#marassa

Bon fet St Gerard Majella! Gede walks beside many saints, and St Gerard is one of the more well-known ones. I’m not cooking for Gede today (he eats soon enough..), but the Dead Man has some fresh flowers next to his seat.

It’s been BUSY over here at kay Bonkira; September and October are packed on my personal calendar and it usually catches me by surprise after a summer full of ceremony down in Haiti. Things were different this summer--we postponed ceremony until January, but I did go to Haiti in August--and so I had a little more brain space to plan.

September is often a month where folks hold a fet Metrès over several days (or one really long day), which is a fet for many of the feminine lwa and most often for Metrès Ezili Freda, Metrès Danto, and sometimes Metrès LaSiren as well. Several feast days for these ladies fall within that month, so it’s a good time for them to be celebrated.

While I didn’t hold a fet, I certainly spent a lot of time with those ladies. I try to keep at the front a message that LaSiren had for me and that has come up in a leson more than once: I am male-spirit heavy by default, in that my closest relationships with the lwa are with masculine ones, and so I need to make sure I am balanced out. This means conscious effort to keep the ladies at the front as much as I keep the masculine spirits, and that’s not nearly as easy as I wish it was. It’s been a long, LOOOONG process of digging in deep to being more comfortable with femininity and finding how I can connect with that in ways that don’t feel too out of character. 

The ladies are patient with me and probably more patient than I really earn, so that’s a grace I don’t take lightly.

Then, it was time for Marassa, the divine twins and multiple births. I have previously been a person who has not really enjoyed children, but taking care of my pack of Marassa and my own twin who did not make it to life has changed things. The happy, playful energy lightens my household; I am a fairly quiet and reserved person (really) and so my household tends towards quiet and perhaps kind of serious...but children shake that up and remind me to be looser and more playful. We hold our Marassa in a set of special purpose-built clay vessels called plat Marassa, as well as utilizing some traditional wooden trays as well, and they all got bathed and refreshed, and then given an assortment of traditional snacks called manje marassa. Like all the metrès, they give me grace to understand and open up another part of myself and I think that’s pretty great.

A few days later was Michaelmas, which is Agaou’s feast day. Agaou has always been what is honestly a sort of gleeful surprise for me. He wasn’t a spirit I knew well at all until after my kanzo, when I started dreaming with him regularly. As I prepped for my maryaj lwa, he began presenting me with rings in dreams and asked to be included in the wedding. When he came down to marry me, the first thing he told me was that the choice for maryaj had been his, and that he would have pursued me until I said yes if I had fought him. 

How I have come to know him is unique and he is a huge presence in my day-to-day, so when his feast day rolled around you know I was making some of his favorites. He eats turkey, so there was sòs kodenn (heavy on the sòs), diri ak pwa wouj, a few kinds of labouyi, and kafe ayisyen. Something small to hold him over until fet Agaou this January in Haiti(!!!). I have never been to a fet Agaou before, so I am really REALLY excited.

And each year that I celebrate Agaou’s feast day, he gives me a gift in an area that I don’t have a lot of knowledge in: somehow, he is invested in my family and family history. Last year, he clarified a really significant dream I had about my family while in the djevo, and that was a personal and spiritual bomb going of, and this year he chose to answer a long-standing lifelong question about my parentage, complete with some namedropping of someone who actually exists. It’s like spiritual Jerry Springer and I sit with all of this in a mixture of gratitude and ‘you have got to be fucking kidding me’. Agaou holds his cards close when he wants, so the pieces he gives me are important. Mapping out my ancestors and family--a hugely difficult area for me--has become it’s own small act of devotion.

October 2 was for my girl Thérèse de Lisieux and, if it was Before Plague Time, I’d have gone to mass at one of the local Carmelite monasteries and brought her some flowers but the majority of the churches here are still closed and Thérèse knows I love her without me needing to go to church. And, as a saint who died of a respiratory illness (TB), pretty sure she doesn’t need me getting sick just to prove a point. 

What’s next? November brings Gede and time to feed ancestors, as well as a special time for Simbi right before Petwo season kicks off full force in September. January bring fet Twa Wa/Three Kings, and unless things burn down even worse than they are now, I’ll be in Haiti celebrating and enjoying all the ceremony we postponed from this summer.

In between those things, I am working on a contribution for a book on folks who are converts to African and African-descended religions which will be out in early 2021, pumping out art (pestilence has been good for my creativity), and celebrating some career milestones and successes. 2020 has been an absolute bitch of a year, but I’m glad there are some positives to hang onto.

Writer: Greg Anderson Elysee / Artist: Antonello Cosentino / Evoluzione Publishing

You see, for me, one of the most important parts of any sci-fi is the world-building and the characters. What does your vision of the far future look like? It’s got aliens? Cool, cool. Space pirates? Okay, dope. I’m digging that. A cast of mostly black and other characters of color, all unique from one another, embroiled in a mystery and the beginnings of an epic space adventure. Oh, yes. I’ll have some of that.

Marassa by Greg Elysee and Antonello Cosentino sets up a universe full of badass space pirates, unique futuristic technology, and humans coexisting with all manner of aliens. It’s pretty much your standard affair when it comes to sci-fi tropes. However, what sets it apart is its cast of mostly POC characters and the tone it brings to the genre. From the characters to the setting and plot, everything just feels different.

The way characters talk, the crazy wooden technology, the worlds we see and even the designs of the aliens feel inspired by a touch of black culture. It’s not exactly revolutionary when it comes to sci-fi but there is enough style held together by a strong plot to keep us wanting more. If the opening issues are anything to go by, Marassa does everything right, making it the start of a great black space opera.

The story follows twins Mara and her brother, Sa. Mara is a former pirate, living the life of luxury in what I can only describe as futuristic space Wakanda with her husband, the alien prince, her mother-in-law, the queen, and her two sons. Meanwhile, her brother Sa is a space pirate, known to be troublesome, confident and for others, somewhat annoying. Riding the cosmos with Sa is his “son” Petit, an adorable humanoid and childlike wooden droid who has a few secrets of his own.

It has been a busy, breakneck few weeks/months over in these parts. It always catches me by surprise how everything cranks up once March hits, and I always end up coming up for air right about now and wondering where the time has gone. Inevitably, it goes to the same places: work, spirits, art, planning. There is ceremony this weekend, which preparations have already started for, and then summer careens forward. I’ll be back in Haiti for a few weeks for kanzo and our fetes, as well as Doing Some Things for my spirits, and then the fall brings lave tet here in Boston and all sorts shenanigans, plus whatever adventures my spirits have in store.

My birthday was recently, and I spent it with my brother; my twin who was never born. He is a recent acknowledgement, in the strangest of ways. After kanzo, I started waking up from dreams in tears, telling myself that I missed my brother. This was weird for me, because I only have one sibling, and it was uncomfy because it kept happening. I made a lamp one night and asked to have what was going on explained to me in ways that I could understand, and so I dreamed with my brother.

I have had a fraught relationship with my ancestors for years. One whole side of my ancestors, after much argument and back-and-forth, insisted that I am not their child but were happy to deal with me if I conformed to their wishes. I wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t, and so they walked away. The other side showed up and said that I wasn’t who or what had been intended and that something had happened that changed things, but that this was fine, since back home and back when the culture they are from was more traditional, there was a word for me and people would have known what to do. None of this made me less theirs, it just made me different and explained more of why I am who I am.

In a series of dreams my brother pieced together the story of those things in the way only a soul that was never really born can. He told me what happened while we were in the belly of my biological mother, and how we knew that, if we were both born, I was not going to survive. He painted the picture of how we--two tiny not-persons--came to the decision that I needed to survive no matter what and that the only way for that to happen was for my brother to give me his strength.

So, in all the wisdom that tiny not-persons have together, the decision was made between us that I would eat him...and I did. He told me this with no regrets, past or present, but only sadness that gave way to screaming when he grieved not being incarnate when I needed a sibling most. He would have been the oldest, and he sobbed like an older brother sobs for a lost opportunity for their younger sibling. How strange it was to look at someone in a dream who is the picture of who you would have been, had you been assigned male at birth, and watch them grieve for a hurt and a wrong that no one else in your life has ever spoken out loud.

He made a lot of things made sense over that several week unfolding, and it became this process of grieving this sudden space in my heart. Who knew that your heart could be divided in half by a previously unknown absence?

I asked him what his name was, and he told me a name that, in the native language of the ancestors I am closest to, translates roughly to ‘from the realm of the spirits’. Go figure. When I saw my biological mother after that, I casually asked her about the name he told me and she told me, in her 'I’m trying’ way, that I if I had been born a boy, that would have been my name. Funny how that works. She also told me that when I was very small, I had make-believe friend that I called by his name and wasn’t it curious that my younger sibling had also had a friend she called by the same name, too? Very curious indeed.

I went to my spiritual mother with this, partly because I was sort of at a loss as to what to do and partly because not doing something was really not a workable option, since his presence was so heavy. It feels so remarkably different to be joined at the spiritual hip with someone who is a piece of you than it does to remain close with your spirits.

She told me what I could do for him, and it was enough that he has a comfortable place to be that is not right up on me. My Marassa with my Marassa, tiny children welcoming the soul of what wasn’t but could have been home for rest and refreshment. My spirits taking care of me, and us, again and again and again. Blessings come from such unexpected places in so many unimagined ways.

I went to an event just before my birthday and had my photo taken a lot during the course of the weekend. Photos are weird for me sometimes, because I often feel like I don’t know who I am looking at. The Trans plays tricks on my eyes, because gender is slippery and bodies (generally) are not. Those photos look more me these days, though, and, even moreso lately, more like my brother. I see his forehead in the mirror and a bit of his beard and even his smile. It’s strange and fulfilling all at once, and weird to experience after growing up so certain that I was alone in the world. Now, when my forehead wrinkles, I know where the feeling of being alien and alone came from when I was a kid, and where the feeling of an invisible tether that grounded out somewhere outside of what I knew was leading me.

When my spirits asked for kanzo, they promised me I would have a home and wouldn’t need to wander anymore. After five years, that promise has only really begun to unfold in ways that I understand. I have a mother who loves me, a brother who has held my hand for the longest time without me knowing it, spirits who have walked beside me when I didn’t even recognize their names, and innumerable blessings, all the time. Gras a Dye, gras a lwa yo.

On our birthday, we had cupcakes.