Spiritual (Mal)practice

Spiritual abuse as tufts of rabbit fur and twine feathered the nest of my familial home. My father was prey to Lutheran missionaries who set up shop on a plot of land belonging to his father in the village of Crabwood Creek, Guyana. To survive decolonization in 1966 and immigration to the United States, the only path he saw included his being devoured by empire’s acting arm: Christianity.The British never imagined Guyana as anything but a place of extraction, never a permanent home for people—but the coolies of the Empire were not yet human, indentured to serve (officially five-year) contracts that bound them to plantations and their economies through pitiful, demeaning wages and reliance on colonial power structures. It would make sense that, to get an education in this rural Indian village, my father had to convert to Christianity, at least nominally, to go to the missionaries’ school, where he learned—though perhaps not explicitly—that his own home traditions were backward, the antithesis of sophistication.He converted fully after another brush with forced conversion in 1984 in New York City, where Lutherans provided us, our family of five, with enough food to last another brutal winter. My mother, then, allowed white Americans to “witness” to her and for the sake of survival in the United States blended her beliefs into a syncretic form of Christianity.This is the backdrop for my own explorations into the generational healing that I struggle with. Relearning language. Relearning religion. Relearning spirituality that always felt to be on the horizon of my own personal self-discovery.. . .आज तू वक़्त के चुनरिया छोड़ेलाइ अच्छी रंग-विरंगी रेसमियाइ बदन के भी छोड़ेला।कांपत-कांपत डरो मततू दुसर किनारा पहुंचके समझबा।. . .DevotionWaking up at five a.m. to read the bible.Washing your hands and feet before lighting incense.Filial pietyमातृ देवो भव।पितृ देवो भव।आचार्य देवो भव।अितिथ देवो भव॥Saying the right pronunciation.Having the right color skin.Praying for the right colored skin so that God can hear.Believing all your ancestors are burning in Hell.Rightness of action, speech, being.Being of a caste that is allowed to touch the statue’s feet.Being of a caste that is allowed to chant in Sanskrit.. . .Sarai Rohilla, Delhi (2002)कहाँ से आया कहाँ जाओगेखबर करो अपने तन से—Prahlad TipaniyaThree men huddle close over cards and rupee notesthough it’s summer of 46 C. Orange light overhead,the almost deserted platform burns its coil cold. May I haveyour attention please. The train on platform two is a cowand the tracks are the underworld’s riverbefore it silts and snakes into old age. It’s older than you think.In the distance trumpets and a brahmin asking for 2,500 rupeesto ensure your father’s spirit does not starve. The mosquitoesin your berth aren’t hungry. You have seen to it personally.They leave their poisoned saliva under your skin. You will knowexactly where they have been. Delhi could be Jaipur could beBenares, could be New York City. Your body is of planks and steelin need of filling and repair. The tracks are alreadywhere they are going. One track of veins goes andone track of arteries comes. What exactly can you see of this,friend, looking desperately for a destination with your head up your ass?. . .I grew up hearing chutney music and music in Bhojpuri, though, without my Aji as decoder, the access to the ideas and theorizing the universe remained occluded. A colonial caul. A shield against what our bodies knew intuitively through drum and dance. Through movement I came to realization first. (We are not of caste identity that would be recognized in India—of those able to learn the Vedas or to chant in Sanskrit.)Kabir, the bhakti poet of medieval South Asia, migrated with jahajees into the Caribbean with my family. The thing about Kabir, as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, translator of Songs of Kabir says, is that Kabir is more of a spirit anyway. That the authenticity of the penned verse relies on the kavi chhap, the poet’s signature line, कहत कबीर सुनो भाई साधो Says Kabir, listen wise brothersHis work is collected in three main volumes: the Bijak of Kabir in Bhojpuri, the Guru Granth Sahib in Punjabi, and Rajasthani manuscripts. In all these versions Kabir emerges as a poet who fervently decries caste, religious difference, and any kind of division that people create between one another.The first Kabir poem I learned was through Babla and Kanchan performing the Yusuff Khan song “Aaj Sawaliya.” When I learned the meaning of the song, it crashed on me with awakening. I sat in a restaurant in Jackson Heights and translated and retranslated and retranslated the song from Bhojpuri into English into Creole into Bhojpuri for at least twenty iterations so that each iteration contained a different aspect of the magic Kabir sang about, each incarnation of the song became its own diaspora of the original, which was of dubious origins anyway.I must be comfortable immersed in the Unknown.. . .Today you leave behind everything you knoweven time’s veileven that this body is made of living mattereven this body.Do not be afraid (though you tremble)you will understand from the other side of knowing.. . .On the other hand, my Nani—my mother’s mother—grew up as a Christian just outside Georgetown, and when she wed my Nana she was made to convert to Hinduism. Her own family was a mix of Christians with roots in South India at least two generations back. Her name Emma was changed to Amla.When she died my mother dreamed her singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which was haunting in various directions. She sat on a swing and told my mother, “Believe what they say about Jesus.”Missionization. Forced conversion. Patriarchal control. Spiritual abuse. Violence.I learned to play the hymn on the saxophone when I was thirteen and played it in the Southern Baptist church closest to my home in Chuluota, Florida. I cherish the part of the song that reminds me of her and her spirit—free to visit us now in the form of cardinals.But questions of the origin of my name burned itself into my heart. I was not allowed to ask questions. My father insisted a little education is a dangerous thing. I think he meant it was dangerous to look back at the plantation and try to divine wisdom.. . .I learned to pray the Lord’s Prayer. I learned the Lutheran liturgy. While I know this by heart and can sing it, it comes from the Luther Book of Worship.kyrieP: In peace, let us pray to the Lord.C: Lord, have mercy.P: For the peace from above, and for our salvation, let us pray to the Lord.C: Lord, have mercy.P: For the peace of the whole world, for the well-being of the Church of God, and for the unity of all, let us pray to the Lord.C: Lord, have mercy.P: For this Holy House, and for all who offer here their worship and praise, let us pray to the Lord.C: Lord, have mercy.P: Help, save, comfort, and defend us, gracious Lord.C: Amen.Ritual that leads to realization? For some? For anyone? For my ancestors burning in hell?. . .The Greatest of TheseI’ve only ever knownthat God is lovea few times like thismorning fillingthe coffee pot, the windblowing the birch leavesand crab apples intothe holes my dog clawedafter the rain, and howlooking at the work I needto do in the yard,I smile at her joy atsmelling the forthcoming rain,my throwing the uprootedtree dendrite into the clouds;and how I am back,looking out from the window,shocked into my breathmy body: the damholding up love to Godas if everything betweenis blending into the lightof the coffee maker,and then there is no dam—And isn’t it just so easyto believe that every last thingis doomed insteadof letting this knowingwash over you and allowingthe deluge to carve new canyonsand gorges as your spine,pushing through the muck of you(which is love too)and flowing from your crownand down your neck andflooding the entire earth,until you return to the earth,which is to say you returnto another of your selves,that grasps at the memoryof being that conduitthat almost had you weepingon the linoleum tilesnot for grief or joy or anythingthat you can name, butfor finally knowing, reallyknowing, you are birch,you are apple, river, dam—. . .Dogma does not serve. After unlearning hell and divine punishment, after a BA in religious studies to relearn mantras, I developed my own sadhana—a practice of daily rituals to ground me into remembering my Aji, my Nani, my ancestors.I learned what I could from the mantras of my Aji’s and my mother’s sadhana, those prayers that I pray are coded in Sanskrit to Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwara, Sakshat, and so on, but are really aimed at my ancestors, and the gods of this land that I am on, whose names I do not know except for the tingle I get when I hear the peaks sing to me.There are two types of bhakti poetry, classically: the sagun, those poems and songs dedicated to the gods who take forms that we recognize; and the nirgun, those poems and songs dedicated to the God whose form is unseen and Unknown.I chant the names of Unknown through the languages of the ocean, the water cycle, the earth, the mountain, the air.. . .You resamawa ke orhnia chamke chamkein de sun.Hear you neighbah talk,Wha kine slackness—?You stap sing a Kabir bhajan.Na worried.De an‘ all mus‘ go.. . .My mother has been divorced from my father for thirteen years now. That was a challenge for her, for me, for my brother, for my sister. What it meant was going against the Sita-Savitri promise of the patriarchy that bound her—that binds us all. We don’t divorce, was the subconscious message from my mother, and the overt message from her father was, Men do these things and you just have to deal with them.My mother’s conversion story is the same: forced conversion by Lutherans who in Ridgewood gave us food our first winter in this cold country.In the summer I moved to Boulder, my brother had fallen through the floorboards and into some land, his spirit stolen by spirits and adultery. My mother wanted to bless her new home, particularly the fifteen-by-ten room where my brother lived. He moved in with her after his separation from my sister-in-law. I wrote bless when I meant cleanse.She asked me to recite the Hanuman Chalisa with her and to walk around the house with burning incense and a diya, inviting the light back into the windows and the walls. We did it, marking our foreheads in vermillion, and marking the forehead of my brother’s youngest son. In this moment, the devotion that we showed was to the Pratima—that picture of the Monkey God that we are named after (Mohabir)—but more sincerely to our older ways of being in the world. For my mother this meant remembering her ancestors—her mother and father.The forty verses to Hanuman written by the bhakti (devotional poet) Tulsidas, the Hanuman Chalisa, was the very prayer my mother recited when her mother died, and also one of the Hindu prayers she taught me.She is seeking out a pastor, an obeah man, a pandit to cry mantras into the wind and earth to heal this fault line in our family.. . .avadhū, māyā tajī na jāyWhat marks you read as mantrasis Maya—not gold orb-weaver,but black scratches your mindhears as sound. Pull out the garnetof your breast at midnight.Does it glint red without sun?The riverbed awaits your salts.After burning into nitrogen andcarbon dioxide, bone fragmentserupt from ash, are called pearls—untouched gems you will neverfinger as prayer beads chantingthe rote in search of god. Selah,have you ever known your body?. . .I have started to take Rabindranath Tagore’s translations of Kabir and retranslate them into my own language, using my own ideals of what the Divine is for me. My spirit leaps at anti-divisive philosophy and reminds me that our language makes us think in binaries, how translation even relies on two shores: the original language as one bank, and the target language as the other. I am more interested in the water between—the transit that erases self and submerges caste and creed in its swirl and dark. In that place of the Divine femme: the Dark Goddess that is not named, there is no right performance of puja and prayer. I crave that nakedness, to peel off my shell, to follow it into the next worlds. How to translate this in fixed couplets? Every translation is a mistranslation. Every statement of this spiritual practice is a misstatement.This for me is a process of retranslation when it comes to Tagore’s translations. I use the same title he uses, transliterated from the “original” Kabir poem, and people it with my own symbols and significance. In this way I am reading deeply into Kabir’s philosophies but queering them, reanimating them from nineteenth-century stasis. And this is just a trick of three dimensions: paper, ink, the eye, the interpretation of the linguistic sign—all arbitrary.. . .ghar ghar dīpak baraiI’ll burn in my home,for another thirty years,maybe fewer—the spun cotton of my bodybent before metformin,gemfibrozil, lisinopril.Today may as well be Diwali.I’ve hand-rolled ladoos of gramand ghee. On each one:Heart line, life line, Moundof Venus. I’ve lined upclay vessel after claybody, each red life throwninto the river after sputteringinto black. My headis on fire. I’m still hopingfor a jasmine to openas though a door to my skull,before it explodes on the pyre.I want to see. I wantto see myself as duststill pressed together with blood,the palm print of being formedby hands, the sun shaftthrough the windows.. . .In peace let us pray—. . .I have never been devout to any deity, save poetry. And even then, I am not a picture-perfect chela, though poetry in its myriad incarnations can be that internal guru we are all seeking shikhsha from. And this is not to extol the virtue of poetry as such, as all matters of genre fit into categorizable maya, illusion, or even bhram, delusion. What I mean is that the poem can offer me the trace of my thinking, each draft in revision a mere stage before the realization—which for me is never final.And for this externalizing of the idea of practice—I try to remember to let myself get it wrong. The wrong word. The wrong language. The wrong prayer. The wrong action. The wrong wronging.This feels to be anti-orthodoxy, whether by the genocidal religions of Christianity or Hinduism—we cannot divorce contemporary practices from their enlivened evils. Hindu nationalism seeks to end Dalit and Muslim communities in India and the diaspora. It seeks to end mixed-caste people like me. Indeed, there have been calls for my lynching in Delhi the next time I travel to India by sanghi trolls on social media. It makes sense that my ideas of the Divine threaten these conservative bak-chods.Holding someone else’s ideal of Divinity in the heart during meditation silences the God that shines in the mundane specificities of one’s own life. Bhagwan, Ishwar, God, lives in my bowels as much as my gelatinous brain matter.कहत कबीर सुनो भाई साधोWhat I reach for, what is reaching back to me through the writing that is prayer, is the Unknown Unknowable. How can any spiritual practice, to this Unknown Unknowable be anything but mal-practice if there is no now I to the the and it’s time to your the you that are from or down what you remember of your and spiritual through this Your and me, in translation and in poetry, there is only the of the to the subconscious how meditation of or a will to the In my of these two are and the practice of the self to this is singing the to a song I’ve and to all my life and finally being able to out its linguistic spiritual . .I was in the before to read for the I my looking into things that I am about and that me I let my dog out into the and I was able to her with and I I was the song a Kabir in Bhojpuri that I learned to the for me from Bhojpuri into English is and I and over in Bhojpuri and about the they have with English and the that I am to get at I am a and those the for my language and The that I sang were my of this I have translated not to each you a say house is house isn’t it’s not a for the a a will play this have to at go I my dog I on the or in I do not think about how to translate songs like these into but try to understand them on their own of and in the I was about how I would how the it jasmine a moment, and spiritual of and to me makes the into what the poet a that in the For me, the process of the the universe of its me kind of linguistic and and me in a after more of these of where I on the of just how the of this in the poem my of the Bhojpuri up for me an and I saw the the of where I of the blending of time that only this kind of realization has for me, an to the It was this Unknowable poems māyā tajī na and ghar dīpak in and The of Kabir translations in the A by