In today’s session of Professor Valorie Thomas’s class on AfroFuturisms, the discussion focuses on a painting by Christy Freeman and how the image both represents and challenges our conceptions of motherhood and reflects the blending of African Diaspora spirituality with Christianity.

Thomas: The belief is that when you are born, everyone has a protector, an Orisha who watches over your head, your “Ori,” like a guardian spirit or a guardian angel. You might have relationships with one or more Orishas, and it is within your power as a human being to cultivate those relationships and to learn the lessons that Orisha has to teach you.

There are many Orisha and Catholic saint correspondences as a result of Africanisms encoded within Christianity. If you see images of Mary, and she’s surrounded by stars and is in this archway full of color, and she’s standing on a rock on the sea, all that ideography is consistent with Yemaya, the ocean goddess who is seen as the ultimate protector and great mother figure. So she may be respected as Mary, but the figure will also be recognized and loved as Yemaya.

Each Orisha can have dozens of paths. There’s Erzulie, a Haitian Orisha or Loa, who corresponds to the Yoruba Oshun and is also related to Yemaya. Erzulie is also connected to nurturing and motherliness, but she is the personification of love and the erotic, so she is seductive, flirtatious, loves jewelry, mirrors and sweets and wants to see people happy. But beneath that sweet façade, there’s a formidable persona. I’m going to show you a painting of Erzulie Dantor, a different side or path of this deity. I’d like to have you respond to the image first, and then I’ll tell you what fascinates me about it.

Chloe: In the heart on the crown, the top reminds me of ram’s horns, giving the sense that this is someone who is tender and warm but also can defend herself.

Thomas: Yes, this is reworking stories about the feminine, about gender, about power, breaking some of those conventional story lines that associate romance with sentimentality and weakness and docility. There’s tension that comes through that might, in other contexts, seem diametrically opposed, but in this figure they are combined. The softness and hardness; the love, the heart, but also the dagger.

Sophie: It feels like a lot more emphasis on the mother figure, but then also there’s a protective quality that I don’t think is in Western portraits. Mary isn’t usually actively protecting the baby and wielding a knife or wielding any sort of weaponry.

Thomas: What do we know as viewers about those images that you’re talking about? Where Mary’s not necessarily on watch, on guard; the child is just in his mother’s arms. How does the story end? Those images of Madonna and child, that’s the beginning of the story. We already know the ending. This is a disturbing image in that this Mary is thinking off script. It’s a stance of agency and aggression, a huge intervention on the narrative and on the established, fundamental, archetypal, Christian narrative, even though it’s still framed as Christianity.

Byron: I have a question about her necklace. I wanted to know: what’s the significance of that as a Christian icon?

Thomas: It’s a heart and what else? What is hanging below the heart?

Chloe: It could be a skull.

Byron: It looks like a nail.

Thomas: It’s silver. Is it a nail, are we agreeing that it’s a nail?

Byron: There is also something that looks like a snake.

Thomas: I’m so glad you brought up the necklace. We need to consider all those possibilities. The snake is an ancient Vodun archetype, not evil but representative of life and transformation. What about the line of that little dagger on the necklace? Where’s the line going?

Renata: It’s going right towards him.

Thomas: It’s going right towards him, right? In this case, Mary’s saying, “Well, I have a knife, too.”

Sophie: The stars in the painting also are evocative for me. It’s like faith of some sort, which maybe is nonsensical or unreasonable, because they also have resonance with anti-faith.

Thomas: In a particularly African-American or African diasporic context, how might you come to be thinking about the stars?

Sophie: A star guide for going home.

Catherine: Using the signs of the stars to move north.

Thomas: To move north because?

Catherine: Out of slavery. To freedom.

Thomas: The stars are the liberation narrative, at least back in the day of enslavement when knowing about astronomy was a useful skill in escaping and moving towards liberation. When I first saw this amazing picture it immediately tweaked my understanding of the character Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She commits infanticide when the slave catchers are on her heels. The controversy, the tension in this story is the question: Is this motherhood? I think the painting also asks that same question. What if the knife ends up being something that is protecting the child by keeping it from the attacker who will certainly dehumanize and obliterate its spirit? Sethe says, “I wasn’t going to let them take that child, wasn’t going to let them make that child go through the monstrosity that I went through.” It redefines the terms of motherhood as not only creator but also potential destroyer; nurturer but also warrior. That’s the ultimate extreme case, extreme scenario, but it does bring the idea of the feminine principle into connection with the highest possible stakes of life and death.

In Class with Professor Jerry Irish

In today’s small group discussion for the class, Religion, Ethics and Social Practice, six college students and three residents of Pilgrim Place discuss social entrepreneurship, which combines ideas and practices from both the business and nonprofit worlds to solve problems such as poverty and inequality. The group focuses on whether social entrepreneurs, who seek to create social value rather than wealth, are compromising their values by working within the capitalist system.

Miranda: I’m really interested in exploring the debate about whether social entrepreneurships are a Band-Aid, because you’re working within a corrupted system, or are they about trying to change that system and using the tools effectively to do so.

Eleanor: I just heard a woman over at Pilgrim Place earlier this morning, who spoke about being in China. She said she asked one of the men there, who teaches Marxism at the university: ‘Do you think Marxism has a future?’ And he said back to her: ‘Do you think capitalism has a future?’ I think if there is a possibility of envisioning a future for capitalism, it has to do with something like social entrepreneurships.

Karl: I’ve found out from my younger radical community organizing days that there is a place and a need for Band-Aids; there is a need for cooperating with the system at some point, even if you’re not altogether happy with it, and there is a need for trying to find innovative ways to bring things together that seem to be diametrically opposed—like business and community organizing. I think you come to a healthy understanding of what is the best thing to do for the most common good at the time.

Christian: I don’t see it as a Band-Aid at all. I see business and profit-seeking and these sorts of drivers as extraordinarily powerful tools. Some advancements, such as electricity and drugs like penicillin, have come about because of capitalism, because we incentivize them. If you have the motivation from the get-go to do something for the social good, a social entrepreneurship can be a truly amazing tool that can be used in really cool ways. That’s the way I see it, but I come from a family that is very pro-business, very different from a lot of people in this room.

Irish: In Bangladesh, Muhammed Yunus tried a Band-Aid. He found that for $27 dollars he could relieve 42 women stool makers in Jobra of their indebtedness. But just for one week. And then the loan sharks would come right back. It was his idealism about trying to overcome the poverty gap he saw in this village that alerted him to the fact that he needed to go beyond a Band-Aid. He rallied his students and took them to talk to people in the community to see what they needed. That’s when he got the idea that maybe he could leverage the banks. When he discovered he couldn’t, he created his own bank. Do any of you see in either your placements or project proposals the seeds of something like this in the future? Are there ingredients that you could imagine one day that you would employ or work off of as a social entrepreneur?

Christian: My proposal is trying to understand the adherence to medication in Third World companies. One of the major issues is the way the pharmacological system works. Drug companies send HIV and TB medication to Third World countries as window dressing, without any analysis of what’s needed. It’s extraordinarily expensive, especially when you deal with adherence issues, which means the disease becomes resistant and then you can’t use first-line drugs. And these programs don’t even come close to offering second-line drugs.

Becca: This is about the Coronado Garden project I work on with the Draper Center. It’s an organic garden and a curriculum on food justice and environmental justice at Coronado, an alternative high school in West Covina. The teacher has expressed an interest in selling plants, which could be a way to make the whole project self-sustainable. It would also get merged into a small business class. I’m struggling with envisioning this transition.

Mia: Why do you struggle?

Becca: I think it’s the idea that we’ve been very much trying to cultivate the garden as this safe green space and connect food justice and environmental justice with greater societal injustices and connect that with students’ everyday lives, so encouraging them to use the garden as a tool for money—although it would create a self-sustained project, it feels hypocritical to me.

Miranda: I don’t think that is hypocritical because when you’re incorporating funding into a closed loop, self-sufficient system, you’re ultimately benefiting the project for the future.

Irish: You’re changing the definition of investment, that the capital gets invested in a social purpose. What you’re exhibiting are the skills that are entrepreneurial, and I don’t think some of these skills need to be understood simply in terms of a profit. This gets closer to this issue that you brought up in your reflections, a new kind of citizenship and—I hate to bring in my friend Niebuhr (laughter)—the notion of responsibility to a larger social group.

Christian: You have to play it like a community organizer and trust that people will tend to do the right thing most of the time. By allowing capitalism to inject itself into these social entrepreneurships, we worry about becoming tainted, but it leverages all you can do. If you were to talk about Bill Gates in the late ’90s, you’d say he was completely co-opted by the capitalist system, but look at the way he’s leveraged the funds he produced. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a great example; it does really good stuff and is extraordinarily efficient, much more efficient than any other charity or nonprofit group.

Karen: I’m learning a lot from hearing the stories from the elders and the things that we’ve all experienced about having a vision for some sort of project and then having the initiative to do it. I feel I don’t have a full grasp of all of that yet, but I’m definitely learning. I really like the idea that social entrepreneurship is contagious. You start something and then the people you work with are empowered to do their own thing. I feel like I’m catching the bug here.