M to the A to the S to the K
Put the mask pon the face just to make the next day
Feds be hawkin me, jokers be stalkin me
I walk the streets and camouflage my identity
I’m not really dreaming right now, or at least not having the wild, vivid Coronavirus-pandemic dreams that others are having, but I do notice that frequently songs are popping into my head. Curtis Mayfield, Fleetwood Mac, Erykah Badu: it will just come without warning and stay. This morning during my physical practice it was The Fugees.
I wrote a paper about hip-hop and religion last semester, about this book and how it shook my perception of Muslim-ness and blackness, and my own indictment of the single story of Islam that I’ve been carrying. The Score was a defining album for me, a young black woman in a massive, somewhat integrated high school in white suburban Southwest Ohio. Let me say, for the record: I know nothing of growing up in Newark. At the same time, that record was a vital gift for reminding me of what being black can mean. I grew up in the suburbs, but there was plenty of racism and violence waiting for me there. I am a grateful, fortunate, privileged person. And I live in a world and country where being born into a black body still puts me at risk. Of having a late-term abortion. Of dying in childbirth. Of rape. Of being disbelieved and sent home from a hospital despite being sick. Of being ignored or ground up by the systems that run our world.
I have a hard time in my body some days. I throw a lot of shade at early Christians (and some modern ones, too) for their struggle or inability to reckon with embodiment, with the idea that the human body, with its desires and appetites and longings and sensations, isn’t a breeding ground for evil thoughts and behaviors. This isn’t unique to Christianity either: there are plenty of religions that also have practices or histories of repressing and subjugating the body in pursuit of spiritual practice. Still, nobody gets side eye like the folks you know best—or at least oldest—which is for me Christianity. The misogyny, self-hatred, the body shame embedded in purity rhetoric that are a matter of course in the Church is so discouraging. It’s sent folks screaming from pews and confessionals over and over. It’s easy for me to throw this shade, but I’m as susceptible to the struggle of embodiment as they were. On top of which, Christianity has a rich legacy of oppressing folks, of destroying bodies, families, communities with its rhetoric. At best, it has a checkered past of loving and valuing a diversity of experiences. Most of the time I model fierce love of my own black body in defiance of that past (and present?) but it’s harder some days than others.
One of the things I love about Tantra is its affection for the manifest world, or maybe acceptance is a better word. Rather than pursuing suffering and self-mortification of the body as a means of achieving enlightenment or communion, it seems to advocate a radical fusion between the world and the Divine. No one has ever said that to me before. Particularly when I’ve been told that my body is something I need to hide in order to prevent others from sin (1 Corinthians), or that looking a certain way is mandated in order to worship and take part in community (many places in New Testament), or that how I comport my body makes me a “woman of God” (Proverbs 31)—to hear that my body is not something to hide or control, not something to be shunned, is revolutionary.
One of the tenets that non-dual Tantra holds is that there is no separation between the individual and the Divine. There is no separation between anything and the Divine. Every sensation, experience, occasion, opportunity is Divine because the Divine is in all of it, is in every subject, object, person, place and thing involved. This is a big deal when you live in a black body and the voices around you tell you your body isn’t worth anything. When you don’t see yourself represented, when you don’t see black joy, black achievement, black health, black peace, black beauty, when the single story of what you see when you look through history is torture, slavery, subjugation, genocide, oppression, illness, death, and erasure of your ancestors, and the same for you and members of your family in the here and now—the idea that your black body is Divine is huge.
So why are we blase about black people being killed?
*
My posse in the Brooklyn wear the mask
My crew in the Jersey wear the mask
Stick up kids doin boogie woogie wear the mask
Yeah everybody wear the mask but how long will it last
These are Agbogho Mmuo, or Maiden Spirit masks. One is at the Art Institute, or at least, part of their collection. These are Igbo, from a region of Nigeria. Unlike (contemporary) Halloween or Eyes Wide Shut or clowning, where a mask gives its wearer license to act out fantasies or socially “inappropriate” behavior, masks like these that are worn in religious ritual. The mask is a doorway to incarnation of other Gods, and when the wearer puts on the mask, he (because it is a he) becomes that deity, he is that God present in body and flesh, as a part of the ritual. The man you knew who was a part of your community is no more, at least for a time; now he is the spirit and the God represented by the dress, the mask, and the dance. The God is in him, the God is him. “Whenever I… interview[ed] a masked dancer after his performance…, I was told that the dancer felt himself undergo some sort of transformation. He usually acted as if he was another being and not his usual self.”*
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
I heard a teacher once describe mantra using subject and object as principles of divine-human relationship. (Subject and object are words I hear get thrown around in Tantrik circles.) We tend to think of ourselves as subjects and when we chant a mantra we use it as an object to nod, bow, pay homage to—whatever—an energy or deity, or the capital-s Subject right? But what if, he said. What if the mantra is the Subject and the deity is the Subject, and we chanting the mantra are the object? What if the vibration created through the labor of our brain, vocal chords, and respiratory system is the means by which God is worshiping itself? What if we are a tool for God experiencing God?
So maybe this idea of the separation between human and divine, between manifest and unmanifest is a slippery one. Many of us believe that: a spiritual experience doesn’t have to involve ingesting anything and tripping, though it certainly can, but it might also be as easy as understanding what ritual act is for. Maybe all we have to do is put on the right outfit and dance; maybe all we have to do is open our mouths and enter into the vibration with sound. Maybe all we have to do is let the door between worlds slide open just a fraction, and we can see and know things that only seemed available to learned men who would hand it down from on high. Maybe our feet, our voices, our faces are available to us as means of connection with the divine, with no mediator necessary. Yes. My body as gateway.
Here, Toni Morrison writes, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it.**
I love that use of flesh as a verb. We flesh. We glory in the celebration of our skin and arms and feet and hands and heart and liver because we know how easily, how frequently it can be taken away, and how many will line up to take it away. She invites, demands, exhorts a righteous and dogged treasuring of our body because it is so vulnerable in American society. I ask myself, if Devii chose to incarnate as a black woman at the end of the 20th century—or for that matter, at the end of the 17th, 18th, or 19th century—in America, if she chose me because she wanted to be me, why would she choose a body so shitty? So risky? So vulnerable or burdened?
I ask this question a lot, not because I’m a philosopher, nor because I’m seeking attention or causing trouble. I’m reckoning. I’m reckoning a radical worldview of non-duality with the profound delight of creation and the near-constant destruction of black bodies, and the white teachers I ask can’t help me do it. I remember being in a training a few years back and the two teachers were talking about shedding the narrative of identity (some of y’all know what’s coming). Race isn’t real. Set aside things like race and gender. I remember one of them saying that we live privileged lives, that we can walk streets without fear. I raised my hand, and countered, I walk the streets in fear. I don’t live in a country or city that shows that it values my existence, that in fact shows that I and people who look like me are expendable, that forces of “law and order” can take me out, and so can private citizens, by and large, with impunity. To their credit, my teachers acknowledged the reality I was pointing out. They’re the only two white teachers who have ever done this. One of them told me later, You work that identity as a black woman for as long as you can, until it doesn’t work for you anymore. I thought this was an interesting idea. I know that race is a construct, like gender, or sexual orientation, or affiliation, like so many of the ways in which we identify. I know that it is a narrative, and that the lie that the world is telling that this construct is who you are (and maybe I’m telling myself that too) is an incomplete truth. And I know I buy groceries and go to school and get sick and require medical care and walk streets and go for jobs in a world that uses the racial construct to ignore, erase, and oppress me and others. I don’t know how to live free, how to pursue and realize liberation in a world whose systems have embedded in them, either implicitly or explicitly, the mission of grinding me into dust. I’m not asking for a world where nothing bad happens. But I need a better reason then, because it’s more fun that way. (I have heard teachers say this. I think it is the Apex of Privilege to characterize race-based violence as a more compelling plot point for God than its absence. It is thoughtless and harmful, and it’s bad teaching.) This is my work, this is my practice, this is what I uprooted my life and moved across the country to learn to do. And I’m lost.
Life is a precious gift. Is it, though? If I believe that the God/dess is all things, that s/he is Ahmaud Arbery and the father and son who chased, caught, and subsequently lynched him, and the bullet(s) that ended his life, and the camera that recorded it and the man holding the camera, and the system that indicted them only after white people found out about it, (and will likely be unable to get a conviction because of some legal fancy footwork),and you and me and anyone else who is sick to fucking death of black people being killed because they are alive… then really, how precious is my life? Maybe it’s not so special. I am not talking about conceptual, abstract suffering; I am talking about walking The Path as a black woman in America. What value, what prize is a black life if the God/dess ends them so constantly and easily? How do I walk it actually believing I should love my body and prize my life, knowing that it’s disposable by Divine design? How do I love, trust, surrender to That?
*
M to the A to the S to the K
Put the mask pon the face just to make the next day
Brothers be beefin', cops be thiefin'
Brothers be schemin, they should be teamin
Jokers be smokin, and staying broke-in
Bitches be teasin, there money skeezin'
Niggas be creapin, baby mothers be weepin
I walk the streets and camouflage my identity
*
Maybe being human, maybe being a black woman, is a great disguise. It tricks me into believing that I’m not Divine, but that I’m the sum of my physical parts and that only. The vidya, the knowledge this path is supposed to move me toward is that, right, is realizing that God is in all the things, all the time, everywhere, that good and bad are just stories that we assign to stuff? In which case, the veil of reality that has convinced me that my birthright is not Divinity, but is only this manifest reality, has done a bang-up job. I want to believe that if I know that you are Divinity, as I am Divinity, then I will not take from you to feed me, that I will not ignore you or curse you or erase you. I want to believe that if you know that I am Divinity, as you are Divinity, then you won’t shoot me, or assault me, or won’t even interrupt when I’m trying to make a point. I want to believe that the recognition of God in and as all will make me want to be a better person, and you too. But I’m not sure. It feels like painfully hollow consolation to weep with those who are weeping and to tell them that God is in the actions that have caused them grief. I don’t feel better thinking that, I feel worse. I would get rightfully punched in the mouth for offering that as comfort to another.
At the end of this, all I have is presence. I don’t know if that’s enough. It would be a very Christian thing to say that God knows life is suffering and allows it, and that’s why s/he sent Jesus to literally be with us, though all I/we have of that is old third-hand stories about it. Frankly, it’s not that far off from saying that Devi knows life is suffering because she built it and she is in it as us, experiencing domestic violence, struggling to make rent, grieving for and with those who are terrorized and murdered Now. And now. And now.
All I have, All. I. Have. is presence. I’m supposed to, in this darshan, believe that I am Devi. Perhaps when it comes to this, being closer to Devi is me believing that s/he is with me in my rage and grief and despair. Maybe if s/he’s with me, even as she’s showing me my own shortcomings or skewed vantage points or whatever, I won’t think s/he’s just some Epicurean masochist who wanted to experience the best and the worst of life, of my life, for shits and giggles.
I know. It’s that single set of footprints thing. Terrible, right? Cheesy AF.
But I don’t have anything else.
*I’m quoting from an Anthropology Master’s Thesis written by Emmanuel Chidi Onwuzolum written in 1977 at the University of British Columbia! Delighted to use such a… random resource!
**This is from Beloved, spoken by Baby Suggs to members of her (black) community. Beloved is… a brilliantly crafted novel.