elena guzman.
oríkì oshun
cohort. 2024-25
project. Oríkì Oshun: A Visual Praise Poem to the Mother of the Sweet Waters
location. Bloomington, IN
medium. visual arts
From Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, the United States, to Nigeria, the Orisha are praised throughout Africa and its diaspora. In Yoruba-based religions, Orishas are the spiritual intermediaries between humans and the Supreme Being, Olodumare. Practitioners give prayers and offerings to the Orishas as a means of navigating the complex experiences of life. Each Orisha reigns over different aspects of life and nature, such as the ocean, motherhood, rivers, roads, and paths, among many others.
Oshun (also spelled Ọṣun, Ochún, and Oxúm) is the Orisha associated with fertility, love, and beauty. In Nigeria, she is associated with the Ọ̀ṣun river. In the diaspora, Oshun is associated with all non-salt waters such as rivers, lakes, waterfalls, ponds, etc. Oshun is a deeply venerated Orisha throughout the world. More recently, Oshun has received attention from popular media with stars such as Beyonce, SZA, Summer Walker, and Kehlani paying homage to Oshun. In a world in which the divine is often relegated to the white male patriarchy, Oshun serves as a shining light that shows the sacredness of the Black feminine as divine. Oshun’s multitudes demonstrate the complexity of Black womanhood, not only in relation to fertility and love, but also in war, rebirth, renewal, and joy.
Oríkì
/ō.ɾí.kì/
orí = head (destiny, intuition, essence), kì = to praise
In Yoruba cosmology, the head is a deeply sacred place for it represents one’s destiny, intuition and essence. Each human has an orí, a path that their soul chooses before they are born. Once we are born, we forget the path we chose. It is through divination and ritual that we can honor our Orí.
An oríkì is a praise to one’s head and destiny. During an oríkì, a performer will describe the attributes, praises, and hopes of a particular Orisha, person, place, or object, and in doing so utter sacred possibilities into the world. Anthropologist Karin Barber argues that oríkì are “the living link through which relationships with the orişa, the ‘gods’, are conducted. And it is in oríkì that the past is encapsulated and brought into the present, where it exercises a continual pull. Oríkì, then, are one of the principal discursive mediums through which people apprehend history, society, and the spiritual world.”
Oríkì Oshun is an experimental short film that honors the Orisha Oshun, a central figure in Yoruba cosmology and spirituality. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, Oríkì Oshun weaves together sacred stories (pataki) that reveal the multidimensionality of Oshun. While often celebrated as the Orisha of beauty, love, and wealth, this film ventures beyond these familiar portrayals, offering a deeper and more complex vision of Oshun’s identity. It explores her sacrifices, struggles, resilience, and transformation into a fierce warrior. By blending traditional Yoruba performance aesthetics with experimental film techniques, Oríkì Oshun creates a polyrhythmic and immersive space where sound, image, and movement converge to honor the sacred. This project is not just a celebration of Oshun but a meditation on the power of storytelling to expand our understanding of divine multiplicity, human imperfection, and sacred possibility.
Drawing on my experience as an Olorisha—a priestess in the Afro-Caribbean religion of Lukumi/La Regla Osha—I approach storytelling from a practitioner’s perspective. My filmmaking practice, which I call cinéritual, transcends representation by using sensory techniques to create affective, spiritual spaces for remembrance and African Diaspora world-making. Cinéritual integrates divination, dreams, readings, and other ritual acts as essential components of the filmmaking process. It also honors the dead and spiritual guides as active collaborators, rejecting passive notions of memory in favor of dynamic ancestral presence.
In what follows, I share various ritual elements that went into the making of the film. Sharing insight from the film's collaborators, we offer a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film and three realms of ritual creation: Dance, Poetry (Oríkì), and Music.
Elena Guzman, Director of Oríkì Oshun | Photo Credit: Marian Gabani
a visual praise poem.
Oríkì Oshun is conceived as a visual praise poem to the Yoruba Orisha Oshun. In the film, praise manifests in different forms and mediums, namely dance, poetry, and music. With pataki as narrative guides, the film’s script, cinematography and editing interlace these praise forms together to honor Oshun and the complexity of her being.
oríkì oshun.
edited by iiritu
dance.
Dance figures centrally in one of the main stories the film tells, that of Oshun Ibu Aña, the path of Oshun that is always dancing to the tambour drum, and it is central to the performance traditions dedicated to the goddess across the Black diaspora. In Oríkì Oshun, Cuban American contemporary dancer and choreographer Beatrice Capote draws upon Afro-Cuban folklore and movement traditions of the Orishas to choreograph and perform sacred dances for Oshun.
Oriki Oshun, it was a dance performance piece where I embodied the Orisha Oshun. My goal for this work and film was to really go into manifesting the essence of the deity Oshun. Oshun is honey, Oshun is water, Oshun is femininity. Oshun's honey, Oshun is also a warrior, Oshun make sure that there is love surrounded especially women who may not necessarily feel as though they have a voice feel as So they may have some insecurities or shown. Reminds us the empowerment that we give and that we have all the time. There is different manifestations and avatars of Oshun. And my goal and contribution was to embody those different facets as we as women in the universe, we as woman as spirits, embody different facets of ourselves. So my goal was to embody all of the different avatars of Oshun. One of the most prominent one that I love dearly is Ibu Kole, where Oshun saved the earth, saved humanity from dying, and she made the sacrifice to go towards the foot of Olodumare. And to be able to do that by sacrificing herself from her feathers turning into a vulture and her turning into vulture and being dehydrated when she reached the sun and passed the sun. So that one really reminds all of the different Arikis, all the different Patakis, really reminds us of the sacrifice that the Ariishas do and did for humanity and how we as human beings need to continue that same essence to save humanity, to save our spiritual energies. There's also lessons that are being taught to us through the arishas. So Oshun, as I said earlier, really teaches us to value our fertility, our value femininity, value womanhood, value power, value sacrifice. Value justice, value equality. So my goal was to embody all of her essence through characterization, through dance form. And those things artistically I'm pulling from the Afro Cuban dance, Orisha dances, Afro-Cuban Orisha Dances, and I'm polling from that. Sort of realm and dance practices in order to really show the embodiment of Oshun within the drums, within the bata drums, and the spirit that calls. Most importantly, I am to really connect spiritually with Oshuun, think about how ocean lives in me, how the water flow through blood, through menstruation, through just the essence of water that's carried in our bodies and the feminine body has a big placeholder because that begins with rebirth, rebirth with menstruation. Rebirth within also motherhood. So it has a lot of weight. In the essence of ocean and the mother ocean. I'm very proud to have contributed to this wonderful film, Oriki Oshun. I'm proud to be a part of this in order to really represent and resemble and show the world the essence of the Oriki Oshun and how the empowerment of Oshun is needed every day in our lives.
poetry.
Throughout the film, oríkìs (praise poems) to Oshun accompany Super 8 and archival footage, structuring the film’s narration around themes of wisdom, sacrifice, renewal, grief, joy, and healing. Written in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Yoruba to reflect the diasporic reality of Indigenous Yoruba spiritual practices and faith communities, the oral oríkìs inflect the film with a polyphonic quality, heralding the river(s) as connective tissue between people, place, spirit, and time. We collaborated with Priestesses of Oshun, Dr. Solimar Otero and Dr. Maria (Osunbimpe) Hamilton Abegunde so they may offer their praise and ache to the film’s ritual textures.
Hello, my name is Solimar Otero, Ochuna de Ola Adenike, and I wrote the poem "Huesos Limpios" for the film Oriki Oshun as an offering to the deity Oshun. Oshun is the orisha that I am initiated into in the Cuban tradition of Lukumi, also known as Santeria. And my ritualistic practice informs my writing in the ways that I think about the river and the flows of the river in the movement between cultures, between languages, between states of being, whether that is being alive, a newborn, an ancestor. These are all elements that I feel that the water, the stones, the sediments, the different elements of Oshun bring out in both my creative and my scholarly work. I feel Oshuun and providing material offerings to her, which also include poetry, altar-making. Other forms of connection and expression, provide ways for us to think beyond individual selves, and also connect to histories and memories that are important to recognize and commemorate, especially in relation to all the healing that needs to happen in the afterlives of slavery and colonialism. I was really honored to be asked to be part of this project honoring Oshun. And I am really grateful that part of that offering included this particular poem that was dedicated to the road of Oshun, Oshun Ibu Kole, which is represented by the turkey vulture and which represents the regeneration of life that comes from death and also life that come from endings that become new beginnings.
The question about the ritualistic component of my practice, specifically in relation to my contribution to the film, Oriki Oshun, and how I engage spirit while writing Oriki, poetry. This is something I think about often in one form or another, whether I'm writing poetry or other forms or collaborating with different artists. Ritual shapes my work and is foundational, and especially when writing oriki, or poetic forms that honor the Egun, the ancestors, orishas, and the earth. Before coming to the page, I come to the ground. That is, I acknowledge the land around and underneath me. To have language to articulate the wonder that is this world in which we live, a planet that supports our weight, that returns to us food, and water even when we are not deserving. This awe is sacred and inevitably creates the space for me to make words to name what is unnameable and indescribable.
Oriki is prayer. In Yoruba, prayer is chanted or sung. Embodied in that is the acknowledgement that sound carries our prayers, our yearnings, our petitions to those to whom we bow and seek guidance. Spirit engages with me before I engage with spirit. That is, whether or not I want to, whether or not I am ready, if I have prepared the room, the mat, the desk, the computer, the pens, the paper, the orishas and Egun, and all that arrive with them, they accept this preparation as an invitation to be present with, to, and for me. There is no time. There is only life and all the supports life. I write Oriki and other works because they are a call back to ourselves through the path of the sacred energies we embody.
To be a priest, a container in this way, is to agree to be open to what one does not know. To accept the invitation to praise one's orisha is to set one's deepest self out of the way and to allow that Orisha to mirror the infinite possibilities of one's spirit. This work is about finding freedom and liberation through an act of praise that reminds us that we are divine beings whole however we show up in the world. To write anything is a surrender to what wants to be seen and heard, what wants be moved from the unformed into the formed. To write prayer, however, is to surrender to all that. And to the energy being praised in ways that demonstrate that I, as the writer and carrier of the message, know that the limits of language cannot prevent breath, sound, and gratitude from manifesting the joy that sometimes erupts from my mouth and cries and moans, sometimes through my body, my feet, my hands, as dance or stillness.
When that cycle of ecstasy is completed, the page gets what I can distill into something legible for others. But even then and after, there is a fire inside me, followed by air or breath, followed by water, all of which ground me to earth so that I remember why I was born here this moment. When I came to do less, I fly away. To write. Is to pray. To pray is to still have hope. To still have hope is to be open to love and loving. And that means that we can be healed.
Praise and honor to Oshun for love. Always love.
music.
Bells, drums, and harps—all these instruments are sacred to Oshun and figure centrally within the soundscape of the film. In ritual, five bells are rung to invoke Oshun’s spirit and draw her near to her petitioners. In Oshun Ibu Aña’s pataki, the sound of the tambour drum is the only thing that brings her joy and moves her to dance. We worked with Indiana-based Andre Rosa-Artis and Indianapolis Pan African Drum Ensemble to record traditional songs for Oshun.
This song, recorded by the ensemble, is a popular call-and-response praise song for Oshun used as an offering and invocation:
Elade Oshun
Osha mina la yeo
elade Oshun
Oshun osha mina la yeo
elade Oshun
Lare lare
eko
Lare lare
eko
Oshun Ikole
eko
Oma omaoke oke yeye moro
oma oma oke oke
Yeye moro
oma oma oke oke
In addition to the traditional drum and song, the film also has an original composition by harpist Samatha Feliciano. In certain traditions, the violin is sacred to Oshun, with string music in general being favored by her, making the film’s original harp composition by vocalist and harpist Samantha Feliciano a rich offering for the Orisha.
Recording the harp music digitally, Samantha then was inspired to record it analog as a way to add to the textures of the film. Using super 8 film and analog technologies allowed us to imbue the film with different ritual material textures.
Drummers and the River | Photo Credit: Marian Gabani
Oshun and the River | Photo Credit: Marian Gabani
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Citation: Guzman, Elena. “Oríkì Oshun: A Visual Praise Poem to the Mother of the Sweet Waters." SPIRIT HOUSE: A Crossroads Project. July 2025. Date Accessed. https://www.crossroads-spirithouse.org/guzman.
Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua director and producer raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. As an educator, she teaches feminist filmmaking, Black cinema, production, and visual anthropology. Her work as a filmmaker has been supported by PBS, Black Public Media, the Independent Public Media Foundation, and the Scribe Foundation amongst others. She is the director and producer of the film Smile4Kime (2023), a short experimental hybrid documentary that uses animation and live-action footage to tell the stories of how two friends transcend, time, space, and even death to find that their friendship lives on. The film received an honorable mention for the Jean Rouch Award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival and was nominated for the LOLA Shorts Award at the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival. Smile4Kime will have its international broadcast premiere on AfroPop, PBS. She is also producing a docuseries called Conjure that explores the traditions of African American Hoodoo in the United States. She is a co-founder of Ethnocine Collective, a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and a producer for the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films.
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