Obeah Woman

Obeah Woman

Richard Elliott

...An obvious point of reference is the contemporaneous work of Dr. John, though Exuma’s particular brand of conjure was less well-known than the Night Tripper’s and its creator was also destined for a more obscure fate. There was also something more cosmic about Exuma’s work, the landscapes of which are as frequently posthuman as they are primordial. The first album’s cover bore a poem by the artist that described Exuma as a character “beyond the universe / a star that once lit Mars” and bore the message “the future is freedom, the past a chain / the present anybody’s game”...

... It is not clear where Nina Simone encountered Exuma’s work (they would have been Greenwich Village contemporaries in the 60s) but she clearly found something in it that would allow her to play with notions of possession, ritual and altered states of consciousness. Converting Exuma’s ‘Obeah Man’ into ‘Obeah Woman’ allowed Simone to take on the role of priestess, a role she for which she was eminently suited..

... As she eases into the song, she seems keen to educate her audience: “do you know what an Obeah woman is?” To affirmative response she launches her version of Exuma’s lines: “I’m the Obeah woman, from beneath the sea / To get to Satan, you gotta pass through me”. The crowd roar their approval and clap along to the hypnotic beat. Simone continues, interweaving Exuma’s mythic lines with asides that clearly refer to her own life experience: “they call me Nina, and Pisces too / There ain’t nothin’ that I can’t do”, the latter appended with the ambiguous agency of “If I choose to … If you let me”. Indeed, ‘Obeah Woman’ plays out as a classic example of the double nature of possession; to possess something (forexample, to take ownership of a song through performance) and to be possessed by something (music, the act of musicking). In order to offer the illusion of power, control and affective dominance, Simone needs to give herself over to the driving, possessive force of what John Mowitt calls the “percussive field” and, even more, to the audience’s approval (signalled by shouted responses, handclaps and, presumably, body language), effectively making herself a vehicle through which the spirit of the performance, its Obeah, can be channelled. “I didn’t put that name on myself”, Simone confides after six minutes of possessed performance, “and I don’t like it sometimes”...