“What do you mean a poetic revolutionary, a spiritual gunrunner?”
Lessons from the erotic, messages from the spirits
Much has been written about and many lessons have been drawn from Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In her writing, Lorde locates the erotic as a bridge between the spiritual and the political as well as a place of deep intuitive knowing that ‘was not available to [her] when [she] was trying to adapt [her] consciousness to [an exclusively european-american male tradition] mode of living and sensation’. The domains of the erotic are many and we know, from Lorde that poetry is one of them. At this moment in time and history, I am drawn to thinking through and about the self and self-care and their facilitation of the erotic. I know and it feels to me that this time requires a different self-orientation. In an effort toward this, I’m struck at all the things I have to unlearn in order to make this re-orientation possible.
In our calls for ceasefire, and calls to free Palestine, Palestine is freeing us, as others have noted, and compelling us en mass towards anti-imperialistic and anti-colonial perspectives that have us relooking at our lives. The worlds that we, who love and embrace life, yearn and have yearned for are beckoning to us again, or rather, we are beckoning towards them. We’re disillusioned with the West and its ideals (and have been for some time now) and we are filled with feelings of anger, grief, and disbelief at the genocide being committed and ethnic cleansing by Israel and its allies against Palestinians. As a sangoma, a house and vessel to ancestral spirits, it is not lost on me that for many Black, brown and Indigenous peoples the world over, our feelings of grief and anger at this moment are additionally ancestral. I’m especially curious about what this particular shared space of the erotic animates, requires, and communicates because when we listen closely, we know it has much to say and demand.
Why do you spend all this time trying to decipher where you begin
Where we end?
Where we begin,
where you end?
Why do you spend all this time demarcating the past from the present?
O tletše ka sekgowa
too much
white-ness
in you
How could you ever think you were singular?
When you were always we, with us
When we were always we, with you
How could you ever think you were only present?
When you were always history, with us
When we were always present, with you
There are many ways to approach the erotic but I want to zoom in on the self and self-care because I have used them before as technologies for attempting to approach the erotic but have failed. I think there have been particular messages part of the more recent self-care movements, which have, undoubtedly been valuable but have also been used in service of numbing the erotic and priming us towards silence, apathy, and political inaction, both materially and spiritually. I have, in the past and present, adopted self-care as one of many domains of the erotic. I have used its quiet registers as a space to reconnect and reground to the spiritual fabric of my life and as a space for self-scrutiny and soothing. I have also used its quiet recklessly and in unsacred ways. In its quiet, I have turned more often than not to consumption, drowned out my inner life, learned a harmful kind of silence, shrouded in fear, and avoided and isolated from those I love and whose community I desire and have always desired. In essence, I have more often than not used it to numb the erotic in me.
In beginning to lay out the erotic and its uses, Lorde reminds us that, in the face of profit, it can be abused and misconstrued. The ‘self’ and ‘self-care’, and other tools that facilitate our connection to the erotic can equally be, and have been, misconstrued. I’m sure you too, often find yourself bearing witness to the abuse of ‘self-care’, even in this moment. In this abuse of self-care, the self is cast as small, isolated, and, fundamentally, a consumer. In such a context, we are continuously conditioned towards Western and colonial notions of the self and ‘self-care’ that are removed from their communal, liberatory, and radical roots. In this context, cut off from ourselves, each other, and the erotic, we begin to believe that the life-affirming worlds we once dreamed of were only fantasy. And we begin to lose sight of the versions of ourselves who love life and living and breath and breathing. We begin to be fluent in the practice of losing hope, fluent in keeping our heads down and avoiding trouble.
Man oh Man
I was once Spirit
Became human
And now I struggle against being consumer
I’m writing this because this is something I have struggled with for years. I am frequently pondering the quality of the time I spend alone and with others. I am also writing this from within the pain and confusion that comes from scrutinising these under the light of the erotic, finding that I have for too long shrunk the scope of self and I have for too long shared this living without risking anything, which is to say I have barely begun to share it at all. I have sat too long in the shallow of the erotic, and there found myself unknown to myself (and you), quietened and afraid and not knowing how to cross the threshold from me to you. Unable to do that, I cannot cross the portal from this world to the other.
Even in sitting in its shallowness, I have misconstrued the erotic,
allowed fear to run my life and have only known a shadow of myself,
with my life left to chance.
When was the beginning of this undoing?
Where is the beginning of its undoing?
Prayer? Spirit, please may I learn to stretch myself in service of more liveable worlds.
The erotic is a spiritual place that casts the self as not simply singular and material, but as of spirit and existent in multiple, tangible and intangible, communities all at once. In this space ‘inner peace’ isn’t the purpose, for the erotic is always already a chaotic place. It is loud, screeching, and urgent (in some parts of the world–in our cosmology–, it requires you to memeza idlozi at least 3 times a day, summoning, from their ocean hiding places, the dead who have, in their lifetimes, faced apartheid and disenfranchisement, much like the people of Palestine). When we strive for ‘inner peace’, for ‘high vibrations’, ‘protecting our peace’, ‘honouring our capacity’ (when we have been heavily conditioned to reserve our capacity for capitalist labour and our nuclear families and our mundane everyday), in a world that is anything but peaceful or just, we know that at some level, we have to learn to look the other way frequently, be idle, isolate and numb ourselves. And we learn to swallow and regurgitate the lie and harmful sacred-less notion that we aren’t interconnected, that we don’t owe each other anything.
It is okay to get in your body, to begin to touch the grief and injustice of it all. Grief, anger, confusion (or their speechless counterparts) are appropriate responses to watching genocides unfold. They are appropriate responses to imperialisms impeding on, decaying our living and our breath. You are completely wrapped up in this because you are a part of it.
The erotic encourages us to enlarge the scope of the self. It reminds us that, at our core, we are always in community and to reach out is a natural impulse and inclination. Swimming deeper in its waters, I have found that even in the space of alone, if we can learn to pay close attention to the way the air is always shifting around us, we can wake up to the notion that we are not singular or even truly alone. When we learn to notice breathe, hear and follow the silence that surrounds us in this space we may begin to discover the community of guides, ancestors and spirits that we are always navigating. Aligned with the light-seeking ones, who are always with us in our desires big and small, including in our desires for a just life and world, we can learn to ask about liberation and to be guided accordingly.
In past years we have been led in droves to different types of divination tools that we have used to navigate the big and small questions that plague our everyday. The People’s Oracle, Dayna Lynn Nuckolls, posits that it is imperative that our Tarot loving selves learn to practice ‘divination for liberation’. She reminds us that we can learn to ask our guides and spirit companions about freedom and justice and to ask the abyss ‘How do we respond to this moment’ just as much as we ask ‘Will I ever find love’. Spirituality, and the tools that surround it, can and must be orientated towards anti-colonial presents and futures and orientate us towards similar futures (as it is at the base of our lives). I say this as a conduit to ancestral spirits who have lived through different waves and periods of disenfranchisement of Black, brown and Indigenous people in Southern Africa. In the same language that they instruct and remind me to cleanse, fortify my home, or do this or other ritual, they remind me that colonialism and disenfranchisement of Black, brown and Indigenous peoples are ongoing and that they have always been violent, painful and horrific.
Not periphery to liberation:
Our grief: new and centuries old
Mourning: you have always been sacred to me
Your heart, mine, June Jordan’s: broken and/or in tact
Spirit, moya: the breeze, air and our breathing
Prayer: as in ‘I need more than we have, can I pull from the abyss/will you enlarge me?’
Cleansing, hohlapa: rivers rushing to the sea
Ancestors: yesterday’s lament for freedom belongs to today too, it was always unyielding.
Now more than ever, guided by the erotic, we can learn to orientate our full selves, including our spiritual selves, in times of upheaval, depending on what we do in the space of ‘alone’ and the quality and scope of the presence we choose. We can and must learn and practice digging deep (and together) to find textured, multidimensional, responses (worthy of our living) to overwhelming and horrific situations. We can learn to pick up our tools of divination and ask our guides, ancestors (blood and otherwise), nature spirits, and other helpful spirits: How do I respond? What is my role in bringing forth a more just living for all of us? And we can learn to listen to what comes. Tarot at hand, the response will come. The quality of our listening dictates what and how deeply we hear.
This morning the 10 of wands instructed me to stock of the world I have participated in bringing forth and sustaining and to begin to walk away from the ways I have been complicit, even passively, in life-depriving practices, like capitalism. It said it is not enough to watch from here but to be disciplined in bearing witness and to take to the streets where and when I can. The 4 of cups told me to stay close to beauty, to find ground through feeling and looking inward, to remember our sacredness and all the ways we are held in ways we can’t see. It said to mourn, to grieve and to hope. The 4 of discs said ‘Hold steadfast in your spirit enriching practices and begin to practice the world in which you want to live. Embrace transformation and work for it. Hold hope, faith, and your spirit guides as companions.’ In chorus they say, there is always something to be done from where you are, something else is on the horizon and it depends on our doing and as well as the quality of our non-doing. Above all be unwavering in our belief that from the river to the sea, from Cape to Cairo we will be free from imperialist capitalist war mongering and extraction that produces, normalises, and manifests itself through Black, brown, and Indigenous death. This is not only a political declaration, summoned from the erotic it is, a spiritual one too.
Kganya le Lesedi
Gogo Mantwa