Writings

The medicine man Malidoma Some writes in his book Ritual, “When two or more are gathered with a purpose, the conditions for ritual are set.” This wisdom comes from his people, the Dagara of Burkina Faso and the cultural technologies they have developed through centuries of living as a closely woven community; this is wisdom he was charged to share with the world as part of his calling to be a bridge between the industrial and the indigenous. I start here because it is the basis for all else that follows in this loving critique of the re-enactment of the German Coast Uprising of 1811. We were 350 gathered, with varying intentions, and yet this potential for radical healing and solidarity of community remained largely untapped. Theater is transformative in part because it is real in the mind and body enacting it. It transcends play and pretend and becomes an act of manifestation of feelings and sensations, thoughts and questions, and at its most transcendent: Truth. To embody a thing is to take it on body and soul until it becomes instinctual, until the false separations of time and space are collapsed into the universal truths of all existence. The call to embody the German Coast Uprising of 1811 had this energy when I received it, the call to encounter what lies underneath the narratives of the common cultural tongue of “The United States of America”. Unfortunately, the power of that call was diffused by the treatment of the re-enactment and the people called to participate in it. The truths of the context and the truths of how it was handled resulted in an experience that while serving as a potential potent cauldron for deep healing and transformation was rather lukewarm, often frustrating, somewhat underwhelming, and distinctly sad for me. Sad not because it was poorly done, it wasn’t; in terms of taking care of our physical needs I cannot complain about the way that the operation was carried out. My loving critique is of a different nature. Ritual is a living parable. Ritual, like theater, is a form of cultural technology that utilizes human physiology as part of a larger generative process. In all indigenous cultures, ritual is a critical piece of maintaining a healthy and thriving community. Ritual reinforces the shared cultural myths that all culture is built upon, somatically affirms our connections to one another, and harnesses that energy that we produce for the greater good. As living beings we emit energy constantly, it is what we are made of, and when humans are gathered our energy waves sync and create a distinct pattern that is made up of all the individual inputs and yet is not of them singularly. This existential Truth is part of what is so critically lacking in industrialized societies. The ancestors brought here from Africa knew this and part of the gifts given to their descendants is the tacit knowing of this, which is affirmed most explicitly through our art forms. I thank Dread Scott’s vision and determination. I thank the team that did the logistics and provided for our creature comforts. This critique is offered in the spirit of solidarity and co-creation. My desire is for things like this to happen again, and again, and again, and… (until we’re all dead probably because industrialized human beings are kind of cosmic trash but that’s another thought piece). Contemporary humans by and large haven’t learned the lessons of the past and so we are repeating them again, and again, and again… and we will again, and again, and again, and... until we do. Some of our biggest obstacles are the cultural and practical priorities set by capitalism and patriarchy working in tandem as secular cosmologies. What I experienced as lacking in the execution of the experience was all the more disappointing because it was predictable. And because, quite simply, I expected more of a production that explicitly named itself as revolutionary in its purpose and praxis. I write this from a place of body-privilege that allowed me to walk the 20 something miles of the journey with little more than some portents of blisters. I also write this from a place of experiential privilege. My graduate studies in post-colonial Social Transformation and Culture & Spirituality were at a seminary and my own spiritual journey has been one I’ve chosen for many years now. As a result, I have spent a lot of time in ritual spaces and I have spent a lot of time studying, practicing, and experiencing spirit tending. I write this knowing this has not been everyone’s choice or option. I also write this from a place of ignorance, not being privy to the inner workings of the production. As someone who often coordinates events I can appreciate that what comes out in inner circle planning conversations doesn’t always make it through to the edges of the operation. I also understand that it was the first time and that comes with a learning curve. Those things being said, while this critique is somewhat rooted in academic reflection, it is also personal. Through my grandmother’s line, my people left the German Coast area of Louisiana and came to California, where I am from,3 generations ago. It is likely that one of my blood ancestors participated in the Uprising; from anecdotal evidence of my own existence, we are not of a sort to grin and bear it. And to add complexity to the mix, some of those ancestors, from my mother’s family ancestry research, were also likely the German’s of the coast. Exactly how these bloodlines joined streams I am unlikely to know in specific; it is possible that they were joined by some sort of Grimm fairy tail-esque story of genuine affection and respect in the midst or tragedy and turmoil, and it is just as equally possible that it was by rape and torture. This macabre “What if?”, or to be more precise, “What was?”, is an American inheritance. While I imagine few White-identified people play it, it is one I cannot help but entertain at times as a Black person with an Irish last name. I know I am not alone in this. From a lifetime of listening and talking with Black people about being Black, I know that the sordid truths of the past still ring loudly in our lives. The call I received was to retrace the steps of African-American ancestors who had fought and died for their freedom and to establish a new paradigm of living outside the slaving states and culture of the Southern “United” States of that time. Their revolt was not successful in that they did not achieve the goal of taking over New Orleans to create a free Black republic, but they were successful in stating and sending a message of personal and collective liberation loud and clear, one that was, and is, often suppressed in the narratives of this culture and society. The cultural technology that links us then and now in the arc of the African diaspora is precisely why we were stolen. We have always been the most valuable commodity in the American economy. We were weavers and rice farmers and midwives and medicine folk and singers and griots and dancers and geologists and biologists and theologians and teachers and seers and astrologers and builders and chefs and landscapers and so much more. Wouldn’t you much rather have any of those things than a cow raise your children, or a goat be responsible for building your house, or a Fox be responsible for growing your food? Yeah, the colonists too. And yet, they being also human- despite culturally encouraged inhumane behavior- were faced with one of the deeper mysteries and conundrums of human existence: consciousness. They had to somehow carry out a denial of so grand a scale that they could simultaneously accuse someone of being a being they professed to exist without any real existential merit while also lusting after that same being, producing children with that same being, and giving that same being, for all intensive purposes, ultimate control over their livelihood. The desperate escape from bearing the brunt of this dissonance on body, mind, and spirit is what we were called to embody. We were met with- tasty- chicken Caesar wraps, and red beans and rice. We needed food for our bodies, but we also needed food for our souls, and the souls of those we were being asked to honor. (Good) Actors spend a good deal of time immersing themselves into the mindstate of the person they’re portraying, going to places they might go to, talking to people they might talk to, eating foods they might eat. Within the larger context of the legacy of enslavement and the ways it still lives today, the lack of experiential context created for the performance, which feels more accurate to what happened than re-enactment, took away from people’s ability to fully Believe for a time they, that We, really were going to win New Orleans and start a new world, that we even could. The most obvious issue was quite simply that the majority of the direction being given was being given by White men. This to me was really a shocking faux pas; the irony of being asked to take on the spirit of a person, a people, who were/are fighting for liberation from some of the most inhumane and casually tortuous conditions human beings have ever known and then to also be in real life being told where to stand and how to behave by a red faced white man in a puff coat was not lost on me. Or many of my peers. When we were in costume, black and indigenous and creole and all the crayons of the diaspora, there was mostly an easy flow. There were definitely moments of tension but when left to our own devices, to fully embody the spirit of rebellion we created songs and dance steps and rituals and instruments and truths. When the production team, mostly White males, would get into the mix there was a noticeable chill. People paid attention but in a way that felt realer than what the re-enactment was going for, the kind of attention that is mostly ears while body language speaks volumes in response, the kind you find in classrooms ruled by dominance rather than respect. One reason for this is that their relative position in the experience was never acknowledged, which created an environment that was emotionally and spiritually unsafe for the participants. This is not about White people being unable to be allies, they can be. There were White people who always knew enslavement was wrong, and some of them even actually Did something about. But this is not the same as being enslaved. Part of establishing oneself as an ally- whether it be about gender, religion, class, race, or anything else- is establishing that you have something I call contextual empathy. Contextual empathy is about having put in enough effort on your own part to understand how people in the group you’re allying with might be experiencing the world. In practice this could look like a man approaching a supervisor to advocate for a female co-workers raise because he knows he’s more likely to be taken seriously as a man; it may look like putting paper and pens out for a friend who couldn’t find childcare so their kid can be occupied during the meeting. It can look like many things but the power of it is in people who often have to expend extra effort to get their needs met, get to have the transformational experience of being considered without having to explicitly ask for it. In the case of the performance, it would have been speaking to the visible power dynamics at play during the experience, which, unfortunately, still all too often align themselves by race, and gender. If any one of them had acknowledged the context of their position explicitly, it would have gone a long way towards creating an environment of real-time solidarity, of shared ritual, rather than a movie set which only exacerbated what Hasn’t changed since 1811. I was surprised that a team who’s literal job is optics did not see this and think to address it. I doubt that no one on the team thought about it, but from a place of spiritual practice and radical praxis it needed to be named. While I knew it would be filmed, it is something all together different to be having to fight the urge to swing my machete at a drone when I am supposed to be fleeing chattel slavery at the turn of the 19th century. “But that’s acting!” you might say, and to that I say, “But we weren’t called as actors; we were called to embody”. That we did not do this fully, in my opinion, has to do with the larger cultural context in which we live, one in which the spiritual element of life is devalued or deformed. That this is true does not remove accountability from the production team for not attending to the spiritual nature of the experience with care. We failed to rebel against the status quo of our day while celebrating those before us who did. As the colonial scientific perspective catches up to the wisdom of indigenous experience, it is understanding that we are all far more deeply connected than the Cartesian paradigm that rules our society posits. We are quite literally woven into the fabric of a universe that talks to itself through our living being. We are light and sound, therefore frequency and vibration. Understanding this is part of the cultural inheritance of being African-American; our art forms carry this medicine through rhythm and color and speech and movement and taste and texture. When this medicine would arise organically among those that had answered the call, song circles and drum circles and play, it was captured to be packaged and sold. What was done to ensure that the people creating the medicine would at least be acknowledged for their offerings? Is there anything being done to ensure that they will be compensated for their creative-intellectual property? Of the media I’ve seen, there are almost no mentions given of the individuals who created those moments which the production team will then use to build upon for their own endeavors. How is this much different than what our ancestors cried out against, the use of our bodies and souls without reciprocity? While I honor that it is no cheap or easy task to pay 350 people, and I noted with gratitude that it was happening, the amount paid does not reflect the larger value of what was created nor how it may be used in the future. The ritual that was done was primarily participant led. Even the one for the whole group felt like it was initiated by the indigenous representatives and approved by an abashed, and appreciative, production team. And that this then was capped by a call to the Christian god, the same god that was called on to justify enslaving us in the first place, was allowed to pass without note. This is not about policing people’s beliefs, but it is about honoring the wounds that god has allowed, whatever you believe in, and also speaking to what is binding across our diaspora. We were stolen from Africa as muslims, babalaos, members of the lost tribe of Israel, and so much more; once here were created candomble and santeria and re-created vodun. There was such careful attention paid to the optics that would live on camera, but what of the details of the spiritual lives of the time? What rituals gave them strength, what rituals restored their purpose, what songs refreshed their voices? These too are part of what it means to embody rather than play dress up. Our gods are many but the belief in God, in the ultimate oneness of our existence and therefore our interdependency as a community, unites us. It is why when one Black person does bad we all go, “Damn!” and feel some shame. This too is our inheritance. From my experience- I marched with many columns over the days (mostly trying to stay near the drummers)- from the lead there was a tendency to kind of quiet down in areas where I felt we’d have the most impact, going through neighborhoods, near public areas. The life of the line was always with the drums, typically in the middle, and where I spent most of my time. I noticed that in these same moments that belly of the ranks would swell with music and chants and affirmation while the fore marched stoically ahead with a sort of grim posturing of defiance. There was no shortage of press though… more than once an organic moment would emerge from within the ranks only to then be swarmed by a cloud a white people with cameras and equipment attempting, in my opinion, to do the same variety of thing their ancestors did: love the culture but not so much the people. Our enjoyment, our experience of embodiment, our cauldron for intergenerational healing was made submissive to the desires of the white gaze. What keeps us resilient was commodified, and what was sacred was profaned in the act. In the end I cannot speak for everyone only myself, but there were glimpses of the possibility, and again and again the Whiteness would intrude and disrupt the organic process. This created an environment with not only a lack of emotional and spiritual safety, but of physical safety as well. Time and time again these types of oversights are solved by the simplest solution: put us in positions of power. By us I mean a multitude of things but mostly Black womxn and queer people and people of color, in more or less that nonexclusive order. It matters because we see and experience the world differently due to our relative positions within capitalism and patriarchy and the whole mess of other -isms that are eating humanity alive. That this production was primarily male-led was no revolution. That this production was primarily White male led, despite having originated in the process of a Black man, was no revolution. The tenderness of the psychic and spiritual wounds we inherit as African-Americans deserved better. Our liberation lies beyond the bounds of the world we know, a place we can only reach metaphysically. The places we occupy with our hearts, minds, and spirits become our waking abodes; someone thought of capitalism, and industry, and patriarchy, and chattel slavery, and environmental racism, before they were acted upon. We now all live subject to the imaginations of those given the power to define. It is our responsibility as artists and activists and regular ass Black people who fight the good fight by simply staying alive to nurture and honor what lives beneath our skin in our lives by aligning our behavior with those inner truths. Our ancestors knew this. They lived it in ring shouts and while hiding orishas behind the images of saints and in the charms sewn into the hems of their clothes and the patterns woven into their hair. I understand that the concert in Congo Square was intended to be a re-imagination of how the 1811 Uprising ended then, but again the lack of consideration of the participants themselves did not create a container that could hold what had been brewing over those 20 something miles. The time that we took outside of the Mint felt to me as OUR celebration, the one production wasn’t thrilled about. The barrier of the fence between us and the watchful, still highly White, gaze created a vortex that then spilled out and through the Quarter as we marched. Finally, after the lines of formation and chant we broke loose. While this had happened at rest stops along the way, they were as the stretches to the dances we did in the streets. And then we encountered Congo Square and the energy was again diluted and consumed. There was no space made for us to enter, and not only was that dangerous with our props, it was a jolt to the spirit. While we had been preparing, the onlookers hadn’t and acted accordingly. At some point during the Say Their Names chants I looked at the stage and again saw Black culture on display with a front row of White faces. Even in costume they were reluctant to cede space to me to have the best view when I decided to take up space there. Once it was over we had no circle as participants to “close the container”, we were simply directed to give back our weapons and get our things. This is the most powerful place for us to gather, once we have already stirred what’s in our souls. Tending to this energy, gathering and directing it towards meaningful future actions is the true point of ritual. There was much lost in this moment. I watched people lose the confidence in their steps, the gleam in their eyes, the expansiveness of the space they took up, at being dumped back into a reality that did not have space for them to remain free. People moved aimlessly around the square, still hungry for the connection, still wanting to see what would come of what we’d made, disoriented by having to integrate their 24 hours of altered reality These things are my experience, the critique. The love is what I see can be done about it: -From the get go I have to wonder why more PoC media were not visibly involved. While I understand that the art world, as most spheres of the professional world, are run by White funding money, I also know that there are Black journalists and media producers with the talent and skills to tell this story. -The Black folks that were involved were not given as much air time as the White folks involved. The optics and the message this sends needs to be thought about: can we only have revolution if it’s aided by Whiteness? What does radical and equitable cross-cultural collaboration look like? How can the predictable patterns of power be subverted with intentional project design? -While there were Black womxn and QTPOC involved in the planning of the performance, they were not centered at times when we were all gathered. When thinking about who will be offering direction and serving at various liaison positions, give Black womxn and QTPOC the mic. Too often we are critical in making things happen and may even be given lip service as to our importance but when it comes to delegating actual authority and power we often end up empty handed. These womxn were acknowledged to, primarily White, funders but most participants were not at the funder’s event; at times when it was primarily Black performers present, White men had the mic. -Mental and spiritual care is not an afterthought. Do a pointed needs assessment of what makes people feel supported during the registration process (Do you have any mental/emotional health conditions and/or needs?). You can also use this to identify people in the community that can offer gifts (Do you have a spiritual practice that helps you stay grounded that might serve the whole?) Asking normalizes that these are important issues and also provides important information about what you will have to deal with in terms of group dynamics. It gives you critical management information about the mix of people you will be putting into quite and intense experience together. This is particularly important in Black and Brown communities because PTSD and PTSS are endemic and the effects of those wounds often show up in ways that can be disruptive to creative and collaborative processes, including explicit violence. -Be explicit about how the power structure is set up and the relative responsibilities that go with it. This ensures clear communication paths and minimizes the people in power misusing it as they can be held accountable when actions or behavior fall outside of their respective role. -Be active in community building. Set aside time and space to speak intentions and facilitate the types and ways of connecting you want to create. If you want people to be talking about what comes next, ask them. This is not about distrusting people’s capacity to do this for themselves but about leveraging positions of leadership for their visionary power. People by design strive to meet the expectations set by their environments and setting the expectations for deep and strategic conversations facilitates the mind state of revolution and revolt. -Have healers and mental health practitioners on site and on call. The intensity of what can be triggered by asking people to embody positions of enslavement, even in revolt, cannot be overstated. Inter generational trauma lives in our genes; the beauty of this is that it allows us to be in a position to heal our ancestor’s wounds alongside our own at essentially any moment. Integrating people with specialized skills in this area again normalizes this type of caretaking and uplifts the type of cultural practices our ancestors used for their own resilience and bridges the gap in time between us. -Create explicit moments for release and relaxation. Provide board games for people staying overnight. Create circles rather than rows. Design a landing space that encourages conversations and connections. Offer open questions at meal times, “What is you favorite part of being Black? What do you wish you saw more of in the Black community? If you haven’t been, would like to travel to Africa? Why of Why not? If you have been, what’s your favorite place to go?” These types of questions ease connection, especially for introverted personality types, and provides a fertile ground for potential collaborations to sprout. -Do not assume that just because people are Black they will all be on the same page. It was very clear some folks showed up for the paycheck, and some folks showed up for the revolution. These are not mutually exclusive, but it does have deep impact on participant expectations and therefore participants responses to what happens. This is part of why curating the participant experience is so important. There is a huge diversity in the diaspora and people have many varying experiences of what it means to be Black, their positive and negative associations with it, the wounds they carry from it, what they find beautiful about it, where they want to see Blackness go next. There can be a lot of judgement within the Black community about how people live their Blackness and modeling from the leadership that All of it is welcomed and celebrated goes a long way towards building solidarity within a group. -Always keep the whole and the sum of its parts in a balanced ratio. By this I mean track both the forest and the trees. While any sort of film production is a huge undertaking, it is not more important than the people making it happen. This cannot be a matter of words but must be supported by intentional actions and behaviors that affirm it. This was not totally absent, and there is a lot more that could have easily been incorporated to care for the wholeness of participants. As I stated early on in the letter, I want to see things like this happen again, I just want to see them happening with a deep love and caring for the Black people who still labor to birth this nation state's ideals despite it’s own best effort at miscarriage. Our daily struggles and triumphs deserve to be tended to and is in fact the only way we can ever reach true equity. Beyond the labor wages, this country owes a deep debt to Black people for the completely unpaid and devalued emotional labor that was done. Emotional justice is also freedom work. Designing experiences that value the emotional wounds, costs, and labor of Blackness is fundamental to creating a world where Blackness thrives without fear of being snipped and pruned to adorn the living room of Whiteness. In solidarity, Jihan