Is Religion the Path to Black Liberation?
In an earlier post, I described how I had developed the ability to recognize injustice at an early age. This concern for justice marked me despite my turbulent adolescence. By the time I left my home for college, I had developed two equally strong convictions. Religion was a waste of time. And I was an African.
I Am Wasting My Time
My religious experience consisted of weekly Sunday mass at the Roman Catholic Church in our village on the southwest coast of Dominica. It was a beautiful, bright building with stained glass windows, one of the first churches built on the island. I knew the Mass like the back of my hand. The Church had established its format centuries before, and I struggled to see its value. The homily that followed the Gospel almost never spoke to the struggles that I saw around me. ‘What was the purpose of religion if not to address everyday problems?’ I wondered.
I also rejected the Church’s teachings. What kind of god only allows Christians into heaven when the majority of the world was not? I did not care for a god that would condemn all non-Christians to hell. I saw cracks in these teachings. It was an open secret that some of the most pious congregants were unfaithful spouses. The evidence of their infidelity was all around the village. But most of all, it was the Church’s role in slavery which I could not reconcile.¹
My mother countered that the Church was making progress. The Belgian priests now faced the congregants; her cousin was a young priest; and my father’s cousin was an archbishop on a nearby island. She also pointed to our possession of the Missal. We owned 3 of them. These arguments did not appease me; they made me angry. I wanted to distance myself from that institution. I complained that going to church was a complete waste of my time. I preferred to sleep in or watch tv with my father.
But my mother demanded that her children go to church every Sunday morning. We had only two choices: go to the short service at 7:30 or the High Mass at 9:00. It was a condition of living in her house. Full stop. My father was the only person above that law. By the time I was 14, my mother and I had reached an uneasy truce. Every Sunday, I arrived late to church and left early. I stood under the church’s belfry, where those with the most tenuous relationship with the Church felt most comfortable. it was there that my disdain for the Church grew.
I’m African
It was my history lessons on the horrors of the Atlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery in the island Caribbean that cemented my African identify. I was 8 when Lennox Honychurch narrated the Dominica Story on the local radio. I learned that I was a descendent of the Maroons². European colonists had stolen them and enslaved them in Dominica. They had resisted their oppression. Their stories inspired and thrilled me. Dominica was the last island in the Caribbean to be colonized. It was a refuge for the Kalinago people³ and the Maroons fleeing the brutality of plantation life on Dominica and other islands. Maroon Chiefs Balla, Congo Ray, and Jacko, alongside others, built and led camps in the interior of the island. They waged war on the plantation owners and the British administration for seventy-five years. The war ended with the first phase of emancipation in 1834. Lennox Honychurch noted in his 2017 book that the Maroons had ‘succeeded in establishing an African state within a colonial European state.⁴’
I fleshed out that identity during my years in high school. I often overheard my parents whispering about the young men from good families who, under the influence of marijuana, had headed into the ‘bush,’ the interior of the island. They were disenchanted with ‘babylon.’ Babylon was the set of colonial values, practices, and structures that dominated island life. The Black Power movement and anticolonial politics emerged in Dominica in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The Rastafarian movement⁵ and the movement for political independence from Britain were the most visible aspects of that consciousness.
Babylon Is Built on Lies
The European colonial powers and the Roman Catholic Church co-conspired to enslave Africans and strip the emancipated descendants of enslaved Africans of their labor and their cultural and spiritual assets. Even after the abolishment of slavery, they denigrated and maligned them. They used vagrancy and Obeah laws⁶ to control and de-Africanize the newly emancipated people. The Church made no attempt to reconcile the chasm between its teachings and the history of its congregation; it did not own its role in the criminal enslavement of Africans.
I refused to accept that Africans were godless before they encountered the Europeans. There was nothing to support such an assessment. Besides, I refused to see the Maroons, my heroes, who pushed back on colonization and enslavement as a godless people. Moreover, why would I trust what the Church and colonizers had to say when they had not yet repented for their sins against the enslaved? Furthermore, I argued, if these chiefs were godless, they weren’t any more godless than the Church that underwrote that evil enterprise.
I’ll Be God Then
Having fled my mother’s control in 1985, I was ready to shape the life that I wanted. I was also free to release what I did not like. The religion that I experienced did not address what mattered to me — the truth. Looking back, I now understand that I am part of a long tradition of Black women — womanish women — who step out of the place relegated to them, bear witness to hard truths, and ask uncomfortable questions.
In the United States, I openly and publicly raged against God. I was convinced that the God of Rome did not care for Black people. ‘Where was God during the Atlantic Slave Trade?’ I demanded of anyone who tried to argue for God’s relevance in my life. I had no use for a god that remained silent in the face of atrocities and untold suffering. That God was made by and for white people who wished to justify the oppression and brutalization of Black people. I would spend my years in college and medical school being my own god
Being God Is Killing Me
But being my own god put me on a downward spiral. My rejection of religion did not quench my yearning for something which I could not then name — a desire for justice. In this new white world, I experienced chronic anxiety, driven by the belief that my performance had to be above reproach. I had to work harder than everyone around me; and I had to do it alone. I pushed myself to excel at the medical school admissions test, fearful that my white peers would assume that I had gotten into medical school only through affirmative action. I would wake up with the feeling that I was behind, even before my day had started. I was exhausted and filled with despair. That kind of despondency comes from the combination of extreme independence and high performance.
I almost never kept my promise to return home in time for dinner. For years, I arrived in the office before 7 AM and left between 6 and 9 PM. My husband cooked and often waited. Our dinners were punctuated by rageful monologues or hostile silence. After dinner, I read to my daughter before putting her to bed. It was my only respite during the day. Once she was asleep, my despair rushed in full force. I chased it away with alcohol, sugar, and flour — or some combination of these. My favorite was a rum drink, either rum and coke or rum punch. I preferred to drink alone, knocking myself out to sleep. But some nights the substances failed. On those nights, I silently wailed to a god that I neither knew nor believed in, ‘if you exist, show me your face.’
This was not a trivial request. It was a soul-saving plea. Years before when I first became a mother, I had the overwhelming sense that I was not up to the task, notwithstanding the fact that I wanted to be a good mother more than anything in the world. And so, I went back to the Church. The masses that I attended in the local Roman Catholic church left me feeling numb, empty, and dissatisfied. Nothing I heard there could help me be a better mother. I convinced myself that the solution was to join a Roman Catholic church with a Black congregation. After attending several services there, I abandoned churchgoing. And heartbroken, I escaped into work, substances, and activities. Again, I had failed to find God.
That plea also gave voice to what was an inescapable truth. Underneath the veneer of success, my life was imploding. My career was exhausting; and my marriage, a stone around my neck, threatened to drown me. The substances were not working. I wanted to do better. For myself for sure, but mostly for my daughter. I discovered what I now know to be spirituality in a twelve-step recovery room.⁷ I was there to get help with my addictions. There, I learned to open up and ask for help. I learned that it was okay to put my trust in something that was greater than me. That fledgling understanding of spirituality would eventually lead to peaceful, coherent, and powerful life.
First Contact
I found God. My first conscious contact with spirituality brought immediate relief from the isolation and exhaustion. But it was the god of my understanding. God was much bigger that what was possible for me to understand. What seemed important, however, was a posture of openness, humility, and honesty. My appetite for spirituality grew as I came to understand that spirituality is an everyday, everywhere, every-time, every-problem kind of phenomenon. Within a year, I discovered and embraced the Baha’i faith.
I Walk Through A Portal
The Baha’i Writings deepened my experience of spirituality. They deploy the metaphor of the light and lamp to distinguish spirituality from religion. Spirituality is the light and religion the lamp.⁸ The purpose of the lamp of religion is to manifest the light of God, spirituality. And with this light we can recognize and develop the powers that enable us to establish connection and unity within ourselves and among human beings of diverse nations, races, and cultures.
With that understanding, I was ready to revisit my history. If spirituality is a light that can never be extinguished, how did the Maroons manifest their spirituality? What if the Europeans were unable to see the many ways that the Maroons’ spirituality revealed itself? What knowledge of spiritual reality did they carry across the Middle Passages? Moreover, was the Maroon’s spirituality the source of power that enabled them, in a foreign and hostile land, to establish a state within a brutal European colonial state for seventy-five years?
In the African worldview, Spirit pervades everything and is everywhere⁹. In her book the Womanist Idea, Dr. Layli Maparyam wrote, ‘Spirit is the substrate of all reality and it pervades everything. Everything is a manifestation of spirit. Nothing is without spirit.’ There are parallels between the spirit and physical world. Invisible forces and energies govern both. They also follow a given set of rules. And humans can investigate both. Furthermore energies flow between these worlds. Indeed, I believe the Maroons were successful in the face of the overwhelming greed and brutality of the plantation colony because they had a profound spirituality, borne of their African lineage.
Returning Home
The Maroons, many of whom were born in Africa, understood that Spirit and its endless resources could be harnessed in their fight for dignity and freedom that they had lost. These freedom fighters recognized the intercourse between the spirit and physical worlds, and channeled spiritual energies into their earthly struggles. This expansive worldview, carried from Africa, was the antithesis of and the antidote to the ideologies of colonialism, racism and capitalism. These extreme and toxic ideologies of materialism could not obliterate the mysterious, invisible forces that sustained these Africans.
The European-descended ideologies of materialism continue to undergird almost all present day institutions and distort social life. These ideologies do the work of normalizing the sustained degradation and exploitation of Black people, projecting the basest of human qualities and values on them, and erasing and co-opting their history of accomplishments. Spiritual bankruptcy is the master’s tool that built anti-Black ideologies.
The power of these ideologies rest on African descendants’ amnesia of their access to deep spiritual resources. Dismantling anti-Blackness requires stepping outside of materialism, and into a more expansive consciousness; it requires a more expansive experience of spirituality; it requires a collective Black remembering and a reclaiming of that expansive understanding; and it requires us to re-acknowledge and re-embrace the primacy of the Spirit world and the interdependence of all living beings.
I believe the Maroons, my forebears, petitioned the Spirit world for assistance in waging war for their freedom and dignity. They were spiritual warriors and activists. Like them, I draw from the Spirit world, a limitless source of power and resources, to engage and dismantle anti-Blackness.
Let’s keep this conversation going by clapping, commenting or sharing on SM. You can find me or tag me as Kaytura Felix on Facebook, Twitter or IG. You can also email me at kayturafelix@gmail.com
Sources
[1]: The Roman Catholic Church through a series of papal decrees beginning in the mid fifteen century authorized the monarchs of Portugal and Spain to seize and appropriate non-Christian land and to dominate, enslave, and dehumanize non-Christian people around the world.
[2]: Maroons — enslaved Africans who escaped and formed autonomous communities — dominated Dominica’s mountainous interior for centuries.
[3]: The Kalinago were Amerindian people who settled in the Caribbean island chain as far back as the year 3100bc. They were previously referred to as Caribs.
[4]: Honychurch, Lennox. Negre Mawon The Fighting Maroons of Dominica. www.academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/8562448/Negre_Mawon_The_Fighting_Maroons_of_Dominica. Accessed 23 Feb. 2021.
[5]: Rastafarian movement in Dominica began in the 1970’s as a youthful (primarily male) adherent of Black power thought from upper and middle class background. Upper class students who studied abroad and were a part of the Black Power movement brought the ideas to the island.
[6]: Obeah laws t served to intimidate and punish the emancipated people from engaging in African derived cultural and spiritual practices.
[7]: Twelve step recovery programs are one of the most well-known and commonly used types of recovery support for the treatment of addiction.
[8]: Bahai writing on religion and spirituality. The Bahai writing use symbolic imagery and metaphors to convey important spiritual truths.
[9]: Layli Maparyam is a womanist scholar. Her groundbreaking work on womanism includes The Womanist Reader and the Womanist Idea
