In 1973, working at City Hall in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, I could not continue my revolutionary activities with the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), set ablaze in 1970. I was expecting my second child. Bouts of irritability and morning sickness were common. Yet, with a more somber spirit, my inquisitive mind searched for the true meaning of life. I focused on esoteric teachings, recalling Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, and Gibran’s Prophet, while hoping that their deep meanings would unfold during the still nights, when I would try to forge my mind into the blackness of time not yet born, to see what was ahead. My first level spiritual elevation seemed to have awaited cosmic timing, for a full moon or a constellation, but since the revolution of April 21st, 1970, this month has always been auspicious.
Seeded by Kambon
That late evening in 1970, a sixteen-year-old still in my convent uniform, there was I squeezed up among the defiants. You could feel the tension as ‘the three kings’, flanked by Mutope and Nunez mounted the podium along with some other militant supporters. There was a confluence of spiritual forces as it was all happening on the old St. Anns riverbed along which our First Nation once sailed in their boats. Fired up, Kambon took the microphone and shouted his declaration of black rights to the eager crowd, “We should be reading from our own Bible, the Egyptian Book of the Dead.” His mystical words made my heart leap causing my soul in a flash to visit the pyramids, then returning to my standing position in Woodford Square. Kambon had seeded me, and I went home with my spirit pregnant with his words. The word in me grew. I was three (3) years rooted and pregnant with them, and seven (7) months pregnant with my son Keino, when on Thursday 19th April 1973 (Holy Thursday), something of cosmic dimension happened to me between sleep and wake. The words of my Christian friend Joe, “Christ is the answer,’’ swum around in my head, but Kambon’s declarations remained in the womb of my spirit. That night, my soul was engaged, intensely. I did not hear the sound of my infant as he cuddled in his crib, nor the barking noise of our dog named ‘Obeah’, and another ‘El Bruno’, as they fought over a scanting manicou. It was around midnight, the time when ying balances with yang, when I slipped into my inner world, into another dimension, not for dark souls, nor the fearful, where I surrendered to a most unimaginable peace. Three (3) black crosses appeared in the skies and an ancestor stood by a gate allowing my toddler Virgil, and me with my big belly, to enter. It was a karmic message for the future.
The Coming Forth by Day
With the purging fire of a black power soul resurgence, the words “Christ is the answer,” took me back to the ancient world. Good Friday morning first out of bed, I was anew, and ran up and down our house shouting that I had ‘seen’ God. My father Noel felt that I was mad, while my Vincentian mother of black Carib blood, warned him to, “leave meh chile alone”. Easter Sunday brought five visitors from the Morvant Pentecostal Church who said that God had sent them to convert me. They concluded that my black power experience in Woodford Square was from the devil, and that I should come down to the church to be saved by a white Jesus at their wooden altar. Indeed, Heru/Shango, the will, had arisen in me, ‘the coming forth by day’, the Book of the ‘Living’ and would not be entombed again, although, in October 1973, I visited and was later baptized, as a rite of passage. Yet, my soul was in the temple of Auset in Egypt, in the houses of yesteryear, and not at their altar, and it was NJAC who had led me there. Indeed, Daaga had rallied me, Ome inspired me, but it was the words of Khafra Kambon that truly emancipated me, pointing me to the Nile River. Albeit, years later, it was the Kamitic sage/king Ra Un Nefer Amen who encouraged me to drink…drink the sweet waters of the Nile, to become an Ausar/Obatala with the title Krst. Krst is indeed the answer. Today, I am Queen Mother and Chief priestess of Maa Kheru Universal-Ifa Oje Temple, and a doctor of East Asian medicine. This for me is true emancipation. Do enjoy the celebrations but learn from our past…lest we forget.
