My beloved Black women sisters, you may not know this but even the cosmos is now aligning in order to ensure your to return to your rightful place in the evolution of humanity. This statement is in no way meant to diminish the essential role of Black men our beloved complements, but to suggest we must restore the balance of the divine Black feminine so desperately needed if human life is to become just, sacred, and sustainable. If you were unaware of this cosmology, it is likely because you may have drank the deadly potion of manipulative capitalist social engineering, and not sought the truth left you by your AfRaKan ancestors. While Black women are taking leadership, it will come to naught if they do not do so with the values and principles of Maat driving them. We must heal ourself(ves) from the inside out, confront and overcome all vestiges of mind control, liberating our consciousness so that we can be free indeed. Please check out this brief allegory, part of which I first published in “The metaphysics of optimal psycho-social functioning in eliminating abuse”, in L. Rodgers-Rose, and Z. Zai’mah (eds.) (2010) Healing Black Women from Violence: Reclamation and Peace. Norfolk, Va.: Traces Publications.
The Empress—Our Story
Imagine this. What if you were an Empress (or Emperor, as the case may be, but we will focus on Black women at this time) with full and sole authority over your wonderful kingdom? Your kingdom is invaded by the evildoers whose goal it is to take over your kingdom, control, exploit, and enslave you and your future generations for their benefit. Over time you succumb to the invaders’ deception and manipulations, and begin to lose any memory of yourself as the Empress. You have become accustomed to responding to the dictates and definitions of your captors, even their standards of beauty, as if they were your own. You, having internalized their false ideas of your inferiority and their superiority, fall unconscious and enter the nightmare state of existence of unwarranted pain and suffering. A victim of epistemic violence (violence perpetually assaulting your cultural ways of knowing and strengths), you are continually subjected to systems of racism unfairly assigning low value to you and not allocating fair opportunity, tin addition to domestic terrorism and other systems of dehumanization.
Insecurity, anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, fear, addictions, dysfunctional relationships, violence and self-destruction become the hallmarks of your trauma. As you survey the landscape there is no relief in sight. While you vaguely remember the stories of your ancestors and their glory days, even how they too had been overrun and captured, but fought back and achieved what they thought was the beginning of a new day. Their sense of liberation was short-lived (although their health stats were the best in history in the sixties Black Power and Civil Rights movement), as a few decades later found they themselves only further immersed in the structures and systems of the oppressor and having internalized the oppression.
Needed is a magic potion to awaken the Empress from her sleep to awareness of her greatness and her ability to wield her divine inheritance. In order to regain her power the Empress must plug back in to her power source, the Divine Spirit within her and within which she is, with her time and attention.
Clearly this allegory is about what has happened to Black people in general and Black women in particular, as we have experienced the Maafa, the African Holocaust, and seek to regain our power. Distress, dysfunction, and disorder are the negative and harmful manifestations of a people living under systems of dehumanization, terrorism and trauma for generations. In addition to individual subjective distress and behavioral problems, dysfunction in relationships and roles, families, groups, and communities signal the need to attend to and make the psychological changes necessary for health, wholeness, and sustainability. Identifying and confronting the source of the trauma and difficulties is the first step toward healing, as the Ethiopian proverb says, “He who conceals his disease cannot be cured.” Stay tuned for the next installment… Much love.
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