A conversation with Ashanti Dinah Orozco

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ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for tuning in to the Africa multiple cluster of Excellence at the University of biroid today it's our pleasure to receive here with us Ashanti Dina Orozco Airport from Barranquilla in Colombia but also a student for studying PhD at the University of Harvard in the U.S Ashanti has published a collections of poems and her most prominent work is la semias de Montu and at the same time she has also published a very numerous articles on the theme of African diaspora as africanity in general so today we are going to have a discussion with Ashanti on her poetry on her world view about the African diaspora and about the African dashboard memory and the connection with the continent so actually I have a few questions for you so we're going to have this dialogue for 20 minutes and I will begin with a very simple question for every writer the question why do you write is quite simple but I've noticed uh doing research in Latin America for a number of years now that it's this question is not as simple as it is yeah because of the historical uh situation of the African diaspora so let me ask you why do you write okay good morning today is a pleasure to be here with the invitation of my brother uh gave me okay I'm so glad to be here in Germany this is the first time I I can't hear in Europe so it was a great trip it was a great travel to cross the oceans and to be here um this is a very important question that signifies myself as a African women and from the diaspora you know what I mean it's very important to locate myself into a meaning of a standpoint that I'm I consider myself um as a writers who concerns about the African philosophy traditions as a practitioner of Santeria palomayombe and whose worries about all these ancestors uh foreign of symbols that you know that protect myself so I'm writing to discuss uh my place of being in the world that needs to be decolonized okay so that's very important because writing helps you to locate yourself and to trace your ancestry I think that's quite clear and another another Point here is writing to demonstruct the racism and racial discrimination against black people in the world okay so forcefully I mean you I committed writer by virtue of being a an African writer in the diaspora of course you you want to give a particular image about about the black people in Colombia in particular but also generally and so the the the image of the ancestor is quite important in your work and one says that in almost every poem that you've written and one other aspect that I think is connected to the issue of the ancestor is the female ancestor because when we talk of the answer we usually talk about the forefathers and sometimes we forget the four mothers and I see that you have a poem actually that is really my like really on the women and says like female ancestors is there particular concern that the female ancestor might not have been well represented in history in the literature that you want to rectify otherwise why are you focusing on a female ancestor yeah I try to recuperate voices of female black women's uh uh in the in the political you know contest of my writing so I tried to recuperate their voices in terms of their participation in the in the history has not been recognized as well as as you know so the female ancestor mean a way to declinize the the colonization of gender as Maria lugones used to turn so this is a way to to to invite people to read about the black women participation in different periods of History um so this is a way to recognize her okay to to give their the the the the the important participation of this women's in different in in different historical situations and contests okay given that literature poetry novel or drama takes roots from history I mean history is quite important there's a kind of symbiotic relationship between literature and history and in the history of uh the afrodescendants in Colombia we know of male male Heroes Romero Manuel Pia and many others are there some female figures that's maybe we who studied the history of Colombia from the outside might miss out on do you have like historical uh they like also historical examples of Colombian afro-descendants Colombian women who have played a crucial role in history maybe in Colombia but also in Latin America in general I would like to say that for example if we are thinking about a African African literature uh or African or African Latin American literature focus on on this especially field we know that there is a male tradition um afro-caribbean and afro Colombia male tradition that recognize just uh men as for example Manuel zapatolive candelario Jorge and many others and the way we signify historic uh the the participation of historical black women is to to recognize her so recognize her so uh I think and I would like to focus on literature so we might say that for example um one of the the greatest writer in female writers in Colombia is Marie Rose Romero yeah and we recognize this uh ancestral life ancestor ancestral Woman as a way that we uh um we conduce our lives in in Colombia uh so one of them are a heroic women that participates in the emancipations against slavery and through all the times of the reconstitution of the independence in Colombia so we need to organize like like a canonical afro Latin American literature that includes uh the the black female women's in the the in in this chronological kind of construct this historical uh tradition or archives so we need to to deconstrate the archives in order to put to put in the women's black women's in the in the in the recognition of the the historical account thank you very much it's good that you mentioned Marie ruizo whom I met almost at the same time that I met you in the federal level in Bogota 2019. and I also had the chance to talk to her when she was she came to my class in in guadalentura wow my students surprised me they just said it was our last laboratory Africana and they just said they were going to surprise me so they arranged and then brought her to my class uh and it was quite a very interesting gift you know but the question I wanted to ask you about Marie gruenzo is uh in Colombia one has come to know that and that's something I will discuss also with with Javier just when when the time comes about that Colombia the African diaspora in Colombia is so diverse and that when one visits uh the Pacific part of Colombia and then you go to the Atlantic part uh there's a kind of difference I don't know Caribbean yeah the Caribbean part of the country there's a difference that you you notice also any discourse of the people so when you read The Works of Marie Grosso and maybe compared to your poetry or to any other Caribbean yeah writer do you yourself maybe that's right I noticed some difference you're not you know is the difference you know uh Colombia has a fragmentary uh geographical position and there is a big difference between the Pacific coast and the Caribbean coast uh with you might say that there is a great a huge and indeed identification in the Caribbean the Colombian Caribbean with the great great Caribbean I mean with Dominican Republic with Cuba with Puerto Rico and the rest of the island and there is there isn't you know or there is a gap an historical Gap that the other that can be problematic in order to identify what are the borders between Colombia because there is the Indian the Indian hegemonic you know uh region in Colombia and the rest of us the literalists the Pacific coast and the Caribbean coast has been doing uh or making a role as a sole turn of the history because we are rationalized we have a geographical rationalized uh region yeah so there is there is a big difference between this this Coast but beyond this I think there there is a relationship between among Among Us in terms of the rationalized geographical position and the way we are fighting against racism and racial discriminations every day in our lives I think this is this is something that we have in common yeah thank you going back to uh poetry uh there was a strong presence of what we can call African religiosity in your text in your and also even in your intellectual writings there's a strong focus on African religiosity and which for me I got to know more about this University when I began working on Latin America especially with Colombia and Brazil Brazil in particular so which means that um the Africa majority that uh the like the codon Blade the orishas are going to represent of course what is Yoruba and when I look at uh the way it has been transformed in the diaspora it is quite amazing and surprising to some of us from the mother continents but then I was listening to Wally shoyinka recently the the Nobel Prize winner and that's the one who has made uh the Europa mythology very popular through his drama through his works so if you ask me how did I know about the orishas is through the works of Wales but then when I when I listened to his interview he said he doesn't believe in any religion be in western or African that Europa the orishas are for him in mythology so my question to you is is at the auditions a religion for you or mythology and what could be the difference uh between what do you consider to be religion and mythology and a myth is something you can mobilize to convey an ideal you know it could be a Utopia but what is the difference between using like or considering the orishas as a religion which implies worshiping and using it simply as mythology okay mythology is a problematic word I comes from Greek philosophy so I don't consider that uh jeruba tradition as mythology this is the my my my position here I am a practitioner of Santeria and Paloma said before and I consider these traditions as uh you know as a pluribus of knowledges Origins have knowledge and this knowledge means to be polsonate in the world view uh as fear or in the worldview uh intellectual tradition so this is a way to construct to build an intellectual extradition um related with the with the world of with the richest world so I think riches uh give us uh knowledge and this knowledge is a way to to decolonize uh the the human being so we must to can we must consider that one of the divisions of the western philosophy Visions has made by considered the African body or the black body as known being so as as news I used to say friends funnel but by doing or by writing about the origins is a way to recuperate these knowledges that has been uh through the years to hundreds of years of knowledges and to recuperate the relationship with Moon 2 and Ubuntu philosophy that means the relationship with the nature with the animals with the forest and this is a way to to think about the important role of our god and goddesses have in our life and our in our daily life yeah thank you very much and then talking about the the use of orisha symbols in your poetry water is a constant image in your in your all your in almost all your water so yeah it's water used mainly as of course it's a strong symbol in the spirituality in the rights like the rituals of the of the orisha or condombly but there's also a historical reading of water you know the sea the ocean in diasporic literature we know of the works of Derek Walcott we know the works of uh kamau bright whites who died recently what types what the whales mean so how do you mobilize this this this uh double meaning of water the the historical one and also by the religious dimension of water water [Music] um what the water give a sense to the deaf the upperclides because of this the the the Middle Passage you know but at the same time it's life it means life for us so there is um a kind of Eco poetic Crossings in the sense of building a sense of water border uh as the relationship with the female orisha or shoe the the richest of the rivers but the Reconstruction of the the the the the meaning of the sea in relation to Yemaya the orisha of the of the sea so we have a strong meaning identification with the with the waters the purify our bodies that also like connects very well with the Omni presence of death and life work uh because there's so much focus on the death of course because of those who might have those who died in the Middle Passage but also the fact that uh their death gives birth to death and I'm thinking and thinking about camouflage title Optics which is a definition in the translation into Spanish okay the the as a philosophy of being in the Caribbean the waves the movement the movement our body you know the performance of our body ourself yeah that's very interesting because I'm also a student of karma Brad white and we study the arrivals arrivals in in school yeah so this is quite uh interesting so um in your poetry one also notes that the there's there could be uh you you construct your poetry on a tradition on a long tradition uh in literary criticism we say every text is an intertext which means that you always also borrow from precursors I mean from those who have come before you so when I was reading your your poems I I think of Corgi and then uh tambores and La Noche uh there's also like the the insistence on the drums in your in your acquainted drums feature as a means of communication you know as as also a strong afro device for example yeah the drum be in Peru in Colombia in Venezuela the drum is so but at the same time also I saw you making reference to William Blake which is quite interesting we also did William Blake in school uh you know Songs of Innocence and experience so uh is it also foreign exactly so so it means that this is quite interesting because it means your poetry is enriched by multiple Traditions yeah yeah so can you maybe throw light on that yeah I I think you need to be informed by the Canon literature if you wanted to write against the Canon literature you need to be informed by them that's the dialectic Point here the binary between uh who I am and so the question who I am you need to situate your yourself uh looking for uh the traditional or the Western uh literature but to reconstruct yourself as someone who belongs to diasporic Counterpoint you need to recuperate all these voices in order to creative construct or to build a literature that that has a creolized a transcultural you know clear life uh writing includes the pal ancestors intertwined the dialogue intertwined between Western philosophy and the ancestral and traditional and oral historiographical tradition for an Africanus Vision thank you so so much and this was an intro to what we're going to have tomorrow as we're going to have a longer discussion tomorrow so see you tomorrow at 7 00 pm at cool 2 house and it's going to be transmitted Live on YouTube thanks so much thank you so much foreign