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\"Washington writes supple and thoughtful prose and creatively integrates African and African-derived terminology, which never distract the reader. I consider Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts not only a brilliant study, but also a model to be emulated.\" -- Ousseynou B. Traore, William Patterson UniversityÀjé is a Yoruba word that signifies a spiritual power of vast potential, as well as the human beings who exercise that power. Although both men and women can have Àjé, its owners and controllers are women, the literal and cosmic Mothers who are revered as the gods of society. Because of its association with female power, its invisibility and profundity, Àjé is often misconstrued as witchcraft. However, as Teresa N. Washington points out in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, Àjé is central to the Yoruba ethos and cosmology. Not only does it underpin the concepts of creation and creativity, but as a force of justice and retribution, Àjé is essential to social harmony and balance. As Africans were forced into exile and enslavement, they took Àjé with them and continued its work of creating, destroying, harming, and healing in the New World.Washington seeks out Àjé's subversive power of creation and re-creation in a diverse range of Africana texts, from both men and women, from both oral and contemporary literature, and across space and time. She guides readers to an understanding of the symbolic, methodological, and spiritual issues that are central to important works by Africana writers but are rarely elucidated by Western criticism. She begins with an examination of the ancient forms of Àjé in Yoruba culture, which creates a framework for innovative readings of important works by Africana writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ntozake Shange. This rich analysis will appeal to readers of Africana literature, African religion and philosophy, feminist studies, and comparative literature.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men reveals that African Americans were able to revise, restructure, and reformulate African orature to fit their social, political, and spiritual needs. This study examines the transformation of Yoruba ese Ifá (Ifá divination verses) into folktales and analyzes the similarities and divergences in the content and characters of the orature. This essay highlights the subtle ways that African Americans politicized and revolutionized the ese Ifá to protect the verses’ wisdom and facilitate their proliferation. The revised ese Ifá, disguised as innocuous folktales, were central to the formation of the African American worldview because they reminded dislocated Africans that divinity was not restricted to an invisible entity or controlled by a select few but was both an inheritance and an imperative essential for liberation and self-actualization.

Washington writes supple and thoughtful prose and creatively integrates African and African-derived terminology, which never distract the reader. I consider Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts not only a brilliant study, but also a model to be emulated. -- Ousseynou B. Traore, William Patterson University

Washington addresses Toni Morrison's critical challenge by using an Africana theoretical perspective centered on a force called Aje to interpret the intricacies of the mother-daughter relationship in Beloved. Aje is a Yoruba word and concept that describes a spiritual force that is though to be inherent in Africana women; additionally, spiritually empowered humans are called Aje.

Debunking the myth that rap music was created in the Bronx, New York in the 1970s, this article traces the origins of rap music and hip hop culture to their roots in West Africa and to the ancient Wolof Gods called Raap. The Wolof Gods' impact is most apparent in the divine directive that guides rap artists who are members of the Nation of Gods and Earths, also known as Five Percenters. Not only do these artists continue the tradition of invoking the Gods with lyrical tributes, but they are also contemporary incarnations of Raap who herald themselves as Gods and who use their lyrics to reveal to other Africana peoples their inherent divinity. Despite the watery oblivion of the Middle Passage, concerted attempts at cultural genocide, and centuries of dislocation, the influence of Raap is gloriously evident in the Gods of Rap in their artistic presentation, lyrical complexity, political imperatives, and spiritual depth.

Zora Neale Hurston'sMules and Menreveals that African Americans were able to revise, restructure, and reformulate African orature to fit their social, political, and spiritual needs. This study examines the transformation of Yoruba ese Ifá (Ifá divination verses) into folktales and analyzes the similarities and divergences in the content and characters of the orature. This essay highlights the subtle ways that African Americans politicized and revolutionized the ese Ifá to protect the verses' wisdom and facilitate their proliferation. The revised ese Ifá, disguised as innocuous folktales, were central to the formation of the African American worldview because they reminded dislocated Africans that divinity was not restricted to an invisible entity or controlled by a select few but was both an inheritance and an imperative essential for liberation and self-actualization.

This essay examines continuity in African and African American philosophies, rituals, and spiritual phenomenon. Many researchers have dismissed the African origins and the cultural significance of African American phenomena altogether and relegated them to the realm of \"Negro\" myths and superstitions. However, research into continental African sciences, spiritual technologies, and philosophies makes it clear that the skills and technological advances of Africa survived the Middle Passage and were put to use in the Western Hemisphere.

\"Oruko n ro ni. Oriki nro eniyan: Naming affects the individual; Encomium shapes personality\" (Kolawole 26-27). This Yoruba proverb reminds us that profound cosmic, political, and personal power and responsibility accompany acts of naming and signifying. Considering the vulgar and erroneous terms by which she and her works have been known -- black witch, negress, Sapphire, castrating bitch, and black magic, witchcraft, magical realism -- the Africana woman's efforts to recover and create language appropriate to her being and art are logical and necessary; this work may even be her duty. Clenora Hudson-Weems suggests as much in Africana Womanism; in fact, the first two of her \"eighteen distinct and diverse characteristics of Africana Womanism\" are \"Self-Namer\" and \"Self-Definer\" (55-58). The veracity of Hudson-Weems's assertions is apparent in Alice Walker's neologism, \"Womanism,\" which inspired Hudson-Weems's study, and in Molara Ogundipe-Leslie's \"Stiwanism,\" \"Stiwa\" being an acronym for \"Social Transformation Including Women in Africa\" (qtd. in Kolawole 22-23). However, I contend that the self-claiming, -naming, and -defining powers of Africana women have sources more ancient and authentic than reactions to the racist and myopic socio-political agendas of others. In this article, I will attempt to use the ancient Yoruba concepts of Àjé and Òrò to elucidate the origin of the signifying soul of Africana women's literature. [Rowland Abiodun] asserts, \"In Yoruba traditional thought, the verbal and visual arts are [...] considered as metaphors\" for the \"essence\" of Òrò (252). Similarly, in Workings of the Spirit, Houston A. Baker contends, \"In mythomania, strategies are multiple, guises of the spirit are manifold, and genre, paradoxically, an almost noncategorical denominator. Such flexibleness and permeability are functions of the nonmateriality of classical space which is always a medium rather than a signally distinctive substance\" (76-77). The invisible essence or mythomanic space of Òrò resides in the artist/speaker who transmits through the artwork/utterance. The conjured and conjuring essence of Òrò continues its mission of meta-signification by obligating the audience to use its properties to remember and re-charge ancient and create new words of power. Òrò's cyclic signifying path is evident in such poems as \"Ka 'Ba\" by Amiri Baraka, \"Conjuring Against Alien Spirits\" by Quincy Troupe, and \"My Daddy's a Retired Magician\" by Ntozake Shange. Òrò's furtive force is also manifest in Toni Morrison intentionally putting \"spaces\" and \"holes\" in her art for her audience to fill (Tate 164). Even when invisible or unknown, Òrò is a cognitive-critical-creative force that unites art to artist to audience with the goal of infinite re-creation. As is well known, [Zora Neale Hurston]'s ground-breaking literary documentation and application of Àjé Òrò, including her transcription of [Marie Leveau]'s aásàn, had fallen out of print and into obscurity when Alice Walker decided to vindicate her mother. During the depression, a haughty relief worker humiliated Walker's mother and denied her free government-issued food. Walker wanted to redress this violation and empower her mother, and she chose literary Àjé, compounded power of the works, as her weapon of choice. Walker needed an effective and authentic Òrò to give her mother agency; but, similar to Morrison who \"distrusted\" published studies on Africana spiritwork, Walker described available expositions on the \"craft of voodoo\" as \"all white, most racist\" (Davis 225; Walker, \"Saving\" 11, respectively). However, just as Bòkólo's text of supremacy radiates from the margin, a \"footnote to the white voices of authority\" led Walker to Hurston's Mules and Men and Leveau's Òrò aásàn (Walker, \"Saving\" 11-13).

With its melding of tortured musings from inner child and political analyses from accomplished adult, this memoir is filled physical and metaphysical paradoxes, humiliations, and conundrums. With Diawara's letter and Mody's response, the author is left at the end where we meet him at the memoir's beginning, sifting through the shifting sands of self-ignorance and awareness and thumbing innumerable glass shards of self-hate and love hoping to find grains and fragments enough to fashion a usable existence.

The most versatile element, the elemental force, the essential source of all life is water, and the Mother of all of the waters of this world is Yemo̠ja. So important a God is she, Yemo̠ja boasts the oríkì Yewájo̠bí, which means Mother of All of the Gods and of All Living Things.¹ There are no Gods without the Mother. There is no life without the Mother. Every human being frolics first in her rich waters, in the safest, most serene home, the most perfect domicile—the womb. Mother molded us to perfection in liquids that we carry in us and