Part of my coming to terms with myself is understanding what motivates me to get involved in movements. It is a kind of possession that takes place, much like what I have witnessed in my spiritual practice. This piece explores the three women who shaped my spiritual consciousness and how their engagement with their own divinity continues to affect and possess me.
My creation myth begins with the house my mother had been saving for since she started working at 19. In her 30th year, she finally had enough money. This house was run down and full of jumbies. She would go there, pregnant with me and sleep by herself. The unborn, she says, have their own power and protection.
My mother who had begun a journey into some different spiritual understanding as a result of her involvement in the 1970s Black Power movement. She used to dream things. Like when next the police were going to raid her mother’s house. She imagined that there was something beyond what she had learned in the Legion of Mary. She was dreaming of an old man with a cutlass and a glowing fire. She had a brief encounter with Spiritual Baptists that made her want to know more. She was hearing about a woman who could help her. That was how she met Iya.
Iyalorisha Melvina Rodney was less than 5 feet tall. Then again, many of the women I was surrounded by as a child were around the same size and stature. Short, ramrod straight backs, serious to a fault. Unless they were telling jokes. These women were/are all funny in their own sad and cryptic ways.
Just before I turned ten years old, Ogun decided he was ready for Eintou. She was gone for days, the longest we had ever been separated, I was demanding to see my mother. Eventually Iya relented. I went to see her. She could not have physical contact. I cried and I think Iya warned my mother not to cry. But it was the first time I learned that Iya could choose to break her own rules. We sat in the gallery facing each other, my eyes darting around the yard trying to figure out what this place was.
In the years to come I got to know the yard better, even though I was fascinated and terrified by it.
I got to quietly watch and listen to her, dancing, singing, telling stories.
Iya’s eyes would twinkle with so much mischief you could see her girl face again. Her girl face before she started to fall down to drums. Her girl face before her mother, afraid that her child was becoming a tool of the devil, tried to keep her away from the drums calling her late into the night, causing her to walk for miles to find them. Her girl face before Shango took possession of her, sending her searching for Africa.
Iya said she was a saint horse then. The beloved body the spirits would want to occupy, put all their ase and make her tiny frame leap everywhere at once, staring into an impossible forever. Shango possessed her first when she was 8.
Everybody called her Iya. I thought it was her name until I found out years later that Iya is the Yoruba word for mother. To add another layer to her all powerful motherness – people called her Iya Gbogbo – Mother of All.
Iya always wore immaculately sewn double layer dresses with ruffles at the neck like a Bele dancer, sweeping down to the floor, big gold earrings.
Iya’s personality was the opposite of my grandmother’s.
Ida my grandmother was also less than 5 feet tall. She was five years younger than Iya, too poor to finish primary school, loving books and reading so much that I always wondered what else she could have been in this world. She was so quiet and resolute that when she spoke she could cut meaning out of every word. Sometimes she looked at my mother with such confusion, I imagine she must have been thinking, what happened?
I used to go on early mornings with her to Mount St. Benedict colloquially referred to as de biggest obeah house in Trinidad. Leaving Laventille before dawn, taking a small maxi taxi at the bottom of St. John’s Road winding all the way to the top of a mountain. You could see the whole small world called Trinidad. And I followed her after mass to the various statues and she whispered her prayers. No doubt most of the prayers were for my mother. My mother, too bright for her own good. My mother, too curious and own way. My mother, always searching for more.
My grandmother who was the most devout Catholic, would give us bush baths. My good church going grandmother, who taught me how to wake up a plant if you wanted to pick from it after sundown. My grandmother who used to feed us tea spoons of asafoetida to ward off negative energy. My grandmother who would write the name of someone who had done her children or grandchildren wrong and wear it in her shoe. She would take those names to the saints and damn them to a white hell.
My grandmother who was concerned about the presence of Iya Rodney in our lives, of the mortal soul of my mother who had abandoned Catholicism to go and find herself in this Shango business.
My grandmother always took things into her own hands for our sakes. She would say in case prayers for us, because you could never fully trust anybody else to save your children. This is why her knees were scarred until her death, with imprint of all the peoples’ floors that she cleaned to afford school for her son and daughter. My grandmother quietly loving and protecting her child searching for more. My grandmother, who never got over the shame of having her house raided during the Black Power State of Emergency in 1970. My grandmother, who fought the church and eventually ignored their instructions and used her own money to fix the abandoned statue of St. Martin de Porres the Black Peruvian saint. My grandmother’s love was an endless and fanatical deal making with seen and unseen forces. My grandmother never met Iya, never made the journey from Laventille to that other house of obeah. But my mother recalls that in her final years, my grandmother gave her her best white dress to go to Iya to do her rituals.
Iya’s feasts went on all night. My mother drove nervously down the highway after a day’s work and maybe a meeting and probably a rehearsal and possibly a million other things.
There was a fire lit already at the gate. The yard immaculately swept and Iya cooking or preparing the yard or in a light doze in her inner sanctum, surrounded by Shango and Shiva. Her eyes half closed like Shiva’s in the bliss of dreams of creation and destruction. At night the yard became even more magical, full of secret corners, flickering candles, animal sounds, creaking wood, stones and statues and figurines, the sea just beyond the back wall.
Around midnight the palais would swell with people of all ethnicities, all levels of wealth, all modes of devotion.
Sometimes I stayed in the palais for as long as I could, Iya did not tolerate sleeping in there. I was young enough to be allowed to go upstairs and sleep and dream dreams filled with drums, or the primal scream of someone who became electrified by the forces crackling in the air. We left early in the morning and straight to school to Christian/Muslim/Hindu classmates with whom I never discussed the night’s events.
Iya would say to her children like my mother, you go out and do the work and I will stay here and work the obeah. Iya did not forget the days when the police would try to raid feasts and arrest drummers, practitioners, leaders. Iya knew her children would encounter obstacles, not just from the authorities. Iya praying for my mother. My grandmother praying for my mother. Similar, different prayers.
Iya stayed home and worked the obeah and gave advice and things happened in those years – the Orisa Marriage Act was signed. Trinidad became one of the few places in the English-speaking Caribbean to repeal anti obeah laws, drumming was legal again for the first time since 1884. This work was done by Iya and her children, directly and indirectly, going to shrines across the country to get consensus from the other priests. In a time when Orisa practice still was frequently referred to as devil worship, trust and openness were rare.
My mother wanted to rip down anything that had to do with Christianity. It was the old way and the time when they had to hide their Orisas behind the white saints was coming to an end. But Iya would admonish that you say the rosary at Christmas because Mary was a mother and a mother is a child’s first idea of what God is. Iya knew that above all else life and existence required a kind of sensitivity that transcended any and all divisions. My mother wanted to get rid of Christianity even as she drove her own mother to church.
Iya said her skirts were big multiple yards and layers because she had plenty of children, she used her skirts to catch our pains, our mistakes, our worries.
She knew her children’s shortcomings like she knew the moods of the Orisas, knew what to do when they arrived, knew who to beg for when Shango demanded justice. She knew us in ways we didn’t know ourselves.
Iya was more than just the best Obeah woman in Trinidad, appointed and anointed by the great Pa Neezer himself. She was also a strategist and a leader, embodying Shango’s Kingly character in her ramrod straight back, in the fire in her eyes. She stayed in her yard, venturing out on rare occasions to meet foreign priests and local Ministers and Prime Ministers (they would usually sneak in to see her when they were less likely to be seen).
My grandmother walked the six blocks to church visiting the people who were a few years older, the ones who were sick, whose children lived elsewhere. My grandmother knew their stories, their favorite snacks, their loneliness. My grandmother stayed in her community helping in the ways that she could.
But for the names, these are women who exist in every community, anywhere in the Caribbean. Women who have the kind of power that doesn’t really have a name.
Women who could take a personal concern and magnify that to ripple out into their communities to the people they cared for in emotional, material, spiritual ways. Women who knew how to catch the power and use it to make work happen.
How did they learn to use power in this way – not just manifesting their personal dreams and fears but also being unafraid of becoming Shango’s double headed axe or shape shifting like Osun’s sweet water, able to move above and through any obstacles. The way they became the obeah they needed to work to transform their lives.
In my dreams the voices of Iya my spiritual mother and Ida my grandmother are interchangeable. They are both fine and warbly in the way that old women who sing hymns are fine and warbly. Cracking in their translucent throats. Their voices rise above the noise of what I have been taught about my body and its need for salvation. They both turn up when I am in danger physically, emotionally, spiritually. They find me to whisper directions in my ears, to deal with loss, to find myself back when I am lost.
Stop. What are you really running from? Sit. Drink this water. What are you really angry about?
In my dreams I am guided to fly, to be so light as to leave behind this black body so heavy with weight of ideas that it did not birth, burdens that are not mine to carry.
In my dreams I try to prize away that mask we wear in contemporary movements of trying to name-drop the goddess, neurotically claiming ourselves as light filled beings, casually declaring goddessness without truly preparing ourselves for the implications. What if we were to center ourselves in the fluidity of the divine? What would it mean to embody Shango’s desire for justice? What would it mean to engage with Kali’s destruction of the ego? How do those ideas manifest in our work with trauma and how do we end cycles of re-traumatization? How does a deeper understanding of ourselves then affect the way we work together, reach consensus and even demand accountability for those members of our community who have caused harm?
My brain is disobedient like my body. My head is full of drums and distant wailing and wanting to dance instead of sit in meetings. My Ori wants this idea of liberation through possession to become the center piece, not just the entertainment interlude.
My mother, still here on this plane, offers to stay home and work the obeah now. We put light and water for Ida and Iya, they occupy the same space of revered ancestor now. Speaking of them keeps the memories fresh and their energies alive, their mischief, their jokes, their silent threatening. Speaking of them helps also to consider their work in different ways all the time.
Ifa offers me a perspective on them too. Every time I sit on the Babalawo’s mat, I observe the things Iya and Ida lived. That masculine and feminine polarities are a distraction. That good and evil are subjective. That negativity is as important to positive energy is for progress. That the poison also has potential to be the antidote and the lie you tell to save your life is as important as the truth you speak to bring death to your enemy.
That power is not just for the powerful. Anybody could catch it. Power is in those women who are seen and unseen. Sometimes you need to lose control of your senses; you have to unleash the power you didn’t think you had. Sometimes logic and order are irrelevant barriers to radical transformation and healing. Sometimes the answer is in the wailing and the dancing. Sometimes the spirit calls for disruption. Sometimes you need to just walk and listen and be with your people. No judgement. No prescription.
It is unsustainable work for our spirit selves to try to shift our communities without giving the whole body space for transformation.
Author Biography
Attillah Springer is a Trinidad born writer, communications professional and cultural worker with an interest in the intersections between culture, memory, festival arts and social justice. A 2021 UN OHCHR People of African Descent Fellow, Springer channels over twenty years of experience in culture and communications work to help facilitate movement and awareness building for grassroots and community projects with a specific focus on Caribbean festival arts, preservation and recognition of African spiritual traditions and using these forms as ways to confront social justice issues among women and young people of African descent. She is a Director of Idakeda Group, a woman led family company focused on changing communities through culture.