THE AFRICAN TRICKSTER
by Ezili Dantò,
(c) 2000 Ezili Dantò, All Rights Reserved


(Vodun drummers and dancers performing ritual dances and chanting softly throughout the Mologuist's performance, the African Trickster poem is also a multi-character play. For a passage, see Epilogue, part 2, The Gede Trickster.)

VOICEOVER:
Ommmm, Ommmm

*

The Hero, finding no orgy of profit, power and prestige would halt his crawling years or withering youth - finding that even he, the Hero, must return to the eternal womb where he will again be undivided - escapes by wallowing in mind activity creating alternate universes, marked by divisions, left/right, black/white, good/evil, yin/yang.

And fitting himself into his alienated society, he discovers, still, he's an embryo riding the coattails of the Universe's melanin entrails. His shrunken essence slipping through the cracks of The Great Black Mother's undivided legs. (Woman looks down. Grabs a fistful of earth soil.)

But that one night when the African Trickster entered my dream, he told me:

"All the Zodiac blood signs say the First Worlders' are me in the past when i'd lost my way and tried to suffocate infinity.

Me, painted in grey mind activity full of statistics, clocks, calendars and theories i'd elevated to a rarefied science.

Me, a vampire, conceived in fear and dedicated to the proposition of profit - come from the past to remind me of what i had to transcend.

Me, crucifying my sanity in rational ejaculations, making sense of nonsense and partial wisdom.

Me, wallowing in mind activity, creating minds worshiping abstract knowledge cause no blood bubbled between my thighs.

Me, when i refused to know that logic and attention could not reach certain realms; that mind activity was incapable of deciphering the most important of
knowledges.

Me, when i couldn't find the unity within multiplicity blending collectivity and so i extended abstract Gods with no souls, not living deities like Vodun unrolls.

Jefferson-me, when i was into denying, disassociating from pain, living in a false reality so i couldn't integrate with my own shadow; so i said i was about saving souls, while a 42-year-old-me kept on molesting a 14-year-old Black girl named Sally Hemings at Monticello, whose very existence i made dependent on pleasing me, while i mouthed to all and sundry context-free words like my love for justice and liberty for all.

Me, a Y chromosome tightly wrapped in fears shackled in the Enlightenment's braille, my armies of insecurities the psychic imprints blowing me outward.

Me, when my virtues where alleged and very disconnected from the human body and i had to win my 'Cold War' no matter what the human or material cost to developing countries recovering from centuries of my colonizations.

Me, swinging to and fro - redefining my alleged virtues as i go.

Swinging, swinging, swinging...leading from abstract, derivative knowledge, from 'eternal verities' i'd put on the altar of logic and science, not from source.

Me, when i was linear and predictable, refused to go deeper than dualism and thought that that was the progressive path, refusing to see life is a palimpsest painting: one picture, a thousand perceptions.

Me, wedded to theories and pretty thoughts that bring suffering and loss that should never be valued, no matter how "logical" and mathematically correct they are.

Me, when i went against moving, turning, returning and spiraling serpentine paths
and did the linear thing.

Me, totally frightened by irrationality cause it felt like the abyss before my Western creations... even before mind activity, like i was going back to a primal Black darkness.

Me, when i couldn't leap from out there with tenderness and faith.

Me, when i had no 6th sense and could not live-love in my Western created darkness.

Me, when i recoiled from the contradictions with rational ejaculations; when i clashed with my own mind activity but still i elevated rationality and averted my eyes, like the-Garden-of-Eden Adam did; refusing to look with an inner eye to see
underneath the appearances of my creations.

Me, when i couldn't suck the abstracts out with my own tongue and couldn't find the Kreyòl ignition that started creation.

Me, before i tried concrete reality, killed abstractions like 'God,' 'Democracy,' 'Equality Before The Law,' and all those words i've rendered context-free by my actions.

Me, full of words i propagated to obfuscate and reduce life's harsh realities, not to bring about transparency.

Me, when i refused to reverse clocks imprinted with abstract genetic information; when i wouldn't absorb context, but was into carefully painted happy faces, pretty thoughts and hopes.

Me, when i did not connect with merciless reality and inner wisdom.

Me, when i didn't know my actions would change the FATE OF HUMANITY
because they molded Nature's responses and growth.

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(c) 2000 Ezili Dantò. Excerpted from The Red, Black & Moonlight monologue series, based on Kenbe La! Crossings of a Vodun-Roots Woman by Ezili Dantò. All rights reserved.