ESSOESS
Writer • Oracle • Visionary
Shaniqué Olivia Small, known as ESSOESS, works across writing, spiritual practice, and research-led visual inquiry. Her work explores African and Caribbean spiritual knowledge systems, diasporic memory, and the contemporary reconfiguration of ancestral practices shaped by colonial rupture, migration, and cultural displacement.
With over fifteen years of experience as an oracle and spiritual practitioner, ESSOESS approaches spirituality as a lived archive—one that carries memory, ethics, and cosmology through the body. Her work draws together archival research, intuitive intelligence, and creative expression to examine how African-derived practices persist, transform, and are often misattributed or commodified within modern spiritual cultures.
Through essays, cultural research, and visual experimentation, ESSOESS creates work that is both intellectually rigorous and spiritually grounded, centering Black epistemologies while opening space for reconnection, reflection, and repair.
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ESSOESS’s work spans long-form writing, cultural analysis, and conceptual visual exploration. Her essays examine spirituality, identity, power, intimacy, and cultural memory through a lens that blends personal narrative with historical and philosophical inquiry.
Her writing interrogates how African-derived spiritual practices have been suppressed, distorted, or repackaged across time, while also exploring the intimate ways these traditions continue to shape relationships, embodiment, and self-understanding within the Black diaspora.
This work is published through ESSOESS as an ongoing body of essays and editorial projects, including The Devil You Name Is the God You Forgot, I Found Me Inside Her, The Gospel According to Us, and White Sage, White Spaces.
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ESSOESS’s practice is rooted in over a decade of intuitive and oracular work, supporting individuals through spiritual inquiry, ancestral reconnection, and personal transformation. Her approach treats intuitive knowledge not as spectacle, but as a disciplined, ethical, and culturally situated mode of insight.
Drawing from African and Caribbean cosmological traditions, her practice emphasizes accountability, consent, and respect for spiritual boundaries. This work informs her broader creative and research pursuits, offering an embodied understanding of how spiritual knowledge is transmitted, protected, and lived rather than merely studied.
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ESSOESS’s conceptual documentary research project, The First Gods and the Forgotten Roots of Spirit, extends her inquiry into suppressed spiritual histories, diasporic continuity, and the contemporary commodification of African-derived practices.
The project traces the survival and transformation of African cosmologies across the Caribbean and the wider Black diaspora, examining how these systems endured colonial suppression, missionary intervention, and archival erasure. It also interrogates how African-rooted spiritual practices circulate within modern spiritual economies, often detached from their cultural origins.
This research integrates archival study, oral history, visual experimentation, and intuitive methodology to develop a filmic and written body of work that approaches spirituality as both historical record and living presence. The project prioritizes ethical engagement, cultural accountability, and non-extractive research practices.
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