It’s so magic folks feel their own ancestors coming up out of the earth to be in the realms of their descendants; they feel the blood of their mothers still flowing in them survivors of the diaspora.
Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo
In revisiting Vanessa Valdes’ Oshun’s Daughters, I have been able to re-engage with Afro-spirituality as it appears in Shange’s work, specifically Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. Valdés illustrates the ways in which each protagonist is associated with a Yoruba or Dahomean deity, sometimes representing more than one entity at a time. These depictions of Afro-spiritualist deities are heterogenous in that they activate a range of traditions manifested in African-descent communities across the western hemisphere. Shange does not limit the characters’ embodiments of Afro-spiritualism to singular practices; at times, we see the Oshun of Santeria, the Gullah-Geechee Blue Sunday, or the different forms of Erzulie in Haitian Vodou. In this effort, Shange is honoring the transcendent quality of Afro-spiritualism, in its limitless iterations across communities and cultural contexts. Read More
