What does "spirituality" even mean when it wasn’t yours to begin with?

What does "spirituality" even mean when it wasn’t yours to begin with?

This piece, my higher self, blue-faced and empty-eyed, came through after a long stretch of unlearning. I had to burn a lot of doctrine out of me to find God again. Or maybe not God, but presence. Essence. The feeling of knowing I’m connected to something deeper than survival.

Growing up Black in America, as a first-generation American raised by Caribbean parents, “spirituality” often meant Christianity by force, obedience by trauma, silence by design. You don’t question God. You don’t question the Bible. Asking "why" was not allowed, and that never sat right with me. Even as a kid, I felt something was off. In my meditations, I often ask for wisdom, knowledge, and understanding, not blind faith. Going deep to the root of things is just how I’m wired. And it doesn’t make sense...

In the Western world, we’re taught to fear anything rooted in African spirituality. From childhood, we hear words like witchcraft, obeah, voodoo, and juju and are told they’re evil, dangerous, or demonic. But those labels were tools; tools used by colonizers and missionaries to sever us from our power. Tools to keep us afraid of our own reflection.

It’s no accident. The systems that enslaved us knew exactly what they were doing. They understood the threat of a people who remembered who they were spiritually, culturally, and cosmically. That’s why they erased our languages, buried our rituals, and renamed our gods.

Because if we remembered, we’d rise.

They feared the spiritual fire that fueled revolutionaries like Nat Turner, who saw visions and led uprisings. They feared the Maroons of Jamaica, who used African war medicine and mountain rituals to remain free. They don’t teach us about the hundreds of slave rebellions across the Caribbean and the Americas from Haiti to Suriname because those revolts were often spirit-led. Not just political, but ancestral.

Even today, religion is often used to control, not liberate. But the spiritual technologies of our ancestors — prayer, trance, music, dreamwork, and ritual — were never meant to shame us. They were meant to reconnect us to Jah, to God, to Source. To Oneness.

And that kind of connection threatens systems built on division.

This painting isn’t a saint or a preacher. It’s a transmission. A face built from fragments. The mouth is boxed in, maybe still unspoken, but the eyes are wide open. This is what happens when you listen to yourself before anyone else. When you ask your ancestors what they believed before they were baptized into fear.

The red in the background, that’s the fire. Not hellfire, but purification. It burned away what I didn’t need. It brought me closer to what’s real.

I don’t make art to be understood. I make it to try to remember. For me, Black spiritual art is not an escape from this world, but a re-anchoring into one that was stolen and is now being reimagined, one brushstroke at a time.