Tignon for Ayda Weddo (or that which a center can not hold)

Firelei Báez overlays symbolic imagery, calligraphic patterning, and gestural painting as a means of personal engagement with the cultural memory and history of the African Diaspora. The image features an architectural plan of the American Sugar Refinery’s New Orleans filter house. As the largest US-based sugar refining business in the early 1900s, it had significant economic interests in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean locations and took an enormous physical toll on the many Black bodies linked to its history. Báez’s entwined serpent form references Ayda-Weddo, a spirit (loa) derived from Vodou traditions in Benin, West Africa and brought by enslaved peoples to Haiti and New Orleans. The color white is frequently associated with this female spirit of water and fertility, also referred to in some African cultures as Mami Wata (Mother Water). Her form is in the shape of a tignon, a head covering once worn by creole women of African descent in Louisiana. The use of tignons resulted from an oppressive sumptuary law passed in 1786 intended as a means to mark and control these women who might otherwise move too easily within white society. Resisting such imposed limitations, Black women transformed their tignons into elaborately adorned fashion statements and vibrant markers of cultural pride. In the lower center of the painting hangs an azabache gemstone amulet carved into a fist and commonly worn as a charm for protection in Latin American cultures.