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Amsterdam University College

Hip Hop Co-creating Afrospirituality:

Reconstructing Afro- Spiritual Practice Along the

Axes of Space And Time in Princess Nokia’s Brujas

Tirsa With

15/12/2018

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Abstract

Religious studies scholars have investigated Afro-Caribbean religious practice, but have not considered Hip Hop, an artistic genre centering Black culture as a location of constructing religious identity. This paper investigates how Afro-Caribbean women construct their spiritual practice through , transgenerational transmission and socio-spatial location in Hip Hop. A discourse analysis of a primary source, Princess Nokia’s 2016 single

Brujas, will place the artefact in conversation with theoretical understandings of religious syncretism, deconstruction and creolization. This research illustrated how Nokia constructs along the axes of space and time, through placing her religious traditions of Christianity, witchcraft, and ancestor veneration in conversation with her Black urban reality. This solidifies the works connection to the genre of Hip Hop, which suggests the importance of future research into the intersection of Afro-Caribbean religion and Hip Hop.

Keywords: Religious Studies, Afro-Caribbean Religion, Religious Syncretism, Hip Hop,

Witchcraft, Brujeria, Yoruba Religion, Ancestor Veneration, Christianity, Post-Colonial

Criticism, Puerto Rican Spirituality, Nuyorican Identity.

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Afro-Caribbean cultures are a constituted through cultural encounters, colonial history and ancestral memory, and these same elements manifest themselves in the various religions hailing from the region. Its practitioners construct their practice though the incorporation of different European, African and Native-American religious systems. The synthesis of different religions interacts with believers’ socio-political reality to construct new sets of meanings, beliefs and practices. I will refer to this synthesis as an expression of religious syncretism which, although contested by some religious studies scholars such as Bettina

Schmidt for its pejorative connotation (236), offers a useful framework to understand the engagement of various religious systems (Knepper 71).

New generations of Afro-Caribbean people are continuing their ancestors traditions, and although plenty of ethnographic research into the practice of Puerto Ricans’ spiritual practice exist from scholars such as Schmidt (Meeting the Spirits, 17), there is little research analyzing the manifestations of Afro-Caribbean spirituality in Hip Hop, even though it is an important genres of Black art in the Americas. Princess Nokia, born Destiny Frasqueri, is a

New York based, Puerto Rican Hip Hop artist who deconstructs and reconstructs her spirituality along the axes of space and time in her 2016 single Brujas. By conducting a discourse analysis and close reading of Brujas’ lyrics and video I will answer the question: how do Afro-Caribbean women construct their spiritual practice through religious syncretism, transgenerational transmission and socio-spatial location in Hip Hop. In my analysis of this video, I will try to answer this question with theoretical insights and concepts such as deconstruction, religious syncretism and creolization. As Hip Hop is an important genre, which centers Black identity, it is important to understand in what ways it co-creates

Afrospirituality in Black communities.

“We is them ghetto witches, speakin' in tongue bitches” introduces the audience to

Princess Nokia and her religious identity (Genius). It is the first of many repeating lines in the With 4 song, which creates a stylistic parallel to religious chants, hymns or mantras. In this way, the form of the song embodies Nokia’s tribute to her spiritual practice. Nokia’s portrayals of spirituality cannot be pinned down into one religious system. In fact, the interweaving of different religious traditions forms an important theme in Nokia’s Brujas. Throughout Brujas’ video and song. Nokia incorporates elements of Christianity, witchcraft, ancestor veneration,

Yoruba religion as well as her urban reality as New York born Puerto Rican, and through their synthesis, she defines her own spiritual practice.

In many Afro-Caribbean religious systems, one can find interactions with Christianity, as this religion was often imposed by colonizers (Schmidt, The Creation of Afro-

Caribbean Religions 239); traces of Christian symbolisms can also be found in Nokia’s work.

The words “speaking in tongue bitches” are accompanied by a shot of Princess Nokia speaking with her eyes closed, followed by a close up shot of a cross necklace worn by one of Nokia’s companions. However, Nokia does not seem to subscribe to Christian norms imposing a dichotomy between holiness and profanity, allowing herself to juxtapose the practice of speaking in tongues with the swearword “bitch”.

This reshaping of norms, conceptualizations and imaginations of religious systems through the representation, deconstruction and reconstruction of religious practices and symbols is not only done in relation to Christianity. In Brujas, Princess Nokia also defies

Western conceptualizations of witchcraft. In the last lines of the first verse, Nokia defines her relationship to witchcraft and her playful approach to it: “Good witches, I fuck with, hopped off of my broomstick / Witchcraft, bitch craft, light magic, it's nothing” (Genius). Through the mention of broomsticks [please include a reference], Nokia comically taps into the popular culture imagination of witchcraft. By saying that witchcraft, bitchcraft and light magic are nothing, Nokia carries a sense of ease and comfort in her practice. With 5

Nokia also incorporates features of witchcraft through the representation of the coven.

Throughout Brujas’ video, Nokia is accompanied by three black women, joining her in various rituals, games and performance shots. These images, as well as Nokia’s usage of the first person plural in the first repeated couplet “We is them ghetto witches” highlight the significance of black sisterhood. In the final verse, she raps: “Castin' spells with my cousins,

I'm the head of this coven”, which solidifies the bond between the women both in a physical, familial sense as well as through a spiritual union through the juxtaposition of different types of relationships between the women (Genius).

In the last verse of the song, Nokia elaborates on her definition of witchcraft. “I cast a circle in white and I can vanquish your spite / And if you hex me with hate then I'ma conjure the light / Your evil ways put no fight, I ain't no queen of the night / I'm a bruja, I'm a bruja, and I'ma dress in all white” (Genius). Again, Nokia shows how familiar she is with witchcraft’s practices such as the casting of circles, hexing and conjuring light (Rodríguez

94). However, the lyrics suggest that Nokia does not subscribe to mainstream Western conceptualizations of witchcraft as being associated with satanism, a black Gothic aesthetic, and darkness. An example of such portrayals of witchcraft in mainstream media is the 2018

Netflix series the “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, in which witches worship Satan, oppose the Christian god and attend the Church of Night. By juxtaposing her experiences with witchcraft with references to light and white, e.g. through the dresses she and her companions wear in the video, Nokia rejects the limited Western imagination of witches and instead centers the Afro-Caribbean image of the bruja.

The usage of the term bruja as the title of the song is significant, given Nokia’s Puerto-

Rican background, as the Spanish word bruja in an Afro-Caribbean context signifies a different symbol and practice than the Western witch (Glazier 433) . In Brujas, Nokia comments on the importance of her heritage in her spiritual practice. She dedicates the entire With 6 second verse to her identity as a “Black a-Rican bruja” (black Puerto-Rican), highlighting her

Yoruba ancestry, her ties to the African diaspora, Cuba, as well as her Black Native-

American descent, hailing from the Arawak people (Genius). In the midst of her personal identification, she also makes a specific connection to her spiritual ancestry, rapping: “my grandmas was brujas”. This juxtaposition of Nokia’s heritage and her more direct familial connection to brujas, signifies that she positions her own spiritual practice and identity as a bruja within an Afro-Caribbean cultural context, rather than a Western one.

Mentioning her ancestry may not have only functioned to position Nokia’s personal identity, but may also have more literally served to honor and pay tribute to her ancestors. In an interview with “The Hundred”, Nokia commented on the intertwining of her personal spirituality with that of her ancestors by noting: “I also understand that my connection to my powers and my relationship to magic and Brujeria is very family-oriented, cultural, and matriarchal.”(Nokia, as quoted in Cruz) Thus, specifically mentioning her grandmothers also shows the intimacy of Nokia’s connection to her ancestor’s spirituality, they are important to her not only in how they influenced and constructed her heritage, but she also stands in direct conversation with them. In this way, Nokia continues the tradition of her ancestors, as throughout Afro-Caribbean and Western African spiritual traditions, the veneration of ancestors plays an integral part of spirituality (Glazier 424). Nokia does not only represent this intergenerational transmission verbally, but also visually, through the inclusion of different generations of women in her video, from a child to an older generation black woman.

Nokia’s attention to not only her grandmothers but also earlier, pre-colonial generations which preceded her embodies the importance of her African Diasporic identity in her spiritual practice. More specifically, Yoruban rituals and symbolism play a central role in her video and lyrics. The Yoruba religion has largely influenced religious systems in the With 7

African Diaspora, such as in Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodun, Surinamese and Puerto

Rican Spiritualism (Solimar 181; Schmidt, Meeting the Spirits 241). Central to many of these

Afro-Caribbean religions are the , the pantheon of Yoruban deities (Pérez Y Mena 17).

During the chorus, in which Nokia chants “, my alter” we see the worship of two

Orishas, and Yemaja, two feminine deities who are connected to river and the ocean, respectively. Yoruba deities are often worshipped through being channeled by an individual

(Schmidt, The Creation of Afro-Caribbean Religions 240). In Brujas, four women ceremonially offer sunflowers to an individual veiled in yellow cloth, representing Oshun.

Yemaja is honored more extensively. During the opening scene, a black woman covered in a fishnet structured veil stands in a large body of water. Surrounded by women in white dresses, she dances smoothly to the chanting of “Yemaja Olodo”, a hymn celebrating the transition from the river into the sea (Samiro 1013). It is only after this tribute that the viewer hears

Nokia’s own voice, as Brujas song kicks off.

Religious syncretism is common practice in many Afro-Caribbean cultures (Mazama

122), and forms a large part of Nokia’s spiritual lineage. Her Afro-Caribbean ancestors merged their traditional Yoruba and Native-American religious practices not only with other religions such as Christianity, but their lived reality as colonized and enslaved subjects also played a large role in their practice (Knepper 74). Haitian , for instance, was influenced by West-African Vodun but in its new form, it became a location of political resistance, as it played an integral role in the Haitian revolution (Pérez Y Mena 25).

Likewise Nokia does not only merge different religions, but her practice also engages with her lived reality as a Nuyorican – a New York Puerto Rican (Solimar 174). She thus reconstructs her practice through her self-identification as a “ghetto witch”. In this way, Nokia defines her spirituality as a connection to the physical and the spiritual world: her urban reality and her witchcraft. This is reiterated in the line: “Talk shit, we can cast spells, long With 8 weaves, long nails / Corn rows, pig tails, baby fathers still in jail” (Genius). Here, she juxtaposes imagery that symbolize her black urban womanhood with her witchcraft. In the video, scenes of rituals in a forest and in the sea are also alternated with performance shots in front of brick walls and concrete stairs. These images communicate that although nature plays an intimate role of her spiritual practice, so does her life in the inner city, in the “ghetto”.

This, too, underscores the intimate connection between Nokia’s Afro-Caribbean religion and

Hip Hop; which shares its birthplace in Black inner cities (hooks 7). It illustrates how with

Brujas, Nokia not only positions her spirituality within Hip Hop, she in turn centers Hip Hop within her spiritual practice.

Although Nokia’s Brujeria may not look exactly like that of her grandmothers, the practice of deconstructing and reconstructing one’s own craft is still continued. Like those who came before her, Nokia constructs her spiritual practice along the axes of time and space, as she engages with her lineage and her physical and political location.

Thus, in Princess Nokia’s single Brujas, we can see how she brings the present and the past together to create her own definition of what is holy and spiritual. She does this by incorporating Christian traditions, defying Western imposed norms and stereotypes about witchcraft, worshipping Yoruba deities and honoring her ancestors. Nokia summons the past into the present by standing in conversation with her ancestors and honoring their traditions.

She asserts her agency by positioning herself as Bruja, creating her personal concoction of spiritual practices and symbolisms, rather than bowing down to one set of rules. With this practice, Nokia positions herself within the lineage of Afro-Caribbean religious practitioner who have placed religious syncretism and political identity at the heart of their practice since their inception. It only makes sense then, that Hip hop, a genre which centering the black experience serves as the birthing ground for this ritual. Uncovering the religious symbolism incorporated in Brujas is important in understanding the political and spiritual positions of a With 9 young generation of Afro-. Future research into the intersection of Hip hop and

Afro-Caribbean spirituality can shed light on how Hip Hop artists stand in conversation not only with their ancestors, but also with their peers within the field and their audiences, which will help to understand the role of Hip Hop and afrospirituality in the public sphere.

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