The principles of science and religion often differ, but they find common footing on one thing. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it is simply transformed. We often forget that about death…it is simply evolution to a nature much different from our own. It is sacred transformation. That is what my people believed. Let me offer some insight on why I am the way I am. I have often sought meaning in all things. I have yearned for answers. They told me there was a God and the more I tried to find that God the more it seemed to hate humanity rather than love it. They said the colour of my skin made me inferior but every cell within my body rose in protest whenever that rhetoric was spun around me. It seemed to me that the people who deemed themselves superior in any way, were in actuality inferior and tried to hide their weakness within the folds of brutality. I hate violence yet it seems to be the language that everyone responds to, never willing to be the victim, but always excited to be the perpetrator. Always ready to harm, kill and force the will of their own mind on to other people around to assert some false sense of superiority.
I often struggled with these narratives that forced the concept of inferiority on to me, as a woman, as an African, as a child within African society. You have to be this or that. If you do not conform, then you are not worthy of anything. You have to follow this or that belief, whether it be Islam or Christianity. The same beliefs that affirm my lack of worth on the basis of my gender and appearance. These story books that we adopt as truth, because yes, religious text is open to interpretation, they are just stories that reflect the human condition. They tell you that by virtue of you existing, you are already tainted and have to spend eternity toiling to prove your worth, with a promise from a God that has never proved itself to you yet expects you to break your back proving yourself to it. You guzzle it up, spend your days praising and hoping and, in that uncertainty, you find divinity, if everyone believes it, it must be true. You give away your power. That is the same way you as a woman submit to the man. That is the same way we as people of African descent beg at the feet of the white man. We beg to be seen as equal when we can affirm our own equality. We give away our power when we can own it and make our own space. Stop owning the narrative of victimhood.
If anything, I think my people were smarter than most, building societies that sustained themselves without the need for a king or ruler to look up to. They lived in peace and harmony. Society valued morality and understood the power of the self. The body and physical life were not a test or a curse, but a means for the soul to perceive existence from another perspective. Women could hold space within society as doctors, leaders and true equals. That was what gave us power. The ability to come together during times of need and celebration while also honouring the separateness of each of the individual eight cultures. We forget ourselves and our power. We succumb to greed, helplessness and brutality to carve out space for ourselves but forget that even by virtue of us existing, we are worthy, we are enriched, and we have power to create within the world. All that there is, is the now. Burn in bright loving positivity and the world will open up before your eyes. See all the possibilities bursting at the seams within you. Never give your power away, never let anyone define or determine who you are, for that, my dear, that is true freedom.