I need to tell you about a turning point.
I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why I couldn’t detach from this world, float the way other nonhumans like you and Ann do. I studied Rumi for months—making notations, copying out quotes by hand as if they could travel up my fingers, pierce my skin, take up home in my flesh. When craving comes, then virtue is concealed; a hundred veils divide the heart and sight. I thought if I could unshackle myself from the flesh, from the desires of this world, I would be free, and the pain would stop. But that’s a lie; even Rumi said it wasn’t true. The pain that the Creator wills is useful. Still, there was something there, something of spirit, something I wasn’t getting right. I had touched it before; I remember explaining it to the monk in Bulgaria with the stained-glass eyes. I remember how he stared at me. “People spend years in the monastery trying to get to what you just said,” he told me. Rumi had said, God’s shadow is the servant of the Lord; he’s dead to this world and alive to God. How do you die without killing your body? Each moment you have death and the return—the Prophet said the world is for an hour. It’s like Shams said. There is only one way to be born into a new life—to die before death. Or the Drowned God. That which is dead may never die.
I’ve written before about being an ọgbanje, that if you are born to die, then you are a dead thing even while you live. I learned so much from being a dead thing, unseen even when in bare sight, nowhere no matter where I go. Every time I made a new home, all my parlors were graves, all my roofs were earth. I became a void and it was earbleed loud, but I was dead and happy and just starting. I put my teeth in the back of fear’s neck and shook it till it was limp, till it surrendered. I catloped after happiness, tackled it down, and dragged it home by the bloody throat. Who dares tell me I can’t have everything? My God, I’m coming over the hill, I’m a monster. I tried not to forget it. You reminded me often; thank you so much for that.
I have a note—something you told me once when we were talking about humans. “They will serve,” you said. “They are dealing with a god at all times, even when you don’t remember your own self.”
You were right, I didn’t remember—not because it wasn’t true, but because it wasn’t true all the time. If a mask is also a face, a collection of sixty-seven masks is a collection of sixty-seven faces. I’m still counting them, trying to throw away the ones that are made of poor human skin, empty-eyed rotted things, puppets. I made the ọgbanje face when I carved my cheeks in St. Augustine as the new year exploded; that one is comfortable, but old now. The face of a dead thing, the void—the Baron’s childwife, really, fuck me in a fresh grave—while that face is true, it wouldn’t stay all the time. So, I thought I was failing.
You and I talked about compassion often, about grace, about trying to be more like God. I started to think of it as attaining some sort of enlightened status, leveling up as a nonhuman entity, moving from superficial fleshlike things toward a state of deep spirit. Rumi was all about that shit: destroying the ego, killing want and attachment. I do not chant this spell out of desire, he wrote, for I have turned desire upon its head. And God forbid I want something from others. There is a world of peace within my heart. I couldn’t forgive myself. The magician would say that’s so Catholic of me. Why did I keep wanting so goddamn much? Why couldn’t I find peace? I prayed every night. There is a drop of knowledge in my soul. Free it from lust and from the body’s earth!
Last year, I flew to LA to spend Christmas with Ann. We sat in my hotel room for hours, night crawling into early morning, pulling at threads in questions, following the whorls that unspooled from it. What roads could we build to sustain these embodiments? How were our experiences alike? How were they different? What exactly did deep spirit mean? I’d been viewing it as a state both humans and nonhumans could access, where Rumi lived. One drowned beyond all hope of being found, and none would know him now except the ocean. Ann is centered in deep spirit; she has the opposite problem I have. She can’t seem to stay in her body, I can’t get out of mine.
One thing I know about myself, though, is that I always fumble when I start thinking there’s something “extra” I have to do to live as a spirit. Like in Trinidad, before I marked my face, when I kept thinking of spirit and human as a binary, either one or the other, even though the whole point of an ọgbanje is that it’s both. An ọgbanje is only an ọgbanje when it is in a human body. It’s not a spirit possessing a human; there is no demarcation between the two—there is no two in the first place. I didn’t need to do anything to move as an ọgbanje. I was already doing it, by existing, by breathing. There’s something in here about the misguided way people search for authenticity.
The other piece of this map is my correct name: the deity’s child, Ala’s somethingborn. If my mother is a python, then so am I; if my mother is a god, then so am I. That’s how it finally clicked—I can’t reach deep spirit because I’m a particular kind of spirit, an embodied one. Not just an ọgbanje but an embodied god, and that’s specific. Embodied gods are not above fleshly things, they revel in them. They wield the flesh wildly, and the consequences are not the same. No one knows if humans take it as far as gods or gods take it as far as humans, who was made in whose image, that’s not the point. The point is: even if I hold the voidface, the dead thing, I’m still hyperpresent in the flesh. The flesh can be dead if it likes, but the god who animates it will always be louder.
Ann shook her head at me when I told her all this. “That’s what I’ve been saying,” she laughed, with that delicious little gap in her front teeth. “Even years ago, before we started talking, I’d say, ‘Akwaeke is a god! Why are they moving like that?’”
She was right: once I realized I was a small deity, I had to move differently. If my whole mother is the Ala of Odinaala, of Omenala, the one who is everywhere, a shrine in every compound? Ah-ahn. It’s enough. Birthright loops a quick knot around doubt and strangles it. I can’t move afraid when I’m a god. In this flesh world? The fear doesn’t make sense. I can do what I want—who can touch me? A human can’t enact consequences against things like us, we’re not even moving in the same dimensions.
Back when I was studying Rumi, I tried reaching for humility, a sort of grace, rising above things, deep wells of compassion and all that shit. I’m not saying there aren’t gods like that; I’m just saying I’m not one of them. Maybe it’s also an ọgbanje thing; my brothersisters are terrible little spirit children, you know? I think they gave me some trickster residue—not the actual trickery, but the unrepentant part has to come with that kind of mischief, the petty and vindictive. Quick to burn things down. If you take traits like impatience and a hot temper, and plug them into a god already annoyed at being put into flesh, you end up with a nature I can’t believe I spent so much energy trying to repent from. What god doesn’t come with a streak of brutal?
But it’s fine, I’m still mostly sweet, I think. This is just one of the faces—the bratty deity.
If we allow our respective birthrights, how else can we move but as mad and arrogant gods? Rightness sits strong in your bones when your parent is divine. Between you and me, our temperings are different—siblings are never the same—but we’ve both been taught fear, conditioned by the humans. They had their reasons, but you can’t keep things like us folded for too long, the creases can’t hold. I know you’ve felt the seams bursting, too, how much it hurts, how terrifying it is because we know how terrifying we are, they must have folded us for a reason, we’re going to hurt the humans if we expand fully, we’re going to burn everyone we care about, we burn too bright, it’s not safe to exist, we’re dangerous, we’re dangerous, we’re dangerous!
The only right thing to do is cage ourselves, wrap the collar around our throats and pull it tight, lash our own backs, save them all from us. How many times have we tried to stand up fully only for them to tell us that we’re being violent for just trying to be whole, that our attempted wholeness was hurting them? They’ve lied to us for such a long time. And I think when we’ve been taught to be afraid of ourselves in such ways, we absorb some of our teachers’ fear. I wonder what terrified them about us, like I kind of want to know the fine details. Is it that our spirits were too large to control? Had they just never seen anything like us before? I’m so glad we found each other at the end of the day; being witness to you is one of the joys of my life, I swear.
My therapist told me that when people think about power, they think about the choices that power will give them: options, resources, things like that. What they don’t often think about are the consequences of power. The things you lose, the things you sacrifice, the costs. It was great hearing that, because of course I knew about the costs but it makes such a difference to hear them framed as a direct consequence of power. No one has patience for hearing about the consequences unless they’re experiencing them as well; otherwise, all they can see are the choices. As in, life must be sweet where you are! That’s one of the more insidious ways this kind of power just isolates you from other people: it’s like they become blind to what’s actually happening with you, replacing it with an illusion they created, their imagination of what your life is like, which is really a fantasy of how they think their life would be if they had what you have. The magician explained this to me. You and I know it well, it’s why we’re taking our time to become the beasts we are. Consequences are things we’re learning to handle in small doses.
Like that thing where you show someone just a little bit and they run, and then you think, wow, if just this terrified you—the tip of a feather—how am I supposed to open up entire wings? If I’m already so alone with this useless human face pressed over mine to make you more comfortable, how bad will it get if I show you my nonhuman faces? Ann worries about this, too, all the time, because the hurt the humans feel will pierce its way through her as well. I hate that pain. I spent the other day sobbing for hours on my bathroom floor, because my human mother will never see me and all she knows is that the child she bore does not want to be close to her, and I can feel her hurt and she doesn’t think I know, but of course I know, it just changes nothing, the woman suffers for being a deity’s surrogate. There is no lonely like a god’s lonely; I suffer in different directions.
We should just become utter and complete beasts, anyway, fuck it all.
These humans are so loud in how they press down, in how they enforce their realities. What would it look like if we took up our own space, all of our space, planets and planets worth of it? They won’t like it, I know, but Elo, how long can we stay dungeoned just because they’re afraid of us? Let them look at us, let their eyes bleed, they don’t see us anyway. It’s actually impressive, how someone can work so hard to crush a thing they can’t see. Maybe they use their other senses, maybe they can smell things more powerful than them, feel the danger in the small hairs of their necks. I do think we’re dangerous, just not in the way they told us we were. In this their world, it’s dangerous to not be afraid. Do you know what kinds of things we can do without fear? You can’t control a thing that doesn’t understand fear, you can’t condition a thing that doesn’t experience consequences.
Did you ever watch the Alexander McQueen documentary? There’s a quote that Jahra pulled from it and shared: I didn’t care about what people thought of me and I didn’t care what I thought of myself. Okay, we’ve heard the first part before, but fuck, that second part? To not care what you think of yourself? You and I talk often about making unleashed work—like what you’ve done with Vagabonds!—about writing without any censorship, writing the way we think, not translating it for the humans or the West or the white people, not worrying if it fits form, if it has precedent, if we’ll be able to make a living from it, just writing because these stories, these words, are the truest things we know. And McQueen was here talking about removing not just the collar other people put on him, but, more important, the collar he put on himself! It blows my mind—to free yourself from yourself, to hear the voice in your head saying all the things it’s been conditioned to say, and then to ignore it and make the work anyway? I love this idea so much—especially because it doesn’t demand that you not think things of yourself. You can think whatever you want, just don’t care about it. That’s wild. That’s some next-level magic.
We’ve spent too long with the leash of what other people think on us. We mask so well for them; we know how to see through their eyes, how to climb in and lean against their retinas. When I look at myself through them, I know to fold this part, turn down the volume here, accentuate there, so I can pass, so they can think they see me and that creates a gentleness there. They can’t actually see me, but they need to think they can. We justify needing them to buy into the illusion, the glamour we spin so prettily for them, because that gentleness they have evaporates the moment you show yourself to be a loud, illegible thing. Now you’ve become unknown, now you’re a threat, a thing to be brought down, torn into pieces they can chew and swallow, you know?
But the thing is, they don’t see us. So, in using their eyes, not only do we unsee ourselves, but we also stop existing even for ourselves, which is such a cruel thing. What kind of looped violence? Fuck their eyes, may they bleed out of their heads. We deserve so much better, my love. I hope we find it all, and more.
I can’t wait to see what you turn into.