Rethinking Riva Muma as God's Good Creation

Me & Little Bro

I have had a complicated relationship with water. My only full brother drowned when we were young. He was the only sibling I grew up with, and his death marked me in ways I did not fully understand at the time. For years, I could not even take a shower without feeling panic rising in my chest. More than once, I jumped out of the shower suddenly—not because the water was cold, but because the memory was hot.

Divers came from as far as Negril to search for his body. For days we could not find him. When his body finally surfaced three days later, he was clad only in an underpants I had given him. That detail never left me. It made the loss feel unbearably close, unbearably personal.

After that, I wanted nothing to do with large bodies of water. No beach. No sea. No pool. He had died in a pond, a place the locals said was home to a Riva Muma. As a teenager, that explanation only deepened my fear.

Overtime, I began to realize that Riva Muma belongs to something much larger than Jamaican folklore. She belongs to a reality that has existed in human imagination since the dawn of time. In her book God’s Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and the Divine Hitmen in the Bible, Esther Hamori writes, “Sea monsters loom large in the cultural imagination, as they have since long before there was a Bible.” It should not surprise us, then, that the writers of Scripture drew upon ideas already present in their cultures when they spoke about the deep, the sea, and the creatures within it. Culture itself became a source of theologising.

The most obvious biblical example is Leviathan, mentioned, for example, in Psalms 74 and 104. Leviathan is a dragon-like creature that lives in the sea In Psalm 74, the sea monster appears as a force of chaos, something God must defeat. But Psalm 104 presents a very different picture. There, the psalmist praises God for creating Leviathan in wisdom and sustaining its life, providing it with food and care. In this tradition, Leviathan is created to be a pet to play in the sea, not to terrorize the world. Leviathan is not outside of creation but part of it. The Psalm mirrors the theme and structure of Genesis 1 creation account. Having created the sky and sea, including its “great sea monsters” on day five, God pronounces that all he made was “good.”

I see Riva Muma as our Afro-Jamaican cosmological equivalent to Leviathan in the ancient Near East where the biblical writers lived. This half-human (generally woman) half-fish comes to us primarily from our ancestral memory. She inhabits our seas, rivers, springs, ponds, pools, and even cotton trees and springs. She is a “mysterious otherness,” sometimes vengeful, sometimes protective. She can be feared, but she can also be a guardian of nature, a source of healing, beauty, wealth, fertility, love, and moral reckoning.

I encountered the idea Riva Muma in my childhood, and came across it again in Revivalism. Riva Muma is acknowledged across the spectrum of Zion Revivalism, though not always embraced. Part of the ambivalence, I suspect, comes from the fact that she is not named in Scripture, and much of Revivalism ascribes to the protestant idea of “sola scriptura.”  Part comes from Riva Muma’s association with what some consider to be malevolent, queer and even sexually explicit traits. But much of the rejection, may have to do with its proximity to Africa. In the Jamaican psyche, the more African something appears, the more easily it is stigmatized, shunned, or feared.

For Revivalists who embrace Riva Muma, she is encountered through journeying to that part of the spiritual world (also known as realm or nation) referred to as “River.”  She is approached through water and ritual involving water. And, though she is powerful, she can be bent to the will of the skilled practitioner.

Riva Muma gives us an opportunity to recover something modern readers often miss in the

Bible because we are so far removed from its cosmology. In Scripture, water is never just water. It is power, danger, chaos, life, judgment, and blessing all at once. The same is true in our own tradition.

In other words, the people in the Bible had their water creature too, drawn from their larger culture. We needn't cast ours asise anymore than they did theirs. In fact, we can celebrate ours as they did theirs!

I am not suggesting that we must find biblical justification for embracing Riva Muma. But there is certainly biblical precedence for recognizing that the world God created is filled with creatures, forces, and mysteries that do not fit neatly into our western theological or biblical categories, yet still belong to God.

Water / Riva Muma remains mesmerizing and frightening, sacred and life-giving. It is a gift given to all of us, a power that can destroy, but also a power that can sustain.

For me, reflecting on Riva Muma has become a way of re-thinking my own relationship with water.  What I once knew only as terror, I can now see as involving more – a deep mystery. What I once avoided, I can now approach with reverence.

And perhaps learning to live with that tension—rather than denying it—is part of what it means to say, with the writers of Genesis and the Palms, that even the most frightening parts of creation were once spoken over by God with the words:

“This is good.”

Riva night it was!