Skip to content
Waterbearer - copyright Lorna Simpson

The Star as Griot: Surviving by Way of Enigmatic Water-Bearers. In Person Workshop with Christopher Marmolejo

$0.00
"Historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, musician. Who will preserve our stories from one generation to the next? And how? And what when our existence is actively denied, our memory repressed, our histories undermined, our knowledge ignored?


I’m sure you’ve heard, Pluto is at long last in Aquarius; for good. As such, I am looking to Lorna Simpson’s Waterbearer, who looks away from the viewer, pouring her water with abandon. What does it mean for her to turn her back on those who cannot hear her? If she is a griot then why does she not command universal admiration?

The Griot will be a meditation on the oral histories that survive hundreds of years by way of the enigmatic water-bearers.


In the examination of Simpson’s striking art, we will look again, see what has never been seen, bear witness. The Griot realizes tarot as a technology of the sacred. In many different languages, we dial up the Divine. We hear ourselves in the echo of a myth. Certainly, there is a slippage, in the long distance between our histories, between the celestial guidance we seek, and the rough dirt road we walk evermore on, there is the space between what one says on the phone and what’s actually going on. But there is an efficacy of word-power behind the water-bearer’s storytelling. And it’s subversive.

Those who remember are of an ambivalent characterization. Their testimonials question our perceptual limitations. Their words have occult power, and by their speech, their sacred pouring, what had been far-distant in the night sky, impossible to transcend, becomes critically intimate, immanent

About Christopher Marmolejo

Christopher Marmolejo, MA, is a brown, queer, And trans writer, diviner, and educator. They use divination to promote a literacy of liberation. 


They are the author of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide To Divinatory Literacy, published By North Atlantic Books.

They Were Born And Raised In San Bernardino, California, In Community With The Serrano People Of The Pines, The Yuhaaviatam Clan Of The San Manuel Nation. 

As a trained educator focused on cultivating classrooms of emancipatory possibility, they work with students around the world to plant and nurture the seed of a divinatory practice, finely weaving tarot, astrology, and curanderismo with  decolonial, queer epistemologies and critical, feminist pedagogies.