Ezili’s Mirrors

Read this book like a song," Omise'eke Tinsley exhorts the reader in the first line of Ezili's Mirrors.What does it mean to read an academic monograph like a song?Partly, it's a question of orientation, of letting the text wash over you, of swaying to its beats and rhythms, of experiencing the writing as a mood rather than an argument.For Tinsley, the pantheon of female spirits that comprise the Haitian spirit Ezili is not an object of study but a point of departure, "an expansive gathering of the history of gender and sexually nonconforming people of African descent" (p.4).Building on classic theorizations of Ezili by Karen McCarthy Brown, Maya Deren, and Colin Dayan, she performs the important work of unpacking the spirit's queer valences and implications, which have been noted by scholars but never before discussed at length.The result is a genre-bending feat of writing that mines popular culture and performance for uniquely black theorizations of gender and sexuality, staying true to Barbara Christian's maxim that "people of color have always theorized" (cited on p. 5).Written in three different fonts signifying three different theoretical voices, Tinsley's style creates fortuitous encounters between unlikely subjects, all in the service of tracing Ezili as an archive that connects black femmes across temporal and national boundaries.Whitney Houston holds hands with Tinsley's great-grandmother, the ballroom drag queens of Paris is Burning sing with queer Haitian vodouizan, America's first black prima ballerina dances with a New York drag king.The four chapters focus on different manifestations of Ezili, linked by brief, impressionistic "bridges."The chapter on Ezili Freda, the consummate femme, discusses the way black cisfemmes have used performance to show the constructedness of femininity, laying claim to "a kind of beauty [they] were never supposed to believe was [theirs]" (p.57).Ezili Dantò, a fiercely loyal single-mother, inspires a meditation on queer kinship and the beautiful, fraught households that queer and trans people create for themselves in an inhospitable world.Ezili Je Wouj, Ezili's most vengeful incarnation, is transformed into a dominatrix whose violence against white submissives is nothing less than the act of "imagining alternative pasts ... to begin creating possibilities other than the living deaths that are supposed to be our lives" (p.127).And finally, Lasyrenn, who takes the form of a mermaid in Vodou cosmology, becomes the standard bearer for queer black party girls resorting to substance abuse and altered states of consciousness as a bridge between their interiority and the world in which they are drowning.Tinsley calls her approach "theoretical polyamory" in order to distinguish it from "shoddy interdisciplinarity" (p.177).And it is only fitting that a spirit such

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