ESSOESS is the work of Shaniqué Olivia Small, a writer, oracle, and cultural researcher exploring African and Caribbean spiritual knowledge systems, diasporic memory, and the living afterlives of ancestral practice.
Through writing, intuitive inquiry, and research-led visual exploration, ESSOESS examines how spiritual traditions survive colonial rupture, migrate across generations, and reappear—often transformed—within contemporary culture.
ESSOESS
ESSOESS
Writer • Oracle • Visionary •
Writer • Oracle • Visionary •
Current work includes essays, spiritual practice, and a conceptual documentary research project tracing suppressed spiritual histories and their contemporary reconfigurations across the Black diaspora.
What This Work Is Concerned With
The work of ESSOESS sits at the intersection of spirituality, history, and lived experience. It asks how African-derived cosmologies endured displacement, how they were altered or obscured through colonial and missionary intervention, and how they continue to shape identity, intimacy, and meaning today.
This is work rooted in ethical inquiry, cultural accountability, and respect for spiritual knowledge as something lived, protected, and relational—not extracted or aestheticised.
ESSOESS is an evolving body of work grounded in memory, inquiry, and spiritual intelligence.