Texting Afro-Atlantic Tales The Production and Circulation of Ritual Narratives in Afro-Cuban Libretas
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Abstract
This article explores two forms of under-examined Afro-Cuban material texts that are crucial to the education of Lucumi adherents and initiates at every stage of their unfolding religious journeys. Libretas are co-created sacred texts compiled and cared for by Afro-Cuban religious community members. These libretas (“notebooks” in English) are central to orienting religious lives and actualizing sacred pedagogy, as they contain a wealth of information on divination, ritual, history, and communicating with deities and ancestors. The notebooks are carefully transcribed, edited, and curated to preserve linguistic diversity, and their texts contain topics that include iconography, biography, vocabularies, prayers, and practices. The phenomenon of co-constructing religious notebooks challenges popular and contemporary notions of authorship, particularly in European and American academic contexts. Libretas, in Afro-Cuban religious milieux, are a core part and process of a historically situated multilingual and polyvocal textual process that entails the intellectual expression and innovation of practitioners actively navigating multiple faiths and are part of a unifying thread that extends through and beyond any one religious domain or geography.
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