Gates We Can't Close
by WALLACE ROSE BELONGS
in Spring 2024
Julia Mallory, I've Been Sweeping for a Spell, Now,2022, Mixed-media collage on transparent mirror acrylic panel, 12 in. x 18 in.
Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of Freshwater’s publication. I love this novel. I have a dedication to it etched in ink across my back and resting on my shoulder. As the anniversary neared, I reread the book. I didn’t think I needed to, but once I started reading, I realized I needed to be reminded of the bitter clarity of liminality: aliveness and endings—like innocence or childhoods—that are worse than death; embodied spirit and the mask of the human face; the desire to be saved, and the truth that the gods will never exalt cruelty and suffering over divinity.
image, Due Season Metals and Castings
As a child I knew the spirit world existed, but I had been taught that you had to be initiated in order to speak to them, so I didn’t worry about them much. The first time they made their presence known to me I heard voices singing. I had been told that world was forbidden and dangerous, but I giggled despite myself because the image of a chapo ki tonbe nan lanmè seemed silly to my eight-year-old self. Whose chapo was it? A fisherman’s I reasoned. But how did it end up in the sea? I asked the question inside my head, but I didn’t get an answer. The song, accompanied by rattles and tinny, brass instruments, extended into verses I no longer remember, then repeated, while I smiled with my head cocked to one side, waiting for whatever was coming next. When I asked them where they were from, the singing stopped, but there was no response. I was scared now. In that moment I felt like I had gone too far down a path, and all the stories I’d heard about bokor came rushing to the forefront of my mind. My child self didn’t trust anyone who could not be forthcoming with their honesty. I didn’t ask again, and then I shut the gate. It would be many years of silence before my curiosity got the better of me and I went looking for them.
It took me months to figure out their name, and to realize that I in fact did not need to be initiated. When I realized this was why they had announced themselves to me all those years ago, my skin flushed with panic. I didn’t feel ready. Realizing I didn’t actually know how to prepare myself, made me feel even more afraid. I was afraid that they would know I had gone looking, and I was afraid what they might do to punish me for seeking them beyond the gates. I gritted my teeth waiting for them to stretch inside of my 22-year-old body. The walls of my room didn’t shift. The lights didn’t dim or shut off. The wind outside of my window blew at the same consistent, unhurried speed. They made no sounds at all. After many minutes like this, I realized they weren’t coming, and I sunk heavily into my bed breathing deeply with relief.
Two years later, I was in Haiti, interviewing queer and trans people as part of my graduate research. Something in those conversations spoke to me. In every interview, my participants expressed that the joy and ease they experienced in their lives was solely due to the community they’d fostered with others who were engaged with indigenous practices and religion. I had already been struggling with loneliness at this point. I had spent my whole life being the only one—the only Black person, the only queer person, the only person who wasn't cis, the only autistic person. Yet, here I was in my ancestral homeland, talking to people with genders and sexualities like mine, whose troubles, both public and private, I knew well; being told that the spirits could bring an end to the isolation and exclusion I'd been subject to in community. I breathed deeply beneath the sleepy fans and the too-hot sun, tucking my secret desire to be visited by the spirits again behind a polite smile. Before I took my flight back home, I decided that I would find a way back in with the spirits, and in this way, I assumed the loneliness that plagued my life would end. It would be years before I realized the trouble of seeking spirits for a human problem, but by then it was too late.
For many years, the spirits and I talked and listened to each other, I thought this was all our relationship could be. By this point I was even more desperate for community, having just ended a significant romantic relationship, and moved away from my hometown leaving everyone I knew behind. I was living in a small town with slippery customs, where no one ever said what they meant and assumed I did the same. Within a few months I knew that I wasn’t meant for this place, but depression and the shock from all the fires I had let someone I loved set in my brain had already sunk their teeth into me. I was frozen in place. Fear that I had wrecked my life and shame came next. I was inclined to spend hours berating myself silently while hot tears rolled down my face. Some bizarre and traumatizing things happened to me in this town and my body became no different than a frozen lake.
For a while I didn’t speak to the spirits and the spirits didn’t speak to me. Then, an old friend came to visit me in this place. While this friendship felt strained, I considered her to be the last person who cared enough about me to know me, so when she came to visit, I felt safe enough to let myself be untethered. We sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor and talked about things here and on the other side of the veil. It had been two years, maybe three, since I last felt safe enough to be myself in front of someone else. The lightness in my body was so palpable, I felt like a different person. It was such a relief to feel safe. Emboldened by her honesty and the way she didn’t pull away from mine, I let myself dissolve from my body until I found the gate, in the same place I’d left it. I went looking for the spirits and when I found them, their presence perfumed the air. I let them in and my skin rolled with the pleasure of having them awake inside of me. My senses worked differently. The world sharpened, yet my vision greyed, denoting their presence behind my eyes. In my body, they showed me how they were able to touch all the things around us for miles. My spirits had waited for me to come looking because they knew I did not enjoy being taken. They knew the games humans played with me. They knew consent was a line they could not cross. Behind my eyes they didn’t have to speak, and I didn’t have to listen. Nothing worked like how it did when our roles were reversed. We existed simultaneous to everything else that existed and neither time nor direction mattered. Just being. I think the moment lasted for an hour. When I came to, I was breathless. My friend told me I had been shimmering the entire time. For the first time in my life, I felt proud of myself.
My friend had help me to find the cool, mud place my spirits and I rested when we tired of having a body, so the letters of her name tasted like the wet mud, too. Even after she went back home, I found I could still lean against the mud wall when we spoke on the phone. From in there, I called her mother. It wasn’t an accurate word to describe her in a human sense, but it was the closest word to define the human whose presence evoked spirits walking in my skin, whose presence allowed me to open the gates. Months later, the fissures in our friendship were a cliff’s edge, and her absence felt like the width of an anchor was being dragged across my heart. I didn’t think her leaving was a wound I could survive. I kept trying to hide from the despair, but it found me again and again. The familiarity of this ending mirrored too many other times where a person I relied on to help me feel safe had left. Her leaving was breaking something inside of me. I kept thinking that if I found another person like my friend, someone with whom I could be in mud with, I could be safe. I tried, but in the slippery town, nothing made sense. People were less inclined to kindness, though their mouths were always saying nice things. It was like a dream. Social isolation and loneliness were poisoning my brain, and the hurt was turning into madness. In my desperation, I decided that spirits could keep me company in lieu of humans. This made me more unbalanced. And because I was aware of this, I began to feel even more shame.
I was also confused. I didn’t know how I was supposed to want to keep being in the human world, where loneliness was ripping my mind into halves, when being ridden by spirits was the only pleasure my body had ever known. As the months stretched on, my depression getting worse and my mind closing in on itself too, the people became worse. I had been an outsider before. But here, the word took new meaning, and I began to feel un-human. Many paid lip service to the word “community,” but community kept looking like the people who didn’t look like me. My connection to spirit became more and more tainted by desire for human connection and my desperate attempts to get it.
A year later I read Freshwater for the first time. The visceral experience of Akwaeke Emezi’s voice was both a shock and a balm to my mind. Even while well-versed in transcorporeal practices by this point, I had been confused about the spirits’ presence in my life. I had confused the edicts and rules of Abrahamic religions with Spiritliving, and I had made my practice a blur of fear and craving and shame. I had made a story of my suffering and my loneliness, reasoning that these hardships occurred because I had not been worthy of sweetness and closeness because of the strange things I believed and the strange way I was being and because of the way the madness of loneliness was tearing at my brain. Even while wanting to burn the separation of body and spirit to the ground, I was so afraid of loneliness that I developed a paranoia about my spirit face slipping down in front of humans. Until Freshwater, I hadn’t realized how exhausting it had been pretending to believe in Cartesian separation, knowing full well I wanted to and was able to live in a completely different reality. Freshwater made me realize that I could let the spirit world’s reality take over this world’s, I could make spirit my center. For a time, I knew peace. I let them take over, and when I was not the one in charge of carrying us, for the first time, I relaxed. I had been so, so tired. Somehow my spirits thrived here. They didn’t seem to have any of my concerns. It made me think I might be able to live like this, so freely, too. I became fully invested in my own divinity, the many voices that had always lived right beneath my skin. They whispered to me constantly. Even when I was muted, behind my Only-Human-Not-Embodied Spirit mask, they whispered people’s secrets, tantalizing morsels of their power, appeared as colors in my field of vision, hinted at the things humans carried in them—their intentions and their pains. I loved it when they did this. I turned their offerings over and over in my mind, a terrible pleasure. Soon, I went full days letting my spirits ride up my spine and take my head. They rode me in my skin, while I fell backward into the cool, damp mud of my mind. It was ecstasy for a while.
But then the world changed. There was a pandemic. People I knew were dying, were dead, and I was scared. The more months of dying that passed, the stranger people became. The communities I had not been allowed to be a part of before were called “pods” now. The reach of the global hysteria and dying convinced me that being an outsider was even more dangerous than ever before. I decided that rather than let loneliness run through me like a fever, I wanted to commit myself to a future where I could be safe and keep others safe too. I started taking post-bac coursework in the Health Sciences and even though my anxiety told me I couldn’t make it, I chipped away at the dream of becoming a medical professional. I spoke to my therapist, then a psychiatrist about my anxiety and inability to focus, and I was prescribed a stimulant. The better part of two semesters passed. The loneliness was a fathomless hole in my heart, but I was getting my work done, so I tried to make peace with it and plugged away at fetal pig cadaver dissections in my kitchen and hours spent on Chemistry II problem sets.
In early winter the spirits started warning me that something was wrong. I wasn’t sleeping. Sometimes I would get four hours, sometimes I would be up for days. I alerted my psychiatrist to the sleep issues. She said she wasn’t concerned. I remained worried, but I was getting so much work done, and I didn’t want that to change. Maybe it was the fear that I wouldn’t be able to accomplish my goals if my anxiety returned, or the burdensome interpersonal issues I was experiencing which left me feeling harmed and paranoid and wanting to disappear into the mycelial networks and microbiomes I could not stop reading about. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t dig deeper into their warning. The spring term ended. It was summer now and my condition had deteriorated. The sleep deprivation was ruining my brain, and now there were other symptoms. I told my psychiatrist about the ones that were most benign. Again, she didn’t seem concerned. I didn’t tell her about my spirits’ first warning nor did I tell her about their second one, even though this time the warning came with a date. I was afraid of how I would be treated if I was honest about my relationship to spirit. I tried to talk to them myself, to get more information, but my mind was shredded and I could no longer reach the gates. Within weeks of the second warning, I was in the hospital.
It took a year for me to get back to myself. For a year reality shifted and took on monstrous shapes. I spent that year feeling untethered in a wholly unnatural way. Even though what happened wasn’t my fault, or anyone’s fault really, I felt so much shame. The way illness had changed my mind made me feel unlovable and monstrous. My anxiety and my feelings of unworthiness grew. Because of the year, plus the heaviness of the shame, I couldn’t bring myself to go looking for the gates. I was also filled with so much rage.
Why didn’t the spirits keep me safe? Why didn’t they take my hand when I couldn’t reach the gates? For the months that real madness seared through my mind, why weren’t they there to dull the pain? Why didn’t their awarenesses trickle coolly into me to put out the flames? A friend I speak to from time to time about spirit matters thinks the reason they didn’t save me is because spirits are our human ancestors. My friend thinks the spirits can only give us the tools they had themselves in their lives. Sometimes I think my friend is seeing clear, but other times I remember all the things my spirits have shown me and it makes me think that my human problems are more than solvable for them.
Perhaps it wasn’t their responsibility to save me then? Perhaps. Perhaps, like Ada’s gods, they weren’t moved by human suffering. Even if that’s true, their absence made me not trust them. Already as my human self, I have many times been burned by the flame of unmitigated interests in my flesh. I won’t let myself be burned by spirits too.
I and the spirits live in shadow now. We no longer dazzle ourselves with our rides. I am learning what it’s like staying human. Though I find this existence to be excruciatingly dull at times, I feel centered in it as well. As a human, the solutions to my problems are on the same scale as the problems themselves, and I find this to be a lot more manageable.
image, Due Season Metals and Castings
Sometimes, you recognize truth because it destroys you for a bit.
- Ada, in Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater
Can I tell you one last thing? Can I tell you something honest? I needed to remember that once you open the gates nothing, not western paradigms nor the colonizer’s religions or pathologies, can close them. I needed to and so I remembered that for those of us who live with one foot on the other side it is nothing for us to die and resurrect at the crossroads. I needed to remember this, so thank God I reread the book. But the truth is I don’t miss it. I don’t miss the way spirit shimmered in my body, nor the way spirit danced in my skin. I needed safety to help rebuild my mind and I found safety in my humanness. I, too, have let loneliness back in. It leaves my skin numb and cold, but it is nothing like it was before and I’m grateful to all of the universe for that. I know my fear of being spirit-ridden is irrational. I know they would never hurt me. I know in fact that when I was reaching the end of my mental purgatory, spirit came and once again told me a date, and on that day my suffering did end. I know that spirit only comes when they have my full consent, I know when I was struck with pharmaceutical madness, spirit knew better than to visit me then. I know that even though they don’t talk or sing or show me things the way they used to, if I’m being honest, they still find ways to let me know the things I need and want to know. I know too that perhaps they could have always spoken to me in this softer, human way. I think that… No. Something I am starting to know is that before, when things were slippery and my interpersonal connections were strained, when a person I loved lit a fire in my brain, when people I loved broke my heart into pieces, then, I think I needed spirit to be something larger-than-life and they came the way I called them. But now that I’m different and my heart is less broken, now that I feel more centered in my body, and now that I’ve forgiven the people, and now that they are humans and not monsters at all, my spirits are coming to me in a way that exactly matches what I need.
wallace rose belongs (they/li) is a queer and trans, Southern boy of Haitian descent. As a writer, they are concerned with the ways superstructural frameworks inhibit genuine connection & intimacy in community. They became inspired to create with their words because of their uncle, who, to this day, is the best storyteller they know. wallace is sustained by speculative worlds of other Black writers, radicalism and liberation movements, and individual acts of unruliness and transgression taken against the State.