“Spiritual and cultural warfare are the bedrocks of settler colonialism”
-Cara Page, Healing Justice Lineages
How do you know you’ve been changed? What signals to you that you have undergone some profound transformation or healing? When I speak of change, I mean to discuss a freeing change, a liberating change that brings us closer to ourselves, to each other, to our ancestors, to nature, to a reordered world void of antiblackness. A metamorphosis that allows us not emptily to purport “we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams” but to know their dreams intimately because we know them because we sit at their feet unabashedly. When I speak of change, I speak of a politics of refusal, collective healing, imagining, and embodied liberation. This is the subject of my current thesis research, which seeks to explore the liberatory potential of ritualized theater informed by Afro-Diasporic spirituality and how this form of performance enacts collective healing and incites liberatory thinking.
In Healing Justice Lineages, Cara Page asserts that the bedrock of settler colonialism is spiritual and cultural warfare. Culture for Amilcar Cabral was also integral to black liberation in National Liberation and Culture Cabral argues for the validity of culture as a valuable tool of resistance. For Cabral, culture is a manifestation of a people’s thinking and history as well as a shaper of their history, both past and future, a people with a strong indigenous culture has the tools and knowledge to transform their history. Spirituality, an integral aspect of culture, has long been part of black liberation tradition. During the Haitian Revolution, they depended on the divine power of Voodoo and Voodoo priests to help raise the consciousness of the enslaved people of San Domingue and solidify their divine intent and protection. In the American South, revolt leaders turned to the power of conjurers and Black folk religion to aid in the formation and success of their revolts. At the center of this convergence between spirituality and liberation struggles is an ancestral worldview that does not delineate between the supernatural or spiritual and the physical. In Ritual by Patrice Malidoma, Malidoma expounds on the role of ritual in our lives and how it affects change. He asserts that the physical manifestations of the ills of our world all have spiritual/psychic dimensions that can only be fully transformed through ritual. Through ritual, we access the knowledge of the supernatural, our ancestors, and engage in repair and healing in that realm, from there we then can begin to bring about the healing necessary within the physical. Through their refusal of the anti-black practices and ideologies of the state as well as the aesthetics and confines of Western theater, cultural workers like Amara Tabor Smith and Ebony Golden engage in both an aesthetic and politics of refusal through their assertion of black radical traditions and Afro Diasporic spiritual technologies within their work. Embedded in the fabric of their practices are black feminist frameworks, African cosmologies and ontologies, and elements of the black radical tradition.
In a panel hosted by the Repair Project, a San Francisco-based initiative designed to address anti-Black racism in science and medicine, dance ceremonialist Amara Tabor Smith discussed her practice known as ‘Conjure Art’ She described the practice as an art-making practice integrating traditional Afro Diasporic spiritualities into the art-making process to shift the energy around pertinent social justice issues, calling on spirit/god/source/high-power/etc to intervene in the transformation of these issues. In a workshop hosted by theater ceremonialist Ebony Golden, participants were invited to engage in healing and world-building through an ecowomanist lens.
In Theater of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal discusses the political potential of community theater, asserting in the following quote; “ present always a vision of the world in transformation, therefore, is inevitably political insofar as it shows the means of carrying out that transformation or of delaying it”. In Critical Ethnography, Soyini Madison, in her discussion of Performance Ethnography, argues performance is a natural human occurrence that includes theatre performance. In these performances or performativity, societies engage in the daily act of performing prescribed social constructs, identities, and values, and it is through the ritual of performativity we preserve hegemonic culture. But performance and performativity also provide a space for resistance. Through performance, we can face and interrogate hegemonic constructs and inform and alter human behavior by creating and performing subversive counter-identities, values, and realities. The theater then becomes the fertile ground for us to water our visions, to set ablaze the institutions and systems of “cisheterocapitalistpatriarchy” and till a new world. Now, I’m not arguing that we can simply “perform” our way to total liberation, no I’m positing that as we consider the psycho-spiritual impacts of our colonization, conjure art should be an integral aspect of our strategy for liberation as we strive for total liberation; a liberation of the body, mind, and spirit. This form of theater is not new and belongs to a lineage of black culture workers.
During the civil rights era in the Deep South, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) established Freedom Schools that provided the masses with political, historical, and cultural education. Three members of SNCC also established a touring theater company alongside the school in 1963; Derby Doris, John O’Neal, and Gilbert Moses established the Free Southern Theater. The theater was the cultural arm of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The theater traveled throughout the South, staging community plays and workshops to engage Black Southerners’ political and social imagination, employing a technique known as participatory theatre, which encouraged the audience to engage in the play as the play’s actors and playwrights. The local audience determined the action and direction of the play, acting out social and political problems as well as potential solutions.
As the civil rights era gave birth to the Black Power Movement the Free Southern Theater also birthed the Black Arts Movement. During the Black Power Movement, the ritualized theatre of Barbara Ann Teer and her National Black Theatre functioned in the same capacity as its predecessor. NBT, like the rest of the Black Arts Movement, operated as the cultural extension of the Black Power Movement. Shaping the consciousness and altering the spirit and psyche of Black people inspiring them to align themselves with the fight for Black liberation. Teer’s National Black Theatre sought to evoke the rituals of Black Pentecostal churches and Yoruba traditions and merge them with the cultural elements of Black Americans to create rituals that would raise the consciousness of Black folks, nurture community among them, and heal their spirits and psyches. These rituals utilized theater as the conduit to disseminate the liberatory counternarratives and healing energy encapsulated within them. Teer created rituals for Black people’s empowerment, affirmation of their humanity, and elevation of their spirit with the intent of “rehabilitating Black people’s ability to love themselves” and each other into liberation. These two artistic movements helped to cultivate and sustain the liberation movements they were attached to. Theater, as a component of culture, can shape how people think, act, and imagine other ways of being. Not through mere mimesis of their flawed actions and behaviors but by bringing them back into their bodies through catharsis, the emotional and psychic clarity of their reality. By inciting their imagination and providing them a space to wield their imagination into reality. So, what happens when we combine these elements of ancestral spiritual technologies and ritualized theater?
We get Amara Tabor’s multi-site, ritual-based community dance performance, House Full of Black Women. The production of an eleven-part multi-site, multi-media ritual dance performance, comprised of artists, sex-trafficking abolitionists, survivors, somatic healers, spiritual healers, and community members addresses the artist’s Oakland community as they grapple with the increasing peril of sex trafficking that has overwhelmingly impacted the black women and girls that reside in Oakland, displacement due to gentrification, and collective well-being. The ritual takes audiences on a journey of reflection, introspection, healing, and activation. In episode six, the audience is invited to participate in a ritual of healing and oathing as Tabor leads them in a chant,
“those that have trespassed against our bodies, against our homes, we eat the fruit this sacred fruit to change their hearts to change their actions to right the wrong. To this, we say no more! Never again!”
Through the ritual, Tabor invites her audience to become active participants in the transformation of their community by taking spiritual and psychic responsibility for what is happening there while also activating them to show up in the material. The ritual also forces audience members to reflect upon and interrogate the ways they have been socialized to view black people and black bodies, particularly the black female body. What does it mean to trespass against black people’s bodies if you’ve been socialized to only ever view black people as merely just bodies? Bodies that are disposable and that are not in possession of themselves? As the ritual delves into the psychic and spiritual, it works to excavate those subconscious programs audience members have undergone, thus challenging their thinking and the psychic attachments they have formed.
While the collective care and healing that is taking place helps to repair the energetic connection between mind and body, and the psycho-spiritual tolls of living under neocolonialism, the work of these practitioners also compels audiences to tap into the feelings of their lived experiences, which can also propel them to action. These practitioners, in the worlds of Kativa Panjabi, wield the affective as a means of mobilization. When we allow ourselves to feel our rage what can we do with it? How can we let the fire of rage blaze a path towards our liberation? Our body knows because our soul knows that what we are experiencing is wrong. The transformation of our mind, spirit, and collective imagination is vital to our total liberation as we shift out of the colonial imagination and envision and fight for a reality untainted by its residue.
Notes
- <a href="http://<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/462794859?h=97d12deb77" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="https://vimeo.com/462794859">House/Full of Blackwomen 2015-2020</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user10980737">amara t. smith</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.House/Full of Black Women
- Page, Cara, et al. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety. North Atlantic Books, 2023.
- Boal, Augusto. Theater of the Oppressed. Pluto Press, 2007.
- Somé, Malidoma Patrice. Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community. Penguin Compass, 1997.
- Madison, D. Soyini. Critical Ethnography. SAGE Publications, 2005.
- Panjabi, Kavita. “The Aesthetics in History Making: The Tebhaga Women’s Movement.” Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South, by Shalini Puri and Debra A. Castillo, Palgrave Macmillan US, New York, 2016.