The Yemaya Festival…Montevideo 2015: a Living Tradition

Where do your ancestors’ bones reside? Where do you call home?

By Lezlie Kinyon, Editor-in-Chief

Log entry: March 13, 2015

We left Andes just about a week ago and stayed in Buenos Aires for a couple days, then Montevideo for 4.  Montevideo is a charming, old city with beautiful beaches and graceful plazas.  There are areas devoted to (high priced) tourism, but we were not there. We walked all over Old Town and the Puerta Mercado.  

Monday was the Yemayja Festival (pro: Yem-e-ja) – it was a truly remarkable, dream-like event that will stay with me always. On a public beach, hundreds of people gathered and dug small holes in the soft, white sand. These were made to block the wind which constantly blows. It was a very warm night and a beautiful full moon rode the sky…

The night sky here in the southern hemisphere is – truly – a “sea of stars”. Very befitting for a festival dedicated to the Orisha who carries the title “Star of the Sea”. (Who is also identified with Mary, the Virgin.)

Everywhere, candles burned in the holes dug into the sand, glowing against the night, while around each were gathered people: friends, families, couples, people alone, concentrating on assembling their offerings.

On the street was a carnival atmosphere with all the trimmings: street merchants selling light sticks, popcorn, balloons … and, of course, candles and “offeriterias” of seashells, combs & mirrors, perfume, blue beads and small boats to “sail” them all away in.

We found a place for our candles and burned them.  Blessing our offerings as we did. Some traveling photographers paused to take photos and we gave them permission. They were very surprised to find that we were from N. America and, also, knew about  Yemayja. We spoke briefly about the festival.  When it seemed right, we also burned a small envelope with the wishes from the friends who asked me to take them to  Yemayja as well as our own – then, we took our small blue & white boat – now filled with all the “wishes” (prayers) – entrusted to us to the river’s edge and set sail. I also had a small basket “offerteria” that I sent away as well with my own desires.

Men drummed, everyone sang. The songs were both like and unlike the songs I have heard (and, sung) at events where the Umbanda priestesses led bembes.

Afterward, we walked around the beach, I took a few photos, and enjoyed the magic of the night. I followed drums to find a Circle where a priestess was fully visited by an Orisha and who performed several healings & blessings. Men drummed, everyone sang. The songs were both like and unlike the songs I have heard (and, sung) at events where the Umbanda priestesses led bembes.  This, I think, is to be expected. All the songs in Uruguay to the Orishas (I heard several over the course of the four days) have a candombe beat to them!

Other priestesses and one priest were giving blessings elsewhere and we stopped and received one just as the crowds began to melt away.  It was time to go…

I dreamed that night of roses … my dreams since have been full of the sea.

Now, we go for our last cappuccino chica at the small café  around the corner from our hotel in Buenos Aires and then, pack for home, leaving summer behind for a (hopefully) rainy and wet end-of-winter-into-spring Bay Area.  

Everyone has a “Place of the Ancestors” …

Every person on the earth has a place where her or his ancestor’s bones reside. Stretching all the way back to the plains of Africa where Lucy found her final rest.  This issue explores the work and traditions of some of those ancestors.  Conceived as a celebration of those traditions, we received submissions on topics stretching from Azerbaijan to Cameroon, to an Episcopal congregation in Berkeley, CA, to Zambia. In the author’s “backstories” we found tales of personal struggle, health challenges, natural and human made disasters, struggles for freedom, and acts of war.  While some few will appear in the next issue of Coreopsis, the selected works (papers, editorials, and reviews) presented here provide a window – of sorts – for a certain understanding of the issues and struggles facing the indigenous peoples of this earth.

Conceived as a celebration of those traditions, we received submissions on topics stretching from Azerbaijan to Cameroon, to an Episcopal congregation in Berkeley, CA, to Zambia.

Many modern Americans hail from families who have wandered very far from their ancestral place of origin. It has been, therefore, some point of discussion to understand what the word “indigenous”- in this modern age of global “moving about”- actually means.  Is it to be reserved exclusively for the First Nations peoples of North America and Australia? What then of the traditions of the Arctic peoples of Greenland, Lapland, Iceland, and Siberia? Or the peoples of the island nations of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean?  For the purposes of this issue, we began to think in terms of First Nations and the long struggle of the African peoples, at home and in the diaspora, as being the subject of this issue.

For me, personally, this subject brought up the idea of “home”.  We visit and are guests in many places during our lives. While traveling we meet many people, and, in this modern age, home changes from place to place as the heart and economics will. In our minds, home remains the place where we live out our lives with those we love. It has been said that the people who surround us make home what it is: the place where we belong.  For myself, it is also the place where the land and the soles of my feet know one another. More than familiarity and context: a meeting between the land and my own heart. It is my fondest hope that all reading this issue will find that meeting, the people, and the place of home.  May those who continue the struggles of our time find strength in the stories that unfold in this issue in the papers and essays presented.

Many blessings,

Lezlie Kinyon, Ph.D., ed.

Completed August 14, 2015, somewhere in Montana on the way home to Berkeley.