UNIFYING
OURSELVES
Patience. It's the Rada's psycho-spiritual legacy to me. So now when
the white boy's eyeball starts to fit over mine. Casting itself over
my core. To stop this double vision thing. This hemorrhaging migraine
thing. i remind myself how the captured tribes in Haiti had to first
unify THEMSELVES with one Ginen persona and temperament. The Ibo, Gede,
Kongo, Rada and Nago ancestral groups helped the Ancestors reach into
their veins to extract the more rebellious spirit nations, giving the
Petwo nation - lwa Petwo yo- the helm, all the while showing
honor and respect for the more gracious, hospitable and accommodating
West African ancestral deities from Rada and Nago which would be sublimated.
Zansèt mwen yo, they nixed dualism, found the unity
within multiplicity and extended that, even when it denied those so
called Western "eternal verities" we modernists put on an altar no matter
what the human, material and environmental cost.
Zansèt mwen yo, they went with the concrete instead
of the abstract, connected to the wisdom of their own being; connected
their pains and passions with the power of things as they are - killing
the abstract gods and saving Abel, the real suffering body.
So now when i’m impatient with mandatory sentencing and the calling
for the death penalty for juveniles under ten; when i’m gasping
for air over Northern America's unfair application of the criminal laws
and when i’m mad as hell with the Uncle Toms and accommodationist
Haitian blanpeyi yo. i avoid hypertension - the Black woman's
disease - by putting on a new psychology: thinking myself a new mind.
Touching my own power base with my Ancestors' psychology. Pushing out
these right and left orbs in here which bring only an impasse. A confusion
and hopelessness clinging to me like a second skin. Lè m
panse a zansèt yo, i tap into fiery lyrics within where
i own solutions and do not avoid conflict. I unleash Ezili Dantò.
Li lèd li la.
Through her, now i know life is not full of dualism, even though that
seems rational. She showed me. Life is a palimpsest painting. One picture,
a thousand perceptions. Now, my new mind passes what i see through Grann's
uterus and suddenly imprisonment and containment in islands-of-pain
turn to that new vision - like a water teeming with life and destruction.
A sacred scarlet sea flows through me. Embracing me in Marinette's ruby
love. Concentrate, girl. Voilà! i can see beyond the "royal" priesthood's
red rage, a life in a bare mountain. Look with an inner eye. It's like
the mound of a womb, see. The vessel of life. There are roots beyond
the bare layers we see teeming with life, nourished by the heavy midst.
Roots flowing back to Lè Marasa and without end Anba
Dlo.
Ohhh yes, wonder is in hibernation waiting for your sight to reveal.
******
(c) 1997 Ezili Dantò. Excerpt from The Red, Black & Moonlight
monologue series, based on Kenbe La! Crossings of a Vodun-Roots Woman
by Ezili Dantò. All rights reserved.
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