Going anba dlo: A Scholar’s Response to a Mother’s Love and Lament

• In Event: Sacred Africana, Aquatic: Exploring Abundance and Scarcity Through Ritual in Burkina Faso, Cuba, and Haiti

Description for Program

How does water, a site of rupture and dismemberment for the African diaspora, also bring us into wholeness? The anba dlo. In Haitian Vodou, the anba dlo (sea abyss) holds the dichotomy of the haunting history of the Crossing and sacred site—where the living, the dead, and the yet-to-come meet and heal each other. Relaying the story of a Haitian mother whose three sons were murdered by state agents as a haunting of the Middle Passage, writing from the anba dlo, this paper re-conceives the Haitian feminist corpus (that can be perceived as elitist) to put forward motherness, a way of doing scholarship that does not aspire to science. Instead, motherness privileges proximity to Spirit as well as care and intimacy with the (grieving) other. Beckoned by the mother, the scholar who is willing to be transformed and goes anba dlo, encounters Freda (a lwa, a Vodou spirit) and gets to know herself as a mother, too. Subsequently, as she affirms the aliveness of those the nation discards, she too is granted personhood, bringing the scholar—and hopefully, those with whom she shares the story—into wholeness.

Author

• Christina Désert