the language of liberation does not exist in the colonizer’s language
on speaking in tongues, the language of politics vs. spirituality, and decolonizing my art
Hello friends! Here is an audio version of this newsletter if you prefer listening over reading today:
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Last week I posted my personal mantras for 2024 on Instagram, and received a DM with well-intentioned feedback that my first mantra came off as insensitive. It read, “In this moment, everything is perfect.” Given the violent content we’re inundated with on Instagram and the cursory way we quickly consume content on the app, I understand this feedback. I actually anticipated it, and included a disclaimer in the post in hopes of clarifying my intent & meaning, which read: “[Everything is perfect] from a spiritual perspective—right here, right now, in this eternal present moment. This practice of presence is not meant to minimize the violence happening in Gaza.” Nonetheless, my words had the unsettling impact they did, so I took this as an opportunity to deeply listen and reflect. Here’s what I’m learning:
The language of liberation does not exist in the colonizer’s language.
Earlier that day, I recorded a podcast episode with my friends Pedro & Mercedez. (We host a podcast called Communion, record when we feel like it, and don’t market it. This has been very healing for me, showing me that I don’t need to turn every creative project into a thing, and that simply being an easeful, nourishing creative portal is worth exponentially more to me than monetizing, branding, and scaling something.) We somehow meandered our way onto the topic of speaking in tongues, which Pedro & Mercedez have both experienced firsthand. From the lens of the Christian church, the understanding is that people speak in tongues when the holy spirit takes them over, and the sounds coming out are the language & messages of the divine. Pedro described his one, hours-long experience of him speaking in tongues as him accessing a completely different frequency that was not limited to English, or any other earthly language—a truly awesome frequency that eliminated the distortions that naturally come when attempting to articulate thought into language—allowing his soul to express in a liberated & expansive way.
Pedro also mentioned that most of us have languages that are indigenous to our bodies that we don’t know how to speak. He says, “We don’t know how to speak from that grounded place because our bodies were encoded with the vibration of another language. That’s why we have a hard time articulating the language that was used to colonize us.” (I had a brain explosion after he dropped this gem.)
Over the past few months, I have been experiencing my own reckoning with the English language, feeling utterly frustrated by its ineptitude for expressing what my soul really wants to say. And, as someone who was indoctrinated into the colonized, false belief that English is Superior, as a poet who earnestly studies & genuinely loves the English language…there is a sense of grief I feel knowing that a more pure way of expressing has been stripped from me through colonization. Luckily, there are many artists actively exploring what a decolonized voice looks like, and I am uncovering my own values systems, my own “rules” for English, non-linguistic ways of knowing & communicating—and coming to the terms with the fact that English is an imperfect, clumsy, imperialist way of conveying.
The language of spirituality is often at odds with the language of politics—though they have the same mission: self & collective liberation.
This basis of understanding is critical when thinking about how I might edit the post about my 2024 mantra to be more sensitive. In addition to removing the post from Instagram, which is not an outlet conducive to the nuanced context & multidimensional understanding this post requires, I can also be more specific. What is the framing of these words and what are they referring to? What do I mean by perfect? And as I attempt more specificity, I can give myself grace knowing that I won’t be able to translate my soul’s message perfectly—and that is okay.
“In this moment, everything is perfect.” Perfect is the problem word here, rife with connotations, most likely conveying that everything is “good” (another problematic word with great potential for misunderstanding), or free from flaws. What I am actually trying to convey doesn’t exist in the English language—by “perfect,” I mean a spiritual place of pure presence and peace that exists on an entirely different plane than our material, 3D world. This is a transcendental place that I can access through meditation, hypnosis, and breathwork; and this spiritual practice of presence, somatic grounding, and spiritual faith is not a bypassing of the violence happening in Gaza—on the contrary, it is a necessary and powerful tool for accessing self and collective liberation. We must be able to access this place that holds space for a better world, that imagines it, that enables us to actively embody it—and to create new systems, movements, and consciousness from this space here in our 3D world. Without this place of spiritual “perfection,” we are utterly lost.
“Perfect” is an acceptable word through the lens of spirituality, but it is unacceptable through the lens of politics. In a political lens, “perfection”, and the way it shows up in people & organizations is actually a symptom of white supremacy—aka very very bad. It’s bewildering that one word can mean opposite things through two lenses that actually need to work together to achieve their shared mission of liberation. You cannot be spiritually enlightened without an intersectional, global concept of politics & solidarity; and you cannot be politically righteous without a practiced embodiment of love and the divine / faith in a higher power / sense of interbeing. (There isn’t an English word to encompass this concept, either!)
On crystallizing my creative values
All in all, I’m grateful that this feedback opened up a portal for me to think critically about my craft, my calling, and my creative values. It’s helped me crystallize my feedback protocol, which I began developing in a workshop called “Decolonizing Your Creative Voice.” Because I err on the side of fawning to others, part of my protocol includes taking time to reground in myself and what I know to be true, and deciding from there how & if I alter my work. I’ve realized that I need to give my own voice and wisdom the same amount of dignity I give to others’—it is the only way I will be the type of artist I strive to be, and the only way I can live out my soul’s purpose.
And, lastly, this has also been a learning moment for me to take out the ego from my work (which I realize is paradoxical to what I wrote in the previous paragraph, illustrating the ineptitude of English once more), and to take out my ego from the response it receives. I need to allow people to have their own reactions to my writing (thank you to my friend Angel for this gem)—other people’s responses to my work are just as valid & true as my original intent in creating the work, even when they are at odds with each other. I cannot control people’s reactions to my art…and why would I ever want to?
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