DECOLONIZING DEATH
The suppression of indigenous views on death means that Westerners perceive this event as a sad, final run. Souls are immediately sent to heaven or hell upon a judgment of “salvation”, and burial practices are often commodified.
In following with anti-colonial tradition, we consider our dead “transitioned,” and call them our ancestors. We set up altars in our homes with flowers and their favorite gifts, we make plates of food for them to “eat” and burn candles in their memory.
The day my mother passed from this world to another plane, I physically felt her unplugging from my heart. I had no idea she had passed until the next day when it was confirmed.
I was on stage in an arena, my violin mic’d up in and live for 15,000 people to hear as J Cole was performing music from his most recent project, For Your Eyez Only, a project I had written and co-produced on and was now touring with him. During one of the final stops in Brooklyn, the lights went out as normal on song #3 but I don’t remember them ever coming back on.
Out of nowhere I felt nausea. My throat had been choked up all week and I guessed it was from breathing in the smoke from other peoples’ blunts, but it suddenly got tighter. I felt the weirdest sensation of a thick cord of energy literally unplugging itself from my chest, and a black auric ooze all over me that I could palpably sense inter-dimensionally. Inside me a voice said, “Stay in your hotel room tomorrow and don’t leave.” Another voice within said, “OK.” And I remember flipping out because first of all I thought we all only had one inner voice, and I know I wasn’t out of my mind. The voices came from my body.
This flipped everything I thought I knew about death AND my sudden spiritual connection to my own body on its head.
Feeling someone cross over, even 2000 miles away, turns out to be a common phenomenon.
MY INTRO TO THE DECOLONIZATION OF MY BODY AND SOUL (BEFORE I KNEW THAT’S WHAT IT WAS CALLED):
A couple years prior, I had begun my spiritual awakening after joining some friends in Jamaica and teaching music at an arts summer camp with them. During our off time they all revealed their personal spiritual practices with me, even inviting me to rapé (hop-PEY) ceremony and meditation with them. I learned about collecting crystals, my orishas, and the language of prayer acknowledgments like “Asé!” and “Aho!” I dived into learning about treating food as medicine, veganism and raw diets and eventually trying ascribing on-and-off to blending both over the years to come.
By the time my mother crossed planes, I was still so green in decolonizing my connection to myself, but very committed as it tends to be one of those journeys you don’t just quit once you start. I remember telling a tour buddy about a flower bath I was about to take, and how much I liked journaling (it was still very “Dear Diary”-esque).
BACK TO THE STORY
I knew enough to know I was having a spiritual awakening on that stage, but I had no idea what was causing it.
The next day I stayed in my room and played chess with the sound tech. My phone rang, and my heart just KNEW. I saw “(305)———” and that was all I needed to see to confirm it. Fact: our hearts know things 4 seconds before we are conscious of the thing. I answered the phone and a cold woman on the other line said “Jasmin, your mom expired.”
My funeral for her was a blurry mess. I had been collecting gorgeous stones from all around Africa and the Americas, and after all those talks at summer camp about how tourmaline helps this and tanzanite helps that, these stones suddenly meant nothing to me. I emptied the small plastic bag of my mothers ashes and bone fragments into the sand, mixing my stones in with her and imagining her like some Sailor Moon montage of bones and crystals rising up out of the ocean. I was not in a place to keep any bits of her, because I knew she wanted to be completely free of this world; I knew that from before, when she gave me up as a child and stopped talking to me a couple years later. That sudden unplugging felt like she was SO glad to get the fuck off of earth.
The Western colonized perspective of death is often rooted in Christian and European Enlightenment ideologies, which emphasize linear time, individuality, and a separation between the living and the dead. The colonial focus is closure and judgment, versus cycles and continuities. According to them, death IS linear; it’s the final moment.
INTEGRATION: DEATH IS NOT LINEAR.
My mother felt very present around me for years after that, but always as elusive as she was when she was alive. Of all the nights I’ve fallen asleep in my entire life, I have never once had a dream about my mother, and believe me I used to pray so hard to see her. In my huachuma ceremony 6 years after her death, I witnessed her angrily giving birth to me and my knees buckled to the earth as I cried her tears for her. During ayahuasca a week later, she appeared to me as a giant ancient stone saying “I jumped in my body and had you so you could understand the world better.” (The fuck does that mean???)
Decolonizing my love for myself also meant decolonizing my pain, and that is hard to do without spiritual guidance or a support system. Colonization teaches us to move on quickly, and that death is a flattened experience with a tight schedule. My mother’s death had unzipped me, the workaholic; like the stones, Music itself started to mean nothing to me. I had achieved ambitions of becoming financially successful in the music industry so that I could eventually save my mom, and I even kept getting roped back into in a toxic music business partnership because of it. Anything for her! Once she died, my job as her daughter was over and I had no connection to any other family members who loved me, and no energy to make music for a living anymore.
LIFE AFTER DEATH
Keeping flowery altars, returning to music as a channeling healing modality, and recognizing my ancestors as a part of me is the way I reclaim the indigenous and traditional practices that were never taught to me growing up. The instinct to do these things is deeply encoded in my breasts and my womb. I just know to do them, and I now know who to ask about what other things I should do. It’s not for the purpose of keeping memories alive, but instead, a way to honor the karmic cycles of life, love and death. After 2017, I always felt this intense pull toward practicing visual art as my New Thing; after my mom’s death, just like that, painting became an extremely restorative practice for me. Before, I had reached success in the music industry from extremely humble means, and it took every goddamn thing I had in me; I was already showing works in galleries, but music demanded so much of me that I couldn’t auto-didact fast enough to catch up to the MFA kids.
THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES.
Then in fall of 2024, I discovered completely by chance that my mom worked at the New Museum 5 years before fully succumbing to her mental illness, becoming completely addicted to drugs as a way to forget herself, and somehow deciding to give birth to me as a single mom anyways. When I read a paragraph that included her being thanked for her work with other artists in a short letter penned by the lead-of-staff, the tears that sprang forth were the ones she deserved 7 years prior at her funeral. I finally knew something about her mysterious life and it seemed to be the missing puzzle piece in my own life. This is my inheritance.
I tap very deeply into myself, sometimes ascribing to psilocybin while researching and creating paintings with complex meanings. The medicine is not an enhancer for me, but more of a personal conversation between me and God as I immerse myself in the paintings I don’t plan. I always suspected that in her passing, she energetically pressed her gifts and desires to become an artist into me. I still think so.