Mysticism and Black feminist resistance in the Vida of Úrsula de Jesús

ABSTRACT

Úrsula de Jesús’s Vida puts her life story in dialogue with a broader Afrodiasporic feminist tradition and community. Úrsula’s discourse articulates her liberation through eloquent rage, defined by Brittney Cooper as Black women’s refusal to be relegated to an inferior position. Though imitatio is a common trope among Christian mystics, Úrsula uses the trope to represent her positionality as a moral authority because of her Blackness. In doing so Úrsula refuses to accept the inherent anti-Blackness of prevailing arguments that erase the possibility that she could be fully human because of her Blackness. As she repeats and inverts hegemonic interpretations of Christian doctrine, Úrsula achieves a nuanced critique of racial hierarchies. This paper highlights how Úrsula’s depiction of her suffering as a donada and her work as a healer is a Black feminist discourse that calls for a reimagining of racial hierarchies. Úrsula sustains a Black feminist critique in her discussion of suffering she faced individually and as part of a broader Afrodiasporic community, Black feminist imitatio and a rhetoric of healing rage that effects change within a system designed to deny Black women’s humanity.

KEYWORDS:

• feminism/feminismo
• Blackness/negritud
• gender and sexuality/género y sexualidad
• Catholic mysticism/misticismo católico

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank the reviewers and the editor for their incisive critique and support throughout the review process.

Notes

1 Van Deusen rethinks early modern feminist epistemologies that were based less on formal knowledge and more on spiritual experience through the body and visions (2007, 137). Women of all races gained spiritual authority as ‘this path of affective spirituality gave women a sensorial authority […] the experiences they had of the divine and of the supernatural world were validated through their bodies’ (idem, 138).

2 Donadas like Úrsula generally started out as enslaved and servants in the convent. But becoming a donada did not mean they would work less. Their position was reinforced when they took vows and they were required to follow designated task lists that clearly set out the work that donadas were expected to perform. They assisted the nuns of the white veil in the mundane duties of the convent such as managing the pantry inventory and maintaining the organ. They also worked alongside the subordinate servants and the enslaved (van Deusen 2012, 143).

3 My primary source is Nancy E. van Deusen’s transcription and edition published as Las almas del purgatorio: El diario espiritual y vida anónima de Úrsula de Jesús, una mística negra del siglo XVII.

4 See Weber on Teresa de Ávila’s use of rhetoric that changed her reception. Teresa’s ‘rhetoric of feminine subordination—all the paradoxes, the self-depreciation, the feigned ignorance and incompetence, the deliberate obfuscation and ironic humor—produced the desired perlocutionary effect’ (1990, 159).

5 Úrsula’s life influenced at least one African-descent woman in Lima to apply to become a donada (van Deusen 2004, 6).

6 Corroborating Benoist’s argument that the Vida centers Black women and how they expressed communal solidarity, van Deusen argues the Vida contains a singularly important reflection on Black women’s lives in seventeenth-century Peru. Úrsula’s lived experience of racism and race relations in her daily life reveals her struggle as a Black woman to find her own voice. Her internally defined self-image is in tension with racialized perceptions others held of her (2004, 51).

7 ‘Boladora’ or ‘voladora’ translates as woman who flies or ‘madwoman.’ See de Jesús 2012, 277 n.134.

8 As Amelia Schroeder points out, Black women were commonly abused in convents. A nun by the name of madre Juana de Jesús testified to abusing Sor Juana Esperanza. Sor Juana Esperanza’s hagiographer, José Gómez de la Parra, made no effort to condemn the abuse (2014, 100).

9 Alumbrados were lay and religious men and women who met in private homes to read and interpret Scripture. They believed the individual could understand Scripture through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (Weber 1990, 22).

10 Despite the prevailing stereotype that associated Blackness and other marginalized identities with evil, there were cases such as Úrsula’s in which a person of African descent did receive ecclesiastical approval for their mystical abilities. The successful proceso to beatify Fray Martín de Porres, for example, had been challenged. Witnesses expressed doubts concerning the appropriateness of the revered saint’s methods which included not only techniques from European medicine but also popular medicine including superstition and Indigenous witchcraft (Jouve Martín 2014, 239).

11 Santo Domingo is likely a reference to Palm Sunday or Domingo de Ramos.

12 See Moshe Sluhovsky on possession and mysticism in early modern Europe. Embodied religious experiences such as possession and mysticism allowed marginalized people, specifically women, to engage with the divine and to interpret divine experiences without relying on male authorities in the Catholic Church (2022, 6–8).

13 Other Black women Úrsula recognizes in her visions and in life include a morena who had been forgotten after she had died from an illness thirty years prior (Jesús 2012, 178) and a Black woman who had died without receiving confession (182). Úrsula also prays for a Mulatta who is mistreated by her enslaver’s mother (184).

14 See Brewer-García on the erasure of Úrsula’s advocacy for Black women and men. The beauty of redeemed Black people in the Vida was later erased from the posthumous Vida breve (2020, 231–32).

15 This argument counters narratives that the enslaved were impure because of the Curse of Ham. David M. Goldenberg traces the evolution of the association between black skin color and enslavement dating from the post-Biblical period in the Near East when Genesis 9 was interpreted to justify the social reality in which Black Africans were increasingly identified with enslavement (2005, 166).

16 For example, in 1631 Lima’s city council renewed a ban on women of African descent, enslaved or free, wearing silk, gold, or silver. The free and enslaved women who did not abide by the law would be exiled (Walker 2017, 34; Bowser 1974, 311). Tamara Walker proposes in Exquisite slaves that the message sent by such laws—exile imposed on well-dressed enslaved women or the free wives of Spanish men—was that Spanish enslavers’ property would be lost and Spanish men who married women of African descent would lose patriarchal authority (2017, 35). The severity of the punishments for Black women who wore finery is indicative of the social threat posed by women like the young Úrsula, whose clothing threatened colonial hierarchies and divisions of power.

17 In this cultural gambit sketched by M’bare N’gom, literature produced by and about Black people was not generally recognized by literary critics as part of the official canon until the twentieth century in Peru (2011, 499).

18 Black people had become the primary source of labor after the 1535 Inca Manco rebellion (Bowser 1974, 7). Alice L. Wood and Rolando Mellafe discuss how Black people, whether enslaved or free, were expected to be employed in some form. Free Black people were considered unproductive in Peru, and were subjected to limited liberties and opportunities. Most enslaved Black Africans in Peru worked in agriculture, though urban enslaved labor involved household service. Tasks performed by the enslaved were also vital to religious institutions such as monasteries, convents, and hospitals (Wood 2004, 287; Mellafe 1975, 109–10).

19 Úrsula is referred to as morena in the hagiography Espejo de religiosas (1698) which, Wood proposes, is evidence Úrsula is likely of mixed ancestry, though she was probably dark skinned (2004, 287). Úrsula’s dark skin tone is also represented in paintings of her. Úrsula refers to herself as Black or negra in both the autobiographical text and the hagiographical text which also suggests her dark skin tone. Van Deusen has not found information regarding Úrsula’s father. Her mother may have come to Lima from Guinea in 1604 when she was twenty years old (2004, 62 n.2).

20 See van Deusen’s English translation of Úrsula de Jesús’s diary, The souls of Purgatory, where the shift is marked, ‘[A nun carries on writing for her.]’ (2004, 118).

21 Úrsula also refers to the idea of Christian equality in a dialogue with Saint Francis. The saint tells Úrsula, ‘Diferençia ay de las monjas, porque ellas son blancas y de naçion española, mas en cuanto al alma todo es uno. Quin mas ysiere baldra mas’ (Jesús 2012, 235).

22 ‘White females discriminate against and exploit black women while simultaneously being envious and competitive in their interactions with them’ (hooks 1984, 52).

23 Debates concerning whether tropical medicaments were poison or cure before they entered European pharmacopoeias were common. This distinction ‘verged into the realm of the spiritual: was this cure the work of God or of Satan? Did it further divine providence or work against it?’ (Breen 2019, 149).

24 Martín de Porres was canonized in 1962 and he is known as the universal saint of social justice (Cussen 2014, 3–4).

25 ‘While it is true that in the stratified world of colonial Peru, an illegitimate mulatto faced a reduced number of life opportunities, it is equally true that he could circulate among the local religious and lay elite and eventually win their sponsorship, deep esteem, and, posthumously, their devotion’ (Cussen 2014, 10).

26 Afro-Peruvian layman Pedro de Utrilla, a second-generation surgeon in Lima, played a role in the push for his canonization in the nineteenth century. Another Mulatto surgeon, José Manuel Valdés, rewrote Medina’s biography of the saint, renewing interest in De Porres centuries after his death. And Black Catholics in the United States vindicated and elaborated work of Afro-Limeños who launched the cult to Martín de Porres (Cussen 2014, 12).

27 Blending the medicinal with the spiritual was common in diasporic communities. The Obeah Black people of Barbados, for example, were physicians and conjurers. Practitioners of myalism in Jamaica also blended the medicinal with the spiritual (Parrish 2006, 286–87).

28 It is difficult to know with certainty what specific ritual forms originated in west and central African cultures because Afro-Peruvians’ ancestors passed through Iberian ports before their arrival, developing an Iberian-inflected, hybrid ritual practice. In this hybrid tradition, Iberian and African traditions blend together (Garofalo 2006, 67–68).

29 Blending medicine and religion was not unique to Black African healers since doctors and priests were known to believe in the role of the spiritual realm in treating illnesses. By 1550, Archbishop Loayza wrote to doctors in Peru to remind them of the importance of spiritual ‘medicines’ such as confession in patient care in the Hospital de Santa Ana, mandating that all patients confess their sins within twenty-four hours of admission (Jouve Martin 2014, 128).

30 The belief that African healing was associated with evil, and that African practitioners targeted White victims, was widespread (Parrish 2006, 274–75).

31 The discourse linking humility with suffering and labor is rooted in the mystical tradition. For example, Teresa of Ávila stressed the importance of bodily mortification and suffering accompanied by humility to achieve spiritual elevation (Benoist 2019, 65).

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Monica Styles

Monica Styles is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Howard University. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled ‘Recuperating Black perspectives from the early modern Caribbean’ in which she seeks to recover and interpret the contributions of people of African descent to early modern literary culture through critical Black theory and critical Black feminist theory. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Hispania and The Afro-Hispanic Review. She teaches Latin American literary studies from the colonial period to the present.