Sankofa

I asked myself a question one day, a question I was not prepared to get the answer for.  It opened a door for me that I wish I could shut.  Life was much simpler when I did not have to re-examine everything that I knew as truth.  One day, when I was in deep meditation, the spirit of a strong willed African woman came to me and lifted my veil of illusion and confusion.  Let me recount for you the true story she revealed to me. 

One beautiful, glorious early morning, this young woman rose to greet the sun and face another day in harmony with the earth.  She was greeted by the gunfire and weapons of white men that raided and attacked her village.  She fought but she was beaten and subdued.  She saw the bodies of her family and community, massacred around her as the stench of death and blood hung heavy in the air.  She was dragged away, kicking and screaming as she saw the crying and anguished faces of the young and the old that were left to die like useless livestock. 

For months, she walked alongside the horseback prone pale men that raped her and beat her at will.  Her feet were bloody and raw, she was lonely and hungry and she ached for rest but they did not and would not let up.  She was chained to the bodies of men and women that were dead, sick, fatigued and dying, yet she had no choice but to carry on under the whip of the slave traders.  She learned quickly to stifle her cries of pain and anguish because they seemed to bring the sting of the whip that much more.  It was clear her pain served to amuse her captors so she resigned within her soul to not give them that pleasure.

They waved strange items in her face, two wooden sticks tethered together and a coded document of some sort that was bound by a dark piece of cow hide with golden symbols on the front.  They would yell and scream at her in a strange tongue and seemed to take much pleasure in kicking her in her private parts or even her head while screaming this strange word over and over again.  They were brutal in their torture, pushing her body past the human limits for pain.  The only way she survived the excruciating pain was to call upon her God to save her.  She prayed and chanted, she did rituals in the dark of night when her captors were fast asleep, all to help her survive this unknown journey into darkness. 

Arriving at what she thought was to be her final destination on earth; she was ushered beneath the ground to a hole with a stench so awful she could not hold anything on her stomach for days on end.  She was separated from the people in her village, most of whom hadn’t even survived the journey to the coast, and she was housed in a room made of stone with more rats and insects than humans.  The other women there ministered to her, even though they were from different tribes and did not speak the same language; they bonded with her sharing the same evil fate.  They anointed her body with oils and herbs they were able to procure by having sex with the guards of the dark place.  She longed for a medicine woman to come to help heal the weeping and oozing sores on her body and to heal her ripped flesh of her vagina, torn savagely as the men inserted any many of things into her body.  Her period had stopped on the journey and she was sure she was no longer a woman but an empty shell to be beaten and left to die.  She was sure she was going to be a sacrifice to the heavens for a crime she had not committed.

For months she lay in the urine, feces and blood of the stone rooms while she called upon the holy names of Obatala, BabaluAye, and Orunmila to protect her, to deliver her from this nightmare.  She prayed fervently, pleading with them to deliver her prayers to Olodumare to spare her life so that she might live to survive to the glory of the Universal Father/Mother, the Creator, The One Most High.  She sent up prayers constantly because that’s all she could do.  Her body was so severely malnourished she could scarcely put up a fight when the men came to defile her with their sick, twisted and perverted pleasures.  Branded with the searing hot iron at the hands of the captor men, she was called a name that was not a name her had tribe had ever used.  She learned quickly her new name was to be Nigger, but it seemed odd to her that all of her brothers and sisters in captivity had the same name as well. 

Just when she thought she could go on no longer, she saw the light of day only to find that her fate was worse.  She was boarded on a ship, packed tightly one body on top of another, scarcely enough room to breathe.  Some days, the only water she would get to drink was the rancid piss of the people that were chained to the deck above that would drip through the rotted planks of the ship’s hold.  She clung to life in whatever way she could, so she could die of her own choosing, not at the hands of the evil men.  Her plan was to jump overboard to end her own life and not have it be taken from her by her vile captors.  That was not to be the case; she survived, clinging to life with the tender caresses of the others who had not gone insane from the pain, dehydration, disease and despair. 

For months, she had no way to comprehend time or space.  They landed in a place where she was poked, prodded and inspected like cattle only to be put on another ship to land at another strange destination.  Once again, she was paraded around, inspected by the stringy-haired men, and she was put in the back of a wagon with other Black people and taken to a farm with an enormous cottage, the likes of which she had never seen before.  The king was a pinkish man who would come to her at night and use her in ways a man was never supposed to use a woman.  During the day, she was forced to work the land.  Her tears fertilized the crops as she worked in silence alongside the people that spoke the same language as the brutal pale people. 

Many times, she would sneak off into the woods at night and dance and sing and escape in her mind to her home where she could be carefree and happy again.  She would offer her prayers up to the orisha, pouring out libations on this unholy ground, and begging them to wake her up from this horrible nightmare.  She prepared a secret alter to present gifts to the heavens and; it was her place of solace and refuge and it was her reminder of her peaceful but distant home.  She longed to wear colors again, she needed to eat food that gave life, not the garbage the captors threw away, longed to dance and sing, and to feel joy again.  She longed for the sensual touch of a man, not the brutal attacks she endured that made her die a little inside.  She was slowly losing the sensation of dignity and self-respect, traits her fellow slaves never knew.

One day, in the solitude of the woods, she anointed herself a high priestess. She had secretly fasted and prayed for one full rotation of the moon and gathered the herbs she needed to burn to put herself into a trance to pass through the spiritual portal to the heavens.  With only the stars in the sky as her illumination, she uttered the holy words she had heard the spiritual elders say back home along with a prayer that the spirits would forgive any misspoken words in her solitary and extreme conditions.  She knew that if she were caught, she could be killed instantly; the whites in charge were insistent that every African denounce all that was holy and good from their homeland.  She couldn’t share her secret place with anyone, the blacks that were born in captivity in this new world knew nothing of the spiritual beliefs that kept their parents and grandparents alive on the bowels of those horrible ships, they ridiculed her for her language, stories, songs, and traditions, telling her that only the God of the evil white man was good. She wept for their souls; for they had never known what it was like to truly be free.  All of their beliefs and thoughts were dictated by their owners and they would never know truth or independence all the days of their lives.

Her secret place was not to be a secret for very long because one of the guards followed her one evening, found her alter, and flew into a rage.  He slapped her body to the ground and dragged her to the front of the big house.  He tore her meager garments from her body and began to lash her back with a whip.  The leather tore at her flesh as she screamed out in anguish.  The blood ran from the open wounds as she lay defenseless on the ground.   He was screaming at her to accept Jesus as her personal lord and savior.  She would never accept the God of these evil men and she prepared herself for death as she felt the flesh ripped from her body with each lash. Fatigued and frustrated from administering such a relentless beating, the man poured salt into her open wounds and forbade anyone to touch her.  He admonished everyone that if they didn’t accept Jesus, that they would get the same treatment or worse.  For hours she lay on the ground, drifting in and out of consciousness, floating between life and death, visions of her homeland calling out to her.

That night, the others came to collect what they were sure was her lifeless body.  How had she survived such a brutal beating?  The word that clung to her lips was faint yet determined, “Yemaya, Yemaya.”  The fact that she went on to recover physically was nothing less than a miracle.

The years passed, she learned the language of the people, she gave birth many times, her children not hers to raise; they were sold off to other slave owners, never to be seen again.  She wanted desperately for her children to know their real names, to understand that where they came from was a much better place, to pass on the history, culture, language and traditions of the place that she knew to be home, the people she loved and missed.  She didn’t want them raised to be niggers, dead to the ways of life and conditioned to believe in their inferiority.

Her last child was the child of the slave master, and she was allowed to keep him.  She would sneak him off into the night as a young boy and teach him the traditions of her homeland.  He learned quickly and showed great promise and enthusiasm.  The slave master heard rumors that she was teaching her son the ways of Africa in secret and threatened her that if she didn’t stop her teachings immediately, if she didn’t teach her son to worship Jesus and denounce her African beliefs, she was going to witness her son being lashed until death in front of all that could see. The pain she felt inside was the greatest pain she had endured since her nightmare had begun.  She knew that she could not bare the thought of seeing any harm coming to her child but she also believed that his only chance for freedom was in the saving grace of Olodumare to deliver him from the false perceptions that surrounded them. 

She watched her son grow to manhood; he denounced his mother and her African ways and wore a cross around his neck exactly like the one that she had seen so many years ago around the neck of the men that first raped her.  He called upon the name of Jesus for his salvation and he refused to study anything but the leather bound book that justified the reason for the enslavement of his people.  He looked down on her in disgust for her flawless skin the color of rare ebony.  He cringed in horror at the sight of his mother’s natural hair, completely convinced that the hair of white women was somehow more beautiful because he believed that white people were better than blacks.  He could not comprehend that the wooly hair, thick lips, wide nose and high cheekbones of his mother were in any way beautiful for he had been told all his life that only white women were beautiful.  He did whatever he could to separate himself from being a nigger because no one in their right mind would want to be that.

I wish that was the end of my story.  I wish that had only happened in isolation and this was a fictional but tragic story.  Sadly, it rings true for every African American who has ancestry in slavery.  The details might be slightly different but the experience of capture, transportation, spiritual annihilation, and mental enslavement are the same.  There is a lineage of survival and courage in our veins that are at unrest because we, the children of the great ones, are practicing the religion of the people that made them endure the most horrific torture possible.  They cry out to us to look back, to feel their presence, to understand that the lies of the slave master were only to justify his evil actions and the beliefs that we were inferior.  Africans were not heathens, Christianity was not a gift to Blacks, we were not rescued from a savage place we were kidnapped and stolen to live life lower than an animal.

Today, the beliefs of the slaves are still so much a part of our psyche, that most Black people reading this will react violently at the thought of threatening their religion and reality.  They will do anything to hold onto the beliefs of the whip that told us that Africans were saved by slavery.  They will justify the lessons taught by white people and they will insist that other Africans sold their ancestors into slavery and that it wasn’t white’s fault, completely absolving whites from any guilt in their participation in the slave trade.  They will say, “God had a plan and that was to bring Christianity to us through slavery,” justifying the torture and abuse of our African ancestors that survived so that their legacy might live on in honor and in glory, not in captivity. I’m sure they could find no equal justification if even one white person were to endure that same treatment today.  They would never find the “silver lining” in the brutal enslavement of white people yet the very blood that runs through their veins is from those that endured more than their minds will even try to grasp.  They will say, “I’m not a victim,” incorrectly assuming that to be a victim means one chooses to be weak.  They will not understand that if they do not see the horror and errors of our collective past, they are victims of brainwashing and lies. 

Perhaps there is one however that will read these words over and over again,  looking for their own answers, putting together the pieces of a long forgotten puzzle.   Perhaps there is one who will go into meditation and prayer and call out to the one that refused to let go of their beliefs during captivity and died knowing that they were truly free.  Perhaps there is one that will ask the questions that reveal the ultimate truth.

The spirit that called out to me lives in these words.  Her blood was not spilled in vain because it sustains me and gives me life so that I might share her story with those willing to hear.  I must be her vessel and her voice.

Copyright 2005 Scottie Lowe

Sex: As Natural as Eating

Let’s imagine a world where all the world’s religious leaders decree tomorrow that eating is bad, sinful, and wrong, and moreover, that if you absolutely MUST eat, it can’t be enjoyable, it has to be bland, without taste, and you have to eat in secret and in shame, and if you enjoy eating that you are a bad person.  Almost immediately, your normal, healthy mind would scream at you to enjoy that lobster, that juicy mango or summer peach, that hot apple pie with ice cream at all costs.  Everyone would know in their hearts that eating is essential for life, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating, eating is essential for survival, even that eating a good meal with family and friends is one of the few joys in life that has no compare.  But the pressure from society telling you that eating is bad and wrong would set up a mental conflict, a dichotomy where you feel you would need to lie, cheat, and manipulate in order to eat, where you were shamed into feeling bad for enjoying a good meal.  Advertisers would use images of all sorts of delicious food to sell their products but they would make sure no one was eating in their commercials.  Eventually, after enough time, everyone would co-sign the concept that eating was sinful and wrong and they would publicly adopt a position of looking down their noses at anyone who said that they enjoyed eating while you nearly everyone was reading cookbooks, watching cooking shows in private, and people would be left trying to reconcile why something that they enjoy so much, something so positive and beneficial, is considered bad. 

Imagine for a moment, if you would, how eating would become this huge underground phenomenon.  If you tell people something that is natural and healthy is wrong, if you tell someone that their natural urges and desires are something they should be ashamed of and is bad, they will find a way to revel in it behind closed doors.  People would have secret food orgies, they would develop food fetishes, like they can’t eat unless it’s on a paper plate or they only eat donuts or they would only eat in the dark.  No one would have a concept of what a healthy meal even consisted of because there would be no honest discussion of nutrition or portion size, because the simple act of even talking about eating would be considered bad, and misinformation about eating would be rampant.  Children naturally would experience hunger and want to taste different things but adults would shame them into believing that eating was wrong and that they couldn’t enjoy it.  On message boards and forums all over the internet people would have a united voice of feigned moral indignation and outrage at anyone who said they loved to eat food but in the privacy of their own homes, they would be installing gourmet kitchens. 

After enough time, the government would step in and enact laws reinforcing that eating was bad and convincing the masses that bread and water was more than sufficient for survival and that anyone who liked anything more than that was a social leper and a freak. The politicians and loudest opponents of eating would secretly have private chefs making meals fit for a king while they were out proselytizing about how sinful eating is and the perils of food.  People wouldn’t be allowed to learn how to cook or feed themselves and using condiments and spices would bring down the wrath of the folks who insist that eating is only valid if it’s for survival.   

So, eventually, you would have a world where everyone believed that something beautiful, natural, and healthy was commonly and openly considered bad, wrong, and sinful.  People’s psyches would be at war within themselves.  The belief that eating was bad would seep into every aspect of life and culture to where eventually, no one even questioned that eating was wrong and anyone who said that eating was natural and healthy and could even be positive would be shunned.  Eating disorders would be the norm and no one would acknowledge it or seek help for their conditions because they would be ashamed of admitting that they liked eating.  The human mind can’t function in a healthy way under such turmoil so it shuts down in the face of such a conflict, it compensates with dysfunction.  Your inner being inherently knows that eating is right and good but it’s been convinced by society that it’s wrong so the human mind struggles.  It starts craving eating things that are barely edible, things that are toxic, things that aren’t even food in an effort to wage a war against what society tells them is wrong.  People would start eating rotted, moldy food in private, eating stuff that will hurt them; they start feeling entitled to violently take other people’s food by any means necessary.  Meanwhile EVERYONE would be eating.  A few people would conform and eat only the bare minimum to survive and society would INSIST that they are the normal ones and that anyone who enjoyed eating was a deviant.  MOST people would be eating and enjoying food in private and this entire underground eating frenzy would be taking place, in plain sight and under the radar, because no one is willing or brave enough to challenge the belief that eating is wrong. 

Now, substitute the word eating with fucking.

It is precisely this millennia-old belief that sex is taboo, the repression and compartmentalization of sex, it is the very false belief that sex is naughty, dirty, bad, and wrong that creates rapists, child molesters, sex addicts, sexual deviants, and a culture of casual, unsafe sex because the mind and spirit are at war with what is supposed to be positive and absolutely life-affirming.  Religious leaders convinced us long, long ago that sex was bad, dirty, shameful and wrong.  They needed the world to believe that if one were to have sex, that it was only to be missionary sex for procreation inside of marriage.  They were wrong.  They lied.  Sex is normal, healthy, We have been convinced that sex is bad, shameful, sinful, and wrong when it’s healthy, beautiful, and right.  No one, not one of us comes into this world except through sex.  Pleasure is our birthright.  Ecstatic orgasm is a form of meditation, a form of prayer.  There is such a thing as healthy sexuality and it consists of far more than missionary position on a Friday night with the lights out between two married, white, mildly unattractive and boring, financially stable heterosexuals.  But humanity is so cut off from what should be healthy sexuality that we can’t even have a conversation about it.  People assume that healthy sexuality is boring and bland and that’s simply not the case.  Sex should be a beautiful buffet of different sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and experiences that stimulate us on different levels but it’s become something we do that we think is nasty and wrong and we need to get off on degradation and humiliation and pain and whatever else they feel is bad and wrong to compensate for feeling ashamed about their own natural desires. 

“But, that’s crazy,” you say, “That’s a silly comparison.  Everyone HAS to eat, you need it to live.  Sex isn’t a necessity.”  Oh, but you are so very wrong.  Sex is essential for our healthy existence.  We can live without it but we are damaged without it as well.  Touch is essential for life, intimacy is essential, hot, sweaty orgasms with another human being are essential for our survival.  I’m not just talking about the fact that sex for procreation is essential, obviously, civilization dies if we don’t have babies.  I’m not talking about sex for recreation when people go on craigslist and they screw the first person who sends a face picture.  People have been CONVINCED that everyone else in the world is sexually conservative, that no one else could possibly have different, complex, or even unhealthy fantasies.  Society tells us that the only acceptable way to have sex is with soft music playing in the background and candles lit and three minutes of vigorous humping.  In reality, people are doing things sexually that are extreme, dangerous, and even hurtful and there’s evidence everywhere you turn that people are into all sorts of extreme sexual behaviors in every corner of this not so great nation.  Think of a sexual fetish, no matter how obscure, and there are hundreds of websites catered to exactly that.  Yet for centuries, society has implied that everyone on the planet is having sex only for procreation and anyone doing anything more than that is a degenerate.  So, the mind, unsure of how to deal with these contradictory messages, copes by compartmentalizing sex, shutting it off until it becomes an urge and a drive that have dire consequences when approached from an emotionally and sexually immature vantage point. 

Your subconscious minds tells you that it’s perfectly natural to enjoy oral and anal sex because it feels delicious and yummy but since childhood, you’ve been told that anything you feel “down there” is rooted in evil.  Your subconscious minds knows that sex with the same gender doesn’t define you, make you evil, or make you a freak, it’s simply another way to experience pleasure.  But thousands of years of denial and lies tells you that if you experience pleasure with someone of the same gender, you are in the minority, a freak of nature, that you are weird.  You aren’t weird.  Everyone else is a freak for actually believing the lie that gender has anything to do with how you experience pleasure.  Experiencing pleasure with someone of the same gender doesn’t alter your identity, it doesn’t make you less of a person, you aren’t even in the minority.  That’s just another lie society has told us.  EVERYONE can experience pleasure with someone of the same gender it’s just that they have been socialized to believe it’s wrong.  Nothing more. 

Every sexual dysfunction can be traced back to this belief that sex is bad.  People molest children because they have been brainwashed to believe in this erroneous concept that people are sexless, so being sexual with a child becomes the ultimate arousal.  Their innocence, or the act of taking it, making children into something dirty and naughty, becomes a point of arousal for individuals who can’t reconcile the fact that sex is natural and that they shouldn’t be trying to coerce or manipulate children into being sexual.  Sex with children is taboo and anything that is wrong, taboo, kinky, different, or unspoken becomes more arousing sexually for people who don’t have a healthy concept of what intimacy, passion,  love, connection, or what it takes to maintain an adult relationship.  If we taught people that sex was natural, and had discussions about the psychological, social, physical, mental, and emotional ramifications of having sex, if we taught people how to be sexually mature rather than convince them that they are the only people in the world who have sexual desires beyond missionary sex, we could eliminate childhood sexual abuse in one generation.  Men rape because they have been socialized in a society that tells them that sex is wrong and bad but they have urges that tells them that sex is natural.  They rationalize the use of violence and force to rape in order to feel like they are taking back what is their right, because rape becomes synonymous with pleasure.  People have sex with animals rather than humans because animals don’t judge, they don’t tell secrets, they don’t have to emotionally connect to a dog or a horse the same way they need to invest in a relationship with another person.  A human being has the ability to judge and shame, an animal will only love you more and more unconditionally and satisfy their sexual desires without complaint.  Every sexual fetish, the act having one’s sexual aroused tied to a non-sexual object or situation, stems from someone being shamed for a normal expression of their sexuality when they were in a heightened state of arousal.  They were told that sex was shameful and bad, the feelings that they experienced were normal and natural, and then they made a subconscious connection with that object and sex and shame, BAM, their sexuality is intricately tied to that thing. 

Porn addiction is at pandemic proportions.  Men in their 20s need Viagra because they suffer from erectile dysfunction.  I have no clue why HIV isn’t more rampant in this country because people are having unprotected sex and they are not getting tested or having their partners tested in numbers that are staggering.  I strongly believe that the molestation of children, both boys and girls, is so widespread and commonplace, I dare not think about it too much or it will make me sick to my stomach.  All of these things are to be expected when sex is deemed taboo and dirty by the powers that be.  If you tell people that something that is inherent to their nature, a drive as natural as eating is wrong and bad, their psyches rebel.

I think that when children, especially girls, who have sex before the age of puberty, (meaning who are touched, molested and raped in childhood) they grow up to be more sexually addicted than those who have sex at a more "normal" age, like mid teens. I'm not condemning anyone with my comment, I'm simply looking at the origins of the behaviors. I've found that the women who had sexual experiences with adults in early childhood become hardwired for sexual addiction and crave more experiences like slapping, choking, humiliation, degradation, etc. when they become adults, they need sex for validation, they need abuse for validation. I've found the same for men as well, they simply tend to be hardwired to subjugate and oppress when they become adults if the sexual abuse was from a female. They tend, and the key word is tend, to be sexually submissive and masochistic if the abuser was male but they display the same level of sexual need and addiction as women. Again, I'm not judging anyone. I'm simply trying to figure out the origins of our sexuality in an effort to create a healthier dialogue about sex. So, while I am not putting anyone down for what they like sexually, I really am suggesting that the need to be humiliated and degraded is one not a natural one that comes from an healthy place. I acknowledge that some people want and need to be degraded and made to feel humiliated during sex to experience arousal and that is a very valid desire but I'm going to say that in an alternate, parallel world, sex would not be about degradation and shame but merely pleasure and connection. I think it would be a wonderful world if people were to experience exaltation, celebration, and validation while getting the bejesus fucked out of them.  If we eliminate this entire belief that sex is bad and sinful, we eliminate the sexual compulsion and dysfunction that surrounds it, we heal ourselves. 

Schools teach that sex is bad.  The church teaches that sex is bad.  Our parents spank, shame, and punish us for our normal childhood expressions of sexuality.  Politicians try to regulate our sexuality so that we are criminalized for our own natural desires.  The entire world is convinced that we need to be ashamed of our sexuality and it’s created more pain and dysfunction that can be imagined.  Sex is as natural as eating and we need to restore a sense of beauty and reverence to our sexuality in order for us to collectively heal from the abuses that have left us fragmented and dysfunctional. 

Copyright 2013 AfroerotiK All Rights Reserved

God Doesn't Have a Dick

Any religion that teaches that God is a man, and that woman is made for man, oppresses women to a state of unnatural subservience and insanity. If God is a man, and man has a penis, then anyone with a penis is perceived to be god-like. Women, obviously without a penis, are socialized through their oppressive religion created by people with penises, to feel inferior. The subconscious mind of females knows that women are not really inferior, that God could not possibly have a gender, that women are the equal and very much needed compliments to men not their subjects. The conscious mind of the female believes itself to be inferior, to be cursed, and to be dependent upon men, so it sets up a state of disharmony in the psyche of both men and women. The belief that men have some inherent privilege or preferred status with God a.) leads men to think that they can do no wrong and that their penis entitles them to rule over women, and b.) leads women to think that their lives will fall apart without a man, that they must forgive their man any wrongdoing, and that they must compete with the next woman in order to prove their worth as a woman. It is only when we decide to restore a holistic balance to our relationships, based on equality of genders, will they heal.