Conjuring revolutionary magic
Photography JR Korpa
As the US health system buckles under the weight of the pandemic, a Los Angeles bruja finds new ways to heal intergenerational trauma
By La Pachamami
February 2020 marked five years since mi querida Mamí transitioned to the spirit world. Last week, as I swam upstream in the Ashokawna river in Northern California during a psilocybin mushroom journey, I received a message from her: “I wasn’t ready to die.”
Have you noticed the recent ubiquitous resurgence of herbalism, traditional folk medicine, mystical practices, and earth based spiritualities? This resurgence is no coincidence, as the spirits of those persecuted in archaic times return to aid us in shifting the tectonic plates of hex-tory. (Yes, we are hexing his-story.)
May we all tune into the currents of energy of our ancestral guides which activate the subversive, trickster, ingenious, sacred protector, healer, magician, priestess, creatrix energies within us.
I imagine a majority of you are not prepared to die either, or to witness the death of your loved ones. As someone who has lost a parent and who has two remaining “immediate” blood relatives, one living with chronic illness and another en la tercera edad, I ask myself, “How the fuck am I going to survive my grief during and after this dystopian, state-sponsored, bio-terrorist pandemic if I am left an ‘adult’ orphan?”
There are times I surrender to the inconsolable pain I am capable of feeling and cry and scream to the point of hyperventilation. Releasing pains I don’t speak of with others through blood curdling screams when I’m driving alone on a highway makes so much sense to the potency of my feelings. Sometimes, it feels like these weeps and wails conjure magic, as if my ocean waters could set off a chain of events.
Other times, my inner flames ignite, as they always have when I grieve. Burn it ALL (colonialism, fascism, militarised patriarchy) to the ground — not like they burned us at the stake but the way indigenous land stewards wisely conduct controlled burns to fertilise soil. On this fertile ground we plant seeds for organising collective land stewardship, communality, reciprocity, cooperative and popular medicine cultivation and production, renegades in nature & over the carcasses of metropolitan cities. We will heal in currents of tender care, platonic intimacy, cuddles, serendipitous encounters, radical romances that will sustain our lust for life amidst exorcising demonic energy from this planet.
I am a warrior bitch, a femme fatale witch, nice to meet you, mid-pandemic in 2020.
But how can my grief, both anticipatory and melancholic, be of service to others?
Many who aren’t ready to go are abruptly shapeshifting in energetic form. Shapeshifting grief into fearlessness feels important these days. Harnessing collective grief into revolutionary action while participating in generative hedonism resonates. Hedonism is casted with a negative connotation of excess but it actually means the “pursuit of pleasure.”
Photography Brian Michelsen
Those who drive the forces of extermination for time immemorial have targeted those who find divine purpose in land stewardship, collective communal care, healing, and pleasure. Imagine that — demons who cast hate on peace, love, unity, respect… all key ingredients for collective pleasure. We are living in a simulation controlled by sadists who have developed sophisticated technologies and warfare to systemically deny us pleasure.
As people of moral conscience, as people who lust for life, what are our roles during an era of ecological collapse?
What is our individual role in intervening on cultures of extermination that jeopardise paradise on earth for sentient beings?
Shortly before the 5 year anniversary of my mother’s death, in February 2020, I initiated my journey into EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) therapy. EMDR utilises auditory and visual sensory techniques to activate memories and open new pathways of association, helping to process trauma. Shortly after, I was arrested for disobeying 20-plus police officers during a racist arrest on the Metro in downtown Los Angeles. The experience left me with an impression that sinister historical events were on the horizon in 2020. On March 6, 2020, I took the highest dose of psilocybin mushrooms I had taken since 2012. The second week of March, I participated in a four-day transformational training program that was cut one day short because the novel coronavirus was spreading and we were “pushing the envelope” by participating in a gathering of almost 150 participants.
I had taken proactive measures to heal some of my intergenerational traumas because my father has a chronic illness and my grandmother is 93 years of age. I am unsure how long our terrestrial journeys will be bound together for. I sensed that it was a ripe time to do the psychological and spiritual work necessary to be at peace when they are summoned. I wish to land gracefully on those fateful days of transition.
I reacted to my mom’s death with chaos, anger, guilt, dependency, and high-risk behaviour. My mother, father and grandmother are the only blood relatives I have for hundreds, thousands of miles. This is what it is like to be a child of diaspora, first- and second-generation child of forced migration. I am blessed with a loving family that now spans four continents. In March 2020, two relatives were on the precipice of booking their flight to come share the duty of caring for my sassy abuela, but then the travel ban imposed by the U.S. on Europe beat them to it. Another dear cousin was going to visit from Canada to show love and care to my father, but the health risks were too high and that trip too was cancelled.
I have panic attacks in fear of living without my father and grandmother and yet, death is inevitable. Any of us could go at any moment. I am learning to remind myself that this is okay. I remember crying into my mother’s chest in fear of her potential death and she said to me, “Nothing lasts forever.”
In this mortal life, all I wanted was for my parents to have the right to live a healthy and leisurely life together into their old age. I wanted to witness my mother raise grandchildren differently than my grandmother had raised me. Fuckin’ Ouch.
Preoccupations I’ve inherited include but are not limited to migrant mortality, genocide prevention, public health, preventative medicine, and collective, intergenerational healing. A year ago, I launched a congressional campaign to unseat an incumbent who supported a deal that sees more than $3 billion in military aid sent to Israel each year. After attending a performance arts festival and conference in Mexico City in June 2019, I was impressed by the plenary, which included lesbian performance artist and Mexican senator Jesus Rodriguez, living proof that using satirical performance art for political campaigns under colonial governments was possible.
When we are subject to unabashed authoritarians fortified by militarised personnel, we need revolutionary artists to put on a good show on multiple stages. I fantasised of putting on a good show in the halls of Congress or even better, acting out the collective fantasy of putting the Führer himself to rest.
To bring it back to us and the collective, we need spaces for acknowledging the duality of ancestors within our lineages and processing the experiences we carry in our genetic memory. We can conjure revolutionary magic by reckoning with harms of the past to prevent further harms in the present. Remembering our power as agents of the course of hxstory we CAN shift the trajectory of the future.
They tried to crucify us, burn us at the stake, they try to mutilate us, they try to shoot us, they have designed entire systems to make us sick and wage war on healing but our energy is indestructible.
La Pachamami is a queer, femme, non-binary community organiser and performance artist of Mayan, Iberian, and Ashkenazi Jewish lineages. Her work focuses on the intersection of indigenous rights, racial, migrant, environmental justice, feminism, demilitarisation and drug policy.