Conjure

When we stay in Ypsilanti, Michigan, I love to run through this Civil War-era cemetery (right), just a stone's throw from the Huron River. It reminds me that new life rhythmically arises from death and decay. There is a Gospel story that takes place in a graveyard in the country of the Gerasenes. A man who was possessed by an unclean spirit lived there among the tombs. 

The text says that he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. Jesus asked him what his name was and he said, "I am Legion, for we are many." A legion, containing about 5,000 soldiers, was the largest unit in the Roman imperial military. The story signals that our bodies are also a battlefield between a Spirit of steadfast love, social justice and a faithfulness to the most vulnerable versus the perspectives, postures and policies of empire. We, too, are possessed by Legion.

Jesus cast out the demons. They were transferred into a herd of pigs who ran down a hill and drowned in the lake. The text says that the man possessed by Legion was clothed and in his right mind. He asked if he could join Jesus and the disciples on their journey, but Jesus told him, instead, to stay behind so that he could tell his friends about the mercy of God. He became a missionary of mercy in a context of militarism. The healing and liberation of colonized people did not require that they leave empire, but that they infuse it with Something else.  

I was thinking about this story while I was reading Johari Jabir's brilliant book Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's Gospel Army (2017). It's about the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, an all-Black military unit who fought for the Union army during the Civil War. Jabir's thesis is that these former slaves were fighting for freedom, but also for an alternative masculinity in a white supremacist society that only offered militarized forms of manhood. These Black men became real men through soldiering and singing. Their nightly rhythm was rooted in the ring shout, a circle of dance that moved counter-clockwise to the beat of drum and the Spirituals. It was in the ring shout where these men expressed both individual difference and group allegiance. 

Jabir writes that the radicalism of these Black soldiers specifically, and of Black Americans in general, was not rooted in the rejection of America, the military, masculinity and Christianity, but instead, by repositioning and resignifying these institutions so that they would be infused with the potential to enable and enact new forms of freedom. In order to survive, they did not have the liberty to simply cut-off from empire. They had to complexify every aspect of it. They synchretized their spiritual, social, political and economic lives with liberative bible stories, African deities, and ancestral spirits.

For Black people, love and liberation has never been about an either/or engagement with the world. It has consistently called for both/and. They learned to read the bible by what Detroit-based pastor Rev. Roslyn Bouier calls "disrupting the text." Black folk don't quote the text exactly as it appears. They perform it like a script by improvising. They transform reality by conjuring Something different The white supremacist emphasis on the submission of slaves, for instance, was cast out and sent down the hill to drown. A conjurational biblical reading strategy, thus, empowers ordinary people to exorcise demons too. This mentality allows the miraculous to work through messiness. 

Reading Conjuring Freedom reminded me that my liberation from the counterfeit masculinity manufactured by militarism, materialism, racism and hetero-patriarchy of empire requires repositioning and resignifying too. It is not a head game, but an open-hearted, emotionally expressive, erotic engagement with the rhythm of life. It is not a formula or code. It conjures a new world possessed by mercy, which moves to the beat of song, dance, drum, laughter and tears. This is what Jabir calls "spiritual militancy." It is a struggle not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers of empire. I can only get free by conjuring something different than the standard offerings of our institutions.