2018 Womanifesto
It is not taboo to fetch that which is at risk of being left behind.
This is the heart of the paradigm I’m attempting to construct; an archive of my body not solely rooted in the tragic dissolution of black bodies’ presence in America.
Existing white paradigms do not correspond to the realities of darker bodies existences, therefore, a new cosmology is necessary.
I’m using my lifes practice as an act of creating a cosmology ingrained in remembering our spirits innermost connectivity and potential; which is, the possibility of total spiritual and bodily freedom.
An existence without compressions.
To self actualize and decolonize I must imagine spaces and ways of being grounded in a critical yet intrinsic moral style, spiritual style, and aesthetic. Although this potential of being is largely suppressed by those existing colonizing paradigms, research, remembering and experience prove the urgency of expression in our music, spiritual philosophies, movement, language and endless other artistic expressions.
I am learning to understand the nuances and dialectical expressions of Ntozake Shange, Jill Scott, Carrie Mae Weems, Zora Neale Hurston, Erykah Badu, India Arie, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Belkis Ayón (the list goes on) and synthesize these voices with the deep well of history and mythology already presented.
Noumenally - posited or known independent of sense perception. This is the making of culture, an inner knowing.
Foremost, the way we understand the world is through our bodies
then its perceptions
which create its reality.
This too is where I must begin.
The pursuit to know the history/ genealogy of my body is driven by my desire to carve out a space of being amidst the structure of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and a deep responsibility to preserve and interpret the past for future generations. By rebraiding spiritual and ancestral ties worn loose by time, distance, ignorance and colonization, I’m embedding another voice into the bonfire of storytellers settled around establishing the cannon.
Over the last 2 years that’s looked like reimagined origin stories where women are the catalyst, the chaos agents, or the consorts of divine intelligence.
It is important to explore female images of God to get our balance back from thousands of years of patriarchy.
Mythologies mold our contemporary understanding of womanhood, while also chronicling the lived reality and spiritual potential of women at the earliest periods of cultural constellations. Yet just as myths and narratives can open paths of being they can also suppress the depths of being into compressed things,
blocking light,
blocking shadow,
and thereby blocking wholeness,
and denying divinity.
I am not waiting for the day when the unknown thing inside me will incidently be made known. I don’t want its revelation to be revealed only upon my death.