"If You Want to Live, Eat the Dead: Rites of Ingestion, Re-memory, & Healing Praxis"

How does working with the dead/ancestors offer us opportunities to mourn and cleanse ourselves? Maria Osunbimpe Hamilton Abegunde, Solimar Otero, and Elizabeth Pérez--each initiated into òrìṣà (orisha) traditions--explore relationships between the living and the dead, rites of ingestion and re-memory, and their healing of historical/intergenerational wounds. Using literature, poetic inquiry, and autoethnography, they share how and why “eating” the dead ritually can transfigure wounds into sacred sites for becoming whole. Abegunde approaches writing as ritual, catharsis, mourning, prayer, and a path to acknowledge (and release) anger and fear embodied from personal and inter/trans/generational violence in Black communities. Otero’s paper demonstrates that the Black Atlantic dead are historically, culturally, and ritually entangled with female entities that watch over the decay and the transformation of remains. Pérez contributes an autoethnographic meditation on writing _The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract_ (2022) in the midst of severe gastrointestinal and sociopolitical distress.