Essays

ESSOESS ESSOESS

Redemption Song

An exploration of the afterlife of ancestral sound, Redemption Song explores the spiritual legacy encoded in music, memory, and resistance. It’s instruction. A portal through which song becomes strategy, and remembering becomes action.

You don't erase a people by burning their books. Just silence their elders and teach the smoke like gospel.

Truth that remembers its source does not beg for volume. Redemption Song was Marley’s psalm of resistance—an acoustic transmission for the colonized, the censored, the spiritually severed.

When Marley asked, “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”, he wasn’t searching for sympathy. He was indicting systems. Naming what the archive refuses to say out loud: that colonial powers didn’t just enslave bodies—they executed prophets. They burned the libraries carried in tongues. They outlawed the keepers of creation. The griots, the priestesses, the herbalists, the water diviners, the ones who knew the timing of storms by the sway of trees—all labeled witch, savage, pagan, threat.

This is historical record wrapped in breath.
Political memory scored in melody.

Marley’s lyrics enter the tradition of spiritual resistance that includes Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who used coded songs to lead her people to freedom. It includes Fannie Lou Hamer, who said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It includes poets like Lucille Clifton, who wrote, “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life?” All of them carried language that didn’t just name pain—it preserved a pulse.

Colonialism didn’t just break backs. It ruptured frequency.
It disrupted the line of spiritual succession. And in its place, it installed pulpits and protocols, borders and broadcast licenses, turning divine instruction into legal liability.

Bob Marley was not spared. He was surveilled. He was almost assassinated. He died with cancer in his toe, but the infection was in the air around him. The systems that later sold his face on T-shirts once tried to silence the very messages now played in yoga studios and beachfront cafés. This is what theorist Christina Sharpe calls “the afterlife of property”—where even the dead can be commodified, where the rebel can be sold as aesthetic once his truth becomes inconvenient.

But Marley’s voice refused conversion.

In Redemption Song, he did not chant down Babylon with a full band. He stripped everything away. One voice. One guitar. A return to the unaccompanied call—ancestral in function, instructional in purpose.

To sing is to remember.
To sing while exiled is to refuse the terms of forgetting.

And that’s what prophets do.
They don’t predict.
They remind.

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Our first songs tuned the body to the land. They taught us when to move, how to plant, where to pray.

Before captivity, before borders, before paper and pulpit, there were tones—held in breath, passed through bone, anchored in ceremony. Our ancestors did not sing to be heard. They sang to remember. To name the stars. To calm the storms. To teach the babies how to enter the world and teach the dying how to leave it. Song was creation before it was category.

Across the continent and throughout the diaspora, sound functioned as a coded archive. The Yoruba etched proverbs into skin. The Igbo named their children like poems. The Akan used talking drums to send messages across miles without ever touching ink. In the Americas, Indigenous nations turned every river bend into melody, mapping terrain through echo and rhythm. This was data. Doctrine. Direction.

Marley stood inside a tradition of sound as strategy—where melody wasn’t style, but instruction.

When he sang “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,” he didn’t cite the system. He confronted it. He was channeling Marcus Garvey, yes—but also the elders who knew how to encode instruction into breath. Marley didn’t just sing. He invoked. He remembered through vibration what had been redacted in print.

Audre Lorde once wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Our ancestors knew this long before English translation. That’s why they didn’t wait for permission. They tuned their mouths to the pitch of land and blood and wind and bone. They passed down worlds without paper, without podium. This was curriculum. Sound as method. Song as map.

Even under surveillance, even in chains, the singing didn’t stop. It shapeshifted.

The Negro spiritual wasn’t a song of submission. It was encrypted cartography. Wade in the Water meant, move now. Swing Low meant, hold steady. The plantation heard praise. The people heard escape.

This is the lineage Marley stood inside when he picked up that guitar and stripped away the noise. In Redemption Song, he returns to the unaccompanied voice—the one before production, before policy, before performance.

This is sound, returned to its original function.

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The system is fluent in appropriation. It knows how to turn resistance into retail, prophets into playlists, and liberation into lifestyle branding.

There was a time when the messages inside Redemption Song got people watched, fired, exiled, killed. Now they play softly in boutique hotel lobbies while candles flicker and eucalyptus burns. The industry that once feared Marley now sells him in box sets. The same powers that silenced his teachers, demonized his symbols, and raided his people’s homes now license his face for fragrance, headphones, and festivals.
It’s cultural laundering in real time—cleansing the message while selling the messenger.

Marley sang of mental emancipation.
The market responded with merchandising.

The clarity in his voice—once forged in survival and resistance—has been diluted into mood. Aestheticized. Neutralized. What once carried ancestral instruction is now sliced into twenty-second samples, drained of consequence, and sold as ambient culture.

You don’t have to silence the prophets if you can sell them first.

Scholar bell hooks warned us: “The commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption where desire is focused on the Other, but only so long as the Other can be commodified.” That’s why dreadlocks are policed in school, but praised on runways. That’s why African spirituality is feared when it’s practiced in ritual, but adored when it’s staged for content. That’s why prophetic Blackness is safe only once it’s been archived, packaged, and stripped of the fire that made it “dangerous.”

And still—some things refuse translation.

He wasn’t performing style—he was preserving signal. And even stripped down to one guitar, Redemption Song still refuses dilution. The tremble. The breath. The conviction behind each string. It resists commodification not because it is immune to consumption, but because it lives in a different register.

You can sample the sound, but you can’t sell the source.
You can remix the rhythm, but you can’t own the root.

Redemption, in its truest form, will never be marketable. It is too unruly. Too divine. Too ancestral. Too alive.

As philosopher Fred Moten writes, this is “the resistance of the object.” Even when commodified, some truths retain their refusal. They leak. They disturb. They disobey the terms of the transaction.

That’s the paradox we sit inside now:
The song plays everywhere—yet so few are listening.

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Some songs never fade. They shape the air until someone with ears to hear breathes them back to life.
A tuning fork for memory. A call to right relation.

To hear Marley now is to recognize the song didn’t age—it aged us.
It found us in moments when we were still uncertain, still searching, still silent—and offered us not answers, but agency.

Because the work of redemption was never finished. It was always ours to continue.

The line “None but ourselves can free our minds” is the assignment.

Ancestral instruction doesn’t rest in melody. It moves through embodiment. Through the daily disciplines of remembrance: what we eat, how we speak, how we gather, what we rebuild. It reminds us that our inheritance is not just endurance—it’s design. Our task is not just to awaken—but to act.

Scholar and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter reminds us that, “What it means to be human is no longer self-evident.” In a world of dislocation, automation, and curated disconnection, Marley’s voice becomes a spiritual benchmark—a return to the real. A reminder that freedom is not conceptual. It’s relational. Embodied. Rooted in how we see one another, how we carry the wisdom of those who walked before, and how we plant it forward.

This is the work now.
To build a future from the wisdom kept alive beneath the ash.

Because Redemption Song continues every time we use our voice with intention. Every time we protect the story of where we come from. Every time we teach the children to recognize a song not just by melody, but by meaning.

It is one thing to hear the song.
It is another to live it.

And still—Marley asks us:
Won’t you help to sing… these songs of freedom?”

What he left behind is a living map—etched in melody, encoded in song. A quiet instruction. A portal we are still learning how to walk through.

The song is not over.
It’s waiting for your answer.

One love, ESS xo

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References

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Buried in Our Blood

This editorial is a love letter for the displaced, the gifted, and the spiritually dislocated. Buried in Our Blood explores the psychic and cellular memories carried by the African diaspora—how past lives, ancestral trauma, and spiritual technologies shape who we are and the futures we’re building. It is a reclamation of power through embodied truth.

There are things the body knows that the mind can’t name. A tension passed down like heirloom silver, polished and hidden. The way some of us flinch at blessings. The way others cry during sex and don’t know why. Memory does not end at the brain. It lodges in bone. In blood. In the invisible.

I did have mentorship along the way—guides who nurtured my gifts, who saw what I carried before I could name it. Their presence mattered. But I didn’t learn who I was through ceremony or curriculum. I learned it in the in-between—between sleep and waking, between ache and intuition. Between knowing something without proof and proof that never felt like truth.

No one tells you how violent forgetting can be. Especially when it’s not your choice. Especially when you are praised for your proximity to erasure.

I grew up watching women in church speak in tongues and fall to their knees, then walk out into a world that dismissed their magic. I learned to read energies before I learned to read books. I could hear things others called coincidence. Feel things they dismissed as paranoia. For a long time, I said nothing. Until silence began to rot inside me.

According to epigenetic studies, trauma doesn’t just shape behavior—it modifies biology. Descendants of displacement often carry molecular echoes of pain they never experienced firsthand. Scientists call it transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. But my grandmother would say, “di dead nuh dun talk. Is we who nuh listen.”

In the Western world, we’re taught that time moves in a line. But I never moved that way. My life has always spiraled—looping through languages I’ve never studied, visions I never summoned. What some call past lives, I’ve always experienced as parallel truths. I see the soul as an archive—layered, encrypted, remembering.

And some of us are born with the keys.

This gift—this responsibility—isn’t about spectacle. It’s about attunement. I don’t perform for approval. I listen. To what’s buried. To what never had the words. To the sharp pulse beneath someone’s shoulder blade that doesn’t belong to this lifetime. I trace their ache like a cartographer, through bloodlines and belief systems, to the original fracture.

And almost always, I find that what binds us is older than we think.

Before the chains. Before the ships. Before the shame. We mapped the stars. We built libraries from stone. We ruled kingdoms with our tongues and our hands. What I carry is not just memory—it is infrastructure. A soul-deep scaffolding of who we’ve been and what we still are.

Remembrance is a technology. It builds. It reconnects. It repairs.

To remember is to re-enter the contract that predates empire, scripture, and the linearity of Western time. A covenant encoded not in doctrine but in vibration. It is a return not to myth, but to method—systems of knowing and being that existed long before they were renamed, reframed, or erased. Belonging is not a destination. It is a frequency. Remembrance here is not a reaction—it is a recalibration. A reactivation of codes buried beneath conquest, now rising like heat through the body of the diaspora.

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Some people inherit money. Others inherit fear.

But many of us—especially those severed from Source—inherit beliefs. Not consciously, not in language, but in sensation. We inherit shame dressed up as humility. Fear packaged as obedience. Scarcity mistaken for realism. We wear these beliefs like hand-me-downs, never questioning whether they were tailored for us in the first place.

And often, they weren’t. They were sewn by other lifetimes. Other bloodlines. Other traumas we were born into without context or consent.

I began to understand this not through theory, but through my practice. I’d touch a client’s hand and feel a heaviness in their chest that didn’t belong to them—or hear a phrase they always repeated that wasn’t theirs. “I have to do it all myself.” “It’s not safe to be seen.” “Love always hurts.” When I followed the thread, it often unraveled back through generations, or veered into lives they didn’t consciously remember—but that their soul never forgot.

Science is still catching up. In her groundbreaking book, The Ancestor Syndrome by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, she describes what she calls the anniversary syndrome—the phenomenon where descendants unconsciously repeat emotional experiences, illnesses, or relational patterns on the same dates or life stages as their ancestors. These repetitions are not random. They are echoes. A kind of memory that survives without narrative—embedded in cycles, symptoms, and unspoken grief.

But there are truths that even science cannot yet quantify. This is where spiritual technology enters—not as a replacement for evidence, but as a parallel system of knowing. Modalities like past life regression, energy clearing, ancestral DNA repair, and intuitive mapping are not mystical indulgences. They are instruments. They help us locate what memory cannot verbalize. They give shape to the invisible.

I’ve seen people free themselves from lifetimes of unworthiness by naming the exact moment—three lifetimes ago—when they vowed never to speak again. I’ve witnessed women break generational patterns of betrayal by confronting an ancestral contract made during enslavement. These are energetic root systems—alive, layered, and responsive. And when we access them, we don’t just change our lives—we alter the instructions passed down through blood and energy.

In a world addicted to shortcuts, this work requires presence. In a culture obsessed with identity, it requires origin. And in a spiritual industry preoccupied with performance, it demands depth.

Not all wounds are yours. But healing them might be your task. Not all fears are irrational. Some are inherited. Some were survival strategies that calcified into personality traits. But beneath them, there is something older than fear. Something holy. Something waiting to be remembered.

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Spiritual knowledge used to be held in ceremony. In bone. In breath. Passed mouth to mouth, dream to dream, guarded with care because misuse could maim. Now it’s filtered, digitized, stripped of its integrity, and made consumable in under sixty seconds.

What was once sacred instruction has been flattened into content. Practices that took generations to refine are now rendered aesthetic—tied to algorithmic performance, available for purchase, diluted for palatability. The ones who once carried spiritual technologies through migration, through slavery, through silence, now watch them recirculate in sanitized forms—divorced from consequence, divorced from context.

What gets called “new age” is often ancestral. What gets labeled “intuitive” is often inherited. The problem isn’t that these practices are being used. The problem is that they’re being unrooted.

There are people hosting moon circles with no understanding of the origins of lunar cosmology. There are “healers” calling down spirits whose names they can’t pronounce, offering tools that were once outlawed, commodifying traditions their own ancestors never had to protect. It isn’t just ahistorical—it’s spiritually reckless.

To invoke these systems is to enter into relationship. With the Divine. With the dead. With forces that don’t respond to branding, but to reverence. And reverence isn’t a trend. It’s a stance. A posture of humility before something older, wider, and far less concerned with your visibility than your alignment.

I don’t fear the popularity of spirituality. I fear its dislocation—its removal from the lands, languages, and bloodlines that shaped its function and forged its form.

This work asks for more than performance. It asks for spiritual depth forged through initiation—through rupture, through repair, through the slow, deliberate return to truths you didn’t learn but always carried.

To practice without origin is to risk opening what you cannot close. To teach without lived inquiry is to risk guiding others into terrain you have not survived yourself. This is soul-work, yes. But it is also skilled labor.

There is a responsibility in this work. Not just to those we serve—but to those who came before. To those who hid their altars in broom closets. To those who coded divination into dance. To those who swallowed their tongues to keep the magic intact.

This is why platforms like ESSOESS aren’t just important—they’re needed. When ceremony is stripped from context, and Spirit is stripped from structure, we need more than visibility—we need strongholds. ESSOESS is a conduit. A living system. A digital altar. A site of return for ancestral transmissions that were never lost—only interrupted.

There are voices rising. But what’s needed is precision. What’s needed is trust. What’s needed is the reconstruction of sacred infrastructure—deliberate, protected, and immune to trend cycles.

To hold this work is not to perform it.
To hold this work is to be accountable to what it came through.

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There are truths I carry that were never taught to me. Names I’ve never heard that live in my mouth. Gestures my hands make in session that I never practiced. There are dreams that have followed me for decades. Fragments of lives that do not belong to this one—yet shape everything about how I move through it.

I used to question them. Now I document them. I build with them.

The work I do is not to convince, but to clarify. To mirror what others already know but have been taught to distrust. There is nothing extraordinary about being able to speak to the dead, or to feel the ache of a decision made three lifetimes ago. What’s extraordinary is that we forgot this was ordinary.

For those of us born into disconnection—into names not our own, into languages that no longer taste like home, into bodies trained to shrink—our remembering is a kind of uprising. Not loud. Not always visible. But cellular. It’s in how we grieve. How we gather. How we know things without knowing why we know them.

This is the work of ESSOESS: to recontextualize the sacred. To rehouse the ancestral. To give it language without translation. To give it form without dilution. To give it space to breathe without explanation.

This is a love letter. To those who feel displaced, not just geographically but spiritually. To those who’ve been made to believe their sensitivity is a liability. To those who’ve always known—but needed permission to trust that knowing.

And to the ones not yet born—may you never have to reclaim what was never taken from you.

“You are your best thing.”
—Toni Morrison

One love, ESS xo

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References

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