A Calling: I don’t call it “god”
In the last several months, I’ve felt myself closer to the ancestors and elders like Huey, James Baldwin, Marsha P. Johnson, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Kwame Ture, Nat Turner, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Stanley Tookie Williams, Roxane Gay, and many more.
I’ve felt them closer to me not only because of how much of their speeches and writings I have gleaned their insights and political consciousnesses from, but also the parallels of the ongoing struggles in which I have endured—experienced—fought through, highlights a spiritual testament to my own strength.
As of mid-November of last year, I had experienced what I believed to be a heart attack after trying to smoke a marijuana joint. Minutes after I made my way upstairs to my house, I felt as though I were unable to stand. My hands were trembling—I could hear my heart beating loudly. Shortly after having these confirmed suspicions, I reached out to my roommate to contact EMS. My roommate asked if there were anyone that I needed to reach out to and I told him to reach out to my close friends—my chosen family—my 4Ls.
After ten minutes, these two white men arrived. They asked me what happened that led up to this occurrence and I explained to them that I was halfway through smoking a joint. They asked me how much weed I smoked a day. I used to smoke three to four joints or blunts a day. They were loosely shocked and explained to me that what I was experiencing was an anxiety attack.
If it were the case that I was having a heart attack, they would’ve had me on the stretcher on the way to the hospital. Even with that clarification, I wasn’t really feeling any less apprehensive — distraught, but rather, sad and frustrated that I felt in that moment, that I believed that I was going to die. Everything up until that moment, I thought,
“This is it, huh? The end of my life?”
I didn’t want this occurrence to be a matter of being told that “I was fine,” and I was already aware that if I chose to go to the hospital, there were a possibility that I was going to be charged a homicidal amount of money that I could not only afford, but money that I did not have.
They gave me some device to help supplement by breathing. While I was taking the time to breathe and fully regain consciousness, I took my chances and asked these men to take me to the nearest hospital to check in and see what a possible diagnosis was. I don’t recall what hospital it was, but the space had a vaguely eerie feeling to it. The main lobby was crowded with people seated across each other. Most of the nurses appeared expressionless, thoughtlessly taking phone calls. Some, if not just about every person who came through the door were victims of violence, all of which leads back to the source: the colonial settler, white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal establishment no doubt.
I was sitting two to three seats away from these racist, murderous pigs talking at a Black woman who was hunched up in a wheelchair who appeared to be speaking incoherently at length in spurts — logorrhea — I believe, is what clinicians called it. A few young folk seated to the left and right of me waited to be helped, and yet all I could hear was nothing but the uncomfortable silence of the enclosed hallways, phones ringing, clerks muttering, eyes periodically moving, just to have a place to sit above their bottom eyelids.
At a certain point, a Black woman calls my name and briefly asked me what my situation was. I told her I was just smoking too much. Within a few minutes, she picked up that I was Haitian. My guess was from her having read out my last name: Derilus, which I eventually suspected was most likely because the name is of French origin. Just about every Haitian who has come into this world doesn’t have an aboriginal name. We will never forgive nor forget the Eurowestern imperialists for their generational wrongdoings. Just from the inspiriting way this nurse spoke to me—made me feel a presence of comfort—only for a moment.
I cried.
As I cried, the woman told me that I was going to be okay. I let these tears droop down my face in shame and at the same time, relief. I said to her—for myself, that I wasn’t going to smoke anymore. After finishing some paperwork, she gave it to me and it read, Cannabis Use Disorder. I took the symptoms of the disorder like a grain of salt though.
Sometimes, I do tend to have hypochondriacal reactions to certain things my body is experiencing and often tend to assume that the adverse reactions I may be having are worse than they are. After having read symptoms such as:
— “using more marijuana than intended”
— “continuing to use marijuana despite physical or psychological problems”
and shit like
— “needing to use more marijuana to get the same high,”
they were already reinforcing shit that I already knew I was doing, but I didn’t want to openly admit this to anyone because I was scared of judgement. A part of me didn’t care because to some extent, I didn’t really care about being alive.
Moments before I was about to leave, my friends came to get me and bring me home. That trip home was just reflection. I didn’t let myself wallow in the shame of how long I had been smoking or how much money I spent toward smoking; I set out to rectify the mistakes I made. Within a few weeks time, I had experienced on-and-off periods of withdrawal from having not smoked. Having done a full-180 and stopped smoking was a call for me to act—to make a change.
Funny enough, I decided to give away my all my bongs, my glass pipes, and other weed paraphernalia to a few strangers I met at a Black-owned dispensary. The dispensary was having an official opening — on a Saturday I believe it was — and this was before I abruptly stopped smoking for the long term. I also forgot the opening was happening that day.
After having that near death experience, I came to many realizations and the one that made itself known above the rest of them was that I wanted to live. I want to live.
I want to live a long, fulfilled life.
I had been smoking weed since my midpoint as an undergraduate student at SUNY New Paltz. The first time I smoked weed was in high school because of peer pressure. For a long time, I loved weed. I loved the smell of it. I loved the varieties of strains that existed. The sativas. The indicas. The hybrids. I loved them so much so that I made a habit of spending a lot of money on weed—when the government was providing unemployment insurance and giving people $700 a week, most of that money went toward weed—blunt wraps, lighters, bongs—just about every weekend.
There came a period in time where I was not only smoking weed because of these sensations I was getting and enjoying, but also in my mind, being as high as I wanted to be was as close of an equivalent to being dead—like wanting to daydream myself away from reality and the weed was supplementing that feeling of nothingness—a temporary absence of misery from this world. Capital STEEZ’s verse depicted my feelings best in PRO ERA’s song, “Run or Fly”:
I call it astromagentum, I woke up in a dream state
This life may seem great, but it ain’t
It ain’t the first time I seen gray
With more higrade purple rain for the pain
I said I hate to complain
But lately, all I see is days are the same
The ways that it strays can persuade me to change
But I blame it on the game cause it made me this way
In my song, Nimbus, I’ve also referenced this feeling:
Flying nimbus, take me away
On cloud Infinitum, they really can’t find him
I’ve had these feelings since I was a teenager, living under my abusive mother and father. In an attempt to escape this, I was living under my abusive aunt. In both cases, it was until I manifested in my mind that I wasn’t going to live under them forever. I didn’t know how, when, or where, but the thought of escape—the thought of freedom, was a leap of faith. I have two aunts—Fifi and Titine. When I was a teenager—just about a young adult, eighteen, I remember saying that I couldn’t wait until I was on my own and Titine dismissively remarked to me, scoffing, with a condescending tone,
Where are you going to go?
as if she believed that I didn’t know what I was talking about—as if I wasn’t to be taken seriously about that—as if what I was saying wasn’t valid. Yet, when I look back at that self, I think to myself, not having a solidified plan to leave my mother’s house wasn’t the point. It was to get away from her. Get away from my father. Get away from my aunts. Get away from all of them—to never look back because the truth was that they didn’t have the capacity to love me as I was becoming—resisting familial authoritarian control—resisting infantilization—resisting their rigid expectations of me, and for a long time, I blamed myself for foolishly trying to gain their love—a love that was never really there. Black feminist and scholar bell hooks speaks to the incongruity of love and abuse existing together in her poignant text, All About Love:
When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.
The last time I attempted that was shortly after I graduated with a Master’s Degree in English at SUNY New Paltz in May 2020. I vowed to myself that I wasn’t going to invite them to my graduation because it wouldn’t have felt like I was reveling in my own milestones and accomplishments—but rather, their expectations that they could fucking cross off on a checklist that prompted them to ask me when I was seeking employment.
I wanted them to genuinely proud of me, but they never could be—only the accomplishments independent of the person who worked rigorously to attain them. Interestingly enough, because the COVID-19 pandemic was exacerbating, the formal invite to graduation was canceled and virtual graduation was in place. Of course, I didn’t attend that. I took my academic accolades and reclaimed them for myself—all of those which I earned in retrospect until after graduating from graduate school.
Fast-forwarding to 2023, I’ve been living in Brooklyn for about three years now and am faced off against the scumlord in an ongoing battle for my housing rights. I’m five to six months behind in rent. I live with two other roommates. The rent is $2100 and each of us have to pay $700.00 a month. The scumlord let me off with a “well-intentioned” warning to my roomates saying that they will lose the rights to renew the lease if this money is not paid to them. One would think that in an apartment of three people, there would be a sense of camaraderie between one another. Unfortunately, this has not been the case with my roommates.
Needless to say, there are a lot of people in NYC—better yet the world, who are indoctrinated to the ideals of this colonial settler, white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist society—many of whom are unaware of being conscious of consciousness itself, and many who are aware, and still choose the side of malice and greed. One of them, has helped me by reaching out to EMS to ensure I was in the clear; however, I do not owe him grace for doing the bare minimum.
As humans—as sentient beings—as social creatures, we are supposed to help one another. There are no material rewards for aiding—supporting—saving life. There is only an advancement to the greater collective purpose of changing the world. In essence, you are either for life, or you are anti-life. Though it’s not been my responsibility to change the minds of everyone I encounter, I won’t allow myself to be disrespected, especially not with lies about the way in which the world has been constructed to work against Black people; and it is excruciatingly depressing because my roommates are also Black, and they went so far as to use the exploitative power of the scumlord against me to threaten eviction—to displace me. Not only has the landlord been sending me passive-aggressive texts, demanding that I self-evict, they have my roommates under their oppressive control. As a result, this has compelled them to act as overseers—insinuating that they would be continuing the lease without me.
I knew that my roommates were trying to assert an authority that they did not have. I knew that they were going to try to gaslight me into thinking I was the one who was in the wrong. I felt it more wrong—inhumane even, to not communicate to me with open arms—yet, their gaslighting, victim blaming, their lack of even keeping up to date with cleaning the house—while living with other people, is contradictive; it is contradictive for the reason that one of them is not even here, and the other roommate, who lives in his room for the majority of almost every day, is toxic—is controlling. These two only use this space for refuge rather than as a space in which three people can share a home in the most humane way possible. And since September of last year, I have built up the courage to set boundaries—to stand up to them both—and the scumlord, to assert that I will not be allowing them or anyone to displace me. I no longer run away for fear of what bullshit I would have to deal with. In the last few months, I have become a member of the Brooklyn Eviction Defense collective:
Brooklyn Eviction Defense is an autonomous union of tenant associations & organized-tenants combatting dispossessory conditions like landlord harassment, disrepair, rising rent, and threats of eviction, by building working class institutions of power. We are not a non-profit. We do not wish to reform the landlord-tenant relationship; we seek to abolish it.
Including the support and solidarity of this community and my friends and supporters, I am here to stay. I’ve built up the courage to set boundaries—to stand up to both of my roommates—and the scumlord, to assert that I will not be allowing them to assume any type of so-called authority that would allow them to think that they could displace me. I no longer run away for fear of what bullshit I would have to deal with. I am here to stay.
Everything I have said here, speaks to a spiritual testament to why I was born Haitian. For me, it’s important to realize that none of these things that I have experienced—endured—fought through, happened in some kind of a vacuum. These occurrences didn’t happen because I was being punished by some monotheistic or polytheistic deity. They didn’t happen with this deluded idea that what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. I gradually began to believe these occurrences happened because they are in part of the collective struggle for better. The indirect parallels that I have thought about have had to do with the periods of repression and levels of uncomfortability that have come with thought—which has built up into resistance in instances such as the Haitian Revolution itself, where Malcolm X discusses the sociopolitical differences between the Field Negro and the House Negro in his Message to the Grassroots:
When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate. Let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where are we going?” He’d say, “Anyplace is better than here.”
Anyplace is better than here… I thought to myself, this was the same thought I had when I was living at my mother’s house when I was a teenager. Within several years time, I manifested that same sentiment into reality. The autocratic rule that the parents place their child under—the household, which is the site of control—of possession—of harm—of inner and corporeal annihilation of the child—parallels that of the enslaved African doing what is necessary for them to escape enslavement by European settlers.
Bertrhude Albert, educator and co-founder of P4H Global (Projects for Haiti), made a powerful statement a few days ago about Haitian people’s relationship to God and purpose. She stated:
God made you Haitian on purpose. Discover that purpose because Haiti’s future development depends on it.
I felt obligated to respond because I felt like I was a point in my life where in some way, I agreed with her sentiment. I said to her that the feeling was mutual and that I wasn’t quick to call it god, but throughout these several months of reflection, I’ve felt as though there was a spiritual or divine reason for being born Haitian. Bertrude commented to me with a question,
My brother, any thoughts on what your purpose is? I’m interested to know. And you’re right, not everyone will see it as God but I’m glad we are still on the same page that you were made Haitian for a reason. You’re important and needed.
My response to Bertrude:
Honestly, for the longest time I didn’t know or believe what I was ever going to find what my purpose was. I was hung up on the idea that purpose was an isolated, individualist endeavor and it was about a year or so ago that I began to realize that purpose is and can be individual and collective (in itself. For my birthday last year in mid-November, close friends of mine—chosen family members, had given me a birthday card and in one of the messages, they said to me that I am my revolutionary ancestors incarnate. And that resonated with me a lot. I have been looking to become reawakened in not only learning about Haitian history—but our history—how I am a living testament to said history despite having been born in the United States.
The revolutionary energy and verve of my people has further revealed itself to me the closer I have become familiar with its sociohistorical significance—the energies that have manifested in 1804, have too, manifested in 1991, the day of my birth. They are here with me now and always—growing.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Brooklyn, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.
