Returning Home and Claiming the Center
Aug. 17th, 2025 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_lee(all quotes are from Akwaeke Emezi, "claiming the center: Akwaeke Emezi," Locus: the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field #773 June 2025, pg. 58-59)
Akwaeke Emezi, in my opinion, is required reading for anyone questioning the idea of the singlet self: that there is one self per body, wedded forever and ever, and everything else is (at best) mere metaphor.
Their work also gave us permission to start really getting to know what was going on deeper inside us.
We came to what is called plurality through reading about DID, then joining the soulbonding, multiplicity, and plurality communities in succession, then ending up with DID again (extremely resentfully) right around the time plurality was taking over from multiplicity.
Though it's one of those things people don't like to admit, a lot of the multiple groups that fought against MPD/DID/etc. still used the medical criteria as their starting point, just removing the parts they found objectionable. It's why they called themselves "multiples"! You still see this today; whenever anyone uses "alter," "switching," and claims young people/fictives/nonhumans are fakers, they are in fact defaulting to the medical presumptions that undergird the diagnostic criteria. Try it out sometime: write down what makes "a real plural" and see how much of the criteria is just MPD/DID with "the bad parts" removed.
Emezi came from a whole different paradigm, and that gave us permission to start questioning our own. Their work gave us permission to start asking ourself, "what are OUR inner truths? Our reality? Can we deal with it without going terrifyingly batshit?"
And that's when we started really dealing with things like the bony lady, the family god, the abyssal waters, and the "weird," "embarrassing" stuff in our head that felt like it was too much, too crazy to be true. We stopped trying to convert it into a symbol of something else (trauma, trauma, with DID everything MUST surely be trauma), started taking it seriously in its own right, and though it wasn't easy and required sanity-boosting, we did NOT go completely insane. On the contrary: it brought us to new places. We feel more solid in our skins, more steady, harder to jerk around, because we have come to accept what is true for us, instead of trying to continuously translate or convert it into something else. We are accepting ourselves as we are, not as we are "supposed" to be.
We're also on better terms with the whole gestalt of us: our roster, our vessel, our headspace, our other worlds, our dead. Had we focused solely on trauma, we would've gotten stuck. Eventually, trauma itself was no longer the most important thing, and that was SO GOOD.
Before Mori made Madgic, Rogan had kinda written himself into a corner where trauma was everything, and that's a bitter, exhausting, miserable place to be. The DID paradigm said that there was no deeper to go, that everything else was just batshittery that needed to be ignored for the sake of our sanity. (It didn't help that we knew people who DID stare too hard into the abyss and plummet into it. We didn't want that to happen to us.)
In our case, there was no "indigenous" culture to return to, vessel-wise. We have a decent idea of our vessel's ethnic origins, but feel very little connection to them. Instead, we had to embrace a smaller, more intimate, and less dignified culture: our own, inner culture, which was born and will likely die with us. And that's okay; ephemerality and mortality were always part of who we were/are. Everything ends, including us.
We still call ourself multi. We code-switch between the various camps we've stayed in, and found useful things from every one. Nothing has been wasted. But in the end, it feels good to return home, and we are forever grateful to Emezi and their work for opening that door home.
In terms of talking about my work, people often take the spiritual side as an allegory or a metaphor for something else--sometimes for queerness or transness, but for me, it's not. [...] When I use Western language to describe myself, I'm translating. Even when I call myself queer, or I call myself trans, I'm stepping away from my actual Igbo spiritual center, and using Western language, and translating to make myself more accessible. It's honestly a form of masking, because indigenous spirituality is illegible in a Western context. Because of white supremacy, but also because the West does not acknolwedge indigenous realities as real...
Akwaeke Emezi, in my opinion, is required reading for anyone questioning the idea of the singlet self: that there is one self per body, wedded forever and ever, and everything else is (at best) mere metaphor.
Their work also gave us permission to start really getting to know what was going on deeper inside us.
We came to what is called plurality through reading about DID, then joining the soulbonding, multiplicity, and plurality communities in succession, then ending up with DID again (extremely resentfully) right around the time plurality was taking over from multiplicity.
When Freshwater [Emezi's first book] came out, people kept saying, "This is a book about mental illness." It is not. People keep trying to drag my work over to a Western white supremacist center. The book is exactly what the book says it is! It is a book about Igbo spirituality--it is a book about an ogbanje.
Though it's one of those things people don't like to admit, a lot of the multiple groups that fought against MPD/DID/etc. still used the medical criteria as their starting point, just removing the parts they found objectionable. It's why they called themselves "multiples"! You still see this today; whenever anyone uses "alter," "switching," and claims young people/fictives/nonhumans are fakers, they are in fact defaulting to the medical presumptions that undergird the diagnostic criteria. Try it out sometime: write down what makes "a real plural" and see how much of the criteria is just MPD/DID with "the bad parts" removed.
Emezi came from a whole different paradigm, and that gave us permission to start questioning our own. Their work gave us permission to start asking ourself, "what are OUR inner truths? Our reality? Can we deal with it without going terrifyingly batshit?"
And that's when we started really dealing with things like the bony lady, the family god, the abyssal waters, and the "weird," "embarrassing" stuff in our head that felt like it was too much, too crazy to be true. We stopped trying to convert it into a symbol of something else (trauma, trauma, with DID everything MUST surely be trauma), started taking it seriously in its own right, and though it wasn't easy and required sanity-boosting, we did NOT go completely insane. On the contrary: it brought us to new places. We feel more solid in our skins, more steady, harder to jerk around, because we have come to accept what is true for us, instead of trying to continuously translate or convert it into something else. We are accepting ourselves as we are, not as we are "supposed" to be.
We're also on better terms with the whole gestalt of us: our roster, our vessel, our headspace, our other worlds, our dead. Had we focused solely on trauma, we would've gotten stuck. Eventually, trauma itself was no longer the most important thing, and that was SO GOOD.
Somé points out that our very reality was colonized. Things that were real, that had been considered real for generations and centuries, stopped being real because white people showed up at gunpoint and said, "This stuff isn't real. It's juju, it's superstition, it's black magic, it's evil." [...]
When I started my career, I made the decision in my personal and professional life to acknowledge the indigenous realities as real, true, and valid. It's not make-believe, and it's not superstition; it is as real as anything else. To stand in that as the center, as [Toni] Morrison said, and simply refuse to move, and the world would have to move over.
Before Mori made Madgic, Rogan had kinda written himself into a corner where trauma was everything, and that's a bitter, exhausting, miserable place to be. The DID paradigm said that there was no deeper to go, that everything else was just batshittery that needed to be ignored for the sake of our sanity. (It didn't help that we knew people who DID stare too hard into the abyss and plummet into it. We didn't want that to happen to us.)
In our case, there was no "indigenous" culture to return to, vessel-wise. We have a decent idea of our vessel's ethnic origins, but feel very little connection to them. Instead, we had to embrace a smaller, more intimate, and less dignified culture: our own, inner culture, which was born and will likely die with us. And that's okay; ephemerality and mortality were always part of who we were/are. Everything ends, including us.
You can be [...] terrifying and powerful and all the things people are afraid of, and someone is going to love you anyway. All that possibility is part of the re-indigenization that is important for liberation, because if we buy into our indigenous realities, and learn from each other's indigenous realities, we find that same possibility that fantasy gives. You find that same possibility for change and transformation, and when people believe in that, that's when they can actually execute in this reality, and that's how this reality changes."
We still call ourself multi. We code-switch between the various camps we've stayed in, and found useful things from every one. Nothing has been wasted. But in the end, it feels good to return home, and we are forever grateful to Emezi and their work for opening that door home.
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Date: 2025-08-17 07:50 pm (UTC)Cato of the Eclipsed Clade
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