Reading David Blight’s “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom”

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I encountered the writings of Frederick Douglass for the first time reading David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. I was always interested to see what happened when black theory and religion encountered. Douglass’ writings were especially profound to me because it was the first time I saw Christianity’s capacity for liberation, particularly because religion is often solely examined as a colonial device. Douglass is a more recent historical reference that shows the radical nature of the God of the Methodist Church, His just ways, but also the ways that Christianity was routinely corrupted and rebranded as a slave holding, prostituting Phariseeism. He distinguishes this by referring to one Christianity as the “Christianity of the land”, as opposed to the “Christianity of Christ”.

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Douglass was a teacher and local preacher in the Church, where he would develop his skills as an orator. He used the Bible to not only make him literate during his enslavement, but the Bible became a tool of subversion. Douglass points out the hypocrisies of the slave masters’ preaching about serving a loving, just God, yet they created the daily violence of slavery. Douglass frequently points out the hypocrisy of slavery as an institution, when Christianity is founded on a God invested in the oppressed and inequity. I can testify that God is complicated, He is decidedly formed, and Black folks have wonderfully embraced his appropriation, reappropriated Him and embraced the disorder of the world and rendered it artful.

 

Reading the works of Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston would write about the Black Church as a practice, an invention of black originality. It was a space that exemplified the reinvention of the religion of the land as African expression, where gendered expression was made mechanical and alive. She was the daughter of a Baptist minister, and in her anthrographic works and writing, she was always flirting with all kinds of black faiths, hoodoo, voodoo. It was the theater of Black performance, it called for justice, it called to be more loving. It made black drama the highest form of performance and language a demonstration of invention. Spirituals not only conveyed the deepest expression of emotion, but also skilled religious expression or ornamentation. The will to adorn certain words, to liquidize certain words, “aren’t” carved into “ain’t”, where riffs, hums and runs, shouts and expulsions of force speak to the force of faith.3

Performance presents an architectural act, through its expression and poetics. The sound and expression are rooted in a particular kind of place. The slippages between sounds presents creativity, politics, intimacy and community. The breathy collective joins into a chorus and the individual expels into passionate informality, shouting, fainting, convulsing, jumping, and clapping––a call and response where the listener can get immersed in the ebb and flow of of breath. It isphysical immersion in the dissonance of key changes where within the variance one can hear testimony and feel the truth of God viscerally. That one can find from ungodly temples a godly art and render it technical, formal, fluid, rational, all at once.

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Reading my Diary: My Testimony

The word passion comes from the Latin word passivus, meaning ‘to suffer’. My own testimony came from a place of great suffering and broken heartedness. Such pain would express itself throughout all of my work. I was going through what probably was my first significant heartbreak. I don’t want to go on a dictum about a search for romance, but if it wasn’t for the power of this emotion, I’m not sure that I would have gone searching for myself. This pain contrasted so much the sanctity that I had known at home in Miami– the pureness of a family’s love, the aesthetics of their being and the pain of leaving it behind would also find expression in my creative works. I viewed my life then as an intimate audience of one, and in the pain of leaving them, I found joy in knowing that I could echo God through my work; I found joy in the deep knowing of self and community, and vulnerability in allowing my suffering to speak.

Though God provided refuge for me, I cannot universalize my experiences, it would be reproducing the birth pangs of colonial maneuvers, nor is that the aim of this short dissertation. However, I can carve out space and testify that I’ve experienced the value of knowing God, that I forever wish to be a student in the institution of God, that I’ve found solace and love and much of my teaching is animated from principles of justice, beauty, harmony, dissonance.

I found that within the material walls of the Black Church, and I know that others in the margins who have found solace in knowing that even when the world oppresses them, regardless of where they’ve found Him, God honors this sentiment to seek truth, justice and elaborate on His creativity.