Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean by Carlos Ulises Decena (review)

Reviewed by: Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean by Carlos Ulises Decena James Padilioni Carlos Ulises Decena, Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023). "Circuits of the Sacred insists that our lusty, funky, and stank quests to freak through our bodies couple eros with the mystical" (9). So argues Carlos Ulises Decena in his book Circuits of the Sacred: a Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean (as a Black Latinx F-word myself, I can assure the reader that many of us have reclaimed the term intramurally, but this is not a license for cisgendered, heterosexual allies to do the same).1 Beyond the provocation of the book's title and theoretical framework lies, in moments, a charming memoir chronicling Decena's auto-ethnographic experience of growing up in a Black Dominican migrant family. Spanning locations including "Santo Domingo, Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, and Havana" (16), Decena derives his notion of "blackness as a circuit" (6). This circuit, he argues, is important for Black Latinx studies that seek to "address the white supremacist conditionings of latinidad while proffering cartographies of blackness in, through, and beyond the United States" End Page 269 (7). Decena's coming-of-age journey to embracing his queerness was amplified by his phenotypic positionality to whiteness relative to darker skinned members of his family, which afforded him the ability "ser alguien to be somebody" (13). As a youth, Decena took advantage of the solace he discovered in classical piano lessons and other elite forms of Eurocentric education, which created alternative space away from his family to discover his queerness. But this also moved him further away from Blackness: "You have long thought that coming out delivered you closer to yourself, but there were small and consequential signs of your being educated in the protocols of whiteness, even as you began to lie under the banner of gayness" (42). Eventually, Decena made his heroic return to Blackness by embarking upon a spiritual journey of initiation into Yoruba/Santería. Like a Yoruba sacred proverb (pataki), each chapter of Circuits of the Sacred "amasses observations, insights, stories, anecdotes, and theories" (6) as an intertextual narrative in order to accommodate the expanse of being and "excess of the transparent I" (7) entailed within the ontological multiplicity of a Yoruba cosmos. Decena "displaces the narrative 'I' by shifting pronouns, genres, narrative styles, and storytelling techniques" (7). Here, he follows a growing trend of books within Black Latinx / Caribbean gender and sexuality studies that are distinctly Yoruba in their ontology-as-media.2 These monographs are not only about Yoruba conceptions in theoretical content, but their prosaic-poetic voice marshalls readers to engage the book-as-divination-board through Yoruba ways of knowing: a "conocimiento that manifests not through the appeal to our minds but through its appeal to our bodies, to historicities that sediment in them and that we cannot articulate" (66). As Decena underwent Yoruba initiation, an extended process of several years during which the very "morphology of the body changes" (4), he found that only erotic figures congruent with his experience of having gay male sex could help him make sense of his embodied experience through Yoruba. He explains, "My black gay male sensibility snuck into the analogies I drew on to sense what was happening. Sexual practice during initiation was off the table, but the whole path was electrified by the sensorial erotic" (5). Decena narrates how he "realized his full transition from sugar daddy to cura healer" (62) through interspersed End Page 270 encounters with the orisha (divinity) of fertility and love, Oshun, and episodes of cruising for hookups in Havana. Decena acknowledges that his political economic position–an American citizen and university professor–conditions his theoretical "movement and discernment of Santería as idea with a commoditized, complex, and contradictory life under transnational neoliberalism as related yet distinct from Santería/Lucumí as 'a bona fide religion with a theology and practice'" (15, emphasis in original). Nonetheless, Decena proclaims the sincerity of his Yoruba-oriented faggotology: "many of us find the goddess precisely in those places of kinesthetic...