Beninese writer and photographer Laeila Adjovi visits the ruined slave barracks of old Cuban sugar plantations for her Fay Chiang Fellowship research, where she discovers vestiges of ancient African rites.
A character-based documentary series on Cuba’s African spiritual heritage, with a focus on the water deity Yemoja (“Yemaya” in Cuba).
In this essay from “The Roads of Yemoja,” Laeïla Adjovi examines how a West African deity survived the Middle Passage from Benin and Nigeria to Cuba and became venerated on both sides of the Atlantic.
Africans sold into slavery were forced to disguise their deities as Catholic saints when they arrived in the New World. Laeïla Adjovi, ArtsEverywhere’s first recipient of the Fay Chiang Fellowship in Artistic Journalism, is retracing the journey of the African deity Yemoja across the Middle Passage to Cuba, where the old rituals still exist in syncretic form.
