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Abstract: This essay examines narratives produced with entities in Cuban Palo traditions for the purpose of invoking copresences through the assemblage of images, words, and bodies. The dead, nkisi, tell multilayered, coded stories of strife and affliction in ways that weaponize practitioners and objects. We bring together primary sources from the Lydia Cabrera Papers, alongside ethnographic encounters in Cuba with Congo-inspired material, culture, and spiritual elders to trace the afterlives of narrating assemblages. Following Édouard Glissant, we further argue for an understanding of Palo narratives as sites of revelation and opacity whose fugitivity pushes against colonial practices of knowability and appropriation.
Otero et al. (2024) studied this question.