Authenticity and Imagination in the Face of Oppression

Cross

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498239455
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

To live authentically and with integrity in the face of a rampant oppression, which daily seeks to sequester the spirit and rape the soul, one must recognize themselves as one with the God and in this move each day with an authority grounded in a great mystical love which really has no words.Authenticity and Imagination in the Face of Oppression is an autobiography of faith. It is the life of a black transgender woman living a life of faith in the face of institutional and economic oppressions, and the cultural and social stigma of racism and transgender phobia. This book emerges then as a strategy for liberation by nourishing the soul through the provocative acts of prayer, memory, sharing, and acting, thus making real a sure hope grounded in the divine call of Isaiah 61:1. Authenticity and Imagination in the Face of Oppression is a hopeful discourse on mysticism in the context of loving one's God and oneself within a lived communal reality of earth embodiment and the development of a sacred space of irresistible hope.

Chapter 1

Introduction

“

You are evil, just plain evil.”

This was a statement made to me by a black woman I encountered at a local grocery store in Norfolk, Virginia. Her statement reminded me of my conservative theological stances on gender and sexuality prior to my own experience of Coming Out as a Black/African-American transgender woman. I remember at that moment asking myself, “Where did this statement come from?” I actually had a pretty good idea what she meant. I had been a minister at a conservative church, with a conservative theology. I had preached a conservative message, even attended Regent University, a conservative university founded by conservative icon Pat Robertson, where issues and concerns of diversity regarding gender and sexuality outside of the normative binary construction of male and female preferably with the ability to give birth, were considered an abomination and a pastoral care concern.

Her statement has been with me since that day and becomes the ground of my longing to address gender and sexual identity and a compelling reason for this work. The thesis of this work is the presence of the divine black transgender feminine, i.e. Monica Joy, which emerges as the divine transgender feminine and the sacred black masculine, i.e. Alexander, considered a social and cultural production of the black experience in the United States, are interpreted as equitable identities embodied within the human body, considered in this text a queer space of fluidity, and a representation of the infinite. Monica and Alexander are not evil but simply represent a different albeit a more diverse ontological presence of gender and sexual identity with implications towards a particular evolution of being. What I mean here is that they represent a continuous unveiling of who I am, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and physically. In some sense, who I am is an ongoing discourse of spirit and soul possession, becoming more and more evident as I interrogate ideas and concepts of gender and sexual identity beyond the normative modes of being, experienced here as an act of spiritual/religious decolonization.

Similar to Mama Lola, in Karen McCarthy Brown’s book, Mama Lola1, I find myself to be a vessel of complex spiritual intent grounded in notions of the African ancestors. Similar to Mama Lola’s female spirit group called Ezili which consists of Freda and Danto, Monica Joy and Alexander exist in tension, unable to entirely vanquish the other, both presenting particular circumstances and desires as each has a different narrative. In the tension between Monica Joy and Alexander, the “soul and spirit” explore questions of race, sexuality, economics, class and gender, and the intersectionality of oppression. Monica Joy is a black transgender woman, tall, attractive, bisexual, spiritual, a minister, healer and visionary. She is prophetic, a prayer warrior, meditative, and in conversation with the divine. She lives and breathes her faith, queering what it means to be feminine and masculine in the African/Black American context. She is courageous, always in danger.

Alexander is a quiet black man, a construction of society and culture, somewhat safer in comparison. He is an intellectual and a quiet storm. He is tall, dark and handsome and heterosexual. He can be a man’s man intent on getting what he needs when he needs it. He too is full of faith, spiritual and a prayer warrior. He is the antithesis of a white supremacy that would put him in prison given the chance. So, he too is in danger. Both identities exhibit notions of mysticism and the ecstatic, embracing a particular negation of ontological colonization, as inferred by Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and the acceptance of the infinite. Monica Joy and Alexander require space, both spiritual and physical and, in this, both are compelling vessels of a persistent sacred witness of the in-breaking of the infinite. At times this is very frustrating, simply because of the need for the people encountered to locate the body, as indoctrinated by institutions grounded in white supremacy and its privilege, in a specific binary category; not possessing the language or the imagination necessary to respect the soul and spirit’s particular expression, which in my case denotes queer/transgender. My impression is that they have an irrational need for gender security, to make the body and its presentation fit into male or female, with no alternative possibility.

“When [they] meet someone whose [gender] identity is unclear, that throws [their] own identity into flux.

—Alice Domurat Dreger, bioethics professor2”

It is within this context that the soul and spirit evolve. Monica Joy and Alexander present a particular ethical imperative as each queers the expectations of race, gender and sexuality, eliciting the rhetorical wrath of people who embrace a different world view. That said, my journey, my struggle within in the cultural, historical and religious milieu of the U.S., is what Cornel West entitles “Subversive Joy and Revolutionary Patience in Black Christianity” in his treatment of the tragic elements in Afro-American Christianity.3

Far from the staid sensibilities of the Black Church and its norms of civility and decency procured on the plantation4 the proposal of Jesus Christ, the divine and the sacred of Christianity, at least in this writer’s experience is indecent, obscene and at times homeless, and thus far more in touch with the human condition. The use of the terms divine and sacred within a discourse on the human condition are a means to reflect the criticality of an authentic voice of the infinite. The use of the term “infinite” in this project denotes all that is beyond human interpretations and constructions yet inclusive of the same. It is measureless and indefinable, yet intimate to every facet of a dynamic life. It is sacred and mystical; birthing all that is into human and cosmic consciousness. In contrast the identifying term, “God,” from an historical perspective must be considered a colonizing identity. Loaded with particular images it promotes concepts and ideas of nationalism which is not the point of this project.

That said, working on this project I seek to be authentic and concise as an expression within the art of queer hospitality. Queer hospitality is the art of welcoming the stranger and their difference as a signifier of an intimacy of the infinite. For the one sensitive to the infinite, hospitality is a means to acknowledge that love, like life itself, emerges from the infinite, even the everlasting into the heart and soul of all that is. This project is also an invitation into a life emerging from and immersed in the infinite and daily engaging in social, cultural and economic constructions.

I seek to make these matters of the soul understandable, and accessible, to reveal the roots of a liberating consciousness. There is realization that this work has historical significance with implications towards the liberation of the human soul from those systems and structures that sequester human experience. It is an appeal to be very attentive, on the part of the writer and the reader, as this is one of the rarest forms of love. What I mean is, there is a “spiritual gravity”5 to this project and this must be the reality which undergirds the whole matter.

This project is also an appeal to those Mystical, Pagan, Wiccan, Islam, Indigenous Shaman and Voodou influences which are significant spiritual markers on a path of a revelation of being. From my first therapy session through a dark night of the soul in Norfolk, Virginia, to my engagement of Shamanism beginning with a shaman at a Memphis Tennessee Greyhound bus station to an encounter with Voodou, my life has been about a revelation of being. The implications of a revelation of being are an increasing cognizance of the spirit world and its participation in temporal life as well as an increased embrace of my agency and escape from ideas and notions of colonization.

A revelation of being requires strategies of survival as I encounter people who would seek to end my life. As such, these spiritual traditions become a primary support system of my liberation from colonized notions of gender and sexuality. There are aspects of this journey that are simply a vision lived out and this, not of my own choosing, a journey from the head to the heart, from the philosophical to an earthiness. It has been a prophetic mystical path. Dynamic, terrifying and intense yet full of a steadfast hope. Life, for me, is revealed as a meditation of the infinite as I encounter the gravity of this hope, contained in my struggle for liberation from colonization, white supremacy and their interpretations and terminologies that daily seek to enslave love and even imagination itself.

Particularly as a minister ordained in the Christian tradition who lives on the edge of the margins, identifying as an African-American/Black transgender woman, I find that culture and faith in the U.S are still, even today, to a large extent, narrowly defined by what I consider oppressive interpretations for the sake of race, sex and gender privilege.6 These interpretations; the basis of relational empowerment, as well as common space impacting various facets of political and socio-cultural and economic life, seemingly for some, are the only legitimate religious tradition.

In an article in The Root, an online news magazine which focuses on socio-political discourse in the African-American/Black community, Jenée Desmond, wrote an article entitled, Please Stop Assuming all Blacks are Christian, Race Manners: The good news about being an atheist who’s annoyed by this stereotype is that you‘re not alone.7 She writes of a particular narrative, which holds that a significant majority of African Americans identify as Christian and that to be any other spiritual/religious tradition somehow denies some type of salvific privilege embodied in the black e...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Embodied Memories and Teachings of My Neighborhood
• Chapter 3: Oh God, I’m Coming Out
• Chapter 4: Reflections on Knowledge and Morality
• Chapter 5: Locating the Divine Transgender Feminine and the Sacred Black Masculine within a Queer Post-Colonial Architecture
• Chapter 6: Sustainability and the Beloved Community, a Sacred Discourse
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography