Video: Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live

Full transcript: 

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live. Dona Kimpa Vita and The Foundations of Conjure Feminism, November 17th, 2022.

ANN D. BRAUDE: Good afternoon. I hope you're all enjoying this wonderful Caribbean lunch. And I'm Ann Braude, the director of the Women's Studies and Religion Program. And while you can keep eating, I thought you could keep eating while I give some introductory remarks, and then you'll be ready for today's lecture.

This is our last WSRP lecture for the semester, and our spring term lectures are not scheduled yet, but we'll be in touch, so please look out for those. But today, I'm very happy to introduce today's lecturer, Professor Kinitra Brooks, who holds the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

Kinitra has three books in print-- Searching for Sycorax-- Black Women's Hauntings and Contemporary Horror. Did I mispronounce it? No, I'm OK. OK. Sycorax's Daughters, an edited volume of short horror fiction written by Black women, and The Lemonade Reader, a collection of essays on Beyonce's 2016 audio visual project.

As you can see, Dr. Brooks is someone who crosses all kinds of boundaries-- disciplinary, genre, and continents, as well. And that's what we're going to hear about today, as we hear about the concept she's developing of conjure feminism. She co-edited a special issue of Hypatia-- The Journal of Feminist Philosophy, devoted to the genealogy of the concept of conjure feminism, tracing the genealogy of Black women's intellectual tradition.

And today, she will speak to us about her new work, Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live. Donna Kimpa Vita and The Foundations of Conjure Feminism. Kinitra.

[APPLAUSE]

KINITRA BROOKS: Good afternoon. Thank you, everyone, for coming here today. I have only just arrived stateside from the Vatican and the Propaganda Fide Archives in Rome. My talk focuses on my initial research on Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, and her historical presence and significance, and what I believe to be problematic misreadings about her life and legacy. Please note that these original documents were translated into English at my behest, and I welcome your suggestions, reading recommendations, and even your push back, as I am venturing into new and exciting territory.

But before we begin, I would like to sincerely thank the people who are responsible for bringing me here. I want to thank the Women's Studies and Religion Program here at Harvard Divinity School. I would like to thank Tracy Wall, who has been crucial to my success here in the program. She saved my life many times.

I would also like to thank my fellow members of the program, Tulasi, Xerxes, Rahina, Jordan, and Eliane. You all have been so warm and welcoming to me. And finally, I would like to thank Ann Braude for bringing us all together and providing us the time, space, and support to develop and grow as scholars. I am forever grateful to everyone here at the program and encourage many others to apply. And so we begin.

I'm sorry, we cannot let you handle those documents. I stared at the archivist in shock, incredulous at the notion that I couldn't handle Father Bernardo de Gallo's in-depth account of the rise and fall of Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita. I had traveled to Rome in search of Kimpa Vita, as my research led me to believe she was the mother of conjure feminism, a theory I was developing based on the spiritual practices of diasporic Black women.

I was already exhausted from climbing up the steep Janiculum Hill to the Pontifical Urban University, only to find myself extremely lost. I spent the next two hours in search of the Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide, looking high and low with each person I encountered, pointing vaguely to a garden area and saying, "lá" or there.

I finally found a worker who led me into the Hill itself, down into what looked to be a truck delivery or storage area. Everyone had told me the general direction to go in, but no one told me I had to look under the garden in order to find it. And so I took the act of looking under as a lesson when I encountered the next blockade to finding Kimpa Vita, which was the willful removal of her documentation by the Propaganda Fide from their archives and the refusal to allow me to see the original documents.

I was never given a sufficient reason as to why her documents were unavailable, only that they were in another room under glass. In the end, I could not go through the archivist, but I could go under. "I need to see these papers," I implored. "I came all the way from the US to find Dona Beatriz here. What do you need me to do so that I can get to see them?"

And so under manifested as a set of high quality copies of the documents, even though there were far more decrepit documents available to researchers than that of the papers I sought. I recognized that the recovery of so many women's lives, particularly those from actively marginalized communities, required the act of going under.

Later that evening, I wondered aloud with a colleague, how much of a threat did Kimpa Vita and her ideas present to the Catholic Church that they make her documents so difficult to access? Further, the present resistance in sharing the original documents with researchers causes me to ponder, what threat does Kimpa Vita continue to hold?

The life of Dona Kimpa Vita demonstrates her continued commitment to healing the fractures in her community and in her people as she came to for in a time of deep political turmoil and economic strife. A series of civil wars had ravaged the Kongo Kingdom, as the capital city of Sao Paulo had been abandoned to the elements, while multiple Kongolese noblemen vie to take the throne.

The continuous battles had a deleterious effect on everyone, but most especially the poor, who were without land and title. There was a continual hunt for bodies, be it for soldiers in battle and are those who enslave and sell to the Portuguese or the Dutch for guns and ammunition. The two major factions vying for her throne in the first decade of the 18th century were led by King Pedro IV and Pedro Constantino da Silva, known as Kibenga.

Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita was born a noble woman between 1684 and 1686 in a small town in a Valley of the Konda Mountain Range. All of this happens. She dies between 20 and 22 years of age, so all of this is happening in two decades about.

She was baptized as a baby and considered herself a Catholic woman of deep faith. So much so that she was eventually possessed by Saint Anthony, becoming divine in human form. Simultaneously, as a spiritually gifted young girl, she trained in her Indigenous Kongo religion to become a nganga a spiritual leader priestess medium with special access to the spirit world. What is especially noteworthy in her journey to gain spiritual expertise is that she specifically trained to become a nganga marinda, whose special tasks were to address social problems, as much as individual ones.

John Thornton, the primary English speaking scholar on Kimpa Vita, insists that nganga marinda was a highly respected position because it was both socially-oriented and served the common good. Kimpa Vita's religious simultaneity is what attracts me to her as a primogeniture of conjure feminism, for it hinges on women who function as what I term Christian plus, women who identify as Christian, while simultaneously participating, even leading, religious practices that are indigenous to West Africa.

Thornton insists that Dona Beatriz since ceases practicing as a nganga, for she came to believe it was evil, as the Capuchin monks descended upon the small town in which she lived. This is an example of what I believe to be a fundamental misreading of Kimpa Vita as she exists within the European archive.

Thornton penned the 1998 monograph The Kongolese Saint Anthony-- Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684 to 1706. Other English language scholars have written shorter articles, and Anne Hilton speaks of the Antonian Movement in the 1985 publication, The Kingdom of Kongo. There are several volumes in French and Italian that are currently being translated, including the work of Teobaldo Filesi.

The majority of today's readings come from translations of the archived reports of two Capuchin monks, Fathers Bernardo de Gallo and Lorenzo da Lucca, contemporaries of Kimpa Vita that were instrumental in her capture and death. Here I perform a racially gendered reading of Dona Kimpa Vita, a reading sorely missed from previous treatments of her life and work.

My reading is specifically influenced by a Black feminist theology, grounded in a politic of refusal for white supremacists and patriarchal Christian hegemonies. In the archives, there is no thought to Dona Beatriz's complexity and possible duplicity in how she manages her status as a nganga. Why would she not simply say one thing and do another? One does not cease to become a nganga, a religious vow to a spirit, Akita taken after a complex initiation, which involves dying or going into a trance-like state only to be resurrected as a possessed being with a unique access to the spirit world.

I suggest that Dona Beatriz never ceased her life as a nganga, because she neither renounces nor gets rid of her Akita for it lives inside of her. Even Thornton slightly contradicts himself on Dona Beatriz's status as a nganga, later writing, "Her sickness, death, and resurrection as Saint Anthony returned her to life as a nganga, albeit one with a more elaborate mission than most ngangas, or even the initiates of the composite society from which many elements of her teaching were drawn, for how can she return to a practice that she never left."

Dona Beatriz's possession by Saint Anthony mirrors her possession ceremony as a nganga. According to archival text, it is 1704 and she is on her deathbed, ill with fever, in and out of consciousness and beset with visions. Saint Anthony appears to her dressed as a Capuchin monk saying-- these are words taken from Thornton's book. And as I'm going through the archive, I am determining what sort of creative license has been taken. And so these words did not specifically come from Saint Anthony, though I am using them here. And as I go more and more to the archive, I'll become much more nuanced in it.

"I am Saint Anthony, firstborn son of the faith and of Saint Francis. I have been sent from God to your head to preach to the people. You are to move the restoration of the Kingdom of Congo forward, and you must tell all who threaten you that dire punishments from God await them."

After which, the vision of the saint moved toward her, entered her into her head, and merged with her. She felt herself recover. Her strength returned. There is a reason why this possession sounds so similar to her ceremony to become a nganga. The ontology of possession is both possible and common within Kongolese cosmology. And it was an occurrence and existence that was already familiar to her.

My first methodological approach to recovering Dona Beatriz is one of belief. I choose to believe her. I believe that she was possessed by Akita and Saint Anthony. I believe that she occupied both this world and the spirit world.

How does the archive of Dona Beatriz change when we believe her witness? How must we see her when we accept that she is divinely human? Saidiya Hartman questions, how does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and is anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter history of the human, as the practice of freedom.

I believe the first step is to believe the truths of the women of the archive. If we can believe that they experience pain and compassion, love and freedom, how can we not believe that they experience spiritual awakening. The sensation of their bodies being filled with spirit and possessing a knowledge heretofore unbeknownst to them. There exists a willful loss of our humanity in these archives, coupled with a simultaneous denial of her divinity. I rectify that by actively believing in her lived experiences.

The reality of Kimpa Vita's possession was evident even to her fiercest enemy, father Bernardo de Gallo, who recounts on their first meeting. Now this is translated directly from the archive. These are his words.

"On seeing that woman and considering how she walked on the tips of her toes without touching the ground with the rest of her feet, how she swayed her hips and the whole of her body, as if she were a snake holding her neck stiff, as if she were possessed, with her eyes bulging out. And finally speaking like one in a frenzy or a delirium, so that I could understand little of what she was saying. Disorderly and ungainly in all her actions. I confess in truth that I did not at all believe these were mere simulations, but that she was also possessed by the devil."

Though there is clearly a fundamental disagreement with exactly who is possessing Dona Beatriz, there is no denial of the reality of her possession. I will continue to closely read her possession in its spiritual significance as I continue in my studies of the archive.

But I do want to highlight this multiplicity, having worried the boundaries between Abrahamic religions, such as Christianity, and the indigeneity of West African religions. This ontological reality coexists in Dona Kimpa Vita, as it later would in her diasporic descendants and spiritual inheritors through conjure feminism.

To this end, my second methodological approach to finding Kimpa Vita in the documentation of her life and spiritual journey reflects the physicality of finding her that day on Janiculum Hill, to look under to the gaps and the interstices Hortense Spillers and Patricia Hill Collins insist Black women exist and work within.

I believe that Dona Kimpa Vita has been fundamentally misread in previous criticisms in crucial ways that have denied her what Avery Gordon refers to as her complex personhood. Marisa Fuentes speaks of recovering the stories of enslaved Black women from the archive by drawing attention to the nature of the archives, by changing the perspectives of a document's author to that of the subject. Questioning the archives' veracity and filling out minuscule fragmentary mentions or the absence of evidence with spatial and historical context that allows historical interpretation to shift the subject's viewpoint.

I want to be clear that Dona Kimpa Vita was never enslaved. She was born a free noblewoman and burned as a heretic by the Catholic Church through the proxy of the Kongolese monarchy. But her presence in the archive is still that of a subjugated person, noble or not, divine or not. Dona Beatriz must be rescued from the arrangements of power that occlude her very existence.

Certain scholars choose to hinge their readings on the overwhelming casual racial violence of the archive. They often obsess over the disdain for the African that permeates the early modern archives we dissect, but I refuse to do so. It is here that I employ my third and final methodological approach to the archive-- not studying them white folks.

Sociologist, Zandria F. Robinson, speaks of Black Southern folks employing the method of supplanting emotional reactions to everyday racialized injustice. This is not a denial of white supremacy. I acknowledge the effects and the realities of its cruelties. This is simply an act of choice not to center it. To approach white supremacy with clever wit, strategic subversion, and desibilance.

I will use the words of white folks when they choose to be decent towards the women of the archive, yet not be surprised by their violence towards these very same women. I willfully decrease the importance and the weight of the witness of whiteness. I want to highlight that Dona Kimpa Vita's story is told by various Capuchin monks, men who have no intimacies with women, and missionaries that demean the peoples of the Kongo, as well as their Indigenous traditions.

So many of their words reek of disdain. And you see that. We say, that woman, or they refer to her as the false Saint Anthony. It's very demeaning how they speak about her. But I refuse to center that in my recovery of Dona Beatriz because I believe that neither the lack of accounting for it nor the obsessive combing through it fails to offer Dona Beatriz the necessary components for the complex personhood I see in her archival rendering.

To this end, I would like to take the last portion of my talk to push back at the misreadings of Dona Kimpa Vita's last days. Previous depictions of Dona Beatriz, particularly Thornton's, failed to acknowledge her savvy in maneuvering political factions to her own ends. She travels the countryside, gathering followers from different parts of the [INAUDIBLE] River Valley and amongst the heels of the Konda Mountains.

Little of this distinguishes her from the many contemporaneous prophets that occupied the Kongo. There was an old woman who witnessed and prophesied on behalf of the Blessed Virgin. Thornton refers to her as Apollonia Mafuta, while Father da Lucca gives her the her name as Fumaria. Fumaria in turn is pardoned by Father de Gallo, as he declares her insane and therefore not a threat to the church.

Dona Beatriz could not be so easily dismissed. Not only does she gather followers of her unique Catholic practice she referred to as Antonianism, in record numbers and across social classes as King Pedro's own wife was an enthusiastic acolyte. Dona Beatriz becomes a clear threat when she begins to ordain her most ardent followers, calling them her Angels, to go out into the countryside and proselytize.

Father da Lucca recounts a story of going into the countryside to baptize children, and no one would offer up their child to be baptized by him. He was repeatedly told that there were no children to be baptized. Clearly, a lie, as the people in the area are now Antonians, following Kimpa Vita's preachings that diminish the importance of baptism. It was now clear that she was in direct competition with the Catholic Church for arms and souls. She had created her own church bureaucracy.

Simultaneously, she became a political threat to the Kongolese government. Pedro IV had declared his self the King over a fractured land, even as he remained in hiding from his enemies. He had already met with Dona Beatriz, bringing her before him and Father de Gallo, who was eager to destroy her, violently if necessary.

The Gallo was held back by King Pedro, who recognized the political volatility of the situation. Knowing Dona Beatriz's demands for a unified Kongo Kingdom, joined together under one king, chosen by Angels in the restored capital city of South Salvador could present a threat to his already tenuous hold on the monarchy. And what she was preaching and she was saying that the true king would walk to Sao Paulo, and Angels would descend down because there were so many people vying to become king. And Angels would descend down and crown the true king.

And so she gained political power because folks were so disheartened. And not just disheartened, they were threatened by these continuous civil wars that were just ravaging their lives. They had no stability. And what she offered was stability.

King Pedro IV does not openly support her, nor does he choose to move against her, as he allows her to leave without punishment. Dona Beatriz and her many followers ultimately abscond to the abandoned capital city of Sao Paulo, almost daring the King to come and claim his throne.

Her decision to settle in the capital city presented another unique problem for him, as she also gained a shrewd political ally in King Pedro's chief contender for the throne, Kabinga. The largest omission from the archives, as well as previous criticisms centering Dona Beatriz, is the failure to recognize her political genius and prowess. Continuously, critics have underestimated her intelligence and abilities at interlocking spiritual and political savvy.

Thornton refers to Dona Beatriz as politically naive, while Benjamin Hendricks proclaims that a woman who skillfully subverted both the Catholic Church and the Kongolese monarchy for years had simply gotten herself into a complicated situation that was probably above the capacity of what the young woman could handle.

Dona Beatriz uses her spiritual status to push these two powerful men to her bidding. She made promises to neither one, was aware that each had spies embedded amongst her followers, yet still she preached political unity and the unique blessings that would restore the power and majesty of the Kongo Kingdom. Dona Beatriz was tying the men in to political knots, unable to act decisively, so as not to endure the wrath of her followers. Subjects they would need to rule over to unify the Kongo.

Simultaneously, there was the ontological threat her possession and subsequent preaching presented to Father de Gallo, as well as the spiritual competition for souls she presented to Father da Lucca. The situation had become untenable, and Father de Gallo's pleas to King Pedro IV for the capture of Kimpa Vita finally accomplished their goal. King Pedro reached the decision that Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita must die.

In hiding, Dona Beatriz is ultimately found in the bush, having recently given birth to a son. Her follower, lover, and child's father, Joao Barro, was also present along with the young servant girl. Previous critics have painted Dona Beatriz as repentant and defeated in her capture. She is described as feeling shame for what she had come to perceive as her great sins. Thornton even puts the words into her mouth, "My death will be penance for my sins, and, well, I deserve it."

What we're seeing here is Thornton and Hendricks and others believe she is repentant because she broke the vow of chastity in having a child. And I'm sort of working out and digging because chastity and virginity is not highly prized during this time in this region. So I'm working on doing more research here, because it just doesn't make sense that she has shame around having the child. It's not fully making sense to me, and I'm digging more into it.

Lorenzo da Lucca's accounting of the events reads as follows, "The young woman made her confession with much emotion and grief, showing she deeply repented of her past life and error she had made, trusting herself to the will of God. She declared her death was penance for the sins that so deserved it. What does death matter to me, she said. This is a step I will have to take some day. My body is nothing but a bit of Earth, and it is of no account to me sooner or later it will turn to dust, so it's better to die now when I recognize my errors than live and fall into my past blunders through the influence of the devil and damn myself."

I would ask that you entertain me for a moment, as I conjure my own reading of what is happening in this scene. I am actively engaging in what Saidiya Hartman describes as creative disorder, a weapon against the institutional fictions and violent abstractions authorized as fact and truth. A racially gendered reading, one that engages the historical poetics and sees beyond the supposed defeat of Dona Beatriz, takes into account her previous political abilities and remembers that she is a mother.

She has recently given birth and has yet to fully heal, nor has she participated in many of the usual practices celebrating the birth of a new child, while simultaneously bringing the community of women together to ensure the mother's physical health, as well as the mother's mental and emotional transition into her new role as a caregiver. All of this was absent as she gave birth in hiding. She and Barro had been sentenced to death, but so had her son, Antonio.

Dona Beatriz is a woman subtly campaigning to save the life of her child. Conjure feminism allows us for a reading of her humanity, a reading that accounts for the realities of mothering and a heart unwilling to let her son die for his mother's political miscalculations. I insist that this is why she is so compliant. It is why she is eager to confess her sins and willing to be baptized again.

Father da Lucca describes her as using what seem to be carefully weighed words. Dona Beatriz knows an open plea for her child's life may not suit her purpose. It could go either way with the possibility of exacerbating their cruelty to Antonio just to spite her. But becoming the docile servant of God, willing to abjure her sins in front of the priests, the judge, and any crowd that would gather, has a distinct possibility of opening the path of light to life for her son.

Dona Beatriz, to her bearing, gives clues to her machinations. Though led in chains, she still wears the sanda crown that denotes her status as a faithful Antonian as she is sentenced to death with her son in her arms. Dona Beatriz was arrested in early May and was due to be burned at the stake along with Barro on July 2nd. She knew she had to act quickly to save the life of her child.

Her maneuvering worked. After declaring, "What does death matter to me," Dona Beatriz draws tears from the eyes of her torturers, including Fathers de Gallo and da Lucca. In the end, they console her and tell her to put herself in Gods hands. And two sentences later, da Lucca is baptizing young Anthony, though he defies her wishes and changes his name to Jerome.

The request for baptism works, endearing the young Antonio to Father da Lucca. On the day of their execution, da Lucca interrupts the King in order to save the child. When presented with the plea from father Lorenzo to spare the life of baby Antonio, King Pedro balked, referring to the child as fruit from a putrid and infected plant.

Da Lucca fights for the life of the innocent child. "In the name of the Son of God, crucified for love of us, I ask that you save the life of this innocent being." The child is saved, as da Lucca brings the good news to Dona Beatriz, and he later consoles her that her son has been spared and she should have no fear. Not soon after, Dona Kimpa Vita is burned alive alongside Barro.

I believe that Dona Kimpa Vita's journey concretizes her as the mother of conjure feminism. I want to take this opportunity to examine the foundational tendrils that led to conjure feminism, ultimately manifesting as the surety and spiritually-based political action that defines US Southern Black women.

What I am most concerned with is how the intertwining of Indigenous African beliefs and Christianity by Black women provide a source of spiritual and political power. Their woman-centered spiritual beliefs centered systems become politically dangerous. This sets a precedent that becomes a pattern throughout the diaspora, a pattern my book will explore, as I highlight specific instances in which Black women's complex spiritualities presented as a political problem for both social, political, and religious powers.

Conjure feminism is a meditation on Black women who are a threat to the status quo. To those in power that continue to benefit from the subjugation of others. It is an epistemic framework grounded in the syncretic cosmologies of conjure that provides the intellectual and spiritual strength for a Black feminist politic.

Conjure feminism is rooted in the US Black South. A spiritual practice that intertwines Christianity and traditional African religious practices, developed by enslaved Black women, and sustained by their descendants, ebbing and flowing through contemporary times, is an [INAUDIBLE] concept that pre-existed and now coexists, often as an open secret, within the Black church.

Conjure feminism is a set of ethical demands that derives from West African based and Christian practices and are grounded in the ontological potential of the quotidian Black American life. It is more than a simple taxonomy. It is a rematriation project, a method of approaching Black women that is specifically regional, spiritual, and political. It is a manifestation of how Black women approach their lives, interweaving the micro and macro cosmic elements, ordering things in such a manner that even the smallest action, such as the sweeping of a floor, can have larger metaphysical implications.

I have been working on the concept of conjure feminism, and I'm going to present all eight elements here. The first four elements were developed in conversation with my co-editors of the Hypatia Journal. The last four are what I've expanded into, and that's what I'm specifically doing.

The following eight elements of conjure feminism are inspired by Katrina Hazzard-Donald's eight elements of the Hoodoo religion. And it pushes towards defining and refining Black Southern women spiritually grounded approach to their personal and communal lives.

I am obsessed with seeing Black Southern women as intellectuals. And I think there's an eligibility of these women, so people who don't admire and note the complexity of how they think, and how they maneuver, and how they create their worlds. So that's what conjure feminism is really attempting to do.

There are consequences for your actions is the first element. This system of ethics demands a re-imagining of what is right or wrong. Morality both shifts and remains steadfast within the communal space. What stands firm is that there are material, communal, and spiritual consequences for one's actions that cause harm.

Death is not an ending, but a transition. Conjure feminism operates from a hyper-awareness of the conflation of time, as the past, present, and future coexist together, building upon [INAUDIBLE] insistence that the dead are not dead. One is beholden to the ancestors, as well as to future generations. There is a sustained rejection of the linearity of time, for time is conflated and cyclical. Tanisha C. Ford tweeted, "Time is a concept, a suggestion. It is malleable, ductile, pliable, flexible. It is textured and capacious." Individualism is not discouraged, but communalism is privileged.

Next, the spirit work is necessary for our physical, emotional, and psychological health. The spiritual framework of conjuring is not associated with any specific religion, but is a network of various spiritual practices, grounded in the veneration of and communication with the dead, as seen through the ancestors. Our secrets save our lives. and our ways of knowing.

Hazzard-Donald speaks of a paradigm of silence as the primary vehicle in which secrecy was expressed, modified, and further defined that demarcated the lives of enslaved Africans in their interactions with whites. One must fully embrace the double pronged nature of conjure. Conjure is a practice of both healing and harm that involves a mimetic use of medicinal and toxic substances.

In this vain, using herbs to poison thus killing and/or maiming the enemy is a valid offensive defensive political move against white domination. I'm obsessed with Black women who kill and poison people. It worries sometimes the people I date, but I like it.

Spirit possession is a valid ontology and a crucial tool for passing down lost and/or hidden knowledge. There is a sacred nature to spirit possession. Spirits as ancestors, saints, orisha, and loa come down to the earthly plane to give prophecy, offer counsel, and even more importantly, to pass down knowledge. This knowledge is a powerful, yet unacknowledged, epistemic tool available to practitioners.

This is me actively pushing back against folks saying that all was lost in the Middle Passage. That we have nothing to connect us to ourselves, and that we are socially and legally dead. Because death is a transition. We don't believe that death is the end, so that upends that argument.

A politic of refusal regarding white Christianity and toxic patriarchies. There has been a discussion of what Black Southern politics of refusal looks like. Conjure feminism both genders this politic, while simultaneously placing it within spiritual practice. There is a distinct celebration and privileging of Africanity and womanhood in Black Christianity. There is a dogmatic belief in practicing Christianity on one's own terms, based on one's personal relationship with God.

This is why I believe Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita is so vital to the study of diasporic women and their faith journeys. Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita served God on the terms set by their unique relationship, one that manifested as spirit possession by Saint Anthony, even as she remained a nganga marinda, committed to healing her fractured community. And I firmly believe that it is only through the recovery of the complex personhood of Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita that we can finally understand and fully understand the unceasing trajectory of spirit work that originated in West Africa and manifests in US Southern Black womanhood. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

ANN D. BRAUDE: So we have some time for questions after this remarkable conversation. And I think there is a microphone. Yeah, let's see. So we can pass that microphone, if there's any questions. Yeah, thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much, Kinitra. My question is a lot about how you're able or how you're working through the ability to decenter whiteness in archives that are almost exclusively from the perspective of patriarchal whiteness. And also how language and translation functions within that. What are you hoping to do to be able to push back against some of those archives?

Because I'm thinking specifically about in my work there's a lot of-- I work in Togo-- and so there's French language used to describe Indigenous religion. And a lot of times what I see is that the French language itself doesn't know how to talk about Indigenous religious practices, people, hierarchies. Some of the words used to describe priests are like charlatan, that's a French word for an Indigenous priest, or words used for God objects will be [NON-ENGLISH], things like that, that don't reflect at all what those things are, so I'm just curious to hear more about how you're doing that in your archival work.

KINITRA BROOKS: So the accounts of de Gallo and da Lucca are written in Italian. What's happening is I am working very closely with my translator, and we are constantly in conversation. Dr. Jake Wilkinson, who is amazing. We are constantly in conversation about what are the implications of this word? What's going on between this word choice?

There are some words she's choosing to use over past translations from other folks and things like that because we're in conversation with each other. And because of the context, specifically looking for it. But there really isn't anything that is even from the Kongolese point of view. There's one letter from King Pedro IV, I believe.

Because Kongolese folks they were learning, they could read and write, and all of these things, well educated, we just don't have the documentation from them. So I think that me working from a status of belief and in believing her changes the dynamic because so many do not believe her. And in a way, I am taking her side.

It's a bias, subjectivity, whatever, I don't care. Because I don't believe that anyone has stuck up for her in the previous readings and treatment of her work and of her preaching and of her teachings.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for this very, very brilliant presentation.

KINITRA BROOKS: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: I'm happy I'm here. One or two questions or issues. One has to do with the starting point, in terms of the methodology belief. I'm happy now that maybe listening to professor of English, accepting and adopting that, I can also consider talking about belief in similar context in the study of some aspects of [INAUDIBLE] religion. I'm doing a work on the story of a 96-year-old medicine man in West Africa.

I wonder what your take is on that. Because when the word is used in religion, it has certain meaning. I did my graduate school in the 70s when phenomenology was the most important, both method and theory, which is close to that. Simply means that we enter the field with a mind of conviction. That we want to present it in a very truthful manner.

[INAUDIBLE] devotees of the tradition will say, they would know this is exactly what we're talking about. Because not just a method, it is also by extension a theory. And if you do phenomenology very well, it's as good as saying that you believe. Well the crisis for people like us who is also [INAUDIBLE] is that we know [INAUDIBLE] and we struggle with, how do we present it to the Western audience. We [INAUDIBLE] believe [INAUDIBLE] that this is real. So that's one thing I think you may want to think about.

And so the second thing that makes it very, very fascinating to me is that you have helped us to understand the minds of these Catholic priests and the missionaries at this [INAUDIBLE] Capuchin in Kongo. They were the ones that influenced the selection of [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] chose because they wanted to use them. So what I think I'm hearing you say is that they forced her to confess. They were involved in false confessions. They are worse than the police that we're dealing with today.

So somehow you have to find a way of dealing with that. I mean, [INAUDIBLE] said not [INAUDIBLE] people of God, but these folks are very unholy. The entire archives in Latin America, in Asia, these are the things we are reading. They were close to being criminals. Thank you very much.

KINITRA BROOKS: Thank you for that. That's very helpful. Yeah and I struggle particularly with de Gallo, who's just mean and hateful in his language. And that's why I had to even not just in respecting her, but for my own mindset, say, I'm not going to study, but I have to draw this boundary with him. Because he's just such a mean and hateful little man. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Kinitra, I'm so fascinated by the Christianity plus idea, which seems to help us link the trajectory that you're drawing if conjure feminism from the Kongo and to the [INAUDIBLE]. And I wonder if I wonder if you could say a bit more about those two things, both about what you mean by Christianity plus and why it's just how you're configuring that term. But also about how you connect the dots between the Kongo and conjure feminism in the [INAUDIBLE].

KINITRA BROOKS: I'll take the second question first. After she was killed, she had thousands of followers. They were enslaved and dispersed to the Americas. So what folks are tracing, and folks like Thornton are tracing, insurrections by her followers are their kids. So some of her followers have been connected to the Stono Rebellion. And I'm saying that her ideas dispersed.

And that's where we're going, particularly to parts of Louisiana, parts of the Caribbean, and those sorts of things. And I'm also following the spiritual practice of Kongolese spiritual practices, and how they move throughout the Caribbean and influence some of the South, and New Orleans, and the surrounding area, which is where I eventually end up.

As for terms of Christian plus, that's what I came up to describe myself in my own Christian practice, actually. Because I identify as Christian, and I also practice Indigenous African religions. So I needed a way to keep and create and center my witness as a child of God who also practices these things, and not seeing them as a conflict with each other. So that's my own personal thing, so I came up with that.

People would be like, what are you, who are you? And it's like, I'm Christian plus. That's what I am. That's what I do. Oh, and this gentleman here, I saw your hand, sir.

AUDIENCE: So I have a question about [INAUDIBLE].

KINITRA BROOKS: At the bottom.

AUDIENCE: I think it's on now. Thank you, Kinitra, for that extraordinarily generative talk. I mean, it was brilliant. It linked up so many things in my head as well, as what you've been talking about.

But I want to follow on Jacob's question because I think that hits at something. Because you made a pivot in your talk, talking about [INAUDIBLE]. Then you suddenly move to yourself. And you say, I choose to believe her.

I want you to think with us of inhabitation. Because there seems to be something about spirit crossing, inhabiting bodies. You say the dead are not dead, right? They're inhabiting something, and you're inhabiting the archives. Dona Vita inhabiting and threatening the church.

I think I agree with Jacob that the troubling belief is a good idea in your particular case. And I'm wondering if you would think productively about habitation, inhabiting. Because belief is I am convinced by, but habitation is, I exist and therefore certain things are revealed to me, which is quite a different kettle of fish.

KINITRA BROOKS: I like that. Thank you so much.

AUDIENCE: Well, I found this really fascinating, too. The notion of conjure feminism is powerful. And yes, generative. This isn't really doing anything. OK.

I am wondering, in keeping with a couple of the other questions, if you find yourself working the distinction between morality and literacy. The archive is, by definition, written down. Yet you speak of secrets and the importance of secrets. And the secret secrets are so often held in oral tradition very carefully, not written down.

And I'm certain many of the traditions that feed into conjure feminism are traditionally oral traditions. And my sense from my own work is that once language begins to be written down in a formalized writing system, it becomes much more amenable to thinking of language as serving a representational function. We use our words to say what the world is, to figure out what the world is, to represent it.

But oral tradition, peoples, as divergent and diverse as they are, that there is much more a readiness to feel the efficacy of the spoken word, the agency of the word, word magic itself. Words used to conjure, to invoke, to call oneself into the presence of the present moment or the presence of that mountain or this river, rather than to be representing the mountain or the river as if from outside. So wondering if you're engaging that edge at all.

KINITRA BROOKS: Yeah, and [INAUDIBLE] and I were talking about this in the immediacy. And I'm really going to be looking at the concept of possession, and that's why I find Kimpa Vita-- so the immediacy of you must be there to hear the witness, and you must be there to experience the prophecy. And not everyone is possessed and stays possessed, like Kimpa Vita does. Many times or more often it's more fleeting, right? It happens to someone, the spirit comes down, they're down for 15 minutes or a couple of hours, and then they go.

And also many times these are happening in secret ceremonies. So of having the access to that knowledge and what that means, while also respecting the secret. And I think that that has to be a very careful line that is respected. And I also think going back to some of the things that Jacob was saying, there are some things that I'm simply not going to explain to the Western audience. One, it's not their business, but two, I can't do that and still be ethical to the work that I'm doing.

Many of those secrets have saved lives and continue to do so. And I must respect that. There's a question here.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much, Dr. Brooks. I didn't know anything about Dona Beatriz, and so this was fascinating to learn. I'm curious on this. We've been kind of troubling the same waters in different ways. I, too, have been resting with your statement that your first methodological turn is to believe her and her witness.

I also respect that there are people-- I come from practical theology, so I'm speaking from complete ignorance as to the world of religious studies. But I imagine that there are those who might critique that methodological turn really just as a mask for their own racist, or sexist, or colonial dismissal of her altogether. So we're not talking about those folks, because we ain't studying them white people. It's like, I get that.

But within the conversation partners that you are engaged with, do take seriously, the people who you want to be talking to, I understand the ethical response when you said, I choose to believe her because it's a part of your-- you talked about how so many people haven't and nobody has stuck up for her. But is there a way that you could imagine someone that you want to be talking to who would still wrestle or have a problem with that methodological turn? How might that critique be framed in a way you would take seriously and feel like you need to respond to, and what would be your response?

I know what my response would be as a theologian, but within the world of religious studies, what would be your response? And this is really I'm not fishing for anything. I really don't know what that conversation is like in your circles.

KINITRA BROOKS: I'm an English Professor. But I'm going into new waters here, but I think that that's a good critique question. I don't have an answer for that, but you've pushed me to work on one. Yeah, thank you for that.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much, Kinitra. It is a fascinating lecture. I have a small question about Black women that kill. I'm also fascinated by Black women that kill, but not necessarily in a positive way.

So you showed us the elements of conjure feminism, and the first one, if I can remember correctly, is there are consequences for action. So I'm thinking about justice. And specifically, if I'm wrong, [INAUDIBLE] can correct me, that in African traditional religions there is no concept of justice after death. We've talked about this, I think.

KINITRA BROOKS: Yeah, we've talked about this before, yeah.

AUDIENCE: So are they killing their oppressors to bring about justice? I know in Islam, for instance, and other Abrahamic religions, some people have that patience when they are mistreated, harmed, on the thought that after death there will come [INAUDIBLE].

KINITRA BROOKS: We'll give justice, yes.

AUDIENCE: Exactly. So are they killing here because there's no concept of justice that will come? What's the consequence of the act of killing?

KINITRA BROOKS: Well, what I'm thinking of, and I'm thinking this through. And I really think that these are good, Christian, God-fearing women who believe in Christ. But there are certain things that push them to a point, and certain injustices such as enslavement, such as subjugation, such as sexual assault. Things that push them past the point of, I'm not going to wait on Jesus to give me this justice. This is what I think is going on.

AUDIENCE: And what would be the consequence for that action?

KINITRA BROOKS: And I don't know. I think that there's an acceptance of there will be consequences. And I will have to answer to God for this. And I'm willing to answer to God for this. That there are just some actions that are so egregious that women are pushed beyond that point.

And that's just what I suspect is happening. I haven't fully found evidence of that, but that's what I think. Just in case, right? You might not use your little pistol. But if something happened, you might have to take out your pistol. That was very Southern Black woman of me. It's good to have it in your pocket, because you never when you'll need it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KINITRA BROOKS: Of course, please.

AUDIENCE: The question is that it's not that there's no sense of justice in Indigenous tradition. It was a different kind of justice.

KINITRA BROOKS: Agreed, I think so, yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] wants to find out what happened in that moment. As this points to Floyd's death. When you look out over the murder scene, [INAUDIBLE] those who kill for it. There's always the notion of [INAUDIBLE] this worldly proximate justice and salvation.

[INAUDIBLE] me if I'm poisoned by someone. My people look at that how [INAUDIBLE]. It would never allow [INAUDIBLE] to take place without their own recourse of revenge, which is very, very important. What happens in Islam and Christianity, my sister, is that those girls are spraying judgment until they get to [NON-ENGLISH] or to heaven. After they had enjoyed themselves and done everything yet, and oppressed everybody, and killed, because they believe that delegates will not [INAUDIBLE] or cause-- there'll be no revenge. That is very important.

This is one of the [INAUDIBLE] crisis. We're just two monotheistic religions. So I like your position of belonging to [INAUDIBLE]. Thank you.

KINITRA BROOKS: Lord, my mama talking about me right now. I know she is, Jesus.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

[APPLAUSE]

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

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College