Review of 'Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?'

Marta Sofía López Rodríguez starts from a commendable honesty in recognizing her place of enunciation, that of a white, middle-class European (Spanish) academic, situated in the position of an ally of black women. This would allow her to take up postcolonial theory without major complications, and to analyze the representations of sex, gender and sexuality in the three narrative works she examines: Akwaeke Amezi's Freshwater (2018), Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde’s Black Bull Ancestors and Me. My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (2008) and Flora Nwapa's The Lake Godess (1995). However, López Rodríguez is one of the most critical scholars of the dominant place of European (and Eurocentric) epistemologies in the Spanish and European sphere and has spoken out about the limits and legitimacy of postcolonial theory (practiced, not to say monopolized, by white scholars). Her article is entirely consistent with this stance in her research on the impact of spiritual questions that dilute the binary sex and gender categories of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa. López Rodríguez takes African women's knowledge seriously and draws directly on their epistemologies, linked to other theories and practices of Latin American scholars. These epistemologies reveal other conceptualizations of "woman" linked to African spiritual traditions revised and appropriated by contemporary black African women writers, capable of dismantling and deconstructing rigid binary categorizations.

López Rodríguez's starting point is precisely to question the usefulness of gender as a category of analysis. As she puts it, "What does this 'woman'/ 'female' mean? The author establishes a complete journey through the words of non-white activists and writers in the history of feminism, from Sojourner Truth's famous question at the 1851 Akron Convention of Women, Ain't I a Woman? which other feminists, such as the Argentinean María Lugones (2008), have taken up to denounce the complicity of white feminism with the dehumanization of women of color, by not disassociating themselves from the Eurocentric modernity and the Enlightenment that laid the foundations of the colonial world. López Rodríguez supports, following Obioma Nnaemeka (1995), the possibility of an 'in-outsider' capable of analyzing literatures from a position of respect, like herself or other critics who do so from a position of knowledge and humility.

From her reading of the work of great theorists such as Paula Gun Allen (1986), Ifi Amadiume (1987) and Oyèrónké Oyewùmí (1997), López Rodríguez reminds us that gender/sex was not the most important determinant of women's prestige in pre-colonial societies. The author also traces the work of major anti-colonial critics —Guyanese Walter Rodney (1971) and Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1981)— who highlight the marginalization of African women during European colonization both in the educational system and in the transmission of property. It is her quotation of the words of Ghanaian theologian Kwanima Boateng (2020) that directly answers the question of the title, "Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?” Colonialism, with its dismantling of indigenous religion and rituals, and the imposition of religious systems in which there was no place for women in their practices, stripped them of value, and also of the sacramental value attributed to their lands. Thus, healers, mediums and other religious figures were condemned as witches or madwomen. And unfortunately, Western feminism, a child of secularism, recalls López Rodríguez quoting Jacqui Alexander (2005), has scorned the spiritual.

In her analysis of Akwaeke Emezi's novel Freshwater (2018), López Rodríguez demonstrates her critical insight by pointing out the intersections between genre and the sacred. The difficulty of assigning a literary genre to this narrative work (Emezi claims that it is mostly a memoir of her spiritual perceptions) is directly related to the difficulty of categorising the gender of the heroine —a non-binary, trans* and non-human entity. The key to these intersections lies in the narrative voices, spirits that possess the body and mind of Ada, the heroine. This text would force Western feminists to deconstruct their gender categories in order to embrace the perspective of a posthuman feminism open to spirituality.

On the other hand, the protagonism of the ogbanjes (of the Igbo tradition, comparable to the abikú of the Yoruba tradition), as spirits who transit from the world of the dead to the world of the living, plays a fundamental role in blurring the boundaries between existences —between the possible genders to which the bodies in which they choose to incarnate can be ascribed. From this perspective, the Western discourse on dysphoria or the feeling of living in the "wrong body" can learn from this spiritual worldview and become more transgressive: a non-binary body can be accepted, which does not require a surgical intervention for the designation of a body either male or female. Undergoing a transformation towards becoming this non-normative entity may be accompanied by surgery. However, as López Rodríguez insists in her interpretation of Freshwater, and of their author’s words, against gender reassignment within the binary system.

The third intersection analyzed by López Rodríguez is found in the relationship between the heroine and the goddess of the Earth, Ala, with her avatar, the royal python. Recognizing the python as mother involves bodily practices (scarification and tattooing or the more disturbing removal of bodily organs, such as breasts, uterus and ovaries) that contribute to Ada/Emezi's self-assignment as an ogbanje. This again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the natural and the cultural, the material and the spiritual. As López Rodríguez summarizes, "In Freshwater, Emezi has created for themselves, and for us readers, a multidimensional, palimpsestic, non-dichotomous and non-linear chronotope, an Ogbanje space" (p. 10).

In her analysis of Nkuzi Zandile's autobiography, Black Bull, Ancestors and Me. My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (2008), López Rodríguez undertakes another formidable updating of gender theory applied to the history of virilization of African lesbian women. She traces Molara Ogudipe-Leslie's (1994) assertion of the non-recognition of the existence of lesbian women in Africa, Oyèrónké Oyewùmí's (2000) comparison between the status of "wife" at the heart of white feminism versus the status of "mother" among African women, and recent texts on the lesbian women's collective and the sangoma, or Zulu traditional healers of South Africa. As López Rodríguez explains through her more current readings (Nkunzi Z. Nkabinde 2008, Adriaan van Klinken & Kwame E. Otu 2017), sangomas constitute a collective protected by South African law, including numerous lesbian women who again shift the boundaries between tradition and modernity, whose gender (trans)formations are mutable and relational, rather than identitarian or purely performative (and again there is spiritual possession by animal spirits, or through tranimal manifestations). It is at this point that López Rodríguez recalls Walter Mignolo's (2012) concept of border gnosis/gnoseology and border thinking, on the displacement of hegemonic forms of knowledge. Thus, we also learn that these sangomas, whose prestige protects them from violence (especially against butch lesbians) choose the spelling "wo/man" to self-define their sexes and genders.

With regard to the third text, López Rodríguez makes a thirty-year time jump and goes back to 1995 to examine Flora Nwapa's latest novel The Lake Godess in order to give it an absolutely innovative reading, by considering the blurring of the boundaries between the world of goddesses —the "Mamy Wata" of the West African imaginary, or the Uhamiri Igbo— and that of women as a tool for breaking down the limits between tradition and modernity.

True to her position in favor of the dissolution of borders, López Rodríguez closes her article with "a choice of endings" in which she defines herself as an ecowomanist and highlights how spirituality and religion may be considered further analytical nodes that have an impact on those we deal with in the present from an intersectional perspective, principally race and class. In her most personal style, clear and far removed from the hermeticism that characterizes much of the academic literature, López Rodríguez makes explicit her own trajectory of overcoming the aforementioned binarism, with what she inherited from the rural world in which she was born —traditions, precariousness, hard work, unhappy marriages, prematurely dead children—, what she acquired in her intellectual and academic training, her exploration of Cuban Santeria and African religions, her maternal attitude or non-biological motherhood of close people and students, and the development of her own wisdom and her sisterhood with Igbo women, which leads her to remind her readers of "your possibilities of becoming what you want and dream to be".