Yemanja

As a child Jeanette used to attend the shango tent with her grandmother where she learned various ‘Yarriba songs’, including the one she later sang to the Ocean when she started burning her possessions. In this song (page 71) which initiated her revelation, she addressed Yemanja, the African power who is known in the New World under a variety of similar names – Emanjah, Omanjah, Amanjah, Amaja, Yemaya and Eminona. In West Africa Emanja (Yeomowa, Iemaja, Emanjah, Yemoja) is the Yoruba ‘mother of the rivers’, the power of the river Ogu who is revered by women in particular and who is closely associated with their fertility. In Yoruba myth Emanja conceives a son, Orungan, by her brother Aganju, the deity of the dry land. Orungan himself then has sex with his mother (in most accounts against her will), and as she flees from him she gives birth to streams of water, three major and fourteen lesser powers.

In Trinidadian shango, Yemanja is assimilated to the Christians’ St Catherine, or to St Ann the mother of the Virgin Mary. Her personality – demonstrated in her devotees through whom she manifests – is maternal, nurturant, humorous, tolerant, yet implacable. Although shango is associated particularly with the Belmont area of Port-of-Spain where Jeanette spent much of her childhood, in the 1930s Herskovits described the rites of Amaja in a coastal village some twenty miles from the Earth Peoples’ current settlement: her table had a fish-shaped stone on it which was addressed by the votaries as ‘Mother’. Another Afro-Caribbean cult in Belmont, Dahomean rada, revered a probably cognate power, Eminona, who is identified with the Virgin Mary.