I tend to draw inspiration for my art from experiences and people in my life. This piece invokes conversation about spirituality, religion, race, culture, gender, and archetype. The claim that God is a black woman can either be accepted at face value or challenged. To challenge this claim, though, says more about you than it does about the claim. If you have to ask why, I would have to ask why not. I have experience reading and interpreting multiple religious texts and something I think is often implicit in the stories told, especially when I consider how my lived experience sometimes is not fully gleaned by what it written, is that there is a larger community ever present in the lives of main characters that influences the “message of god”. For that reason, I feel like the leaders of our communities are included in what is considered God. Prophets and heroes all have mothers. We are all descended from and most ancient stories are written by and starring melanated people. Just something to think about.

I did some research and discovered a really amazing poem that can say it in a way that I think is better than I can.

Black woman as God

By Belinda Zhawi

Opening God wires defeated women –

they bruise their knees thinking she’s a man.

She’s made of wood, or iron – like you.

Her face like momentary static – sending out

black smoke like one constantly scalded.

Like waiting on a slim crescent of moon

Speak of prayer – pray that you pray,

of your joy, your days of abundance,

of expansion. Teach yourself to pray

in words, save them through your lips

because the body as the sea

is temperamental, ever changing.

Loud like certain cracks of time and space.

Like whole weeks

where each day differs from the last.

Some days it is a warm, sunny creek

hidden between two large rocks.

You must climb it to swim it.

Pour your darkness into space.

Pour

& if you cannot,

just weep it away.

Should your soul summon,

touch yourself – again & yet again –

till you visit that hour of invisible ecstasy,

sweet communion with self, asking you

to speak a wish, to no longer erase yourself

They say bodies are temples,

made for worship,

adorn them with silver;

drench them in hyssop & myrrh.

In that stillness, you might hear you.

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(100% cotton, dtg printed.)