Yemaya’s Daughters, Dane Figueroa Edidi

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language: English
country: USA
year: 2013
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 6.5.23-11.5.23

cw: rape, transmisogyny

Dane Figueroa Edidi’s Yemaya’s Daughters is a difficult novel — you know I hate to use the “challenging” mood, but I think it’s appropriate here because so much of the book is about the protagonist challenging herself, her beliefs, and the beliefs of the people around her, and being challenged in turn by the religious beliefs she was raised in. when it was self-published in 2013 it was one of the only or perhaps the only novel(s) by a Black trans woman ever published in English, and it would worth attending to as a milestone, but it’s also a compelling read in its own right.

it tells the story of Inanna, a woman raised by a secret society dedicated to “the Goddess” who are based in Eden, here a kind of pocket dimension or protected space which only they and those they choose or who are chosen by the Goddess can enter. the Sisters use their (formidable) divine abilities to influence events in the human world, but they are forbidden to kill and expected to refrain from direct violence against humans if at all possible. Inanna struggles with this prohibition throughout the novel as she leaves Eden and becomes increasingly entangled in human affairs and especially in the lives of her human lovers. Inanna doesn’t experience time as entirely linear, although she’s conscious of a timeline of her life, and so we see her life in bits and pieces, moving sometimes back and forth between timeframes, and interspersed with the lives of other Sisters.

the novel is grappling with a few substantial core problems:

• theodicy. the Sisters believe in the goodness of the Goddess and in her eventual return and triumph over the evil and the simple cruelty of the world, but they struggle to reconcile this belief with the reality of human society. the novel partially resolves this by offering a dualist cosmology where the Goddess has a male counterpart, identified with/as Yahweh (more on this later) who is jealous and controlling — much of the world’s cruelty is ultimately tied to him, but this only partly circumvents the problem, since the Goddess is presented as more powerful than and possibly preceding the God.
• patriarchy and gendered violence. this runs through every page of the novel, particularly because, while Inanna was raised from childhood as a girl and then a woman, when she leaves Eden she’s read by outsiders as a trans woman and is forced to navigate Western society in these terms. this was conceptually really interesting — Inanna is conscious from childhood that her body is different from her twin sister’s, but none of the Sisters ever treat her as anything other than a woman just like them, nor does she seem to regard herself as, like, notably different — until she leaves Eden to attend a human boarding school, she’s just another woman. in the human world, however, she faces misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, at times violent, and one thing I think the book does a good job of conveying is how deeply alienating this is, the violence of transmisogynistic social exclusion. that the boarding school she attends is a boy’s school accentuates the cruelty of gender and also underlines the extent to which the Sisters’ religious obligations force them into an extreme pragmatism — Inanna is sent to the school specifically to teach her about how “people” or “they” will see her in the human world — as different, lesser, Other.
• religious devotion. in addition to Inanna’s own struggles with her faith in the Goddess and the Goddess’s injunction to love, care for, and guide humanity in spite of its cruelty, her story is interspersed with the story of one of her previous lives or incarnations, Maryam — that is, the Virgin Mary — as she deals with the shock of divine conception (portrayed here as the result of Yahweh raping her) and the potential she sees in her situation and in her son to transform the world and bring about the return of the Goddess. Inanna, Maryam, and, indeed, all of the Sisters, whose lives we see in bits and pieces interspersed with Inanna’s, are driven by deep religious conviction, but it’s never an easy conviction, and their religious obligations frequently cause them to doubt, to waver, and even to give up.

in spite of its copyediting, which is unfortunately awful, it’s a striking and engaging (though slow-paced, I found) novel. Inanna’s narrative voice strikes a good balance between rightful pride and defiance, asserting the importance of her life in a human world that sees her as doubly disposable, being both Black and a trans woman, and an arrogance that sometimes leads her to hurt the people she loves most. one of the problems the novel is trying to think through is: how can we avoid being made callous and cruel by a world that is callous and cruel?

this leads to one of the novel’s two main flaws, namely that while it does thoughtfully explore the relationship between nonviolence and complicity, it never quite manages to convincingly answer the question of why, if the Goddess is so powerful, neither she nor her followers can simply act. the lack of answer in fact drives multiple Sisters to abandon their order over the course of the novel, and these Fallen Sisters are (for the most part) the only ones Sisters are permitted to use violence against. this is…kind of a weird conclusion!

the other is that the Maryam narrative unintentionally partly reproduces some Christian and post-Christian antisemitism: first, positioning the God of the Hebrew Bible as a cruel and arbitrary patriarch (à la people pointing to laws in Deuteronomy and Leviticus as silly and/or cruel as a “gotcha” against Christians); and, second, a kind of supersessionism, insofar as it posits Maryam as the originator of Jesus’s teachings, which in turn originate in the “true” ancient Goddess-worship, as opposed to the self-interested lies of “Yahweh” — Maryam’s and Jesus’s teachings are explicitly contrasted (favorably) with the priests of the Second Temple. it does veer away from this by having Maryam’s mission be a failure, with Christianity as a corrupted version of her intended teachings, but the vibe was…very weird. it’s all weirdly very Christian even as it’s anti-Christian.

notwithstanding these, however, it’s a weird but really compelling book.

moods: challenging, dark, hopeful, inspiring, reflective

webring >:-]
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