The primary goal of my project, which involved collecting the stories of Bay area residents like Iya Nedra T. Williams, was to map the convergence of African diasporic religious and artistic communities in the Bay area. The people, specifically the elders, represent the embodied memories of ancestral traditions that are passed down orally and learned through close, lifelong apprenticeship. While some written texts and graphic writings do have a place in our worship, African diasporic religions rely heavily on memory. Our songs of worship and dance for a pantheon of spirits are memorized and retrieved in ritual; our  collections of esoteric proverbs are memorized and recited during divination; our bodies, minds, and spirits are synched, and we access past memories, present happenings, and  future premonitions during dreams and sacred possession. Intellectually, I wanted to understand how both adult and youth members of these communities navigate dynamic and hyperlocal understandings of race, nation, religion, gender, and privilege in one geographic location. Pedagogically, I wanted to test the affordances of public oral history narratives for designing innovative and interdisciplinary religious literacy curricula appropriate for grades 6-12. 

​

Implicit and explicit bias against African diasporic religious practices abound in society and academia, leading practitioners to be viewed as deviant and lacking character and intelligence. The Embodied Memories project is part of my larger mission to create liberatory religious literacy curricula that foregrounds the experiences of African diasporic religious community members and how they are impacted by what I am calling Eurocentric Judeo-Christian Hegemony (EJ-CH). EJ-CH situates indigenous and African-derived spiritual practices like Haitian Vodou as primitive, Satanic, and quintessentially deviant and deficient. From my own lived experience, I know that fear of verbal harassment, social isolation, and employment discrimination can lead to the silencing of both adult and youth practitioners of Vodou. As a youth worker and public middle school teacher in New York City, I personally experienced employment harassment and intimidation during the course of my own initiations as a priestess, and I confronted anti-black religious racism during my doctoral journey on numerous occasions. From these personal experiences and violent religious racism globally in places like Brazil, there is a need for liberatory religious literacy curricula that directly combats anti-blackness and EJ-CH. 

​

Over the course of the project, my goals expanded from solely focusing on Bay area residents to including narratives of Vodouyizan (practitioners of Haitian Vodou) across the United States. The latter addition dovetailed with my work as part of the Community Project to Prevent Discrimination and Violence Against Black and African Religions. My community intervention was a survey project entitled “Religious Racism and Resistance Among the Vodou Community in the United States.” The report findings of religious racism and the urgency of the times inspired me to expand the Embodied Memories project to include two genres: 1) Embodied Memories of the Bay and 2) Embodied Memories of Ginen. In Vodou, Ginen is a reference to the African homelands of our enslaved ancestors and the spiritual lineage that connects us. 

​

Because I wanted these stories to be accessible to a broad audience outside of academia, I turned the interviews into an “Embodied Memories” podcast available on YouTube and Spotify. My intended audience is K-12 teachers and students who are seeking information about Bay Area history, African diasporic religious communities in the United States, and curricular materials to support religious literacy in general. A broader audience includes all those with interests in African diasporic religious communities and the role of faith in the lives of artists, as most of the participants are professional artists of some kind. 

​

Overall, I interviewed eight community members and recorded 15 interviews. With one exception, each person conducted both a life history and artistic expression interview. The artistic expression interviews are focused on showcasing the role of faith in the creative process. They include recitations of poetry, a jazz composition, a gallery tour of visual art, interpretation of mystic drawings, a music video, a discussion of esoteric proverbs, a discussion of two academic books, and a dance performance.

  

In addition to the completed interviews that are available, the next phase of the project will entail designing a website to host pedagogical materials. Starting in January 2024, I will work with undergraduate research assistants to create multimodal vignettes of each participant that includes audio-visual materials and written texts presented in accessible formats. These vignettes will include a brief biographical sketch; transcripts, audio, and video of the life history interviews; and audio and video or photos of the artistic expression and artist explanations. Accompanying each vignette will be reflection questions that assess comprehension, synthesize information across vignettes, and offer ideas for extension activities. These questions will be aligned with grades 6-12 learning standards.

​

As part of my Crossroads project, I have designed a webpage for Iya Nedra T. Williams. It includes a brief biographical sketch, photographs, interview clips, and learning activities that correspond with each video. It includes, as well, the aligning California state learning standards in visual art and English language arts.