reflections on nai & updates to the site

I am in the process of updating the website and wanted to share a bit about where it started and where it’s guiding me now.

Reconnecting with Kpele

Nai is a figure in the Kpele spiritual system (indigenous to the Ga people), whose primary domain is water. Growing up in a ghanaian-american family, I heard references to Kpele and was familiar with some of the traditions, but I really just thought of them as Ga traditions more generally. Until adulthood, I didn’t engage with this spiritual system in any intentional ways, as the dominant religion where I lived was Christianity.

At some point I reconnected with Kpele through the book ‘Kpele Lala,’ and it felt like a missing puzzle piece came into place. Being areligious, this was less about believing in the ideas literally, and more about resonating with the way the spiritual archetypes and philosophies were described in the book. After a very eurocentric education, I appreciated connecting with other black americans searching for ways to decolonize spirituality, in part by exploring alternatives to organized religion. Even still, african-based mythologies and spiritualities were often absent from, or very vaguely referenced in, those conversations, due to the erasure of so many aspects of our indigenous cultures. I am really happy to see how much more information is being disseminated globally about the diversity of spiritualities, medicines, mythologies, astrology, and so much more that originated on and are still practiced throughout the african continent. (Speaking of which: if you are interested in reconnecting with mythologies of melanated peoples, I recommend Love in Color by Bolu Babalola.)

That reconnection with Kpele folklore influenced my work because I experience creativity and spirituality as interconnected. For me, spirituality is recognizing and nurturing a connection with source energy. Some artists experience source energy as ‘The Muse,’ others may identify creative ideas as coming from events, or their own minds, or from the collective. ‘Source’ is what resonates with me.

The gifts of the creative portal

I came to think of ‘daughter of nai’ as an energetic studio name: an entry point into the portal of creativity, to allow what I am invited to create to come through me, without as many restrictions from the self I tend to in day-to-day life. For example, I use photos of myself / my body in some of my work. This is activating for my day-to-day self, in part because there’s still stigma about women gazing upon ourselves rather than being the passive subject of a patriarchal gaze. When I set the intention to enter the creative portal, I am inviting ideas to come through that may feel uncomfortable for my ego, but which may help me to access a more expansive experience of being, including more authentic artistic expression.

Following the instinct to use photos of myself has helped me understand that the discomfort of self-portraits isn’t really mine; it is internalized from external narratives. If the fear is being perceived as self-absorbed or vain by using one’s own form, I realized that all art can be viewed as equally self-absorbed, equally vain. When someone paints a flower, that’s how that person sees, or wants to see, a flower. When a man photographs a woman, it is his—and the camera’s—projection of that woman. We are there, in everything that we make, even and perhaps especially when we think we’re not. None of that is wrong; it’s just what is, but it was hard to see in that fear-state of ‘ohhh but maybe I shouldn’t follow my creative instincts because what if people think my art is too personal?’

I had interpreted that personal = feminine = less objective = less good. Thankfully I began unraveling the holes in that supposed logic, and to see: 1) I suspect one reason we internalize personal as less good in art, is that we assume it requires less labor to produce. There is no objective basis for that assumption—how could we objectively measure what creative labor is for one person vs. another? The physical production of an artwork is the tip of the iceberg, and we’ll never know all that goes on under the surface, for any artist. 2) Why is the perception of strenuousness our gauge for the quality of somebody’s work? Unless the artist states it, I wouldn’t know if they were sweating over the piece they made, or if it came through a process of surrender more than one of pushing. And if came through surrender, I wouldn’t know how much work they’d had to do, for how many years, to achieve and listen to that state of surrender. And 3) personal does not automatically mean factual. The stories I tell with photos of my body, or bits and pieces of lived experiences, are through me, not about me. The stories are their own, inviting the use of my body or the emotional imprints of lived experiences to express truths more expansive than facts could accommodate. It’s personal and it’s a projection, a fiction. The creative portal of daughter of nai has been helping me, in these ways and many others, to clarify how I actually experience art as a maker of it and a viewer/experiencer of it. And, to allow people to interpret it as they will / to let go of the perceived responsibility to either correct or carry those interpretations for others.

nai and the ways of water

The nai / water theme has also grounded me thematically. My work (so far) explores themes of home, belonging, and displacement. I am drawn to the perceived tension between desires for rootedness and desires for liberation (in psychology this is basically the authenticity / attachment paradox) — where those desires intersect, where they are in conflict, where they can be layered harmoniously. Inviting the element of water into that investigation is helpful for me, because it is very real, very tangible, home to many, and yet is not rigid.

The concept of ‘daughter of nai’ has helped me acknowledge and explore the porousness and purpose(s) of identity. Where it serves us, where we are best served to let it go. That we are children of our families of origin, nations of origin, communities of origin, yes, and that we can also understand ourselves as family members of all else in the universe.

The name has been as intriguing as it is challenging to me; nai, to my understanding, is described as a male-identified spirit. Because feminine archetypes are prominent in my work, I was drawn, from the beginning, to incorporating naa, a female-identified spirit, into the website name. I didn’t do that for the very practical reason that my given name has ‘naa’ in it and I worried that could be confusing. So initially, I decided to embrace the tension / discomfort / invitations involved in the name daughter of nai, and to see what lessons were available there. Through it, I unpacked what it means to be a daughter, of anyone or anything (in archetypal terms: to be in the ‘Maiden’ season of life). It also helped me confront my discomfort with the masculine — especially, my wounding as a black woman who seldom felt affirmed in her femininity.

So, I appreciate the space ‘daughter of nai’ has provided these past several years, to reignite my creativity and support my growth. Thanks for being on the journey with me. I will share updates as the next steps for this platform unfold.

TLDR: My sun is in Pisces ;)

California Refuse

Visit California Refuse here. And here’s a link to the post I mentioned about respectability politics. Transcription below.

Audio Transcription

[This reflection is a little primer on California Refuse, which you can find in the projects tab. This project has lived a number of different lives. It's existed in other versions, in other formats, in bits and pieces, and I'd shared those bits and pieces along the way, and now this is what it is and has become.

And maybe the most notable change in its process of evolution has been that there are now physical pieces involved in telling this story. I wanted to speak to the two primary inspirations for this piece. The first was a very specific path that I used to walk down when I was living in Oakland, California, and it was littered with trash that was just sort of scattered all over the place, and I became obsessed by the fact that somebody had taken the care to sweep the trash to the side of the overpass, but not to remove it.

And I guess I was obsessed by it because on one hand, that's strange, but on the other hand, there was something kind of honest about it. There was something about it that reflected the hypocrisy and sort of contradictions and the wealth disparities that are so visibly prevalent in the Bay Area. And I appreciated the visibility, like a visible representation of this tension that had always kind of bothered me a little bit, that this is a state which for so many people represents an idea of paradise.

And for so many people, the lived experience of it is quite hellish. So there's something about the trash being left there for so long and being swept to the side that stuck with me. So I took a picture of it, and I was thinking about it for years.

The second major kind of idea or theme that shaped this piece, California Refuse, was the idea of respectability politics. It was the idea of it and also my feelings of it, how that concept lives and shows up in my body. I'll just provide a little background about respectability politics for anyone who's not familiar.

So there's a professor, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who wrote a book called Righteous Discontent, the Women's Movement and the Black Baptist Church, 1880 to 1920. And I'm now referencing from an article on therapyforblackgirls.com. Respectability politics can be defined as the belief that behaving or appearing like the dominant group in society will deem you more respectable and therefore more valued. When it comes to our ancestors, proximity to whiteness was a means of survival.

As time went on, it began to be done to gain true freedom and privileges. And I'll just kind of add this other paragraph from this article. The problem with respectability politics is that it doesn't work.

It places the responsibility and blame on the victim instead of the systems that uphold it. So this is a concept that even before I knew what it was called, I was intimately familiar with because it just permeated every facet of my being growing up. And I want to really stress that when, in this case, I'm speaking to the experience of a Black family, like when a Black family is teaching their children respectability politics, it's generally not intended from a place of harm or from a place of suppression.

It's usually intended from a place of wanting your children to survive and wanting them to be able to navigate a society that wasn't built for them. That said, the cumulative effects of this are pretty intense. And there are a lot of different books that kind of, I think, do a great job of illustrating this.

Eloquent Rage is one that I highly recommend if you haven't read that one yet. So, yeah, it's a concept that influenced my life a lot and continues to have an influence. It's something I find myself grappling with more often than I'd like to because it's so deeply ingrained.

And so how does it intersect with that trash idea? It intersects because one of the fear of being discarded and the use and engagement with respectability politics to avoid being treated as if you are disposable. I sometimes find myself having this physical reaction. It's like kind of a closing in feeling or a compression or something.

And when I see videos or interviews or something or even real life examples in person of women, Black people, whoever I may be identified with, behaving in ways that I have been taught to put on a pedestal. So I guess that would mean people who are saying what I was taught were the right things to say or they are physically carrying their bodies in the way that I was taught were the safe way to carry your body or they're dressed in a way that I was taught were the safe ways to dress. And there is this a intense contracted feeling that I get when I see that because there's simultaneously like the old conditioning, which is to put that person on a pedestal and to put myself down because I'm like, Oh God, I'll never be that polished.

Like I'll never be that elegant. My life has been too messy. Like I'll never be able to portray that kind of image.

So there's that. And then there's a deep grief that takes root. That's like, Oh, I'll never be allowed to be a whole full person with like a dynamic past or a dynamic present or, you know, a three-dimensional life.

And I sort of, if I don't sort of interrupt or recognize that thought process, it can really become a sort of vortex of feelings of inadequacy or feelings of unsafety or both. And I suspect I'm not alone in having that feeling. And so even though it was very confronting to continue with this piece and to follow it through the stages of its evolution, it also felt important to do it.

And one thing that going through with it affirmed for me was like, if you work with trash, like as an artist, or just if for whatever, for whatever reason you go through trash, or you use recycled materials, I suppose, or reclaimed materials is the more elegant way of saying it. There's just a lot of stuff that can be repurposed. There's a lot of stuff that can be used.

There's a lot of stuff that is valuable, regardless of whether it has any monetary value anymore. There's a lot of stuff that is valuable. And I think that's a helpful affirmation when it comes to the way we can treat people that we don't perceive as being useful to, I don't know, amplify the economy or something.

I think it can also be helpful when it comes to our own shadows, the parts of ourselves, the parts of our experiences that we try to discard or shun or keep tucked away because we feel like, oh, that was not a respectable part of me. That's not an acceptable part of me. So it's a waste.

Or that experience was one I wouldn't want to have again, or it's a choice I wouldn't want to make again. And so it was a waste. But it really only is a waste if you let it be one.

And if you allow yourself to believe that. I have come to believe that everything can be valuable, and that everyone is valuable. So working on this piece helped affirm that for me.

And I still have so many moments where I drift back into that conditioned space, that contracted space of feeling as if respectability politics is my god, and I need to bow down to the altar of that. But fortunately, the more practice I get in just noticing how that feels, and then remembering that I have access to a way of being that feels more liberating, the less time I spend in that contracted state. That's all I'm going to say about California Refuse for now.

So thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy taking a look at the pieces.]

There's a whole lotta talk

A new reflection on some much-dwelled-upon communication questions.

p.s. In the recording, there’s a loud mysterious thump after the word ‘unsafety’ and I’m not mad at it.

p.p.s. I have mixed feelings about the term ‘selective mutism’ and reaaally try to minimize how often I lean on pathologizing terminology. I use that term in this recording to offer a window into the experience of not being able to access the words one wishes to in situations that feel pressured / overwhelming. However, my anecdotal and admittedly brief internet research of this topic indicates that what I experience is moreso a form of autistic shutdown, meaning that it is not caused by social anxiety but rather by sensory overwhelm. Sensory overwhelm can cause social anxiety because over time many of us can feel unsafe or receive judgment/social ostracization when we’re trying to cope with overwhelm, but I’m noting there is a difference between having a fear of what other people might think, and one’s nervous system being overstimulated by sensory inputs in the environment.

Progress / Progression

After trying to decipher a recent round of MRI’s, and trying to make my way through an increasingly palpable burnout, I took a walk in the forest, sat by the lake, recorded this.

Form / Figureoutable