Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha’s Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States offers a Black feminist ethnography that considers “aesthetic, emotional, intimate, and negotiatory labor” as “avenues through which to explore . . . religious innovations, [the] use of fashion and the economic negotiation [in a] Vodou temple” (83). Like Karen McCarthy Brown, Nwokocha turns her attention to Evans’s leadership in Vodou, and more particularly to sartorial acts of identification that explore gender, sexuality, race, lived religion, embodiment, and economic negotiation in the transnational Vodou leadership of Manbo Maude Evans. A Nigerian American, Nwokocha experiences oyibo (172), a word that denotes a lack of belonging. She is too American for her Nigerian cousins, but nonetheless enjoys access to Evans for intimate exchanges like head/hair wrapping (94)—not because she is Nigerian, though, but because she spent hours watching her aunt wrap women’s hair in Sacramento. Nwokocha’s not-exactly-belonging is a strength. The book provides an engaging analysis of the role of adornment in collective practices of practitioners and the making of Evans’s success in Vodou temple leadership in Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Jacmel, Haiti, by a scholar who spent more than a decade observing and participating in Vodou ceremonies in Montreal, New York, Miami, and Port-au-Prince.
In Vodou, as Nwokocha richly redescribes, one dresses, feeds, prepares altars, and sings so that the deities will be present. Adornment in religious studies is an ascendent site to explore expression, performance, and resistance. Unlike works that focus on animal sacrifice or offerings by men, (SCOTUS case of Church of the Lukumi Babaly Aye v City of Hialeah), this book explores women’s roles. Nwokocha asks, what about dressing together? Touching on the ways that religiously motivated travel remakes local, national, and transnational practices and identities, this book describes Vodou as vogue because the body stylized, can be powerful especially in bodies open to the gods and goddesses in a community gathered together against marginalization (10).
What one wears, in this case handmade items, in relationship to African diaspora, in colors of the deities, and regional modesty standards, is about seeing and being seen. “See the outfit, see the deity,” Nwokocha writes (43). Like the flair and pageantry of ballroom culture, cisgender gay men, cisgender, queer and transgender women are more able to traverse gender lines. Women can take on stereotypical masculine aggressiveness, for example. The spirits are “unconcerned” with the gender or sex of the practitioner they inhabit (or mount), the “ethos of Vodou is open” (10). Some practitioners, though, are not unconcerned with the bodies of practitioners. When the author modifies her look by wrapping her hair, applying make-up, and wearing bright colors, she gets happy praise for looking “like a goddess” and is encouraged to be a manbo, a priestess or a female leader in Vodou (81). Changing her look changed others’ perception of her authenticity and authority.
Although White women do not presume to linger in Evans’s dressing room for any significant length of time, practitioners are torn over White people being possessed by deities. Evans takes a practical, therapeutic approach: “If vodou can help them, I don’t see myself saying no” (90). Nwokocha seems to wrestle more with White bodies in African Diasporic spaces than Evans, asking “if you shun the body, do you shun the spirit?” (115). Evans’s “I don’t see myself saying no” is the language of a tactical negotiator. In Nwokocha’s examination, Evans’s financial visibility comes with costs, trade-offs, and ever-shifting compensations. Temple leadership is aesthetic, emotional, even intimate to keep practitioners welcomed, safe, and cared for (the mounted person may need a hand to adjust clothing to restore modesty).
Early on, Nwokocha claims that Vodou doesn’t need redeeming (5) and that the lwa (the spirts of Vodou) are queer (10). But Vodou is often left underexplored in discussions of religious diversity, religious studies courses, and interfaith dialogue. And although it is the case that in Evans’s temples gay men may perform women’s rituals, Ezili Danto (the spirit of love) protects lesbians, and women kiss women, even if possessions can briefly queer gender, embodying the deities does not overturn social heteronormativity. Women, in heteronormative spaces, are given more leewayto express affection ( or dress as a male deity, transgressing or renegotiating gender during a possession. Maude overcomes the hesitancy of a Men’s Warehouse staff to measure her for a suit, to dress as Gede, saying “today I am a man, suit me up!” (38) But men are not afforded the same latitude because the community might interpret their being possessed by a female deity as unmasculine. The author admits that Evans doesn’t claim her temples as queer space. Homophobic patriarchal misogyny impacts ceremonies (12) just as the religious authority of women cannot be “truly reflective of [women’s] power and respect in the world beyond the temple until . . . social realities are changed (164). Privileging belief (xiii, 21) by accepting the practitioners’ claims that the gods speak to them (163), might be disappointing  one desires the nexus of queerness and possession to sustain a critique of sexual and gender stereotypical binaries, but like our author, instead of chasing what is hidden, maybe we should look for what is on display.
Rita Lester is professor of religion and director of gender and sexuality studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
Rita Lester
Date Of Review:
December 1, 2023
