Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds by Rebeca L Hey-Colón (review)

Reviewed by: Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds by Rebeca L Hey-Colón Álvaro Ramírez Hey-Colón, Rebeca L Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds. U of Texas P, 2023. Pp. 214. ISBN 978-1-4773-2725-8. In Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds, Rebeca L. Hey-Colón posits an intriguing, thought-provoking approach to reading Latinx and Caribbean diasporic literature. In the prologue, the author lays out the theoretical framework and terminology she deploys in her textual interpretations found in the four chapters and epilogue that constitute the rest of the book. Hey-Colón collapses notions of "diaspora" and "Latinx" into "Afro-diasporic," a term which not only includes Haiti, a country excluded in most studies of Latinidad, but more importantly, she does so because it more aptly describes the diverse migrant histories and fluid identity of Latinx and Caribbean people. She likewise proposes the concept of "Afro-diasporic religions" that incorporates the tenets of the three important Caribbean popular faiths, Haitian "Vodou," "La 21 División," and "Santería/ Regla de Ocha," to analyze the pivotal role that water initiation rites, rivers and the sea play in the channeling of alternative knowledges and spirituality as found in the works of Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana and Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, as well as in the art of Firelei Báez. In chapter 1, Hey-Colón offers an intriguing reading of Mayra Santos-Febres's boat people, a book of twenty poems that offers an elegy to the undocumented migrants that have perished in the ocean in search of a better life in the United States. Hey-Colón selects three poems and reads them against the ritualistic, religious life of the African diaspora in the Caribbean. She argues that for Santos-Febres the sea plays an important role in the saga of the immigrants as a place of death and rebirth, as well as a repository of archival knowledge that contains the history of the passage of Black bodies as commodities and exploitable power for the American capitalist enterprise. Hey-Colón's interpretation of the water as a space where the souls of the drowned people have amassed in a city of the dead beneath the sea is compelling, for in some way their experience and knowledge are not lost but accessible to the living; thus, making their deaths meaningful. Moreover, these poems challenge nationalist notions of belonging and pose a space where all excluded people find solidarity. The only flaw is that Hey-Colón mixes her critical terminology. She speaks of the enunciating voice as a "narrator" and at other times as a "poetic voice," which is more proper in poetry analysis. In the next chapter, Hey-Colón analyses Rita Indiana's La mucama de Omicunlé, a text whose story falls within the realm of science fiction. However, Hey-Colón brings to the fore Afro-diasporic religious features that allow for a more nuanced reading by way of what she refers to as "techno-resonances" that highlight the confluence of religion and technology. Focusing on several pivotal parts of the novel, Hey-Colón argues that in this futuristic novel that takes place in the Dominican Republic, technological aspects intertwine over and over with elements of Afro-diasporic initiation rites related to water. The narrative proper centers on the actions of three queer protagonists to save the ocean which is in dire danger. An essential part of the argument shows how bodily transformations sought are imbued with what Hey-Colón perceives as religious technology. However, at times it is not quite clear what she means by technology, especially when she speaks of the use of beads and colors in initiation rituals as religious technology. In chapter 3, Hey-Colón shares the findings of her research in the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa archives housed at the University of Texas at Austin. She primarily pinpoints crucial details of Anzaldúa's near-drowning experience as a twelve-year old at South Padre Island in Texas, which Hey-Col...