harmony through conflict
though i pulled the title phrase from a page discussing the evolution of my sun sign, “harmony through conflict” is the most precise way i’ve discovered to describe the numerological significance of six. six is where the dust settles after the upheaval and change of five. six is a number of grace, and sometimes forgiveness.
the sixth card of the Major Arcana is The Lovers, associated with Gemini, which also happens to be the sign that rules the first few weeks of June (the sixth month). The Lovers have been able to establish their miraculous union with vulnerability and transparency, aided by the communicative airs of their correspondent sign. this card does not depict the result of two halves coming together to form a whole, but rather of two whole beings acting as mirrors to reflect their wholeness towards each other. within their openness, The Lovers find balance.
[image description: The Lovers card from the Oubria Melanated Tarot Deck]
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like many others, i was born to two people who desired to avoid repeating the mistakes of those who hurt and abandoned them. all of my names have six letters. my first name takes two letters each from the names belonging to my mother, my father, and my brother. my middle name is a portmanteau of my two grandmothers’ names. my name is the closest that any of these people will ever be together again. names are destiny, and at times, i do feel like i’m here to suture wounds far older than i am.
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a stranger once slid into my DMs on Instagram to chastise me for my use of the blue nazar symbol. at the time, i was in the throes of organizing with BQIC, so my life was a frenzy of actions, meetings, and long nights. everyday i grew more frustrated with the simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibilization i experienced as a Black trans person trying to live within a revolutionary praxis. as the bind grew tighter, i began to perceive the evil eye’s many facets: it was ill intent, it was the white Ga(y)ze, surveillance technology, the barrel of a gun, the target on my back.
we weren’t just up against the State or its fascist foot soldiers, but we were also countering the respectability politics of our supposed “community” members who openly disparaged us in the interests of appeasing whiteness and preserving capital. i don’t think i’ll ever forget how a local Black queer “elder” once called our collective a cancerous eye on the community (“elder” is in quotes because not every older person deserves my respect or admiration, as evidenced by the vicious comment this person thought they made in secret).
the Six of Wands radiates the heat of the spotlight and being proud of making it through the fiery chaos of the Five of Wands, but back then i didn’t feel comfortable taking up too much space to express pride in my work. not knowing how to resolve the tension of the hypervisibility/invisibilization, i made the blue eye my worry stone. i regularly adorned my body with the amulet, and i frequently peppered the then-new 🧿 nazar emoji into my posts online. i presumed the latter is what prompted the stranger to reach out.
when i received their message, i gave some initial pushback. something along the lines of “but it exists within cultures throughout the world.”
they countered, of course. something along the lines of, “but does that actually matter when U don’t have a connection to the symbol’s origin?” (meaning Turkey and other countries located in Southwest Asia and near the Mediterranean)
i thought about being snide – after all, who the fuck did they think they were hitting me up out of the blue plus my mama had been told me about evil eye from since i was a kid so what exactly did they expect me to do? be crushed by the Gaze’s weight? but instead of getting defensive, i paused. during this time, i was learning to choose my battles wisely, especially in digital spaces.
the Six of Swords speaks of the mental shift afforded by accepting the residual discomfort of the Five of Swords’ fallout. here, one can be ferried to harmonious and placid waters through remaining open to change. i decided digging my heels in wasn’t worth it and i sheathed my jagged tongue, choosing the path of least resistance. plus, i didn’t want my attachment to any symbol to become stronger than my commitments to minimizing harm to others. i silently conceded by leaving them on read, and i sought other alternatives to arm my spirit in the meantime.
[image description: the Six of Wands and the Six of Swords from the Oubria Melanated Tarot Deck]
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the third eye is the 6th chakra, meaning that the middle path between the mind and the mouth is the intuition.
wait. i’m doing what i can to depose vision as the primary source of perception, just like i’m doing what i can to unseat vocality as the primary method of outward expression.
now more precisely: our inner knowing helps mediate conflicts we might feel between what we think and what we share with others.
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sometimes, i go by the name Moko Jumbie. only four people are allowed to call me by this name. only two of these four people know that they have this permission. i chose this name for myself last year as i more deeply embedded myself in the ancient grounds of my lineage. as i became more certain of my place in the world, i envisioned myself in this lofty sentinel, traversing dimensions with an endless and unwavering stride. beyond its aspirational otherworldliness, the moniker is also wrapped up in a tender memory for me. my mom used to call me a jumbie when i was a kid because my skinny, stilt-like legs would often carry me quietly to the edge of her vision, startling her much like a wandering spirit might.
The origins of the Moko Jumbie can be traced to West Africa where it is known by the name Nyomo Kwouya. The Kwouya is a mask which symbolizes t he ancestral spirits that overlook the community, seeing beyond the present space and time, providing a sense of history and unseen future… The name “Moko Jumbie” combines two words well-known in Trinidad. ‘Moko’ is a diviner in the Kongo language, and ‘jumbie’ is a spirit or ghost; but here the word Moko is also used to refer to a vengeful African God. Notice the saying, “The vengeance of Moko will fall on you.” So Moko Jumbie may also mean, “The spirit of the God Moko””
Source: Falke, Stefan, and Laura Anderson. Moko Jumbies: The Dancing Spirits of Trinidad. New York: Pointed Leaf, 2004. Print. – National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago’s Facebook Page
something i recently wrote on vengeance that was inspired by my namesake: “vengeance can be righteous when wielded appropriately &&&& i am not a vengeful person. i am not as angry or spiteful as people seem to project onto me. i am very keen on approaching understanding but there is something about the selves I contain that pushes people to deny me the same courtesy…”to forgive is Divine” – inherently preceding that is the divinely vulnerable process of communicating harm.”
i don’t believe in punishment (a synonym linked to “vengeance”), but i do believe in righteous anger.
anger is urgent and instructive. we count the seconds between a flash of lightning and its resounding thunderous rumble to estimate how close we are to a miracle. we should feel the same way about the pause anger affords us, how it reverberates to communicate deeper feelings in need of attention. when deserved, i want anger to freely unfurl and crackle in the atmosphere before it is reined back in, whether i am the one wielding it or i am the one being singed. anger should not be considered punishment if U choose to elicit the heat. it is simply a consequence.
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my fascination with evil eye hasn’t gone away since that conversation with the stranger. instead of using the blue nazar, i opted for other eye-shaped symbols, but i eventually desired cultural specificity. after all, if my mom knew about its influence from growing up in Tobago, then surely there could be an item i had greater claims to than the nazar. in my research, i found that the concept of maljo/maljeaux (from mal yeux en français) exists throughout numerous Caribbean countries, Trinidad and Tobago included. there, the seeds of the Abrus precatorius plant are strung into bracelets and worn around the wrist or ankle to ward off maljo. another name for these seeds: Jumbie beads.
what a heavenly full circle moment! the name i articulated for myself has literal roots in apotropaic magic; being centered in my destiny casts a protective spell over all of the selves that will never be legible to the Ga(y)ze, the state, or those who waste their energy attempting to diminish me.
my multiplicity is my refuge.
[image description: three red and black Jumbie beads against a blue background]
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after leaving organizing this year, i made the commitment to be in an intentional space of learning. to know me is to know that my dreaming practice is central to my spirit, so i was ecstatic to come across a budding dreamwork pedagogy that was accepting applications for their spring cohort. even though the materials on the website hadn’t clearly outlined a political framework like i would have preferred, i felt optimistic that pedagogy would still provide useful and novel guidance around dream recall, journaling, herbal medicines, etc. unfortunately, my hopes for the space were dashed by the rigid and unprincipled behavior of the people facilitating it.
though their Community Guidelines touted “citation as a spiritual practice,” the syllabus for the course had very sparse citations as did the remaining materials shared throughout the course. furthermore, i was wary of the halfhearted invocation of deeply-political concepts (e.g. somatic abolitionism, decolonization, and Black quantum futurism) during the cohort’s progression without a political ethos to appropriately situate these concepts within the pedagogy. i waited weeks to see if either of these things would change to no avail; i took the time to reflect on how i would express my critiques, and then i presented them with consent during the penultimate session. the facilitators publicly praised me for bringing these points to their attention, but in a move i’m well-used to at this point, they circled back via email to privately tone-police me for the timing and delivery of my critiques.
like i alluded to before, i used to eviscerate people in the past, so it’s taken a lot of growth and self-reflection to not resort to tongue-lashings as my first, second, or even fifth instinct when i’m being misunderstood. i’ve since developed surgical precision when entering conflict, transforming my word into scalpel and trimming out any excess emotionality for the sake of conveying my needs/boundaries/perspectives clearly. i took meticulous care to construct my feedback, so i knew that there was nothing wrong with the “timing” of it (created over weeks to ensure i wasn’t jumping to conclusions before more fully experiencing the pedagogy), nor with its delivery (presented openly during class time instead of digitally like they suggested would have been preferable).
it’s important to name that the primary facilitators are a Black cis woman and a non-Black Asian non-binary person. it’s important for me to name this because the impact of the tone policing and my subsequent responses would have been way different if the space was facilitated by primarily white or non-Black people (not that U would find me in a spiritual space like that anyways). i tend to be far more patient when critiquing Black folks, especially multiple marginalized Black folks, but my patience runs thin when i get punished for daring to have a dissenting thought. clearly, my questions forced the facilitators to confront the insufficiencies of their work in real time, so they felt compelled to soothe their egos by deflecting their insecurity onto me. i understood. understanding this didn’t make it any less disappointing though. within a few hours, i sent back an extensive and incisive response explaining in no uncertain terms how i didn’t appreciate the way they approached me. as the psalm goes, “my tongue is the pen of a ready writer,” and i do not have the luxury of forgetting how to tend to the things that protect me. my word is my longest, strongest defense.
i was summarily ignored for days while i watched them openly engage with other participants via email and messaging app we used to stay in touch during the cohort; since it seemed as though they were not prioritizing my needs, i asked for a refund for the final session. they ignored me for a while longer before responding to let me know that a partial refund would result in my complete removal from all pedagogy materials and communal digital spaces. that didn’t sit right with me, so i updated my request to full refund if asking for my money back meant that i wouldn’t have any access whatsoever.
the Black cis facilitator immediately responded to call me entitled, denied giving me a refund at all, and let me know that she had already kicked me out of everything. another reason for naming the racial and gender identities of the primary facilitators earlier was to highlight how the forces of one’s transphobia and the other’s anti-Blackness united to oust me without a second thought. to be treated this callously within a dream-centered space was especially demoralizing because i had hoped it would be different than all the other community spaces i’d been harmed in and dismissed from before (always after my intellectual labor has been extracted, mind U).
after repeated experiences like this, it’s hard not to wonder “when will i be found by the spaces large enough for the full range of human emotion?” i joined this space open-minded and open-hearted, but i was still expected to remain close-mouthed. i deserved to feel angry at my treatment, but actually expressing my anger would not have been strategic. i did all i could to remove my emotions from my critiques and the ensuing conversation, and i was still painted as greedy, aggressive, and too much.
it took another person within the “Hive” unexpectedly advocating on my behalf to motivate the primary facilitators to pay me the money i was owed – weeks later – but not before once more flipping the fault of my experience back onto me:
“We have decided to [refund you] because your choice to join our cohort has seemed to cause you a great deal of pain and frustration, which we contributed to as a result of not being aware of how you needed to be supported…” – a quote from the Black cis facilitator’s final email to me
it was intentional to label my pain and frustration a result of my choices and not their actions. same as it ever was.
i once came across the distinction between the Six of Pentacles and the Six of Cups to the distinction between charity and mutual aid respectively. i’m not yet certain that i fully agree, but there is something about the implied power differential that is beginning to resonate. i approached the academy with the imaginal spirit of the Six of Cups, receptive and eager to pour into others, but because i troubled the waters, i was transformed from a person into a line item. under their gaze, i became an expendable and miserly creature on my knees in supplication, expectantly waiting for them to deign to reach into their pockets. i received recompense, but i was also the original cost.
[image description: the Six of Cups and the Six of Pentacles from the Oubria Melanated Tarot Deck]
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a trick i learned during heartbreak from another era is that saying “this situation is devastating” instead of “i am devastated” helps lighten the blow, but now, the de-subjectifying defense mechanism runs on autopilot. i’ve sliced out my anger and sadness one time too many, and i’ve been left with rote memorization. it will be work for me to unlearn this trick and honor my vulnerability, especially when weighing the likelihood that more conflict and callous treatment is around the bend. the overwhelming presence of it is precisely what Estelle from Abolish Time outlines in the following thread:
[image description: a series of tweets from @Abolish_Time that read: One of the affirmations i got during therapy today is "safety is #1" and that as a Black trans femme anarchist i'm the no. 1 target. somehow that felt grounding, but it also made me tear up. it made me feel like i'm not paranoid for being concerned about my safety. but it also made me really sad at how frequently I've been deprioritized, met with feelings of entitlement to me and the labor I'm capable of, left alone to grapple with crises, then blamed for not believing i'd receive help even if i'd asked. i'm sad at how much it's taken for me to access some semblance of emotional safety. i'm sad knowing that I'll be dealing with transphobic conflict for the rest of my life, and my ability to be principled will largely determine my survival. lmao, anyways welcome to cancer szn.]
i’m bored of the copper taste left in my mouth from licking my wounds, though i suppose i could expand my palate if i bit my tongue more often. obviously, neither option is savory. i’m trying to train myself back into allowing my feelings to move through me instead of compartmentalizing them for efficiency. i don’t need to harden myself, what i need are soft places to land.
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charlie and i take every chance we can get to go somewhere else. we traveled to Cincinnati to celebrate their friend’s birthday the first weekend of June, and we were lucky enough to take in the boisterous swarms of Brood X cicadas, coming out to play after seventeen years of patient entombment. (charlie was terrified though, so perhaps the fortune was only mine.) as we traipsed towards an elusive brunch spot, i came across what i thought at first was a two-headed cicada lying still on the pavement. after i thought about it some more, i came to the conclusion that it was probably two cicadas that died while mating. either way, i was grateful to notice the four-eyed omen.
[image description: two cicadas are attached at their tail ends lying on the roughly-paved ground. their wings overlap, creating the illusion that there is a single two-headed cicada]
there was something so deliciously primal about the adjoined insects, i felt inspired and nearly-jealous. if only we were afforded the same simplicity. we’ve lived, loved, and died since time immemorial, bills and violence just eventually got in the way. i like to think there are larger beings who watch us with the same revulsion and curiosity, laughing at the ways we tumble into each other – clumsy, small, sometimes moving with purpose.
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i do not have the luxury of forgetting how to tend to the things that protect me. the other day, i took apart and cleaned my pistol faster than i ever have before, even though i hadn’t practiced in a while. it sits in its holster on top of my altar, tucked away and gleaming like the coming dawn.