The femininity of art and culture in Kongo folklore

• In Event: Framing Women's Life

Description for Program

The question driving my research on Kongo folklore rests within the axis of my discoveries via a folkloric translation of Une Femme en Exil (2000) by Amba Bongo, of the art and custom of feminine storytelling in Kongo folklore. I presented what my reading with a folkloric lens yielded in a paper entitled “‘A man went to rent a room in a woman’s house’: Christian Missionary B.D.S.M. and Sex Trafficking in Colonial Africa” – submitted to various universities and research institutions as part of research proposals, fellowships and grant awards competitions funding research.

Here I present a fuller description of this art and custom. I shed light on, as well as give insight into the liquidity in the feminine language arts used by colonized melanoid women to code colonizer excesses and sexual assaults which included rape, torture and murder. The axiom of my understanding is that water and earth are feminine elemental spirits. Feminine folkloric storytelling does not use force but rather speaks in meandering ways with rhetorical arts which English language speakers call metaphor, simile, metonymy, antonym, synecdoche and allegory. Dark divine feminine arts are the root of justice and liberation through truth-telling about the dark crimes which colonizers have perpetrated against humanity and the laws of nature on planet earth. This paper offers another vantage point on feminine aboriginal folkloric translation, bringing what is not researched about movements led by female spiritualists to the forefront.

Author

• Awo Yayra Sumah