There’s a special kind of energy that sweeps across campuses this time of year – an energy that carries with it the weight of late-night studying, years of perseverance, deep friendships, and silent sacrifices. Caps are tossed, gowns flutter in the spring breeze, and the air hums with the anticipation of what’s next. Beneath the surface is a tangle of emotions: the joy of completion, the anxiety of change, the thrill of achievement, and the quiet dread of the unknown.
I know these feelings well.
Over the years, I’ve celebrated three graduations for three different degrees – my bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral. Except for my undergraduate graduation, my children were present for each of those moments. They didn’t just witness my academic journey – they lived it with me. Through my studies, deadlines, and moments of doubt, they were there. And I always made sure they were there for the celebration too. My success was – and is – our success.
For many years, I’ve also celebrated my students’ graduations. I used to host an annual graduation party for international African students and their families. What began in the modest space of my home eventually grew so large that we had to reserve entire halls. I would cook Nigerian and other African dishes, we’d play music, dance, laugh, and build a sense of community that transcended borders. It wasn’t long before it wasn’t just for international students – anyone who wanted to celebrate joined in.
But this year is different.
This year, I’m not just a scholar, a mentor, or a host. I am the mother of a graduate. My own daughter is graduating – with both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, completed in just four years. I find myself filled with awe, unsure how to fully express what this moment means to me. Do I dance and shout in celebration? Do I sit in quiet reflection? Do I plan a party or simply hold her and whisper, “Well done”?
As I watch my students walk across their stages this season, I find tears welling up – not just for their journeys, but for hers. For mine. For all the roads that led us here. I say silent prayers: that their futures are steady, their paths meaningful, and that the education they’ve fought for is a strong enough foundation for all that lies ahead.
Graduation is not just an ending. It is a threshold. A rebirth.
And in this sacred season of endings and beginnings, I hold space – for the joy, the uncertainty, the pride, and the ever-present hope that tomorrow will be kind to my daughter and to all those graduating in this graduation season.
This Mother’s Day (2025), my children gifted me an experience I didn’t know I needed: a theater viewing of Sinners (2025), the new genre-defying film directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan. It was, in many ways, a spiritual experience. For a few hours, I was not just a mother being celebrated – I was also a daughter remembering, a Black woman reflecting, and a scholar stirred to critical inquiry. My children have formed this ritual of sending me to the theatre to relax and watch movies that just came out, and as usual, this year’s did not disappoint.
Coogler’s Sinners is not simply a movie. It is a conjuring. A remembering. A ritual of reckoning. And I left the theater knowing I would be writing more about it – not just here on my blog, but in academic journals and cultural essays to come.
Synopsis: Vampires in the Juke Joint
Set in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, Sinners follows twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both portrayed by Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans returning home from Chicago to open a juke joint. Joined by their nephew Sammie – a gifted guitarist whose strict preacher father condemns the blues – they hope to build a sanctuary for Black expression, healing, and joy.
But their haven becomes a battleground. A pale, cold force has come to town: Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish-immigrant vampire who leads a coven of undead musicians. They are drawn not just to blood but to Black vitality – joy, sound, and soul. The struggle to preserve the juke joint becomes a metaphysical war for cultural survival, where music is both weapon and shield, memory and prophecy.
Major Themes: Blues, Blood, and the Black Soul
1. Racial Oppression and Cultural Appropriation
Remmick and his vampire coven represent the centuries-long siphoning of Black culture – by those who consume its art, labor, and rhythm while erasing its originators. The vampires don’t just feed – they curate, repurpose, and dominate.
2. Spirituality and Resistance
Far from caricature, African spiritual practices – rootwork, ancestor veneration, sacred drumming – become tools of protection. The film reveres these practices as legitimate, powerful alternatives to Western Christian binaries.
3. Music as Liberation and Memory
Blues is not a soundtrack – it is theology. It holds grief and joy together. In Sinners, music raises the dead, opens portals to ancestral wisdom, and confronts the forces of death with the rhythms of life.
4. Family, Legacy, and Duality
The Moore twins personify two sides of the Black survival coin: Smoke’s guarded stoicism and Stack’s open-hearted joy. Sammie’s journey reflects the burden of breaking generational expectations to reclaim ancestral power.
Unspoken Shadows: Subtext and Secondary Themes
The Model Minority and Complicity
An Asian couple who own two convenience stores and quietly treat injured Black victims without alerting authorities are framed as “helpful,” but their neutrality masks complicity. Their silence fosters unchecked Black-on-Black violence and reflects the model minority myth: proximity to whiteness and economic benefit, but without disrupting racial hierarchies. They profit from pain and patch up wounds – but never challenge the systems that cause them.
Eroticism, Whiteness, and Destruction
One of the twins’ involvement with Mary, a white-passing woman with a one-eighth Black blood, ends in both literal and symbolic death. She is the first to be vampirized – and she turns her Black lover. The tragedy recalls a long lineage of Black male downfall linked to white femininity, not as judgment but as historical commentary. Their intimacy – beautiful and doomed – exposes the dangers of uncritical desire under the white gaze.
This is not just a personal fall; it is a political echo. Coogler revisits a painful archetype and complicates it, forcing us to ask: What is the cost of loving whiteness when whiteness refuses to love you back?
Character Analysis: The Living, the Lost, and the Lurking
Smoke Moore
Haunted by war and trauma, Smoke is skeptical of both God and man. A World War I veteran, he bears his scars internally and outwardly. His silence is not weakness – it’s a defense mechanism against a world that has rarely made room for Black vulnerability. Yet his loyalty and fierce protectiveness ground the narrative. He is the bruised backbone of the family – guarding the juke joint like sacred ground and embodying a form of masculinity forged in survival, not dominance.
Stack Moore
A dreamer, dancer, and emotional heartbeat of the film. Stack believes in the transformative power of joy, music, and community. His expressive nature contrasts Smoke’s reserve, but his refusal to shrink from beauty is its own form of resistance. His downfall – linked to both love and naivete – feels Shakespearean. Yet his arc is also a celebration of art as defiance. His joy is his rebellion, and his memory lingers in every note that follows.
Sammie
Caught between a fire-and-brimstone upbringing and the siren call of the blues, Sammie embodies spiritual hybridity. His father’s condemnation of music as “devilish” clashes with Sammie’s intuitive sense that rhythm is healing. His guitar becomes both confessional and altar. His journey is one of self-reclamation, and by the end, Sammie is not just a musician – he is a griot, carrying forward ancestral memory through melody.
Remmick
An Irish-immigrant vampire and plantation-era parasite cloaked in elegance. Remmick doesn’t just want to feed – he wants to curate, control, and become what he consumes. His villainy is systemic, not individual. In every smooth smile and calculated charm, he mirrors whiteness’ historical ability to absorb Black genius while remaining untouched by Black pain. He is the colonizer dressed in couture.
Mary (Stack’s White-passing ex-girlfriend/Lover)
Mary’s presence is small but devastating. Her relationship with Stack is initially tender, but her transformation into a vampire – and her role in turning Stack – invokes the tragic trope of interracial desire leading to ruin. Her character functions not merely as a symbol of the “forbidden,” but of whiteness-as-desire: beautiful, dangerous, and ultimately, consuming. She does not survive the transformation; neither does the man she loves.
Annie (Hoodoo Priestess and Spiritual Guardian)
Annie, portrayed by Wunmi Mosaku, is a powerful Hoodoo priestess and the spiritual heart of the community. Deeply rooted in ancestral wisdom and protective ritual, she embodies a sacred feminine presence that holds space for both personal grief and collective survival. Her history with Smoke – marked by shared loss – adds emotional depth to the film’s themes of memory and mourning.
Annie’s presence is not limited to ritual scenes; she appears as both a guide and a warning in moments when the juke joint’s sanctity is threatened. Through her rootwork, incantations, and connection to the spirit world, Annie becomes the ancestral channel through which protection flows. She is a reminder that in times of crisis, survival does not rely solely on strength, but on memory, tradition, and sacred knowing.
Annie doesn’t simply represent spirituality – she enacts it. She is legacy and labor, both mythic and real, reminding us that not all warriors carry weapons. Some carry knowledge. Some carry fire.
Pastor Elijah (Sammie’s Father)
A towering figure of moral rigidity. His condemnation of the blues as “the Devil’s music” reflects internalized colonial Christianity. He is not a villain, but a product of spiritual warfare – a man who chose respectability and repression over rhythm and resistance. Yet, there are cracks in his stoicism. His silence after Sammie’s first performance suggests a man wrestling with his own forgotten voice.
The Asian Shopkeeper Couple – Grace and Bo Chow
A deeply complicated presence. They treat Black victims of violence without involving the authorities – a gesture of pragmatic care or silent complicity, depending on your read. They profit from the community but do not participate in it. Their quiet neutrality in the face of anti-Black violence exposes the myth of cross-racial solidarity under capitalism, raising questions about the “model minority” role and what it means to be adjacent to, but untouched by, Black suffering.
Six Theoretical Lenses for Sinners (2025): Reading Horror Through Black, Decolonial, and Feminist Thought
As a genre-defying Southern Gothic horror film, Sinners is brimming with symbolic and thematic layers. To unpack its richness, I turn to six theoretical frameworks that illuminate the film’s deeper currents – each revealing how horror can be a vessel for truth, trauma, memory, and resistance.
1. Afropessimism & Afro-Optimism
Key Scholars: Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton
What It Is: Afropessimism contends that anti-Blackness is not just a social condition, but an ontological one – Black suffering forms the structural core of Western civilization. Meanwhile, Afro-Optimism insists on survival, joy, and cultural creativity as acts of rebellion and renewal.
Application in Sinners: Vampirism in the film is a near-perfect metaphor for the parasitic relationship between whiteness and Black cultural production. The vampires feed not only on blood, but on soul, rhythm, memory. Blackness becomes a consumable aesthetic – desired, devoured, but never fully humanized. And yet, Sinners doesn’t stop at despair. It insists on the spiritual and creative power of the Black community – through music, ritual, and resistance – as a force that cannot be fully colonized.
This tension – between what is taken and what refuses to die – sits at the heart of Sinners, mirroring Afropessimism’s realism and Afro-Optimism’s defiant light.
2. Postcolonial Theory
Key Scholars: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon
What It Is: Postcolonial theory interrogates the lingering effects of colonialism in cultural, psychological, and material life. It explores how colonized people resist domination and how empire reshapes identity and culture through mimicry, surveillance, and violence.
Application in Sinners: Remmick, the Irish-immigrant vampire, is not a caricature – he is a colonizer who cloaks himself in sophistication and civility, echoing Bhabha’s idea of mimicry and Fanon’s portrait of colonial mental violence. His presence in the Black juke joint is not accidental; it is invasive. He seeks to become what he exploits, dressing in style, learning the music, appropriating the aesthetic while remaining untouched by the trauma that produced it.
The juke joint becomes a postcolonial battleground – a space of resistance that simultaneously seduces and repels colonial desire.
3. African Spiritual Epistemologies / Decolonial Theory
What It Is: This framework centers African worldviews and cosmologies as legitimate sources of knowledge. It challenges the Eurocentric binaries of good/evil, sin/salvation, and reason/spirit that have historically dismissed Indigenous ways of knowing.
Application in Sinners: The film unapologetically roots its spiritual logic in African traditions – rootwork, ancestor invocation, spiritual possession – not as superstition, but as survival technology. The church calls the juke joint sinful, but the film argues that spirit moves most powerfully in places deemed profane by colonial Christianity.
Decolonial theory helps us see how blues music, conjure, and oral storytelling become sacred rites. It’s not just about resisting the vampire – it’s about remembering who we are before they arrived. And knowing that the medicine we need is already in our bones.
4. Critical Race Theory (CRT)
Key Scholars: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell
What It Is: CRT holds that racism is not aberrational but systemic – embedded in law, policy, culture, and institutional life. It emphasizes intersectionality and questions the narratives of legal neutrality and colorblindness.
Application in Sinners: The juke joint, while a cultural space, is also a legal and political space. It is surveilled. It is threatened. It is coded as “sinful” and thus disposable. Meanwhile, the real predators – like Remmick -operate with impunity.
The film illustrates how “sin” is racialized. Black joy is pathologized. Black gathering is criminalized. The idea of safety is flipped: within the system, protection is only afforded to the powerful. The juke joint is a site of “illegality,” but also of liberation – where law is replaced by community, care, and rhythm.
5. Black Feminist Theory
Key Scholars: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers
What It Is: Black feminist theory centers the experiences of Black women and critiques the ways race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect to create unique structures of oppression and resistance.
Application in Sinners: Though the film focuses on the Moore brothers and Sammie, it gestures toward women in critical ways: the mother who raised the boys, the preacher’s wife who shields her son, and Mary – the white lover turned vampire – whose body becomes a vessel of transmission.
A Black feminist reading asks: Where are the women’s voices? What are the stakes of Black male vulnerability when it is disconnected from Black feminine presence and spiritual labor? What happens when patriarchal values within Black communities – like the condemnation of the blues – silence the very healing traditions women often preserve?
And what does it mean that the juke joint – coded as feminized, emotional, sensual – is the site of salvation?
6. Gothic and Horror Theory
Key Scholars: Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark), Julia Kristeva (abjection), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Monster Theory)
What It Is: Gothic and horror theory explores how monsters embody cultural anxieties, how the grotesque disrupts boundaries, and how horror confronts us with what we repress – historical violence, desire, grief.
Application in Sinners: The vampire is a long-standing symbol in Western horror. In Sinners, it becomes a racialized metaphor for cultural cannibalism. But the film also builds on the Southern Gothic tradition, where the horror lies not in the monster but in the landscape itself – segregated towns, lynching trees, cracked stained glass in empty churches.
Toni Morrison reminds us that American literature has always used Blackness as a shadow text. Here, that shadow rises fully formed. The vampires are not metaphors instead of history – they are metaphors because of history.
Similar Films, Shared Bloodlines
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) stands at the crossroads of horror, history, spirituality, and resistance. While it offers something wholly original, it also joins a lineage of films and narratives that have used genre – particularly horror, fantasy, and Southern Gothic – to interrogate Black life, survival, and memory.
The following films share bloodlines with Sinners, echoing its themes and broadening the cultural conversation it participates in:
Get Out (2017)
Directed by Jordan Peele
Like Sinners, Get Out uses the horror genre to expose the deep undercurrents of anti-Blackness within liberal white spaces. Both films deploy supernatural elements – vampires in Sinners, hypnotism and body-snatching in Get Out – as metaphors for the parasitic consumption of Black bodies and minds.
Comparable Themes:
Cultural appropriation as horror
White liberalism as masked violence
Black autonomy as the true site of fear
Racial exploitation framed through genre conventions
While Get Out focuses on present-day liberalism, Sinners leans more heavily into spirituality and historical grounding, embedding the horror within a Southern, post-WWI Black landscape where the enemy is not just liberalism, but centuries of colonial hunger.
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
This Southern Gothic classic explores secrets, spirituality, and family through the eyes of a young Black girl in 1960s Louisiana. Though not horror in the traditional sense, Eve’s Bayou simmers with mystical tension, ancestral presence, and emotional haunting.
Comparable Themes:
Southern Black mysticism
Gendered spiritual insight and repression
Family secrets and inherited trauma
The thin veil between life, death, and legacy
While Sinners focuses on male protagonists, it shares Eve’s Bayou‘s investment in Black Southern spiritual knowledge – especially the idea that what is seen and unseen are constantly in conversation.
Blade (1998)
Directed by Stephen Norrington, starring Wesley Snipes
Blade redefined the vampire genre by centering a Black protagonist who hunts vampires instead of being their victim. It merges action with horror and unapologetically repositions Black masculinity as powerful, strategic, and supernatural.
Comparable Themes:
Black resistance against predatory whiteness
Vampirism as a symbol of elitism, corruption, and racial supremacy
Weaponized Black bodies as sites of reclamation
While Blade is more action-based, Sinners slows the tempo, inviting reflection on the spiritual implications of the vampire metaphor – how whiteness feeds on Black expression while simultaneously vilifying it.
The Harder They Fall (2021)
Directed by Jeymes Samuel
A bold revisionist Western that centers Black gunslingers and reclaims a genre that historically erased Black presence. The film subverts tropes and injects style, swagger, and revenge into a narrative about family, justice, and legacy.
Comparable Themes:
Genre revision through a Black historical lens
Revenge as justice
Mythmaking and narrative power
Radical style as a vehicle for radical truth
Both films rewrite genre from within. Sinners does for Southern Gothic horror what The Harder They Fall does for the Western – disrupts, centers Blackness, and elevates aesthetic form into historical testimony.
Beloved (1998)
Directed by Jonathan Demme, based on the novel by Toni Morrison
A deeply haunting narrative rooted in post-slavery trauma, maternal grief, and memory as both gift and curse. Beloved reveals how history refuses to stay buried—and how the past lives on in the body and spirit.
Comparable Themes:
Haunting as historical echo
Motherhood, grief, and ancestral return
Spiritual possession and unresolved trauma
The horror of survival, not death
Coogler’s film similarly explores what it means to be haunted by history – not only by loss, but by the vampiric systems that refuse to release Black communities. And like Morrison’s work, Sinners treats the supernatural not as escapism, but as revelation.
Final Thought
Each of these films dares to envision Blackness not only as a site of suffering – but also as a source of power, magic, creativity, and cosmological depth. Sinners earns its place among them by building a rich, blood-soaked altar at the crossroads of horror and history. It demands not just to be watched, but to be remembered.
What Comes Next: Scholarship and Reflection
Sinners didn’t just entertain me – it unsettled, provoked, and ultimately activated something deep within. It stirred memory. It stirred inquiry. It called forth not only the ghosts of the past, but the voices of theory, music, and ancestral witness that have long lived in my academic and personal work.
This film demands a response, not only as a viewer, but as a cultural critic and scholar. Over the coming months, I will be expanding on the ideas seeded in this reflection – developing essays and academic articles that explore the film’s cultural, spiritual, and political dimensions through multiple critical lenses. Please, let me know in the comment section, the one or ones you would like me to develop first.
Works in Progress:
“Bloodlines and Blues: African Spirituality and Resistance in Sinners” A study of how African cosmologies and ritual practices are reclaimed as legitimate epistemologies and survival strategies within the film.
“Vampires and the Plantation: Gothic Capitalism in Black Horror Cinema” A comparative exploration of how vampirism functions as a metaphor for racial capitalism, extraction, and consumption in Sinners, Get Out, and Beloved.
“The Juke Joint as Sacred Space: Reimagining Sin and Spirit through Black Sound” An analysis of how the juke joint disrupts colonial notions of sin and sanctity, positioning blues music as theology, ritual, and resistance.
“Twins, Trauma, and the Black Masculine Psyche: A Character Study of Smoke and Stack” A psychological and symbolic examination of how duality, war trauma, and masculine identity are represented through the twin protagonists.
“Desire and Destruction: Race, Eroticism, and the White Gaze in Sinners” A critical look at interracial desire, betrayal, and the dangers of romantic proximity to whiteness within the racialized horror tradition.
“Model Minorities and Mute Complicity: Cross-Racial Tensions in Black Horror” A provocative interrogation of how Asian characters are positioned as silent enablers of anti-Black violence in Sinners, and what this reveals about racial hierarchy and cultural proximity.
These forthcoming pieces are not just academic – they are offerings. Rituals of clarity. Testimonies stitched together from blood, basslines, and Black memory. Sinners will not leave us alone – and that, I believe, is the point.
Final Reflections: A Mother’s Gift, A Scholar’s Joy
I didn’t plan to watchSinners.I was gifted the experience.
This Mother’s Day, my children gave me something profound: not flowers, not chocolates, but the gift of story – a seat in a dark theater to witness Ryan Coogler’s Sinners unfold on screen. But it wasn’t just the film itself that moved me – it was everything that came after.
On the drive home, my son and I dove headfirst into discussion, dissecting symbolism, drawing cultural parallels, and naming the characters’ choices out loud like we were building a syllabus in real time. We were breathless with ideas – teasing out metaphors, asking what it meant for Blackness to be desired and devoured, and what it meant to resist through music.
Later that evening, my daughter called, and the conversation picked up with even more intensity. We talked about gender and spiritual legacy, about the vampire as a stand-in for systemic power, about blues as theology and survival, about the role of the Asian couple and the one-eighth Black white woman. I learned from her that Hailee Steinfeld, who played the role of Mary, Stack’s ex-girlfriend who passes for white in the film, is also one-eight Black in real life. Our voices spilled over with excitement, the kind that only comes from being seen and intellectually engaged at the same time.
These are the moments I cherish most. Not just because they show how deeply we think as a family – but because they are proof of love. Love in the form of thoughtful conversation. Love in the form of a movie ticket. Love in the form of listening, reflecting, and wrestling with meaning together.
To my children: I love you more than I can say. Thank you for seeing me – for knowing that this, this blend of spirit, story, cinema, and critical inquiry, is what makes me come alive. Thank you for meeting me there. For gifting me a Mother’s Day of deep joy, of shared thought, of laughter and fire and revelation.
This blog post is also yours. Your voices are here. Your questions live in every paragraph. Your hearts echo in every line.
Sinners reminded me that horror is often just another word for memory. That resistance can sound like a guitar riff. That history lives in both blood and breath.
It also reminded me that the ancestors are watching. And so are we. And thanks to you – my beloved children – I’m watching with fuller vision, an open mind, and a grateful, overflowing heart.
Norrington, Stephen, director. Blade. Performance by Wesley Snipes, New Line Cinema, 1998.
Peele, Jordan, director. Get Out. Universal Pictures, 2017.
Samuel, Jeymes, director. The Harder They Fall. Netflix, 2021.
Books & Theoretical Sources:
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–1299.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.
hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.
Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” Rhizomes, vol. 29, 2016.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81.
Wilderson, Frank B., III. Afropessimism. Liveright, 2020.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.
To my children – Who bring light to my tired eyes And laughter to rooms where grief once sat, You are the reason the world still feels kind. Even in hard years, like this one, You make joy out of ashes, Surprises out of sorrow. With your love, you cradle me As once I cradled you. Your gifts – small, thoughtful, immense – Are my balm and my crown.
To my mother – Whose absence never erased presence, Whose picture still guards my heart, Whose spirit lingers in my wisdom, I was proud to be your daughter. I am proud still. You taught me to give, To stand, To mother with fire and grace. And even now, When I mother my own, I hear your voice humming through me.
Today I live in the middle— Between the one I came from And the ones I brought forth. And in this middle space, This beautiful stretch of love, I celebrate being held, Being seen, Being Mother.
Today I live in the middle— Between the one I came from And the ones I brought forth. And in this middle space, This beautiful stretch of love, I celebrate being held, Being seen, Being Mother.
This Mother’s Day, I found myself standing in front of a movie poster for Sinners, a surprise gift from my children who took me to the theater to see the film. As I stood there smiling for the camera, I couldn’t help but feel wrapped in something deeper than celebration – something sacred.
Every year, no matter what we’ve been through, my children go out of their way to honor me. One year it’s breakfast in bed, another a spa day or a handwritten note tucked under my pillow. This year, it was a movie outing and quality time. In a season that has tested my spirit and resolve, their gesture spoke louder than words: We see you, Mama. We love you. We remember everything.
I live my life for them – not in a way that erases me, but in a way that fulfills me. They are the reason I keep rising, the reason I push through days when my energy falters and my hope needs rekindling. Motherhood is the call I answered wholeheartedly. And it has answered back with laughter, love, and the kind of joy that can’t be bought.
Today, I also remember my own mother -23 years gone but still the lighthouse in my soul. Her photo remains my profile picture, not because I cannot let go, but because I won’t. She reminds me daily of the kind of woman I strive to be: strong, gracious, giving, and full of light.
To be a daughter. To be a mother. To be both at once is to live in a circle of endless love. Today, I feel held by both ends of that circle.
I said I am, and the world listened— not with ears, but with form, shaping itself to match my breath, rising like clay in the hands of faith.
I whispered I am tired, and heaviness sat beside me. I shouted I am lost, and every road curled into fog. But when I dared to say I am light, the dark cracked open, and stars rearranged themselves to guide me home.
What you call yourself, the universe carves into stone. Call yourself broken, and even the morning will hide. Call yourself whole, and healing will find your name.
It begins not in your doing, but in your seeing— in the hush between thoughts, in the way your spirit hears its own echo and calls it true.
Be careful with your I AM. It is not a small phrase. It is fire from the bush that burned but was not consumed.
So stand firm. Speak wisely. Perceive clearly. And know this: the God within you is listening. And responding. Always.
A Multi-Sensory Reflection on Faith, Co-Creation, and the Power of I AM
Mary Mba (Ph.D.)
Today, my daughter shared something in our family chat that was so simple, yet profoundly true, which prompted my son to ask what it means and me to explain: “Your perception is your reception.”
The moment I read those words, I felt a stirring—not just intellectually, but spiritually. This wasn’t just a phrase; it was a revelation, one that echoed everything I’ve tried to teach my children about faith, mindset, and divine co-creation. We are not passive observers of life—we are co-creators. And the way we perceive the world—with our thoughts, senses, speech, and spirit—shapes how we receive it.
Let’s go deeper into what this truly means.
🔥 The Sacred Name: “I AM”
When Moses encountered God in the burning bush and asked, “What is your name?”, God replied:
“I AM THAT I AM.” (Exodus 3:14)
This wasn’t a distant, abstract name. It was present. Personal. Living.
“I AM” can only be spoken in the first person. Every time we say it—“I am loved,” “I am not enough,” “I am powerful,” “I am broken”—we are invoking something sacred. We are not just describing ourselves; we are calling forth the divine essence within us.
God is not separate from us. The Source—Spirit, Creator, Love—dwells within, and with the gift of free will, we’ve been entrusted with the divine power to choose what we attach to our I AM.
When we declare:
I am wise
I am healing
I am held
I am enough
We are co-creating with God. But here’s the caveat:
God reflects back exactly what we claim—through our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. As the psalmist David wrote:
“To the faithful you show yourself faithful, to the blameless you show yourself blameless, to the pure you show yourself pure, but to the devious you show yourself shrewd.” (Psalm 18:25–26)
This is not about God being inconsistent. It is about the mirror of the divine. God, in infinite wisdom, reflects what we project. It is spiritual law. What you attach to your “I AM” becomes your spiritual signal.
🌀 Perception Happens Through All the Senses
Perception is multi-sensory. It’s not just about what you see—it’s what you sense, believe, say, and feel.
Sight – Do you see problems, or possibilities?
Hearing – Do you listen for criticism or compassion?
Touch – Do you feel welcomed, or rejected by the world?
Smell & Taste – Are you present to joy and memory, or dulled by stress?
Intuition – That still, sacred voice that knows deeper truths.
Speech – What do you say after your “I AM”? What tone are you creating?
Your perception travels through every sensory channel—internal and external. It is shaped by how you were raised, what you believe, how you speak, and what you expect.
🧠 Transformation Begins in the Mind
The Apostle Paul wrote:
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”(Romans 12:2)
Transformation doesn’t start on the outside. It starts in the mind.
Your thoughts shape your emotions.
Your emotions guide your behaviors.
Your behaviors shape your life experience.
Renew your mind, and you change your world.
Paul’s insight echoes wisdom across spiritual and philosophical traditions. It reminds me of this powerful, often-quoted saying:
“Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” — Frank Outlaw
This quote reflects the same spiritual law Paul taught: transformation begins with mental clarity and intention. Thought is the seed, action is the fruit, and destiny is the harvest.
From Jesus to Buddha, Marcus Aurelius to Emerson, James Allen to Caroline Leaf, this truth is echoed again and again:
As within, so without. Renew the mind, reshape the life.
Jesus: “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45) What fills your heart and mind will eventually overflow into your life.
Buddha: “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” Thought is the birthplace of destiny.
Marcus Aurelius: “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” Your inner life paints your reality.
Emerson: “The ancestor of every action is a thought.” Even spontaneous moments begin in the mind.
James Allen: “A man is literally what he thinks.” Our character and world are shaped by thought.
Dr. Caroline Leaf: “You are not a victim of your biology. You are a co-creator of your reality through your thoughts.” Neuroscience confirms what Scripture has long said: you can renew your mind.r mind, you shift your perception—and therefore your reception.
Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Awareness is the beginning of transformation.
Neville Goddard: “Change your conception of yourself and you change your world.”
👁️🗨️ Faith Is Perceptive Power
Hebrews 11:1 tells us:
“Faith is the evidence of things not yet seen.”
That means: You perceive first, then receive. You believe in healing before it manifests. You believe in breakthrough before the walls fall. You hold evidence in your spirit, not in your hands.
That’s why Jesus often said, “Your faith has made you well.” It wasn’t just His power—it was theirs. Their faith—rooted in spiritual perception—became their reception.
🛡️ 2 Chronicles 20:17 – Take Your Position
This truth becomes even more powerful when we consider 2 Chronicles 20:17, where God speaks to a fearful people:
“You will not have to fight this battle. Take up your positions; stand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you… Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged… the Lord will be with you.”
The line that stands out to me is this: “Take up your positions; stand firm and see…”
This means that even when God is doing the work, we still have to take a position—mentally, spiritually, emotionally. We must be clear, not ambiguous in our faith. We must stand firm in our perception of what is possible.
Your position—your perception—prepares the ground for your reception.
🌟 Final Reflection: Guard Your “I AM”
So today, I honor my daughter for the phrase that reignited this reflection. And I pass it on to you.
Your perception is your reception.
It’s not just a mantra—it’s a spiritual law, a neuroscience truth, and a sacred invitation.
So, guard your perception. Speak your I AM with care. Stand firm in faith. And trust that what you believe in your spirit, you will one day hold in your hands.
for Sony Labou Tansi, Martial, Chaïdana, and all the unspeakables; for those who remember what was said and what was unsaid
What happens when words vanish from policy, from screens, from speech?
“Erasure” is a poetic meditation on censorship, identity, and memory—drawing inspiration from Sony Labou Tansi’s La Vie et demie, the Trump-era word bans, and the resistance found in storytelling. Through surreal imagery and postcolonial echoes, the poem explores the silencing of identities—and the defiant power of naming what was meant to be forgotten.
They said: Let’s keep things neutral. Let’s clean up the language. Let’s not say diversity— it makes some uncomfortable.
Let’s say merit. Let’s say unity. Let’s not say transgender. Let’s not say pregnant person. Let’s not say climate change so loudly. (It’s just weather, after all.)
And so, one by one, the words went missing— folded out of funding reports, redacted from federal websites, tucked behind quiet executive orders.
The list grew. Evidence-based. Science-based. Vulnerable. Equity. LGBTQ. Non-binary. Racial justice. Systemic racism. Female. Woman. Each word silenced carried with it a body, a memory, a need unmet.
Sony Labou Tansi once wrote: “They renamed everything. Even the dead.” In his world, absurdity was law, and survival meant remembering what you were told to forget.
Here, too, people remember— in classrooms, in poems, in quiet footnotes and fiery sermons, in stories passed between colleagues over coffee or courage.
We are not always loud. But we speak. Sometimes in metaphor. Sometimes in satire. Sometimes in comedy. Sometimes in laughter. Sometimes in carefully chosen words that slip through the cracks.
The words will come back. Soft at first. Then steady. Because language—like truth— always finds its way back to the mouth.
Last night, my son Ude and I found ourselves in a spirited conversation about immortality. His philosophy class had just discussed Socrates—calmly facing his death, curious rather than afraid. Would it be oblivion? Or a new life? We paused, weighing the gravity of those possibilities. But then our conversation took a turn: toward eternity. Toward heaven. Toward hell. Toward Sisyphus.
I told him I found beauty in Camus’ vision—that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because he has found meaning in the absurd task of rolling a boulder uphill forever, but because he chooses to embrace it anyway. That, I told my son, is my rebellion too.
Death as Curiosity
Socrates saw death not as a tragedy, but as the ultimate question mark. He imagined it as either the most peaceful sleep or a doorway to another kind of existence. His serenity came from detachment—but mine comes from immersion.
I am not afraid of death because I refuse to let fear dictate how I live. I want to live boldly, consciously, even when I am broke, tired, or uncertain.
The Joy in the Revolt – Camus and Sisyphus
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus gives us a man condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill forever. But Camus flips the script: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” The absurd does not break us—it offers us the chance to revolt.
Sisyphus is not a symbol of despair but of joyful defiance. His refusal to succumb to hopelessness is a model for all of us navigating the daily weight of survival in an existence that often appears meaningless.
What is the meaning of life when it’s filled with suffering, repetition, and banality? Should we still be happy living it? But isn’t that what heaven—or hell—might feel like too?
What If Sisyphus Went to Heaven?
Here’s where my son and I diverged. He believes that in eternity, God will grant us divine knowledge. I asked—then what? If we all possess divine wisdom, are we truly equal, or does a hierarchy still linger? Will we know in full or only in part? Will questions remain? Will desires?
Would some still long for drama, for choice, for something more than the endless praise of the one who sits on the throne? Will we still have free will?
Sisyphus exercised his free will—and was punished for it. His revolt stopped people from dying, disrupting the cycle of life. In the cosmos of order, rebellion is often mistaken for chaos.
In Revelation, the heavenly realm is filled with creatures covered in eyes, day and night proclaiming, “Holy, holy, holy.” It is an eternity of glory—but also of eternal surveillance, eternal memory, and eternal praise.
And what happens when we remember pain? Earthly joys? Desires unmet? Might eternity itself begin to unravel under the weight of our memory?
Jared M. August asks a similar question in his theological reflection: “What shall we remember?” He proposes that Revelation depicts the believer’s memory as preserved in eternity, reinforcing the importance of memory in all its forms—not just joy, but also pain, longing, and identity (The Gospel Coalition).
Memory, Worship Fatigue, and Monotony. Is Heaven another Absurd Existence?
Revelation promises that “they will serve him day and night in his temple” (Rev. 7:15). But what if service becomes suffocating?
If we cannot imagine Sisyphus happy in his earthly absurdity, how can we prepare ourselves to embrace eternity? What if, like Sisyphus, a soul wakes up one eternal morning and says, “There must be more than this”?
What if rebellion in eternity is not born of pride—but of boredom? What would happen to diversity, to desire, to difference?
Maybe eternity, like the boulder, is heavy. Maybe the truest revolt is to find joy—even there.
My Own Rebellion
I told my son that I am Sisyphus already. I rise each day under the weight of bills, deadlines, longing, and fatigue. And still—I revolt.
I choose life. I choose joy. Not because my situation is easy, but because my refusal to give up is sacred.
I am not waiting for eternity to be handed to me. I am making eternity now, each moment I resist despair. I do not look forward to a heaven or hell as a place— But I live them as states of being. One cannot exist without the other.
Questions for Eternity
So I ask:
What if Sisyphus reached heaven and still found the boulder there? Would he kneel in eternal worship, or would he smile, pick it up, and roll again—just because he could?
Can we imagine an eternity that includes rebellion, Not as sin, But as spirit?
