Recently me and a date went to a showing of Obeah Opera by Nicole Brooks, an a capella opera taking place during the Salem Witch Trials. It follows the story of 4 slave women accused of being witches for practicing religion and spirituality other than Christianity, such as Obeah.
It is the best theatre I have seen since last year’s Eating with Lola by Catherine Hernandez. Which caused me to bawl and floored me with it’s exploration of histories and our elders.
It feels like this play arrived right when I needed it to. For the past few months to a year I have been on a quest to find my ancestors. My grandmother is one of my primary people and she knows just about everything about my family. Except, of course, what came years before her. Being poor black people in the late 19th century into the 20th, there wasn’t a lot of record keeping occurring in my family’s favour. Birth, death, marriage certificates don’t exist. But there are legends.
I grew up hearing the term “Obeah woman”, learning to believe that these were wild and unruly women of Jamaica. They weren’t to be trusted.
Brooks’ deconstruction of where those fears and judgments came from spoke to the conflict I have been experiencing between what I have been taught and my longing for the traditions of my ancestors.
An Obeah woman/man, beyond what I knew and what wikipedia says : is a term used in the West Indies to refer to [someone who practices] folk magic, sorcery, and religious practices derived from West African, and specifically Igbo origin.
I have just recently put down this amazing book on Caribbean religions that gave me such impressive knowledge about all of the different locations the slaves came from in Africa and how it influenced their descendants. Not surprisingly, many of the religions in the islands come from the traditions of the first slaves to the region. The connections just go so far back and I am so thirsty for more of those connections to live in my brain and in my blood.
Obeah Opera answered some of those questions and heartened me to know that there are so many other diasporic folks that are looking far, far back in search of directions forward.
Fold a Fitted Sheet 