of Cubans in his presentation of them as giraffe-like is troubling, as is his erroneous equation of Eleguá with the Christian devil. His Eurocentrism is evident in his reading of the horns of Eleguá as those of the unicorn. Nevertheless, he recognizes the horse and sees the phallus on the chin but fails to develop its implications. Is the fragmented and recompsed penis-in-chin figure a homunculus-type mental representation of the body? Is it an Egyptian stylized beard? Is the chimera a type of sphinx? Is the fusion of female breasts and penises in a single body a commentary of Lam’s own racial hybridity? Could we see the femaleness in the horse as a way to represent the openness of the idealized body-as-vessel in African religious representation?
This painting reveals more clearly the facial features of the orisha Eleguá and those of the equine mother and child. The initiate is the horse of the spirit during ritual trance possession. Wilfredo Lam, Mother and Child, 1957. Charcoal and pastel on ivory wove paper, 73.3 X 58.3 cm.
The acknowledgment of Eleguá and the femme cheval as Lucumí images in the work of Lam provides an aperture for a consideration of the African conceptualization of the body through the figure of the bird in Lam:
If the birds are represented in a rather vague manner, we can nevertheless assume that they are vultures, divine messengers of Olofi, the supreme deity from which each orisha springs. For the initiates of Santería, Olofi, or Olodumare, resides in the head of each human being.
In Flash of the Spirit: African and African American Art and Philosophy, Robert Thompson explains the religious image of the sacred bird that Herzberg finds in Lam:
According to traditional authority, shrines of the head also conceal, in the covering of the shining white shells, an allusion to a certain perching bird, whose white feathers are suggested by the overlapping cowries. This is the “bird of the head” (eiye ororo), enshrined in whiteness, the color of iwa, and in purity. It is the bird which, according to the Yoruba, God places in the head of man or woman at birth as the emblem of the mind. The image of the descent of the bird of mind fuses with the image of the coming down of God’s ashé in feathered form (Thompson 1983, 11)
The image of the bird and its relationship to the human and equine figures in Lam’s paintings present the unique relationship of the spirit to material bodies in Afro-diasporic religions. The use of the preposition “in” by Herzberg and Farris Thompson is not altogether accurate, as during trance possession the spirit-bird rests on top of the head of the initiate without truly residing within her. The body in Afro-diasporic religions is not the hermetic enclosure it is in European philosophy. Instead, the relationship between the body and its anima finds floral representation in the Anacardium occidentale, whose heart or seed — its cardium — queerly rests outside the pulpy corpus of the fruit. Thompson’s usage of the ideas of perching and descent are more in tune with the idea that we see in Lam of multiple beings coexisting without entering, violating, or usurping identities. In this sense, Thompson moves us closer to an understanding of the transcorporeality that exists in Lam: the presentation of the body as vessel of the divine, hosting and transporting a multitude of subjectivities simultaneously.
I not only acknowledge the presence of Lucumí in Lam, but I see it as occupying a central role in his work without reservations of any kind. In contrast to the denials and ambivalences of these critics, I insist on the need to highlight the presence of Lucumí in Lam for the illustration of the transcorporeal self in Afro-diasporic conceptualization of the body.
The difference between Cuban and First World (US and French) scholarship reflects variances in the representation of Cuban national identity both on the island and abroad. The various Cuban projects of independence and revolution have emphasized a whitened version of Cuban national identity that has difficulty finding a place for the religions of Afro-Cubans. To First World social scientists, Cuba is still imbued with some of the same discourse of exoticism that wealthy tourists expect from their island visit. The French love affair with the exotic erotic and the North American one-drop racial rule enforce a view of Cuba as an oversexualized black island paradise. Paradoxically, the exoticism coming from First World vacationers and ethnographers allows for the opportunity to reevaluate the most marginal racial and religious groups on the island. While local Cuban racism effectively elides blackness from social science discourse, the racism of First World researchers actually pushes the lived realities of the most oppressed in Cuba to the forefront of academic discourse. Foreign ethnographers, like other First World visitors, tourists, and conquistadors, overturn the Caribbean social hierarchy to their advantage by aligning themselves with the most oppressed group, effectively reiterating alliances that have turned the existing social schema on its head and yielded, historically, the creation of the colony, the ferment of revolution, and the creation of the nation.
Lam’s arrival in Cuba marks the beginning of a paradigmatic retour au pays natal, but also that of a mythical exodus, an expulsion du pays étranger. The return to African religious motifs is certainly not due solely to Picasso or psychoanalytic deployment of Africa as sociocultural and geographical reference for the subconscious. Lam’s Lucumí imagery reflects Lam’s racial
prise de conscience after experiencing the threat of annihilation at the hands of the Nazis and his internment in a German-controlled concentration camp in Martinique. I propose that the paintings of this period are largely dominated by the representations of humans in communion with the orishas. The small facial motifs atop the head of many subjects with hermaphroditic traits as well as the strong theme of the female horse serve as vivid illustrations of my concept of transcorporeality in black Atlantic cultural production. In this sense, transcorporeality works with my original proposition that the cultural logic of the African diasporic body is that of a receptacle body that transports the essences of multiple and removable selves. Lam’s work also allows us the opportunity to push forth a methodological understanding of transcorporeality, one which the innovative synthesis of previously published information can be recorporealized, re-membered, and rearticulated like the bony joints of a composite corpus in order to advance an understanding of embodiment. Even as much as the transcorporeal understanding is underpinned in some previously published materials, this yields a never-before-synthesized understanding of Lam. This understanding of Lam sees his most significant contribution as the representation of the idealized sacramental body in the African diaspora as the entranced chimera, the liminal being representing the unity of all the cosmos, in its animal, human, plant, and divine forms. In a contestatory relationship to the hermetic enclosure of the Cartesian body, Lam’s artwork presents the spiritual essence of riding atop the material body, using it as a vessel for transportation and manifestation in the physical world. In Lam, the observer rarely sees small facial features inside others. They are always stacked on top of one another. Heads over heads represent the supracephalic nature of the Afro-diasporic trance possession experience in which the deity rides, without entering per se, its human hosts.
In Lam, the open palms, concave head often topped with baskets or plates, present the body as a open receptacle whose essence of being, its psyche, is multiple, external, and removable (The Eternal Presence / An Homage to Alejandro Garcia Caturla). This allows for the transgendering of the body, as evidenced in the hybrid image of the female horse, whose breasted and phallic corpus embodies the androgynous ideal of the Afro-diasporic religious discourse. The horse as woman articulates both the ridership metaphor for possession, in which the horse is the devotee, a devotee who must be ritually female — a category that would include passive homosexual men — in order to account for its open and receptacle function. Indeed, Lam’s paintings provide a visual referent for the transcorporeal view of the body that makes Lucumí fertile ground for non-heteronormative subjectivities.
*The union of the female and male principles is emblematized in this allegorical marriage between Oshún, goddess of love, and Ogún, a god of war and metallurgy. The supracephalic figures of the dove and the horseshoe indicate entranced bodies being ridden by these deities, respectively. Eleguá, the divinity who opens all gates and removes obstacles, is present as officiant and witness. Wilfredo Lam, Les Noces (The Wedding), 1947. Oil on canvas, 215 X 197 cm. Photograph: Jörg P. Anders.
This transcorporeality is also evident in the trickster and border-crossing deity Eleguá, as it occupies an important place in Lam’s semiotics. As the first and last orisha invoked in all ceremonies, Eleguá frames all the deities and in this way becomes a symbol for the entire pantheon in Lam. These Eleguás are mostly stacked atop the head of human or equine figures in Lam’s paintings, presenting the transcorporeality of the Afro-diasporic body, which is modulated from multiple and removable divine external sources. Like Eleguá, birds become symbols of the orishas emphasizes the transitory and temporary state of trance possession, in its fleeting nature. Lam’s femme cheval evinces how this stacking or superimposition of beings has effects on gender. The paradigmatic figures of possession is androgynous. Transcorporeality allows for a transgendering of the body exhibited by the breasted and phallic femme cheval. Male and female, human and animal, divine and material, the female horse is a chimera representing the unity of Being. The liminal and chimerical being in Lam emblematizes Cuba’s hybridity and at the same time also evokes a universality that is also reminiscent of another enclosed seas, the Mediterranean, in its Greek and Egyptian mythological references. In spite of those who would only want to favor these European referents, Lam’s paintings are clearly both, and in this they reveal the same syncretic and integrationist approach as associating saints and orishas.
*Eleguá — metamorphosing into a sensuously hermaphroditic flower displaying both male and female parts, stamen and pistil — marries Oshún and Ogún. The yellow tones and the sexually suggestive flowers are an indicator of the seductive tone and mood of the event. The marriages presented in this painting and in Les Noces underscore the thematic of androgyny found in the figure of the femme cheval. Lam appears to say that the sacramental body is ultimately beyond this realm of binary oppositions. I argue that this body of the beyond/ au delá/ del más allá is the transcorporeal body, regendered, retaxonomized, deified in the moment of trance possession. Wilfredo Lam, The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro Garcia Caturla), 1944. Oil and pastel over papier-mache and chalk ground on bast fiber fabric, 85 ¼ X 77 ⅛ in.
My friend Fran does not readily see the Lucumí symbols in Lam. Only after I decode them for him does he become conversant in Lam’s Lucumí language. Our learning is a two-way street. After all I have learned from Fran, I am happy to help him understand the representation of Lucumí in high surrealist art. I have found myself processing my participation in the Yemayá beachside ceremony as an assistant to Fran. The relationship between the practitioner and the scholar mirrors that between the body and the spirit. Fran is the female horse, and I am like the winged creature that flies from afar into his hand or rests on his head for a while. Fran is the human who lives in one punctual space and time. I begin to see myself more like the Eleguá of the crossroads, the liminal being who brings knowledge from one realm to the other, as mediator between the popular and the academy. My cultural conversion involves a growing awareness of my role as disseminator of knowledge, spokesperson and theorist in the service of practitioners like Fran. In this sense, transcorporeality begins to reveal itself to me as an ethnographic methodology framing individuals and collectives as bodies, which the scholar may ride and possess. Indeed, the work of transcorporeality can be conducted only by the composite chimeric body depicted by Lam, half scholar, half practitioner, entranced.
