Okan Reimagines Afro-Cuban Spirituality
Okan in “Sombras” music video. Courtesy of Okan.
The Afro-Cuban jazz group Okan consists of two Black female musicians: Elizabeth Rodríguez on violin and Magdelys Savigne on batá drums and drums. Born in Cuba and trained musically in Havana, Rodríguez and Savigne met in 2016 in Canada while in the band Maqueque, led by Jane Bunnet. A year later, they fell in love and became a couple, eventually leading to a breakup with Maqueque and the genesis of Okan as a musical and romantic duo. Rodríguez and Savigne gained recognition in 2020 with the release of Okan’s album Espiral, which won the World Music Album of the Year award at the 2021 Juno Awards. The group’s second album, Okantomi, released in 2023, won the same award in 2024. In 2025, the two relocated to South Florida, a continuation of their multiple exiles, a significant and essential part of their performance.
Okan’s music easily reads as an active site of resistance. Through the continued exploration of their identities, Rodríguez and Savigne shape their creative practice by challenging and reframing dominant cultural and religious narratives both from their homeland and within the diaspora. In music and video narratives, Okan engages in acts of worldmaking that rewrite the myths of African religions that enslaved people brought to Cuba, while simultaneously participating in world-breaking initiatives by destabilizing the hegemonic forces of patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, and environmental degradation that dominate Western societies.
As Latinx Black lesbian women navigating legacies of exile and their experiences as translocated migrants in Canada and the U.S., the duo uses their gender representation and audiovisual productions as tools for dissent, critiquing the ongoing marginalization and cultural oppression that their community faces. Their queer performances not only expose the exclusions of Western institutional structures but also celebrate and restore cultural practices through the reimagination of Afro-Cuban rituals.
Okan’s intersecting Afro-Cuban roots and diasporic experiences translate into a powerful medium for defiance, transformation, and spatial reclamation for Black lesbians in North America. Okan’s work embodies a radical critique of societal norms while offering a vision of community, cultural resilience, and liberation. Three of its music videos, in particular, function as mini archives that seek first to erode, then dynamite, and finally expose the futility and long-standing exclusions of the Cuban, U.S.–Canadian, and global agendas in its repression of dissident and rebellious bodies. These videos exemplify Sujatha Fernandes's cogent insights on the status of Afro-descendant Cuban society. When reflecting upon the female body, Fernandes notes that “it is not surprising that the female body would . . . become a site of contestation.”¹
The music video for the song “Espiral,” directed by Kathleen Ryan in 2020, took place entirely outdoors in Canadian open spaces reminiscent of the Cuban countryside. In those sites, the women expose their bodies as foreigners seeking a place for their spiritual practices and rituals, transgressing and recontextualizing the forced diaspora of Africans in a new cycle, not one of forced enslavement, but of forced exile.
“Espiral” opens with an Arará chant evoking Saint Lazarus (Babalu Ayé) as an exile. The landscape of Lake Ontario becomes a physical space of spirituality that welcomes Oshún (goddess of fertility and sweet waters), who later appears dancing in the middle of the lake wearing her traditional yellow dress. In the water, Oshún symbolizes the multiple flows of the orishas and how sexuality in these religions is not fixed or binary but instead fluid, never regulated by power, but rather by desire and nature.
After the opening, the lovers appear walking and holding hands in complicity. There, in “el monte”² and along its various paths (like the paths of the orishas), the Arará chant mixes with traditional campesino music. Historically, the national imaginaries have automatically assigned Cuban campesino music to white rural communities (descendants of the Creole sugarocracy and migrants from the Canary Islands, Galicia, and Asturias), while Afro-Cuban rituals and music were automatically assigned to Black communities. In this case, Okan reminds us that these musical fusions are products of a Cuban countryside that Black people also populate, just as countless white people of rural origin can be practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions. Okan’s most profound provocation is asserting that the Cuban revolutionary regime forcefully exiled both groups, and that lesbian desire, once far from home, can be possible and legitimate.
“Espiral” integrates syncretic spiritual portrayals that become vehicles for many transgressions: the European symphonic violin in offering to Oshún, the image of the dancer in yellow in a Canadian lake, the two Black artists lying on a field of Canadian sunflowers (offerings to both Oshún and La Caridad del Cobre). All of this is happening while, simultaneously, the mere presence of Okan as performers adds layers of complexity, highlighting the bodies of Rodríguez and Savigne, who both happen to be Black lesbian mothers in exile.
Through Okan’s social media, we learn that Rodríguez is an initiate in the rule of Osha and, as such, Oshún is her spiritual mother, the owner of her head. Carrying this knowledge, it is fascinating to know that Rodríguez was pregnant during the filming of “Espiral,” adding another layer of provocation since Oshún is the patron goddess of pregnant women and fertile women. In “Espiral,” rather than challenging the myth, Okan seeks to inhabit it.
Challenging gender tropes, Savigne is a woman who plays the batá drums, an instrument that men typically play. Religiously speaking, Savigne’s role is a rupture with the limiting oppression that this implies for practitioners of the rule of Osha. It also opens up possibilities through the inclusion of this story within the framework of exile as a landscape of underlying force and freedom. Exile for which the patakí³ of Babalú Ayé serves as a shield and excuse that provides Okan agency to tell its own stories of exile and sexile in the first person.
The two women’s romance in the middle of the foreign, yet familiar el monte—an exile that welcomes them with open arms, flowers, and bright dresses—is a celebration of homoerotic romance as something possible within this spirituality, albeit confined to distant soils. To reinforce all the above, the celebratory rainbow that eventually shows up over the lake enhances the queer imagery. The pair’s final embrace while facing the water and the rainbow, but turning their backs to the viewer, is their ultimate act of defiance. In this gesture, they assert their right to make us feel as uncomfortable as they have felt in that foreign land, where only the lake, el monte, and their queer desire have provided a sense of home.
Okan’s music video “Sombras,” directed by Luisa Maria G.R. in 2023, is, as the YouTube description reads, “an abstraction of the Cuban Santeria ritual ‘darle coco al muerto’ (offering coconut to the dead), which has traditionally been presided over exclusively by men. This new representation puts women at the center, allowing us to see what, at other times, was not permitted. The video is a portrayal of every strong Cuban Santera⁴ who has walked on earth. Igbayé!”
In the video for “Sombras,” Okan, as well as the rest of the women who appear in the video, wear winter clothes on the shore of another Canadian lake. Their Black bodies are an intrusion into the landscape, a great disruption since they are not there by choice, but because their present and ancestral life stories have forced them into exile. Once again, the duo is not shy about showing their relationship as lesbian lovers, but rather, they extend that love to an entire community of other Black and foreign women who gather around the fire to carry out their spiritual practices while legitimizing the love of the main protagonists.
It is highly significant that Rodríguez's mother costars in the video and approaches her daughter, anointing her forehead with cascarilla⁵ and kissing her afterward—a sign of unconditional love and support. The production alludes to the association between a spiritual mother who blesses her daughter in religion (such is the role of the Santeras to whom the group dedicates the video), but also blesses all those lesbian women practicing African rituals in exile.
The appearance of this real mother figure in the video, as well as that of the larger community of Black women, speaks to a freedom that no longer questions the sexuality of Black women but rather welcomes and protects them. Additionally, the video reconfigures the ritual of giving the coconut, traditionally assigned to men while women had to turn their backs, giving this Santera mother agency and absolute visibility over who her daughters are, bestowing loving acceptance upon them.
In another music video for the song “Iglú,” directed by Luisa María González, fresh water appears once again –the sweet waters of Oshún– always indicating its significance as the companion and facilitator of loving fluids, offering rituals, and also the element that has kept the secrets of the children of Oshún and Yemayá in both Africa and the Americas. It is the indisputable presence of nature that has safeguarded the lives of the descendants of enslaved Africans.
If in “Espiral” and “Sombras” the homoerotic visuality was somewhat elliptical and suggested, in “Iglú” it is explicit. Okan is not shy about caresses, hugs, kisses, and even the use of the feminine gender pronouns, which in Spanish leaves no space for doubts regarding one female subject addressing another female lover.
Savigne appears now throughout the entire visual narrative dressed as, and therefore portraying, an Iyawó. The Iyawós are people new to the Osha rule who must uninterruptedly dress in white for 372 days after initiation into the religion, cover their heads, and never remove the necklaces that represent the seven African deities. All of these symbols have special significance in the story “Iglú” tells. It is the Iyawó, the most deeply religious person in this visual production, who caresses and kisses her partner (Rodríguez, who wears a simple striped dress with no religious symbolism.
Even from the sacred moment of religious initiation, as Savigne indicates with her costumes, there are no limits to this love, which is possible within the demands of Afro-Cuban religiosity but, on the contrary, is a space of naturalized indulgence to love.
In “Iglú,” there is a mixture of pop music and Yoruba chants, specifically one dedicated to Shangó, where the repeated word aina (fire) signals the fire of their love. This is the same fire they invoke to melt the igloo in the chorus, indicating that both identities (religious and lesbian) can mix and coexist in harmony.
However, the most important question remains: Which specific material or symbolic igloo will melt if they express their love and somehow inscribe it in the blessing of the gods? The possible answers could be that the cold related to the igloos is indeed difficult for Caribbean people to bear in a country like Canada, and also that the igloo in a broader context is Western society, where, although there are legal spaces specifically for lesbian women to live their lives, a certain coldness from the hegemonic and heteronormative society continues to surround them, and finally that the igloos in an even more racialized frame also represent displaced and colonized people such as the Indigenous communities originally living in the northern areas of the Americas. Igloos and its coldness could be read as symbols of the forced distance Okan suffered from its original culture, but also as an alliance with other marginalized communities.
The inscription of exile connects to the social coldness and how their identities are melting away. The strength and fire of the warrior Shango work as weapons for making things happen, and making, once again, their faith their only possible home.
Okan presents the reinterpretation of various patakís that simultaneously embody politics further developed through the music and vocals in a rather defiant way. This practice appears as a constant dialogue with their contemporary lives as Black lesbians representing a nonconformist identity that envisions itself as always in formation, in the rewriting, the re-performing, and the seeking of a home for their displaced and yet undoubtedly resistant and resonant spirituality.
¹ Fernandes, Sujatha. "Fear of a Black Nation: Local Rappers, Transnational Crossings, and State Power in Contemporary Cuba." Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 575–608.
² You can translate El monte” into English as “the forest,” “the woods,” or even “the bushes,” but none of these phrases entirely captures the real meaning that Lydia Cabrera gave to that sacred in 1954 in her book El Monte: Notes on the Religions, Magic, and Folklore of the Black and Creole People of Cuba. This piece uses “el monte” instead of any of the other possible translations.
³ Patakí, in the Lucumí faith refers to oral narratives or religious tales used for teaching and illustration.
⁴ Santera is a priestess of Santería.
⁵ Cascarilla is an Afro-Cuban ritual powder.
