Kayla Reece of Guyana -Destigmatising spiritual practises
Vodou, Obeah, witchcraft…these things have developed a negative connotation from the colonial era that still remains today. Persons who dabble in spiritual practices that veer outside of the realm of what is considered “normal” often have their belief systems stigmatised against. One such person is Kayla Rebecca Reece, a self-proclaimed witch who through her tarot collective, Totowosu has been contributing toward the destigmatisation of the practice. Loop Caribbean recently met up with Kayla to gain a better understanding of her spiritual practises and what that means in an environment that is against it.
My involvement with Tarot reading came about long before I was born, I was not even a thought in anyone’s head. My eldest sister, who is seventeen years my senior, got a deck when she was around fifteen years old. Much later, when my sister had already completed her first degree at UG, I was perhaps six or seven years old and used to love hanging out in the kitchen when my sisters’ had their friends over. They would drink rum and coke, smoke Bristols, play dominoes and cards and my sister would whip out the Tarot deck at some point in the night and read people. I loved the whole scene, I thought it was the baddest thing, and I felt an immediate affinity with it. I knew then it was something I would do. My sister gave me my first deck when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, but when I was sixteen, she gave me her original deck that she got when she was fifteen, and that she used on those warm GT nights in the kitchen. It’s a most cherished possession.
Nothing. Of course, I know a whole lot more now than before, and I believe in being a constant student of one’s craft, but I don’t wish I knew anything earlier. There’s really nothing about my Tarot journey that I would change.
Totowosu is an Indigenous Wai Wai* word that I came across in a local anthropological journal in Georgetown as a teenager. The noun stem Toto refers to a human being or person; wosu is the gendered construction for female & is used as a suffix. Totowosu literally translates to female person, or in one word: woman. It struck a chord with me on many levels, not simply as a word, but as a concept. I think it spoke to my inherent feminism. I grew up in a woman majority family, but also in an environment and larger world where multiple acts of violence are committed against women with impunity, while personally experiencing daily schoolyard sexism and anti-blackness. I can’t explain it, but Totowosu stood out to me as a way or path to do woman-centred work, or have woman-centred conversations. Even as a teen I felt, if not knew, that it was a vessel or container I could borrow to explore and express things about being a girl and a woman, from my point of view. I held onto this for a long time, working up the courage to see what it would become. When I was 19, I was a sophomore in college abroad, and I thought about starting a blog entitled Totowosu where I would write about my own experiences as a Guyanese woman in NYC, but also reach out to other girls and women I met in the diaspora and storytell with them on the blog. Unfortunately, I didn’t listen to that pressing, knowing voice – which I learned was my intuition – and I wasted a lot of time being in self-doubt. Years! All the while I was still studying and reading tarot for myself and very close friends, but ultimately the two projects Towosu, a vessel carrying my Afro-Indigenous diasporic feminisms, and tarot didn’t come together in my mind for several more years.
Honestly, I think my challenges have been few because I flew under the radar. I think as a child my quirks around collecting rocks, whispering incantations, and buying spell books on holiday were seen as play by family, and just plain weird by my friends, laughable, ignorable. When I was in college in New York, my craft was very personal, and I only read for friends when they’d come over to lime, like my sister did before me. When I lived in Jamaica (a very god-fearing, church-going nation) and the topic came up, I received a mixed bag of responses. I’ve been called an Obeah Woman in many different tones, in jest, in suspicion, in recognition and acceptance; and I take it all as a compliment, as an affirmation. I think a deep dive into the because in the Caribbean we are so wealthy with Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions. We didn’t learn about it in school, a book may not have been bound and handed to us to ‘learn’ but it has survived through oral tradition and a lot has been bottled as myth, meanings and significance twisted along the way. But at the end of day, everybody at home knows what “casting lots” or “drawing lots” is or means, whether you read it in the bible or seen it done at your kitchen table; it is a type of divination, replicated in some way in umpteen spiritual traditions.
Undoubtedly, the long-reaching effects of colonisation and the murderous Christian mission that tried to engulf the whole world. Really, this is a dissertation-level question, and one worth writing! We have to unlearn so much, so much of what we have been taught and socialised to believe over generations. So much of what we consider inherent to our Caribbean Christian traditions were drilled into our ancestors by the European coloniser who insisted African and Indigenous people were not fully human, were demonic, or soulless and needed to be “converted” to master’s religion so that they can be “saved”, but also serve and ultimately increase the coloniser’s wealth. There are countless examples from across the region, English, Spanish, French or Portuguese speaking peoples, of much older spiritual systems and practices either outright rejecting erasure or melting and mixing into forced organised religion during and after periods of colonisation; Vodou is an example of the former, and Santeria an example of the latter.
Honestly, I don’t respond. I’ve given up the labour of convincing and trying to educate people about this. At first I used to respond by uncoupling devil worship and witchcraft, they have nothing to do with each other, and in fact, a case in the defence and protection of witchcraft needs to be made. That’s another piece, but personally, I view and use Tarot as a therapeutic storytelling tool for myself, my clients and our communities. I believe that storytelling is both a divine and human right which activates our intuitions while building community knowledge & solidarity. Tarot, though certainly a spiritual tool, is also a pretty practical part of my storytelling practices, my feminism and my way of living a more liberated life. I do also identify as a witch, so Tarot is part of my witchcraft, meaning one of the many tools and practices that I use for intuition building, self-empowerment and being a compassionate member of society.
Related posts:
East African secondary school teaches freedom in Christ
South African Pastor Who Died In 2021 Finally Buried After Failing To Resurrect
These Photographs of Spirituality in America Will Speak to Your Soul | At the Smithsonian
African Continental Assembly: Delegates highlight inclusiveness of synodal process
Journey to the stars: The moon and template for presenting African cultural astronomy
The unequal state of the African Guyanese community is grounded mainly in impositions and systemic c...
--CopyRights: https://heruinterface.com/kayla-reece-of-guyana-destigmatising-spiritual-practises/
Leave a Reply