Notes on Ogunian Anarchism: A Meditation for Hoodoo Heritage Month

The humanity in each of us, along with valid reality checks, will try to keep us holding onto security and control no matter what, yet sometimes the lives that we are seeking become present only through the "letting go."

—Juju Bae, The Book of Juju: Africana Spirituality for Healing, Liberation, and Self-Discovery 

I won't nut up when we up thick in the crunch 
Because a coward dies a thousand times 
But a soldier only dies just once

—D'Angelo, "1000 Deaths"

Growing up, my mom played all of his "neo-soul" contemporaries, but I can't remember D'Angelo ever being mentioned by name or frequency. Repressed from my maturing imagination, I never heard his voice prior to the so-called year of reckoning, 2020. Since this first encounter with D'Angelo, I've spent many hours alone with his music and have been irrevocably impressed by the sonic force of Voodoo. The album's grumbling bass held me many a night as I waded in the "abyss of lovelessness," as bell hooks solemnly names it, trying to decypher my spellbound desires within this winding labyrinth. From its opening recording of a religious ceremony to the prophetic tone of D'Angelo's disarming falsetto, Voodoo summoned an atmosphere within which I could unconsciously exorcise feelings of doubt, fear, resentment, dread, and confusion. "I said the pressure is on from every angle, political to personal/Will I hang or be left hangin'? Will I fall off?/Or will it be bangin'? And I say it's up to the man upstairs." Once consciously attuned to his wayward frequency, I began the process of bleeding these corrosive entities into thought-forms destructive to the unseen structures interning my mind, soul, and, therefore, body. 

Sparked by D'Angelo's grounding excursion to South Carolina—where my people're from—and recorded partly in Cuba—the homeland of Lukumí—Voodoo was my introduction to the rapturous possibilities of Ogunian anarchism before I had the language to describe it. 

Then, the year was 2021. The month was August, Black August. I was sitting in my torn and tattered living room loveseat thumbing through Safiya Bukhari's The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. The book was a tiny lil' thing, but it packed an uppercut worth writing home about. I was struck by Bukhari's frankness and political clarity, along with an unflinching spiritual commitment that oriented and animated her revolutionary ethics. A quote from the text that remains with me is: 

"Those of us who are truly about the work of making revolution and creating a revolutionary culture must be willing to die the death of a thousand cuts. We must exorcise those characteristics of ourselves and traits of the oppressor nation in order to carry out that most important revolution—the internal revolution." 

The War Before narrated Bukhari's personal revolution, which ultimately pushed her underground as a member of the Black Liberation Army. 

I continued my literary perusal through her declension, a baptism into a divine radicalism, until I arrived at Bukhari's marriage certificate with a man by the name of Ashanti Omowali Alston. Not only were Ashanti and Safiya dedicated to one another on paper, but the two also shared a spiritual devotion to the struggle. In the words of Assata Shakur, another soldier of love, they "[made] vows that struggle will multiply." And that they did, together, and for that I'm grateful. The very next week, after first encountering Ashanti's presence through Safiya, I received a text message from another young black anarchist saying that Ashanti actually lived in Rhode Island, just a stone's throw from where I was a student working on my PhD in Africana Studies. This was a serendipitous moment I've now come to expect as a part of the journey towards aligning with my higher, warrior self. We met up with Ashanti on campus soon after, and a few months later I interviewed Ashanti for my black studies journal, (de)cypher+dark notes on the culture. We discussed the intersection between black radicalism and spirituality, among other things, setting the stage for Ashanti to make connections he admitted he hadn't had the opportunity to make before. And afterwards, once I shut my computer, I wept and wept, overcome by a wave of emotional and spiritual energy that alerted me to the fact that my destiny was somehow tied to this seemingly mundane conversation. 

Five Augusts after being informally introduced to Ashanti by Safiya, a number representing divine transformation, Ashanti's book Anarchist Panther has officially entered the world. I remember having Ashanti's over at my house, with D'Angelo playing in the background much to his delight, and listening to Ashanti fret over what I had no doubt would be a masterful and essential contribution to the anarchist canon. This Black August, Anarchist Panther served as my self-assigned reading along with The Book of Juju: Africana Spirituality for Healing, Liberation, and Self-Discovery by Juju Bae, an Oshun priestess, hoodoo practitioner, and former organizer. After a summer spent in Salvador, Brazil, having mundane encounters with ancestors, caboclos, and Orisha alike, I returned to the U.S. trying to understand both how my metaphysical life force, or ashe, worked and how it could be harnessed and wielded amid our rapid declension into the bolder-faced fascism George Jackson warned us was waiting to be activated behind the shroud of liberalism. The "democratic fascism" of U.S. governance, as another BLA veteran Dhoruba Bin Wahad calls it, operates like the seven of cups card in tarot: it casts illusions about what hides behind the veil of the voting booth or is summoned by the ritual of casting a ballot. 

My research in Africana philosophy and early extracurricular studies in Africana mysticisms, facilitated by Spirit itself, led to my newfound understanding that anti-blackness functions as a kind of confusion spell meant to bind our discrete psyches to conservative and anti-black mythologies. This working is essential to liberal-democratic statecraft, operating in the light as ideology and occultly in the shadows to prevent our arrival at clarity about the stakes of black liberation struggle. 

With this understanding, I unintentionally booked a flight to Salvador that aligned with the blue moon at the end of May. Yet this was fitting because my summer expatriation to the African Capital of Latin America, home to the world's largest Black population outside of the African continent, was not a vacation as much as it was an intensive program to gain knowledge and refine skills for confronting what Bin Wahad calls the "esoteric violence" of racial-imperialism. While in Salvador, I was following what Ashanti refers to in the introduction of Anarchist Panther as "inklings," or intuitive nudges about what is missing in our heterogeneous traditions of radical struggle. As a black studies practitioner, in particular, my inklings in graduate school guided me to the realization that the field of black studies is limited in its discourse regarding the feminized labor of metaphysical confrontation that accompanies social struggle. This is perhaps a result of its institutionalization into a patriarchal university that masks its spiricidal violence under the cloak of secularity. 

When I say metaphysical confrontation, I'm referring to spiritual combat on the battlefield of the unseen that can best be illustrated by Bukhari's poem called "A Curse on You" in The Soul of the Black Liberation Army, a boisterous text I originally stumbled upon in an online archive in 2021. Most recently, I've been revisiting it as a zine published by Gabe Johnson, a comrade in Boston working with The Village Worcester. 

Put a curse on you
Taunting Amerikkka 
Your purple mountains 
Majesty 
Will one day tumble
to the sea 

Put a curse on you 
for ravaged bodies 
and crazed minds 
Left hopeless, empty 
By your 
demonic guise 

Put a curse on you 
Sly Amerikkka 
Your spacious skies 
and amber fields of grain 
will reek and sputter 
with streams of flame 

Put a curse on you 
for two edged laws 
that at once create 
things of beauty 
Or of wealth 
And destroy 
Faith, hope, life 
for naught 

A curse Amerikkka 
what shall it be 
               Er you see
               —ennial three 
              Your lofty nights
              Will no longer be! 

Make no mistake, Bukhari is intentional with her words here. She is not only wishing ill on Babylon, but is casting a spell for its imminent demise. One that you could recite right now in front of a lit candle and a glass of water. (If you're hesitant to do so, maybe ask yourself why.) But while in Brazil, I wanted to gain more practical skills and esoteric wisdom to be an unbearable thorn in the side of the corporate state. My prayer and commitment to honor my inklings during what began as a solo trip in a foreign country where I didn't know anyone and didn't speak the language sent me on an unforeseen journey The Alchemist would be proud of. In a matter of weeks, I had participated in my first Egbe ceremony with an Ifa priest, visited a Candomble terreiro on the outskirts of the city, played Capoeira Angola in front of the watchful waves of Yemoja, and traveled to an island neighboring Salvador where I was mounted by an Orisha in a shamanic Afro-Indigenous ceremony, maybe the one Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter argues must be found. 

The last experience, in particular, felt like the pinnacle of a years-long journey to prepare myself for what Ashanti calls an "Ogunian Anarchism" in "Towards a Vibrant and Broad African-Based Anarchism," an essay that didn't make it into the book that I've been thinking with the past few years. Reviewing the dramatic work of Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and the dissertation of Kenyan academic Joseph Walunywa, Ashanti speculates on Ogunian anarchism as a kind of ritualistic radicalism that draws upon Ifa, a West African cosmological system of the Yoruba people. Walunywa describes ritual as revolutionary because it allows both the community and individual to "maintain an intimate relationship with primordial culture and its liberating forces" without losing the personality of the individual to the collective. The liberating force Ashanti focuses on is Ogun, a warrior Orisha within the Yoruba pantheon that is said to have been the first to come down to Earth, and who "forged a sacred path for the return of divinity to humanity." Ogunian Anarchism is thus about a willingness to destroy, including facets of oneself that keep you stuck, so that physical and metaphysical ground is cleared for something holy, even if not whole, to be cultivated. 

We can thus see the alignment with Safiya's suggestion that revolutionaries must be willing to experience a death of a thousand cuts to carry out the internal revolution that is a catalyst to political or social revolution. Together, these revolutions in the realms of the seen and the unseen might comprise what black nihilist Calvin Warren calls an "ontological revolution" on behalf of the slave that concludes in the destruction of "the world and its institutions." 

And through this world-abolition, we perhaps come closer to the divine than ever imagined. Interestingly, Ashanti connects Ogun's praxis of divine destruction to the revolutionary activity of Atunda, a primordial slave that rebelled against Orisha-nla, or a Godhead, by rolling a boulder on top of them, thereby crushing Orisha-nla into the various pieces that would congeal into the Orisha pantheon. So, following this myth, Ogunian Anarchism is a ritual of creative destruction performed from the position of the metaphysically enslaved, which is consistent with the analyses put forth by members of the Black Liberation Army and anti-humanist discourses in black studies such as Afropessimism and black nihilism. After all, who said the slave didn't have a spiritual practice? With Baba Ogun serving as the "principal 'transit conductor'" of revolutionary transitions, the slave can move "through the abyss, the chthonic realm or chaos, [where] there are the elemental forces upon which one can draw to bring about re-assemblage, recuperation and creativity," as Ashanti writes. 

Ultimately, Ogun led me to a clearing in the lush forests of Brazil where I was initiated into a process of self re-creation in the spirit of Atunda, one that also revealed the limitations of humanism, as Juju Bae alludes to in the first epigraph above. I was sitting criss-crossed in front of the talking drum, shaker in hand, when suddenly I was overcome by an energy I had never encountered. The vibrations pulsed through the ground and tore through the air, turning me in circles until everything went dark. My eyes were forced shut for the next hour while I was pushed and pulled by an intimately foreign force. There was me, and there was it, and it pushed me into the little corner of myself to use me as a vessel. According to the observers of my slow and sultry movements, it was Oshumare, the rainbow serpent imagined to encircle the earth that is responsible for maintaining its cosmic balance. Being an Orisha of queer and trans people that spends half the year as male and half the year as female, they also spliced me between feelings of fierceness and ferocity. But never for a second did I feel embarrassment or shame. It felt as if the front-facing mask of socialization dissolved and I was simply existing. 

Ashanti offers some language to make sense of this moment of ritual that aligns with what Juju Bae describes as a "letting go" of one's humanity for the sake of being present in the moment:  

By paying homage to the gods within the context provided by the ritual, the individual, working on behalf of the community, consistently lets go of and recuperates his or her sense of self-constitution. If one wishes to get out of the post-colonial crisis, the ritual says, first, "Yes, automatically, you have the right to rebel," and second, "you must now prepare and transit through an unavoidable hell to acquire the powers, insights, skills, and unities necessary for you and the community to move to the 'Liberation Hilltop.'" This letting go or relinquishing of the self into the abyss, chthonic realm, or the chaos implies being torn asunder from all those alienating forces and ideological influences, individually and collectively internalized, that have kept one stuck in a restricted state. It is in this way that the ritual of transition provides a kind of built-in mechanism for making a transition from a confining, compartmentalizing, oppressive existence to more liberatory and free realities. 

Literally atop a hill, surrounded by palms and overlooking the Ocean, I surrendered to the elemental force of Oshumare. And being ripped apart and thrown around was the closest to a psychic liberation I've felt in my twenty-nine years of existence. My worries disintegrated like sand between my fingers. After the ceremony was over, I sat under the moon while tears rolled down my cheeks as I was overcome with a familiar wave of emotion. It felt like the first extended conversation I had with Ashanti. Purged of some of the alienating forces binding me to illusions of my insignificance and powerlessness, I was a slave ready to rebel. Interestingly enough, it was revealed in a divination with my Godmother a few weeks prior that I actually was once a slave in Salvador in a recent past life. So perhaps my exercise of Ogunian anarchism was intended to disalienate me from not only myself, but also my past self, in the hopes I would steward that knowledge from a former life as a slave on different grounds into my present experience of the changing-same structure of slavery. 

Just prior to being mounted, I had the urge to jot down a note: "Now's a good time to sit in child's pose." Heeding my higher self, after the ritual I felt compelled to crouch at the base of the tree under which the entire ceremony took place, and stretched my arms in front of me so that my forehead rested at its roots. The tides crashed behind me. Later, on the ferry back to the mainland, I realized this was an Iroko tree. Within Yoruba cosmology, the Iroko tree is also considered a divine entity, acting as a conduit between the spiritual and material realms and a basin for ancestral memory. Among some practitioners of Candomblé, the Iroko is even an Orisha. I read somewhere that rituals performed under the Iroko function to open up a person's channels of discernment and intuition before they undergo training as a diviner within the Ifa-Isesse tradition. And to think, honoring my measly inklings led me here, a spiritual training ground all the way in Brazil just to tune my mind and spirit to a divine frequency. 

On the first Sunday of this most recent Black August, a few days after I returned to the United States, I performed my first divination for a friend after months of hesitancy towards the idea. I had been reading for myself for the past ten months or so, and have had friends ask me to pull some cards for them. But I've been nervous about bearing the responsibility that comes with predicting someone's future because prediction is not simply a matter of telling what will happen. Prediction shapes the future, especially when delivered with conviction. But in this divination, performed in her kitchen, we uncovered that her love life was being stalled by spiritual attacks on the person who wanted to come towards her. Yet once I brought what was happening in the dark to light, made the unconscious conscious, my friend and her crush started dating within the next week. 

The next day, on Monday, I woke up to a video on my YouTube feed of an episode of Black Journal, a one-hour series broadcast in the 1970s. This episode was on Black psychics and their role in predicting, and therefore shaping, the nation's future. The video was posted the day before, which, according to its description, was also Psychic Day. That means my first time reading for someone else unknowingly aligned with a holiday celebrating extrasensory perception and spiritual practitioners. More serendipity. 

I find it interesting that Psychic Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of August because this obviously aligns with Black August. But this makes sense when we think about the story Assata shares in her autobiography about how her grandmother predicted she would escape from prison. This prediction provided the hope Assata needed to keep fighting, and actually came true, proving that the reading provided by a diviner can shape the future as much as it predicts how it will unfold. 

There has always been a metaphysical component to black liberation struggles despite the myth of secularism we've been sold in the Western radical tradition. As Cedric Robinson points out in the confusingly named Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, metaphysics and spirituality have been an essential driving force of black revolt since the advent of chattel slavery. We can quickly think of the oft-mentioned Bois Caïman Vodou ceremony that kicked off the Haitian Revolution as an easy example. If the essence of Africana spiritual traditions such as Hoodoo, Vodou, Ifa, Candomblé, Lucumí, and Obeah is the endless pursuit of healing by any means necessary, then can we think of revolutionary actors such as Dutty Boukman and Cécile Fatiman, Ashanti and Safiya, Assata and Kuwasi Balagoon, Harriet Tubman, Queen Nanny of the Maroons, and Michael Eugene Archer as nothing more or less than militant community healers? 

Lastly, if you don't think the state has an occult practice, boy, do I have news for you. After an attempt on Ronald Reagan's life, his wife Nancy employed an astrologer in secret to clear the dates for certain presidential events. Yet it wasn't until 2004 that the North Carolina General Assembly repealed a statewide ban on the practice of "phrenology, palmistry, fortune-telling, or clairvoyance." That means that Assata's grandmother, who lived in North Carolina, technically broke the law by just prophesying that her granddaughter would eventually be broken out of a maximum-security prison. When we juxtapose these situations between adversaries, is North Carolina's "two-edged law," in the precise words of Safiya, not a calculated act of counter-insurgent warfare? What if the racial-imperial state, which is always waiting for the moment to activate the fascism in its heart, is not only interested in the monopolization of capital and violence, but also foresight? If this is the case, what does black anarchist struggle in the warrior spirit of Ogun prescribe? I'm proposing that maybe short arms do box with God. And if so, how do we, the soldiers on the battlefield of the unseen, revolt against our political theodicy in the slave tradition of Atunda and the militant healers that cleared these grounds before us?