Video: Dancing Altars

Full transcript: 

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Dancing Alters-- Embodied Visualities and Domestic Enslavement in Togolese Sacred Arts. February 22, 2023.

CATHERINE BREKUS: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. My name is Catherine Brekus. I teach American religious history here. And I am stepping in for my colleague Ann Braude, the director of the Women's Studies and Religion Program, who is on leave this semester. So it's my privilege to be here to hear this wonderful talk.

Before we get started, I just wanted to let people know, both those of you who are here and on Zoom, of two upcoming events. On March 22 at 1:00 PM, Jordan Katz will speak on Delivering Knowledge-- Midwives and the Making of Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe. And on April 11 at noon, Xhercis Mendez will speak on Conjuring Another Humanity-- Decolonizing Feminist Methodologies From Within Afro-Latinx Ritual.

So it is my pleasure today to introduce Elyan Hill, assistant professor of African and African Diasporic Art History and Material Culture at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Hill is spending the year at HDS, where she is visiting assistant professor of Women's Studies and African Religions and a research associate in the WSRP program. As an interdisciplinary scholar of African arts, her research interests include festival arts, religious materiality, Black feminisms, and embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, Benin, Liberia, and their diasporas.

Her presentation today is entitled Dancing Altars, Embodied Visuality, and Domestic Enslavement in Togolese Sacred Arts. Professor Hill will speak until about 2:00, and then there will be time for Q&A. So welcome.

[APPLAUSE]

ELYAN HILL: Thank you so much, Catherine, for that introduction. First I'd like to thank Ann Braude, Tracy Wall, and each of the other research associates in the Women's Studies and Religion Program for their incredible support, collegiality, and friendship. I'm grateful to all of you for being here, and I look forward to the many fruitful discussions to come.

I'm excited to share this research that I'm currently shaping into a book. My research arises from fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2015 with artists and ritual practitioners from the Ewe ethnic group in Togo. Just to locate us a little bit, Togo is this little strip of a country-- sorry, little strip of a country in Benin and Ghana. I'm so bad at using those little pointers. I just like to point at things myself.

And Ewe peoples, they live across the Togo-Ghana border. And so this is mostly focusing on the work that I did in Togo. But my work really intersects both places. So my larger body of work addresses African visualities, or culturally specific ways of seeing the world that instigate powerful actions, memories, and bodily responses to visual histories, portrayed through images, displays, and spectacles of sacred arts.

I argue that through the assemblage of sacred objects, the bodies of practitioners become altars of a sort-- places set aside for devotional activities. I promise I'll talk more about this image later. I theorized the branching trajectories of what African art historian Robert Farris Thompson calls African art in motion. Where Thompson applies dance criticism gleaned from local collaborators to explain the formal aesthetics of African objects, I examine how West African communities produce and present African arts by using ritual gestures to resignify objects and images.

Today, I will preface my talk with a discussion of how ritual specialists embody and reinterpret mass produced Hindu images as local water spirits through performances that index histories of trade with Indian merchants. In ways that we can discuss more in the Q&A, my research explores migration histories performed during local festivals to draw representatives from Ewe communities from all over the world, including sites like Germany. And this is the chief of the Ewes in Germany, pictured here with his wife and his mother-in-law.

And my work thinks a lot about these celebrations of regional migrations that took place in the early 17th century. And I also seek to recognize the importance of migrations of contemporary Ewe diaspora. So people moving out of Ghana to go to school, to find work, and coming back during festival times.

This image also allows me to point out what Kobena Mercer, art historian Kobena Mercer calls the, quote, "too muchness" of African and African diasporic adornment. In my talk today, I will first introduce theories of embodied altars that display this type of aesthetic density or too muchness before considering how communities navigate histories of the domestic slave trade, which lasted in present day Ghana and Togo into the 1850s.

I do so by exploring religious rituals held for the powerful and malevolent spirits of enslaved persons, known as Mama Tchamba, or Grandmother Slave. I focus on historical memories concerning persons purchased through the domestic slave trade, the majority of whom were women, with attention to the narratives and devotions of contemporary Ewe women who practice for Vodun.

For those who don't know, Vodun. Is a world religion that brings balance to past and present through altar practices, offerings, and tributes to spirits, and the cultivation of what religious studies scholar Aisha Beliso-De Jesus calls co-presence, which has also been called spirit possession in the literature. But I'm moving away from that terminology, because most of the people with whom I collaborate don't love it.

But what co-presence is are moments when multiple spirits may communicate with the living through specific gestures. Sometimes through words, it depends on what's happening. Coastal Ewe Vodun communities elaborate upon memories of transoceanic trade and domestic enslavement through rituals complete with mnemonic gestures, embodied spirits, and evocative adornments. Vodun ritual gestures performed during events held by Ewe people in Togo demonstrate a mode of remembering enslavement that ties the bodies of ritual specialists to real, imagined, and collectively interpreted landscapes as sites of reconciliation with the dead.

Based on knowledge gained through apprenticeship with Vodun practitioners, I argue that what I term spectral geographies allow practitioners to negotiate current circumstances of need and troubled histories of migration. They do so by conceptually, kinesthetically, and temporarily transposing historical narratives of forced migration on to familiar and accessible places.

The female ritual specialist with whom I worked most closely described their rituals for Chamba spirits in ways that indicate a remapping of often unspoken narratives of the slave trade on to the spaces of home courtyards and family shrines. Throughout my talk, I'll examine how theories of the body as an altar, a living archive of accumulated objects and adornments, apply to local understandings of histories of commercial relations with Indian merchants and the domestic slave trade.

Using visual and choreographic analysis, personal interviews, and my own experiences learning and observing Ewe arts practices, I look at ways Ewe religious practitioners inhabit and remap histories of wealth, cultural exchange, and enslavement. My research contributes not only to the field of Black religious studies, but also to art history by theorizing intersections of body and object that challenge Western divisions between art and artist. And by emphasizing women's production, interpretation, and presentation of sacred arts.

I also examine the artists as an object. As a visual object, a sacred object, and as an altar or surface for sacred objects. I argue that religious specialists participate in varied performance events to express perspectives on local histories through material culture, often extending and nuancing written histories.

Serpent India adornment chromolithograph. Through festival arts, Vodun communities in Togo interpret cultural and commercial exchanges between themselves and Indian traders who first arrived in the region as merchants and shopkeepers in the 1890s. From an examination of contemporary embodiment and viewership as imbricated in histories of the circulation of images in the Global South, we can conclude that West Africans actively participate in global markets through processes of critical consumerism in order to resignify images and objects through adornment.

Art historians Henry John Drewal and Dana Rush note that mass produced Hindu images increased in popularity around World War I, when wealthy Indian merchants established businesses along the West African coast. Today, Togolese practitioners employ aesthetics borrowed from chromolithographs, colored images produced through a printing process called lithography. Practitioners interpret chromolithographs depicting Hindu deities as photographs of water spirits called Mami Wata.

Vodun communities view Mami Wata, or Mother Water, as a family of Pan-African water spirits often depicted as mermaids who hold sway over transoceanic trade, including but not limited to the transatlantic slave trade, and who wield immense wealth. And in this image, it says dagbe neva, which means that abundant life should come. And this image is also a visual prayer including the colors of blue for the ocean, green for medicine and healing, and gold for wealth.

Some initiated men perform as female spirits to characterize Mami Dan, a water spirit who appears as a snake charming mermaid wreathed by the serpent Vodou Dan, which you can see here. Vodou Dan is around Mami Dan's neck. Performers carry small silver tridents-- and this is another version of Dan, the serpent.

Performers carry small silver tridents called apia to present themselves as adepts of Vodou Dan. The apia visually links Dan and his devotees to the Hindu deity Shiva, whose iconography includes river water flowing from his hair, a third eye in the middle of his forehead, a trident, like the apia, and snakes wrapped around his neck and arms. Many practitioners see Shiva as a version of the serpent Dan.

And here, you can see some of the visual similarities. I won't run over there even though I'm tempted to. The apia that the Mami Dan dancer is holding in his hand is similar to the iconography of the trident in the chromolithograph. You'll see it a little closer later, but the dancer has armlets that are in the shape of serpents around his upper arms, which also links to the iconography of Shiva.

Mami Dan dancers decorate their skin with drawings meant to resemble reptilian undulations. Such worshippers represent not only Vodou Dan, who is iconographically identified with Shiva, but also Mami Dan, a wife of Dan, who is closely tied to an Indian made chromolithograph image of a South Asian snake charmer. So this is that image.

And this image has been explored extensively in the work of Henry John Drewal. The image was commissioned in the late 1880s as an advertisement for a performance in Germany for German people show or circus. The image was reprinted in Bombay, India, in 1955, and printed again in Kumasi, Ghana, in the 1960s. And interestingly, some of these-- what I call moments of ritual gender fluidity make it so that when I ask people about their interpretations of the performances of Mami Dan dancers, they often say, oh, the Mami Dan dancers are the men who dance like women.

But interestingly, the fact that all water spirit devotees are known as wives of the spirit refers more to devoted service and partnership than to any idea of fixed notions of gender identity. Within such rituals, communities attach gender, like ethnic identity, to signs and symbols layered upon the body, not necessarily to the body itself. Through multiple levels of representation, including drawings upon the skin, objects carried and worn upon the body, and references to chromolithograph images, performers transform their bodies into ritual altars. Points of encounter with wealth bringing spirits.

Both stationary and embodied altars serve as personal archives that evoke other times and places and display objects that re-assert the power and potential of specific deities in the present. Such displays demonstrate that African arts require an exploration of the aesthetics of opacity, to use diaspora theorist Edouard Glissant's term, since in order to translate the ritual meanings of the objects on display, the viewer must reference a compendium of images, objects, and philosophies to make their own connections.

After discussing this performed history of global image exchange, I will now apply such analysis to older and more fraught histories on display upon embodied altars. Walking Stranger-- Muslim Migration. Embodied altars also serve as a means for Ewe communities to navigate the historical marginalization of women by acknowledging histories of their domestic enslavement. Through murals, objects displayed on altars, and adornment set in motion, communities honor the malevolent spirits of enslaved persons called Mama Tchamba.

West African communities had already established an active domestic slave trade when the Portuguese arrived on the coast of Ghana in the 15th century. This trade flourished with the development and escalation of the transatlantic slave trade. By the mid 18th century, enslavers on the coast looked to northern regions for the majority of what they called bought persons, or amefleflewo. "Ame" is person, "flefle" is purchased, and then "wo" is just the plural of that word.

Many captives, possibly as many as a million, came from the northern regions of present day Ghana and Togo between 1700 and 1850. The vast majority of enslaved Africans sold through the domestic trade in Togo were brought from Northern Togo, many from a place called Tchamba. So this is Lome, capital city. And a lot of the work that I do is in Tsevie. And if you go all the way up to where I can't reach, you can possibly see Tchamba up there.

And so this is what Ewe people are talking about when they say north. It's not even technically the northern region, but for them, it's far north and conceived of as far, far north on foot. So Ewe devotees perform dances honoring the spirits of previously enslaved northerners to process collective memories founded upon obligations to their enslaved ancestors whose spirits return as co-presences in the bodies of practitioners to provide counsel and admonition.

During contemporary events honoring bought persons, devotees exaggerate the imagined Northern aesthetics of these enslaved subjects by modeling their adornment after the dress and practices of-- modeling and exaggerating the adornment after the dress and practices of Hausa traders and other groups from the resymbolized North. These performances of Northern aesthetics also posit and embrace ways that identity converges with the imported religious and cultural practices brought from the North by enslaved women remembered as practicing Muslims.

And some of the things that you can notice are that they're carrying misbaha prayer beads. They also have textiles that are not local textiles, textiles from elsewhere. They're also wearing amulets and other elements that they consider to be other or to belong to other people. But it's an exaggeration. Sometimes I call it a carnivalized northernness.

By performing Northern aesthetics, Ewe people interpret the otherness of Northerners based on religion, dress, and embodied markers and integrate those markers into narratives of personal identity. During field research conducted in 2015, I trained with my Mamisi Sofivi-- there she is-- a seasoned Vodun practitioner who honors Mama Tchamba to learn Ewe arts practices and observe rituals.

When I asked Sofivi why she serves Tchamba, she explained that worshipping Tchamba identifies initiates as people coming from historically very wealthy person-purchasing families. She recounted how, quote, "they were rich in cowries and sold other Africans to the colonizers." In order to find the people that they would sell, they went up north to a town called Tchamba. They would take iron bars and use them to make shackles to bind their prisoners around their wrists and ankles. The bracelets and chains, these objects made of iron, we now call tchamba. And they have become a symbol or sign of slavery.

Sofivi confirms that Ewe devotees experience and recognize the presence of spirits through sacred objects, including bracelets, beads, cowries, iron, and imported textiles. So this is a Tchamba altar. One thing that you might not be able to see from where you are-- let me just jigger over and show you. So there are cowrie shells that are covered in offerings. There's [INAUDIBLE] on the [INAUDIBLE], and this is an offering to Tchamba.

But the other thing that I want to point out is that in the gourd on the far left, my far left, there are what are called tchambagan, or rings of tchamba. These are iron rings that would have been used as ID bracelets for enslaved persons. And when they died, when they passed away, the rings of tchamba, the iron of tchamba, or money of tchamba, would be taken and put on to family shrines as a way of remembering them, as a way of keeping them present.

And so those go into the gourd with other medicinal plants, with cowrie shells, with different elements that is difficult to see from this distance, but that have a lot of metonymic importance. And another important aspect of the rings of tchamba is that they're worn on the body. So people will wear them when they're performing, when they're dancing. Or sometimes just in their regular lives. But when they're not wearing them for a ritual or in their regular lives, they will be kept with the altar.

So through the accumulation of metonymic objects like the rings of tchamba, the bodies of practitioners become a type of altar, since they're set aside for devotional activities. Such embodied altars often increase in power through the accumulation of signs over time. And here, I don't know if you can see, but on Anais' left arm-- on Anais' left arm, she is wearing five or six rings of tchamba.

But she's also carrying the prayer beads-- the white beads there are prayer beads. And then she's adorned in water spirit-- in different regalia for different water spirits. So a lot of times embodied altars will, as I said, increase in power through the accumulation of signs over time. The combination of beads for water spirits here and shackle bracelets, for example, serve to acknowledge histories of both the transatlantic and domestic slave trades.

In response to histories of enslavement, Ewe Vodun practitioners continue to extend and reconceptualize the ties connecting them to Northern regions as narratives of wealth and debt. Sofivi and other Ewe Vodun practitioners typically broach discourses of domestic and transatlantic enslavement as discussions of wealth, rather than confrontations with guilt, shame, and grievance, as might occur in the context of Africa's diasporas.

For many Ewe people, the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade by the British in 1807 corresponded with the gradual end of a golden age of wealth, when their chiefdoms had prospered from revenues obtained through the trade in human captives. Vodun communities play out the tensions of histories of enslavement in part to work through feelings of global abjection and the perception of declining fortunes.

Tchamba rituals reverse the power relationship between dominant and exploited parties so that practitioners must serve and appease the spirits of bought persons who they invite to inhabit their bodies. In October 2015, Mamisi Sofivi held a ritual to consult with Mama Tchamba. In a single year, she had suffered the deaths of four close family members. Sofivi assumed that her family members had fallen sick and died due to failures within the family to properly remember and honor the spirits, including those of their enslaved ancestors.

OK, I'm going to play a film and I'm going to talk over it. So I'm going to silence it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'll play another film later, I promise. To invite Tchamba spirits, Sofivi and others danced in welcome. Performers prepared themselves to traverse the dance space with slower, calmer movements that hinted at the short journey to come, as they waited for the call of the lead drummer. Following the signal of the drummers, they engaged in the energetic marching steps of Tchamba.

Finally, each performer closed the dance with a motion in which the body pitched forward and the arms slackened. Through such movements, performers positioned themselves within ritually framed spaces in order to dramatize their relationships with enslaved spirits. In these cases, specialists performed to materialize the foot travels implied in oral histories of slave raiding.

By moving repeatedly across the dance space, performers literally retraced their own steps and those of their fellow dancers while figuratively reinscribing the histories of their ancestors and revisiting the historical paths that led to current situations of need. Communities traced the sources of contemporary circumstances of illness, poverty, and death to distant pasts by acknowledging obscured relationships among persons and geographies.

Co-presence, Skin, Kindred. During one interview with Mamisi Sofivi-- during one interview, Mamisi Sofivi recalled histories of slavery things we do not like to speak of. Yet she proceeded to describe the embodied markers through which she and other Ewe community members identify and interpret legacies of enslavement. As I questioned her about how she knew her family purchased captive Northerners, she noted that, quote, "It is an oral history that people through word of mouth to this day," end quote.

Yet she went on to say that in her family, for example, people are very, very dark. Because people from the North were dark skinned. Though she mentioned oral history, she immediately assessed the presence of histories of enslavement in her life through visible factors like skin color. Through this and other exchanges, I came to realize that Sofivi interprets her body as a visible indication of heritage from Northern captives viewed as enemies and strangers who became domestic servants, adopted children and wives, assimilated to varying degrees in the fabric of Ewe families.

At the time of my interview with Sofivi, I had spent nine months learning dances for Tchamba along with the girls of a local dance association called the Association Deconu. And when I gave a previous talk of this, I told everyone that I have a friend who thinks this picture is hilarious, because I'm the only one smiling. Even though there are children in the picture, I'm the only one smiling.

But this Association Deconu just means cultural association. And it is an association that specifically trains girls. There are two boys in here, but usually they're not a part of the association. They came for a specific performance. I apprentice with this local women's association to learn from women in spaces of female leadership, where they articulate histories through visual and embodied pedagogies.

As I worked closely with practitioners, I was invited to rituals in which Sofivi and other members of her association participated. During one such ritual, the spirits of previously enslaved persons visibly arrived within the bodies of initiated practitioners. Triggered by songs of adoration and the repetitive movements of Tchamba's distinctive tread, entranced practitioners abandoned Mama Tchamba's shuffling stylized step in favor of more variation, demonstrating the fusion of the worshiper with the spirit.

I'll play the video at the end. One priestess began to trail behind the others, dancing backward, as her movements transition into the drunken quality of a danced spirit host. As the others continued to march forward, her feet began to cross, her arms to raise. The movements taking on a separate personality and intention. And attendant rose from the onlookers, running to her aid with a wordless shout, as if surprised by the sudden change in the movements of the dancer.

She began to adjust the sequined scarves adorning the enthralled priestess. By the time four other women had gathered around her, the Tchamba's spirit had modified the motion of the spirit host's arms and legs into commanding marching steps. Sofivi later identified these shifts and movements as demonstrations of power. Ewe people interpret movements like the abrupt disruption of prevailing choreographic patterns, including clear lines and trajectories, as the work of Tchamba spirits who take control of the place of the ritual by intensifying or suspending the dancing to demand that those present perform in new ways or offer additional gifts.

The role reversal of Northern others controlling the lives and bodies of Ewe performers rather than wealthy Ewe people controlling the labor of Northerners represents an understanding of the tenuousness of power and affluence. Through ritual performances, Ewe people fashion their own bodies as indicators of kinship with enslaved strangers from the North whose spirits returned to take control of sacred spaces.

Aggregate Persons, Healing, Debt. Tchamba rituals foster concepts of the space of the other within the body through art objects and the elaboration of what anthropologist Alfred Gell calls, quote, "distributed personhood." Ritual specialists like Mamisi Sofivi acknowledge that their personhood is inextricably linked to the objects that serve as visible traces of enslaved persons.

In this way, individual personhood is distributed and multiplied as performers participate in various genealogical and devotional relationships through which they perceive of themselves as what Gell might call, quote, "an aggregate of persons." Though Gell primarily theorizes distributed personhood to illustrate the social agency of objects based on networks of relationships, I argue that by evoking the hampered steps and arduous travels of enslaved persons while wearing shackled bracelets and Northern imports when cultivating co-presence, devotees recognize the genealogical distribution of the personhood of Tchamba spirits across multiple vulnerable bodies and art objects.

In such cases, Ewe ritual specialists recognize other persons, objects, ancestors, and worshippers as extensions of their own bodies and view individuals as contiguous with larger communities, including both human and non-human persons. Through repetitive polyrhythmic movements, performers acknowledge the agency of the dead to claim certain spaces and frame illness and poverty as conditions brought about through debts of remembrance owed to enslaved Northern ancestors.

In the space of ritual, Ewe people view debt as a physical ailment rather than as something outside of the body. Such debts can be inherited. As I continued to explore the disturbances in local networks of social relations and the physical conditions that practitioners sought to balance and counteract through ritual, I was told that though fierce and frightening, Mama Tchamba's principal purpose in arriving at a ritual is to bring physical healing.

And I found that contradiction a bit confusing initially. Because I really struggled to understand how and why Tchamba spirits would help people. Sofivi claimed that they had power to-- they had power and strength to heal as great as their strength to kill. And Tchamba spirits are known to bring silent and bloodless death to the extent that when people are giving sacrifices to Tchamba, you never use a knife. There's never any blood involved.

Well, the way Sofivi said it was you just put your hand on the animal, and the animal will die. But I think it's this idea of strangulation, of a living death. And so those are scary things, when they're telling you all these scary things that Tchamba does. And even local people are also afraid of Tchamba, I realized.

Well, I tried to do group interviews, and they became one-person interviews. And then I tried to do one-person interviews, and they became group interviews. So this is a picture of me showing images and asking about images to Mamisi Sofivi, and everybody else gathered around.

But as soon as I started talking about Tchamba and domestic enslavement, one by one, people just started disappearing. Before long, I realized there was nobody present. And Sofivi was telling me about domestic slavery or domestic enslavement. But even to talk about Tchamba, she had to pour libation, she had to pour water to cool the spirits.

And basically to appease them, she said, I want to talk to you about this, but to appease the spirits, I have to pour this water. And for me, I began to contextualize the dependence on and tear of spirits of bought persons when I learned that historically, Ewe communities buried enslaved persons as bad dead in the wilderness outside of the village. And Sofivi explained to me that Tchamba spirits became vengeful because their children forgot about them.

But they arrived during rituals to remove illness in exchange for being remembered, acknowledged, and revered. So they give healing in exchange for what they're owed as an unpayable debt, which is remembrance and acknowledgment, as ancestors or at least as predecessors. During Tchamba rituals, practitioners mark the presence of the exiled dead through their own embellished perambulation.

The steps and permeable bodies of practitioners become the temporary gravemarkers and monuments through which communities establish the spaces of the dead. The suffering or wealth of an ancestor are brought to bear upon present circumstances of lack and misfortune to transform problems into opportunities. Tchamba spirits bring order out of disorder to heal individuals and families.

African rituals that use embodied techniques to make sense of shackle bracelets and objects clustered on altars compel art historians and religious studies scholars to consider how choreographic, multidimensional, embodied, and ephemeral forms of vision inform representation in African contexts. Through embodied enactments of co-presence with Tchamba spirits, practitioners claim authority as subjects who inscribed narratives of their own as they invite the spirits of bought persons to imbue the bodies, sacred objects, and domestic spaces of their distant descendants.

Choreographies, Mapping, Space, Process. I call the process of using gestures to visually reorient community spaces for remembering and reinterpreting visual histories, spectral geographies. The spectral geography constitutes a temporary visual and embodied mapping system through which communities recreate the space of the Northern other and root historical geographies in collective memory performances. These sacred geographies are less places than they are processes through which practitioners transform certain sites and activate sacred objects.

Ritual spaces created by Tchamba performances are revenant and temporary sites, created at certain moments and then referenced in oral histories of domestic slavery. Through spectral geographies, ritual specialists create reconstituted spaces that reference distant locations, like the reconfiguration of idealized images of Northern Togo found in Tchamba worship.

The spaces where Eve people revere Northern spirits serve as interpretations of desert and Northern ecology to represent the social and geographical homeland of bought persons and Islam. Tchamba practitioners relabel these sites by encircling and ritually preparing them with layers of objects activated as each performer crosses the space twice and seals their dance with a concluding gesture. Practitioners refer to such spaces charged with ritual objects as mali to signify Northern ritual knowledge and landscapes.

The space of the spectral geography is created within a given moment for that moment in order to link the participants in its creation to one another. In the case of Tchamba, these geographies relate individual bodies to a collective body of formerly wealthy person purchasing Ewe families obligated to serve the spirits of previously enslaved persons.

As Africanist Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts have demonstrated, quote, "Memory is a dynamic social process of recuperation, reconfiguration, and outright invention that is often engendered, provoked, and promoted by visual images and ritual objects," end quote. Through landscapes delimited and defined by rituals and object-laden bodies, worshippers actively invite the power of the town of Tchamba and other northern regions to inhabit sacred sites of memory in order to mobilize and produce visual traces of the role their families played in the domestic slave trade.

The culturally specific ways of seeing framed within spectral geographies evoke a landscape that allows practitioners to express ideas that Ewe communities would otherwise suppress for fear of the stigma of claiming enslaved ancestors and the repercussions of debts of remembrance owed to the spirits of previously enslaved persons. By remembering corporately and presenting the journeys taken by enslaved and enslaving ancestors, devotees solicit healing and produce new versions, however fragmented, of visual and embodied histories of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades.

Geographies, Bodies, Memories, Vision. Through visual and kinesthetic engagement, communities structure oral histories and gaps in knowledge into visual mappings of space and layered iconographies of wealth, debt, and cultural exchange. Adorned in meaning laden layers of objects, ritual practitioners set their bodies in motion as dancing altars by performing movements generated through collective frameworks.

The types of embodied visualities that I propose as a way of reading and interpreting the use of adornments and sacred objects during rituals honoring Mama Tchamba and remembering commercial encounters with Indian merchants involves a move away from static representations to a theory of unfolding practice. Specialists use spectral geographies as temporary cartographies and process, portraying spaces as occupied by spirits locked in familial relationships with human persons.

These spaces become present to many different times and available to different places, reterritorialized through adornment and memory performances. In spectral geographies, artists set sacred objects swirling in spirited performances to transform spaces of disappearance into spaces inhabited by new histories and representational forms. Viewing the adorned bodies of Vodun performers as altars in motion resists isolating these sacred arts practices from the transcultural, metaphysical, and ritually gendered relationships through which Vodun practitioners produce them.

During Tchamba rituals, practitioners pay homage to female ancestors whom they would not otherwise remember. By revealing how Ewe ritual specialists theorize embodied visualities or visualizations of histories upon the body, this research presents narratives of commerce and the slave trade from the perspectives of continental Africans whose voices are often only peripherally included in discussions of the global legacies of slavery in the Black Atlantic.

Their testimonies and curation of ritual objects reveal grassroots historical narratives in the moment of creation and interpretation. By archiving, interpreting, performing, and exhibiting objects, Ewe community members assert their ability to traverse internalized borders between themselves and others, and to fuse the self with the other visually and kinesthetically as a means of historical and cultural knowledge production. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

So I am happy to take any questions you have.

AUDIENCE: Hi, my name's Christian. I'm a student at the college. And I was curious when you initially talked about too muchness, I'm just curious how maximalism or too muchness intersects with the ways that we see the people adorned and what the significance of that is.

ELYAN HILL: That's a really great question. Thank you for that. So Margaret Thompson Drewal talks about repetition with a difference. About how the accumulation is actually a part of the story that you're telling. So one scarf doesn't mean the same thing as 17 scarves. And same with all the different shackle bracelets, for example. Or representing many different water spirits through the regalia.

That each of those objects, each of those repetitions, has a specific meaning to the people who are wearing them. So whether it is something to do with their family or something to do with a story of how they encountered a spirit at another time, each of them has a different meaning. And together, they have a different meaning than they would have apart. If that helps. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. This is brilliant. I think I've read close to two, three dissertations on Mama Tchamba. I think this seems to be the best. So congratulations. And I wonder if you may want to tell us a little bit about those scary things you mentioned. How did you relate to that? Particularly objects of power.

ELYAN HILL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: That are pretty dangerous.

ELYAN HILL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. My second question would relate to your conversations on domestic slavery enslavement vis-a-vis the transatlantic. There does seem to be a kind of a continuity that you showed. Africans tend to be very careful when they're talking about domestic slavery versus shattered transatlantic slavery that came after that. I wonder if you can help us understand how you interpret that.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: In terms of its epistemology. And also maybe ontology. And lastly, as you carefully showed us, lots of symbols and images taken from Islam. Not only in terms of the geography of the place. So I wonder if part of the references to enslavement may be about trans-Saharan slave trade. Many people were taken from that region to North Africa and to the Middle East as slaves.

And which was never studied until more recently. Because the focus was on transatlantic slave trade, and people were very silent on the role of, quote, unquote, "Islam."

ELYAN HILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Given the fact that Islam came to the region around the 11th century and existed for centuries before even Christianity came. So I hope they are helpful comments.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, thank you very much.

ELYAN HILL: Thank you so much for those questions. So first I'll just go in the order that you asked them. So first, how did I relate to objects of power or to things that people around me were scared of? And they know much more about them than I do. The answer is that I'm not an initiated practitioner. And part of my methodology was that I wanted to know things that they would tell their children who are uninitiated.

So I intentionally avoided certain types of secrets. So they said, this is so secret, no one can know it. And I said, OK, then I can't know it. I can't know it. I don't want to know it, because I have no business knowing those types of things. So all the things that I know are things that they invited me into that they said, you're coming from the diaspora, you need to know about this. Or, we teach our children about this because it's important.

But most of what came out about Tchamba was from me asking questions about the movements of the dance, about the music. That saying, what does this mean? What is the purpose of this? Why do you do this? And they would say, oh, well, that's a long story. And they would go into stories about Sofivi talking about her dark skin or talking about the rings of Tchamba or talking about-- the reason I know that my family purchased enslaved persons is not just through oral histories, but also because one of the people who was purchased by my family actually came to me to speak to me.

And so there was a sort of individualizing of Tchamba spirits. It's not just an amalgam of faceless spirits that they each have their own personality. Some of them are supposed to be Mossi from Burkina Faso. Some of them are supposed to be from Mali. Some of them are supposed to be from Tchamba itself. So they do have variation amongst their identities, which seem very important.

But in terms of me interacting with objects of power, I happen to have some of the-- the rings of Tchamba look like those bracelets that they make that are-- it's a copper and brass. And it's like a three-tone bracelet. And so I had some of those on just because they sell them commercially in the market. And people said, oh, Tchamba. And I was like, what? Is it?

I wear these, but they're not the same as Tchamba. But people were telling me, oh, this is Tchamba, you have Tchamba? It's like, I don't know. What do I have? What am I wearing? But I was very careful in terms of my methodology about what I entered into and how people invited me into things, especially about what I took pictures of. I would ask permission for everything.

And my main goal was to come in as a learner, to learn the movements that the girls were learning, whether they were for festivals which are very public, or for more private events. Because rhetorically, a lot of the practitioners that I work with, they would say, oh, we're not teaching the girls Vodun, we're teaching them culture. This is not Vodun. It's the same thing. They're going to the same ceremonies.

But they're like, they're not learning Vodun. They're learning culture. They're not learning religion, it's just culture. Because they're Christians. So that was me in terms of the objects of power. I gave them respect and space, for the most part. If there was something that they wanted me to take a picture of, I would take a pic. Like that image of the altar, that happened-- it was the very last day. I was about to go home. I was doing a last interview.

And so he kept telling me, in the room, in the room, in the room. And she was like, you've been in the room, right? And I was like, no, no, no. I've never been. She was like, you have to go in the room. You haven't been in the room? Why didn't you tell me? And I was like, I don't know. I thought it was private. So I was careful about that.

In terms of the continuity that I make between domestic and transatlantic slave trades, I carefully acknowledge that they are very different, but that they were, in terms of trade, interconnected. That people on the coast would go and capture people from the North. And a lot of times, the men would be sold into the transatlantic slave trade. And the women would be retained in the domestic trade.

And the domestic trade was already established before the transatlantic trade started. But the transatlantic trade fueled the domestic trade. It increased and changed in nature. So I would never say that they are the same, because even now, the status of the person was different. Even the way they call them bought persons indicates that their personhood is still very much intact.

A lot of times, they would be integrated into families, as I said, to varying degrees. Sometimes they would be adopted children, and so they can inherit. But people wouldn't acknowledge their inheritance from the North necessarily. Sometimes they would be-- they call them wives, but if you think about the way marriage is amongst Ewe people, if there's a disagreement, the wife can leave, legally leave and go back to her family.

But if you're an enslaved person and you're married into a family, you can't leave. So it's not really the same status as a wife. So there are lots of different levels of status. And even now, people will-- there's still a stigma about having northern heritage amongst Ewe people. And so Tchamba becomes one of the very few spaces where they can acknowledge that they know that history. And it would never be in any of the public festivals for tourists or anything like that.

So they are different, but they do sometimes remember them together. That they'll say, we remember the transatlantic slave trade through water spirits. And we remember domestic slave trade through Tchamba spirits. So there is a difference there. And then your last question about Islam. So I know much less about this because the trans-Saharan slave trade, I feel like to do that work, I would need to actually go to Tchamba to speak to people up there about what they know, about these practices.

Because some of the practitioners that I knew do go to the North to do certain ceremonies. And so I would have to do more research on that about, what does it mean for them to go to those spaces? What do people from Tchamba, people from Northern ethnic groups, what did they think about Ewe people doing what they're doing? Which is it's not a subtle portrayal of Northerners. This is a very exaggerated, overdone, intentionally so version of Northernness and foreignness and otherness. So that was a long answer, but hopefully it answered it.

AUDIENCE: Hi. My Name is Sarah Clunis. I am the curator of the African collection at the Peabody. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you for sharing, mediating this cultural knowledge for us today. You've done really, really hard work. And it's really a beautiful, beautiful project that you've given us. It's very poetic.

I have a couple questions. One was the-- how Vodou is practiced in Togo as compared to how it's practiced in Benin and whether or not embodied in these practices that you just spoke about today, whether there are similar spirits like [INAUDIBLE] about things like that. I'm interested in particular.

And then you made a comment about-- you might have to find it in your notes, but it just really stuck with me-- about Vodou performing the body of the enslaved and the abject body. And I would love if you could just maybe either repeat the comment that you made or elaborate on it. I think it's really important.

ELYAN HILL: So in terms of is Vodun practice in Togo similar to Benin, yes. And so all the same. The thing that is interesting is that there are always five or six names for the same spirit. That there will be Sapata is the same as [INAUDIBLE] is the same as a Yoruba name. You have all of these names on names, because people are working across multiple languages. They're working across Ewe and Fon and Minna and Yoruba, borrowing some things from Yoruba. Sometimes even Twi, borrowing things from Twi.

So you have all the same spirits. They just have lots of names. It would sometimes take me months and months that we'd be talking about one thing, and I'd be like, oh, these are the beads for Sapata, Sapata. They'd be like, yeah, that's the same as [INAUDIBLE]. And I'd be like, oh. Oh. And then I remember all these other connections that we made with this other name.

Which is why I started talking about distributed personhood. Because I was trying to understand how Vodou Dan, the serpent, for example, could be in a mound of dirt. They were like, that's his house. But then he's also in people. But then he's also in the apia. So this idea of the personhood isn't stuck in one place, even at one time. At one time, it can be in all these different places.

And so that's part of it. But then the names, the names are so many. Are very much related to culture, but also exchanged amongst different cultures, which tells you how much Vodun travels amongst different ethnic groups. Because they'll incorporate whatever is meaningful. Whether it's from Christianity, from Catholicism, from Yoruba religious practices, specifically. Coming from Ifa, that they'll incorporate what works. So there are definitely lots of overlaps and intersections.

And then in terms of performing the abject body, I know I talk about their feelings of global abjection as a way that Ewe people are understanding what it means to have been wealthy and also to have gained that wealth through the labor of women who remain unacknowledged in their patrilineages. And so there's a sense that we did something that we still have to pay for. We always have to pay for. And that payment is through remembering. It's

Not a payment that you can give a lump sum and say, OK, you're paid off. You can leave us alone now. That it's a payment that goes on for your whole life that Sofivi said often, if I tried to leave Tchamba, Tchamba would follow me. And says, no, you still owe me. You still owe me. So I don't know if that's what you were asking.

But it's an interesting thought about how we think about memorial. How we think about reparations as a process that can end. It's not a process that can end for Vodun practitioners. It's a process that has to keep going. And memorial is also a process that has cycles and seasons and repeats and repeats and repeats. And each repetition, just like with the objects, each repetition has a meaning and a purpose for that time.

Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

ELYAN HILL: Hi.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much.

ELYAN HILL: I can hear you, though.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for the presentation. It was really cool. Actually, I am also a student.

ELYAN HILL: Hi.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

All right. And I had a question about what you just said about distributed personhood.

ELYAN HILL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Because you also mentioned during your presentation the connection between memory and ritual and identity.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: So to my understanding, the Ewe people have this conception of an elsewhere, specifically in the North. I was also wondering, how does the story of the diaspora fit into their ritual? Especially as they served as this middleman between people from the North and the transatlantic slave trade. Yeah, I was just wondering if you could talk more about.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah, that is a great question. Because what I found is that there was almost-- how to say? So they would link Tchamba as an origin for the outpouring of the domestic slave trade. So they would say to me you, as a person from the diaspora, have to learn about Tchamba. Because even you in the Americas, if you're Afro descended, Tchamba can chase you there, too. So you're not exempt.

So they see a kinship. And sometimes the people that I worked with would tell me stories about sometimes Tchamba will go and find people in the Americas because there's a connection. In terms of their feelings about being middlemen, at first I found it interesting, and then it made sense to me that they think of it not in terms of, oh, I feel so bad, but in terms of, what do I owe? What do I owe, and to whom do I owe it?

So it's more about debt and wealth and understanding. With wealth, comes debt. And how do you pay that debt? Then thinking, if I just feel horrible, then that will fix something. That's not really a part of the mentality. That it is about what was gained and what you have to pay for what was gained.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. It was brilliant. OK. Yeah, so I know I have asked you about this.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: --having a conversation with [INAUDIBLE] presentation.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I'm still wondering [INAUDIBLE] so this is a [INAUDIBLE]

ELYAN HILL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: It's still about the ancestors of the Ewe people. And especially the enslaved who [INAUDIBLE] transatlantic. So I'm still wondering how they become ancestors despite that. Because I know to be an ancestor, one has to live a long time and have a befitting burial, right? So [INAUDIBLE]

So that's my bit--

ELYAN HILL: But that's also--

AUDIENCE: There's a possibility of [INAUDIBLE] becoming ancestors.

ELYAN HILL: But I think that's part of the tension, though, is that they're not proper ancestors. And so that's what they're mad about. That's why they're coming back to their descendants to say, you have erased me completely. There's no place for me in this place. Because they made them stop serving their own spirits. When they came from the North, they had to serve the spirits that the Ewe families were serving.

So they can't go back to their own homes. They can't go back to their own lineages. They're cut off from their lineages in the North. So the only descendants they have any connection with are the Ewe ones, because they're mixed families, mixed with enslaving and enslaved. And so part of the debt that's owed is of there was no proper burial. There is no proper commemoration of them. It only exists in the silo space that's peripheralized, marginalized space.

That that's the only place where they're really remembered. Like in the States, how we're having all of these legacies of slavery. You don't have that in Togo. You don't have that acknowledgment publicly, except of the transatlantic slave trade. So of the domestic slave trade, you don't have public acknowledgment. It doesn't show up in festivals, which are public for tourists and for everybody coming from the diaspora.

They're not going to dance Tchamba. They only dance Tchamba as medicine in their homes, basically. So I think it's a good question, because that is the tension. I call them ancestors, meaning that they gave birth to them. But they're not revered as ancestors. The only space where they have some sort of acknowledgment is within Tchamba Yeah. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah, thank you.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. It's very interesting that you also talked about a bad death.

ELYAN HILL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Because that's what got across the same problem. Everyone in the West African context, if you die of any of these diseases-- it used to be smallpox.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: You're not going to be given a decent burial. And you cannot. You won't become an ancestor. And so burial by group, if you do not perform a particular festival, 70-year-old festival, you are not that capable of becoming an ancestor.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: So thank you very much.

ELYAN HILL: Yeah, thank you.

AUDIENCE: I'd like to ask a question.

ELYAN HILL: Please do.

AUDIENCE: This was so fascinating. And I'm really trying to think through even what I want to ask about the idea that a body becomes an altar. But part of what I'm interested in is for women, can any woman's body become an altar? What is the age in which you can experience this co-presence? Does it stop as women age? What are the boundaries around this?

ELYAN HILL: That's a great question. For me, a body becoming an altar, I thought about that more as I reasoned to myself what the altar was. It's a meeting place between a person and a spirit. But also the same objects and items that end up on the stationary altar, whether it's the rings of Tchamba or the beads or the cowries or even the powders that they put on the altar end up also on the body and performance. And a stationary altar does a very different type of work than a dancing altar does.

But in terms of the boundaries, a lot of those are determined by the spirits themselves. Who they choose, by genealogies. So Mamisi Sofivi inherited her spirits from her aunt. I think her paternal aunt. And her grandfather. And so she is one of the people-- not everybody is, but she's one of the people who is considered to have been born with the spirits.

For people like Sofivi, I know for sure that there's a period of confinement where, as a child, she lived within a temple, basically. Within the shrine. She couldn't leave that space. And she had long locked hair. And all of that is a part of being a person who is dedicated from birth to specific families of spirits. But there's no age limit that I know of. But sometimes what I heard-- because for a lot of the younger girls, they said, oh, well, we don't want to do the ceremony for her yet, because they give you a scarification or a tattoo.

And they say, oh, well, she's only five. We don't want to cut her yet. But that's a choice that the elders were making for the child. Even though she'd already been visited, already been cultivating co-presence with the spirits. That she'd already been chosen, essentially. So the limits are based on a lot of times the whims of the spirit.

And a lot of times, people will know that they're dedicated to a specific spirit, because they're ill a lot. So as a child, they're very sick. Or as they get older, they'll experience a lot of illnesses. And depending on what type of illness when they go to seek divination, they'll tell them, oh, that's because this particular spirit is trying to speak to you. Or sometimes mothers of stillborn children-- or especially stillborn twins, the spirits of their children will be speaking to them.

I knew a person who had to be initiated so that she could then initiate the spirits of her children, her deceased children who she had, I think, three stillbirths of twins. So she had the figures made. And all of the twins, even though they're figures called [INAUDIBLE], they were all initiated as well. So they all wore the beads. They all wore the skirt that initiates wear. And she showed me the pictures, the photographs of that.

So it's hard to say, because it's a community of spirits, just as vast as the community of persons. And so when and how a person becomes an altar depends on their relationship with lots of different spirits. If that makes any sense.

AUDIENCE: Is the idea that women's bodies become altars?

ELYAN HILL: No, all peoples bodies can become altars. The reason I focus on women in Tchamba is because they acknowledge that they're specifically thinking about their female ancestors. That it's called Mama Tchamba, grandmother's slave. That it's this acknowledgment of inheritance from women who can't really be acknowledged within the cultural context, like what Rahina was saying. That they're not ancestors that can be acknowledged publicly.

AUDIENCE: So are there any gender differences in the experience of co-presence?

ELYAN HILL: That, I don't know. I do know that there are more women participating in the groups that I was speaking with. And they said that women are more permeable in a sense to the spirit. But that's just a person to person-- that's just anecdotal. So I don't know.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for this amazing presentation. For being here. I actually wanted you to go back to something you said, and I wanted to ask you to maybe rephrase it for me so that I could understand. I want to understand this relationship between Tchamba spirits that can both make you sick but also heal. Right? And I wanted to understand a little bit about the relationship there.

Because I was wondering if what you were saying was, it's I'm making you sick in order to heal this wrong in the past of me not being remembered. I'm wondering what the relation--

ELYAN HILL: Yes. That's one way we could break it down, is that they're making you sick. So you can't pretend you don't know them. And that it's a way of coming and saying, well, I'm still here. I'm still here. And if you don't give me what you owe me, I will take your life. Whether by inches or by feet. It's coming.

So that is a part of the understanding of illness that it to me is a very powerful image of debt as illness. That it's not a debt that you can just ignore and go on with your life and say, I didn't pay them, but it's OK. That it is actually physically making you sick. And I think probably more of us have debts from the past making us sick than we would like to acknowledge.

So I think it's powerful because it's the body. It's not just this idea that it's something that's outside of me that I don't have to deal with until I'm ready. But if we're physically ill we all will find a way to fix that as best we can. And as quickly as we can.

AUDIENCE: Any more questions? If not, I think we'll just say thank you so much for this wonderful--

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Women's Studies and Religion Program.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.