Beyond Babylon: What Jamaica Taught Me About Power

Plus how Birdsong Awakens Seeds (& what this means for us)

The woman in the immigration uniform at the U.S. port of entry in Houston looked me up and down. It was three in the morning. My hair was messy from having traveled for 24 hours. I wore my Peruvian sweater, no makeup.

She looked at my passport with stamps from Jamaica, Peru, Ecuador. I had been out of the country for seven months.

Her voice could freeze lava, her questioning so hostile that my words stumbled over themselves. I wondered if maybe I had done something wrong. Did someone sneak cocaine into my bag when I wasn’t looking?

Because she was making me out to be a bad person, because she was “the Authori-tay,” I felt I must really be a Bad Person. Like when the pastor at church tells you to ask forgiveness for your sins, and you’re not really sure what you did wrong, but you know you must have done something wrong, because he talks to God, and God would know.

That’s when the lady got excited and started yelling, almost like she was trying to get me to slip up. I wondered if they might detain me, even though, as far as I knew, I had done nothing wrong and was a bona fide US citizen, born and raised, and as white as paper (sadly).

Vintage Fantasy Mag

Confronting Babylon’s Power

I had been living in Kingston, Jamaica, where I fell in love with a Jamaican dancehall reggae rapper who took me deep into the heart of the dancehall world. During that time, I learned about what the Rastafari call “Babylon,” the systemic, institutional oppression. The system, or “shitstem,” as Peter Tosh called it. The government, the police.

The Rastas, of course, talk about burning down Babylon. Before we widely used the words colonization and capitalism, before I learned about the capitalist-industrial complex and heard Clarissa Mansfield call it the “imperial core,” I called it Babylon.

I watched how Babylon rudely treated my friends, even children. Like the time the police took some kids’ bikes, then threw the boys in the back of the patrol car after repeatedly slamming one kid’s leg in the door. I chanted down Babylon with the best of them, even though as a white woman, I probably looked like Babylon.

I’ve been thinking about Babylon as I watch individuals who are here in the US legally on visas and green cards being essentially disappeared just because they criticized American policies.

Then I was reading about how even American citizens are having their phones, iPads, and computers searched through in border areas, where apparently your constitutional rights are a little more fuzzy. All of this points to a larger pattern, steering me towards the abyss of, “Dios mio, when are they coming for all of us?”

Should I stop posting stories on Instagram? Do I stop writing about politics on Substack? Of course, maybe these were the wrong questions. Do we cancel our trip to Mexico?

Babylon earns its power through intimidation, violence, force, and domination. But this is not true power, I learned while living in Kingston.

Power was what my boyfriend, whom they called Ninja, taught me: earning respect and love from the people on the street. “If you don't have, I don't have,” he would say. He had nothing, and still he shared everything he had. Everyone loved him, did him favors without asking—this guy who didn't even graduate from high school and spoke only Jamaican Patwah and no English.

“True power comes from the ground up,” he taught me, with the people in community. This is the power that is eternal. When Babylon dies, it's dead. It does not go on living. This is what I believe the Bible means when it says, “It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.” Babylon's riches are empty. But true power, of love and respect, the humble power of the people, goes on forever.

While living in the Yucatán, Mexico, in 1997, my Mayan professor, Profe Juan, pointed out how Mexican society desired to emulate its northern neighbor. “They believe that Western modernity is ‘progress,’” he said. Expansion, development, and accumulation of material wealth were considered “progress.”

But they are wrong, Profe Juan told me, because this is not true wealth. “The ‘poorest’ people in Mexico, the ones living in the villages, living in the traditional ways, are the happiest,” he said.

Profe Juan believed Mexico was going through “an identity crisis” because a society founded on violence (i.e., colonization) can only beget violence. “It’s hard to know what to think when your forefathers raped your mothers and mother earth,” he said. The United States is, of course, no different.

Seeds of Change

Recently, I learned that birdsong awakens the seeds under the Earth. The famous mystic Rudolph Steiner has said that for seeds, plants, and trees to grow, birdsong is essential.

Rudolph Steiner also posited that the sowing of seeds should be timed around a full moon and maybe even carried out under the moon's light. The Mayans, who had no connection to Steiner, also understood that pumpkin, zucchini, melon, and watermelon must be planted on the full moon or they won’t seed. Palm trees have to be cut on a new moon. Corn must be harvested on a full moon. On a full moon, Mayan parents don’t work so they can work on making babies.

You can call it woo, but the science of energetic vibrations in alignment with the cosmos has been documented and replicated in Indigenous cultures around the world. It’s just a matter of time before Western science catches up.

Jacqueline Tingey

Singing ourselves awake, rising in power

This Saturday, April 5, is a nationwide Hands-Off! protest. We will be holding our own here on the steps of the Capitol in Juneau. We will unite power and love, and sing like birds, awakening the seeds in the ground, awakening the seeds in all of us.

These protests are happening all over the United States. You can find one near you here.

Some people say I can’t make much of a difference, that I should focus on trying to control what I can control. But we have more power than we think. We can all speak out. And we should.

I’m going to keep using my privilege to speak up for people who can’t— people like Kilmar Obrego Garcia, who was in the U.S. legally and detained while picking up his autistic nonverbal child from school, then sent to El Salvador’s Torture Prison “due to an administrative mistake.”

I’m going to speak up for people like my Venezuelan friend, who was thrown into a “hielera” (ice box) for three months for being undocumented, got very sick, and called asking me for money just so he could buy some soup.

Dustin West, a white American citizen, who plainclothes ICE agents detained for trying to intervene in an ICE abduction, writes:

“White people MUST stand in the way of fascism at every turn. We MUST put our bodies and our privilege on the line. We MUST be wrenches in the gears of this horrible machine we helped create. We don’t have much time left to stop irreversible and irreparable harm from being done to untold millions here and across the world.”

I’m going to close with the words of legal scholar and professor Daniel Kanstroom, who was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday:

“My recommendation is to understand that while this particular moment is extremely fraught and, for many people, extremely terrifying, we have seen moments like this in U.S. history before, and they tend to inspire great solidarity and great forms of activism and resistance, which ultimately have led to legal reforms, important court decisions and a greater understanding of the rights of all of us.”

Let's sing together and rise in power.

With love, Summer

Gustav Klimt

Nikita Gill