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Introduction: Hilda, Oddu Aremu and Social Memory
Hilda Zulueta, who passed away in 2008, was a great-granddaughter of former enslaved peoples, an important keeper of religious knowledge in her community of Perico, particularly the Arará religion, and a living link between Cuba and Africa. "We are from Africa, we are the first Arará," she would tell me over and over.1 Hilda knew many stories about former enslaved peoples, their descendants and thus Arará history. Whenever Hilda arrived at an Arará ceremony, there was always seemingly a sigh of relief. An important elder, she was the living history and link back to Africa present amongst the practitioners. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAfrica so often is the cry heard during Arará religious ceremony.
I remember Hilda's animated interest when I showed her pictures from Dzodze, Ghana, her cries of glee when I danced a specific movement pattern common across two different Anlo-Ewe dances from Ghana, West Africa and one that mirrors a core movement pattern of Afro-Cuban Arará dance. Sitting on her front porch, or in her chair in her house, she would chuckle when I asked her to remember stories from so long ago, and she would take a breath, lean back and begin. The story I love the most is the story of Oddu Aremu, one of the Perico Arará deities (also known in Perico as Las Mercedes or Obatalá),2 and the lagoon near the former and now abandoned sugar refinery España, a short distance from present day Perico. It was at España that enslaved Africans - and later, their descendente who eventually settled in Perico - worked. According to Hilda, her grandmother, aunts and mother once told her that Oddu went to the ojo de agua of the lagoon - literally "eye of the water" and commonly translated in English as a spring - and began to drown:
They had to throw many pieces of white cloth from that ojo de agua to España so as to make Oddu return to this land because he was going to Africa. I had the chant they used in that ceremony, but roaches ate the notebook. They had to chant and throw herbs until he began to emerge and got to the sugar refinery.3
Hilda's story is not the only version...