Restoring Black access to indigenous African spiritual traditions is an important element of the movement for reparations, given this country’s history of using faith to subjugate Black people during and after the enslavement era.
Repairing what’s broken requires both an understanding of this history as well as a vision of the liberation that’s possible when African spiritual traditions are restored.
Our guest today is ritualist, healer and poet Joy Tabernacle Kmt.
When we think about the different ways that African American spirituality has been shaped by the institutions of slavery, it's important for us to interrogate our relationship with organized religion.
We know that Christian leaders relied on biblical passages to build the case for the superiority of the white race and support the institution of slavery. They supported the infrastructure of slavery as well. Many church structures were built by enslaved people, religious institutions owned slaves and invested in ship building and other elements of slave trading voyages.
Joy KMT is a healer, poet, and ritual artist. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, VONA, and Callaloo. She is published in multiple journals, anthologies and magazines, including Black Quantum Futurism Volume 1 and 2, Black Girl Dangerous, The Feminist Wire, Nepantla, Adrienne, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Blackberry, a magazine, Backbone Press, Fledgling Rag, Sugared Water, and others.
She works from the possibility of the personal to be collectively transformational. Her work often blends the magical with the reality of living at the crossroads of multiplicities. She is the producer of Her Voice: The Stories, Tales and Myths of Women of Color which premiered in the Sunstar Music Festival and Testify: A Black Womanhood Series. Her poetry has appeared in Check The Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Emcees and Poets, Amistad: Howard’s Literary Journal, Black Girl Dangerous, Blood Lotus, an Online Literary Journal, Backbone Poetry Journal, The Feminist Wire, Pluck! the Affrilachian Journal of Arts and Culture, Fledgling Rag, Near Kin: Words and Art inspired by Octavia Butler, and is forthcoming in Sugared Water.
