A re-visionist Her-story of De cierta manera ([1974] 1977): Reading Yoruba myth in Sara Gómez’s revolutionary classic1

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Sara Gómez has expanded upon existing discourse on her work beyond her singular feature film, De cierta manera/One Way or Another ([1974] 1977) to examine not only her earlier documentary shorts of the 1960s, but to demonstrate the impact that her body of work has had on a subsequent generation of Cuban filmmakers who continue her mission to critique the Revolution through an antiracist and feminist lens – contemporary filmmakers such as Gloria Rolando, Sandra Gómez and Susana Barriga. This article seeks to push this conversation forward by arguing several interrelated points: (1) that De cierta manera contains symbolic, visually embedded references to a specific patakí (myth) about the Afro-Cuban orishas Ogun and Ochún; (2) that De cierta manera holds this in common with Gloria Rolando’s Oggun: An Eternal Presence (1991), which tells the patakí in a more explicit manner, and therefore the two films warrant comparison and (3) lastly, that this interpretation of De cierta manera offers a novel take on a ‘classic’ Cuban revolutionary film, offering additional interpretive layers that do not change the message of the film, per se, but complicate it by adding an additional filter through which to view and interpret it: that of Yoruba moral philosophy. The Afro-Cuban word patakí in Cuban Lucumí liturgical speech refers to a parable with a moral lesson, and is derived from the word pàtàkì, which means ‘[something] important’ in the Yorùbá language of West Africa. This article will attempt to answer how and why this particular myth is ‘important’ (pàtàkì) to the reading of De cierta manera and argue for a broader re-centring and privileging of African-derived philosophical frameworks within Cuban intellectual history and popular culture.