Bruce Dean Willis
A myth collected from the Yoruba oral tradition, in which the orixá Oxum interacts with her fellow divinities Exu and Oxalá in order for her to gain the knowledge of divination, informs Jorge Amado’s 1966 novel Dona Flor e seus dois maridos regarding the protagonist’s acquisition of diverse epistemological perspectives, both corporeal and esoteric. Even more directly, the same myth about Oxum serves as the climax of PJ Pereira’s recent trilogy, Deuses de Dois Mundos (2015). Both Brazilian works highlight in this way a specific erotics of epistemology from the African diaspora