RED BLACK & MOONLIGHT
@2000 Marguerite Laurent; Windows on Haiti special edition
a) Much like here b) Bwa Kayiman
e) Vodun Woman i) Rolling on j) Beyond 2004
l) Self-Defense
LET'S UNIFY 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 lwas 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, 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 which 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 Les Marassa and without end anba dlo.
Ohhh yes, wonder is in hibernation waiting for your sight to reveal.