In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, halfway through the series we meet Nikki Wood – a Black woman, and earlier Vampire Slayer who was alive in New York City in the 1970s.
In the beautiful Buffy tarot deck that was released in 2023…
Nikki Wood is the Queen of Pentacles.
In this podcast episode, I tell a story about what happened when I pulled Nikki’s tarot card on my altar, and what she taught me about Asian solidarity with Black Liberation.
In the process, I also share a painful story about what happened to me, over a decade ago, when I was financially exploited and sexually harassed out of a grassroots community Asian-centered arts collective…which also links up to pain I experienced when my Dad died in 2016.
…This is a very vulnerable story for me to share. I had this sitting on my desktop for weeks before I am finally publishing it tonight: Jan 25 2024 (hey Leo full moon, why not?)
I don’t share my story to gossip or publicly embarrass anyone – I firmly don’t believe in that. But my Ancestors – and Nikki Wood – made it clear to me that I can’t keep this story to myself, I have to release it with love. I believe we all need to release our painful stories, and allow them to be received and held with love, lest we let them quietly eat away at us.
This story showed me how generations of anti-Black racism charges through so many Asian spaces, Hollywood, grassroots arts organizations, and how we treat our Storyteller Community Mothers, including Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde of Kitchen Table Press.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what genre you write in – all of us who are writers today owe our recognition, reciprocity and respect to the Black women, and Indigenous/women of colour who stewarded Kitchen Table Press. None of what we do as writers would be possible without them.
In this episode I also touch on the film “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”, the way the Oscars disrespected Angela Bassett, Chadwick Boseman’s death, and the Ancestral directive for Asian folks to prioritize “rooting down” to deeper healing foundations so that we do not continue to give away, align with, or allow our magic to be snatched up by white supremacy and supremacy cultures embedded in our own histories, cultures and lineages.
Nikki Wood, Vampire Slayer. Queen of Pentacles. My utmost of gratitude to you for helping me release this important story.
As I lift you up – I must lift up again my Soulshifting Community and Funky Tribe Family. These are Black and Indigenous centered healing spaces dedicated to cross-cultural Ancestral solidarity. I lift up my mothers, mentors and friends: Dr. G. Love Geryll Robinson, Dr. Deanna Downes and Dr. Stephanie R. Burns. I lift up everyone in the hoop. I lift up all my Deer Black friends and chosen family. The Black Ancestors who are on my team, on my side, and show up for me everyday as I fumble around, trying to remember myself.
It’s because you’ve been my family and my friends, that I am able to share this story today. You have held me accountable to the true definition and spirit of lineage healing and Ancestor veneration. Because of you, I came home to my deep soul’s need to have what I need for my ongoing commitment to heal anti-Blackness within myself and for my entire lineage.
We have been aching, and aching, and aching for this, for generations. I believe everybody is.
I want everyone to wake up to the fact that being accountable to our “privilege” or living our lives in true spirit of solidarity and reparations…is not a joyless chore. It’s not something to lecture ourselves into. That’s not sustainable. And it’s not even true.
The truth is, there isn’t an opposition tug-of-war between “the hard work of allyship” and “taking care of ourselves / experiencing joy.”
The truth is, that the deepest parts of our lineage are ACHING for Black Liberation. ACHING to heal anti-Blackness. ACHING for a Free Palestine. ACHING for Indigenous LAND BACK.
WE OURSELVES ARE ACHING FOR IT.
It’s where our true life’s JOY is. It’s where our FULFILLMENT & WEALTH is. It’s where things beyond our prayers live, the beauty, success and freedom we cannot even begin to imagine. It’s where our Soul will be at Peace. And our Hearts will be Happy.
We will never find what we are looking for in life, unless we do this. We will never even comprehend what I’m saying, unless we trust our healing journeys enough to go so deep.
For every Buffy fan out there: my wish is that we remember the truth: that if we were to ROOT DOWN deep enough, we would realize that we get as much joy, love and fulfillment from healing our anti-Blackness as we love and enjoy watching Buffy. We remember that we Love Indigenous Freedom, we Love a Free Palestine, as much as we Love Buffy…
…And Nikki Wood.
LISTEN HERE TO THE FULL EPISODE
Episode Transcript:
Here in the Ancestors Writers Room, one of the principle multiverse philosophies we work with is that we regard fictional characters and the stories they live in, as Ancestors, in and of themselves.
I’ve loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer since I was a teenager. In between 2015-16, I went through a huge Ancestral Awakening, meaning I bacame aware of my ability to communicate with the spirit world, and of many magical gifts that were emerging. Since 2017, so many characters throughout the Buffyverse have come to me as Ancestors.
What I mean by that is that I’m a channeller. So if I want to speak to my grandmother, for example, who is an Ancestor. I sit in meditation and call her name, and she comes, and we talk.
I believe everybody has the ability to commune with the spirit world, it just depends on if you want to open that door, and how much you invest in learning those skills. And everyone has a different way of spiritual communication that is more natural to them than others. So when my grandma speaks to me – sometimes I’ll just hear the words. Sometimes I’ll see images. Sometimes, I’ll just feel something in my body.
I’m well practised by now that I have the tools to discern who is communicating with me and when.
I am what I refer to as a Quantum Whisperer. So I can talk to and listen to anything that has an energy or an essence, and my brain will be able to automatically translate what they’re saying in a language I understand. I also know how to navigate the spirit world safely. That doesn’t mean nothing bad or weird ever happens, because it’s just like life, you can’t control that. But you can be intentional about where you go and who you talk to. I don’t go around talking to anything and everything in the spirit world. I’m very intentional.
When I sit at my altar, I will bring an intention of healing or an energy that I want to work with. Then difference Ancestors of all kinds of species with come through to assist me, including often, fictional characters.
That’s what I mean when I say that a lot of characters in Buffyverse have come to me. When they show up, they’re not just regurgitating what happened on the show, or during their lives, they are spirits that have kept living and evolving in the spirit realm, and they have things to say about what life is like now.
Nikki Wood is a vampire slayer that preceded our protagonist, Buffy. Nikki is a Black woman who lived in NYC in the 1970s.
It was about November or December 2023. I pulled a whole bunch of tarot cards to create this GIANT altar on my floor, because I was in this huge rite of passage moment, this astrological transit Pluto Square Pluto, if you know you know. It’s hard. So I had a big tarot spread that took up my whole floor, with several different decks, including this new beautiful Buffy tarot deck that came out in 2023. I’ll post a photo of it. I pulled 4 cards from the Buffy deck. One of them was Nikki Wood – The Queen of Pentacles.
I sat with this a while because I was like. Huh. Of all the different in Buffy that I’ve been working with, for the last several years – I have pages written down for Faith. Pages for Kendra. I have a whole book of downloads between Buffy and Senaya. But I haven’t heard much from Nikki Wood. And as I sat with that tarot card in that moment. I still couldn’t hear her speaking to me. I wasn’t picking up anything.
But that in itself was a message. She doesn’t want to talk to me. I respect that.
She was letting me know that she was choosing not to share her stories with me. I am a person of colour, of Bengali ancestry, in my blood line I come from a mostly upper caste South Asian lineage. I don’t experience anti-black racism. In fact I was taught, culturally and systemically, like all non-Black folks are, to perpetuate it.
So I understand and respect when Black people choose not to share things with me. Nikki Wood is not just a Black Woman. She is the only slayer, that we know of, in the lineage of Slayers, who was a Mother, to a human child.
Like most Slayers, Nikki’s life ended when she was really young, while her son was a little boy. So in the spirit realm, and arguably in her life, she’s not just a Black Mother, she’s a Black Grieving Mother.
One of the things that I’ve learned through being in relationship with Black folks on many different levels, is that one of the most violent things we can do, particularly to Black mothers, is not let them rest. We are taught to feel entitled to Black women’s energy, including their voice. But they don’t owe us anything, unless they genuinely want to share it.
It was a really beautiful and powerful message, that Nikki Wood did in fact come through and show herself on this tarot spread, and also decided not to talk.
This took me back to over a decade ago. I was working at a grassroots, queer, Asian arts collective, which was originally created as a radical pan Asian history and storytelling space for youth to invest in their writing and creativity. Around 2012 we expanded to hold space for the wider queer and trans BIPOC community.
At that point I had been organizing and teaching workshops for a few years. Then we brought on another co-host, another young teacher, an emerging artist, and he brought forward his intentions to create a space dedicated to Black and Asian solidarity. I give so much gratitude to him, because he asked us to tend to things that myself and other creators and space holders for that collective had missed up until that point.
There was a lot I missed back then, and that I wasn’t getting right. I grew up in a small town in Manitoba where there were virtually no Black people. I was one of the very small handful of people of colour in my school. My healing of inner anti-blackness is a life long journey.
I give my deep gratitude to the Black folks who came through that art space way back then, and took the risk to be there, when Asian community has so often let Black folks down. I thank them for all the ways they held the group accountable, including me, to their healing. I still think about conversations we had back then, and what they challenged in me.
I think about the magic and care I offered to the space, and everything we offered each other. There were a lot of things that needed to be dismantled in that collective, around so many things. And dismantle they did. To my knowledge, that collective doesn’t exist anymore. It was a Holy Dismantling.
My relationship with it ended in 2013 on a really traumatic note. Essentially, I was sexually harassed out of a job that was paying my bills. And I didn’t get paid for the last hours that I had worked. My boss, who was also a queer Asian femme, she was maybe a decade older than me. She was someone who I looked up to, like a mentor. And she was also my boss who had the power to decide if I was or wasn’t going to get paid on any given week.
Long story short, she wanted some kind of intimacy with me, without ever clearly articulating to me what it was that she wanted, she just kept pursuing something that I didn’t want. When I shifted my energy to make it clear that I just wanted to focus on work, and not a personal relationship, which was my right to assert, at my job that was paying my bills, she retaliated via making my job very difficult. She manipulated situations so that we could have personal hang outs, she would make myself and my creative partner chase her around the city to pick up our checks. She made it very hard for me to do my work. One of the worst things she did was through manipulation, she pitted my creative partner and I against each other, which caused conflict between us. We mended things quickly because that’s who we are, but damage was done. I eventually I left without payment for the last hours that I had worked, after pouring my heart into co-creating what would have been my last workshop series. She gave that workshop series, those hours that I worked, and that money that was agreed to me, to one of her friends instead.
I want to be clear, that I am not sharing this in spirit of gossip, even though some people will know who I’m talking about. Gossip is actually one of the things that hurt me at the time, when some people saw what was happening to me and were like, ooh femme drama. No, not drama. I was surviving emotional, psychological, and sexual harrassment, as a young person.
So I’m not sharing in spirit of gossip. And not to shame her either. Because I don’t believe that shame is a tool for healing. But this is about needing to release this from my heart, because 10 years later, it still weighs heavy. Because I firmly believe we cannot hold stories like this in our bodies that go unheard for the rest of our lives because that will eat us from the inside until it shortens our length of life. I believe we have the right to tell our stories with truth, compassion and respect for all.
I sincerely want healing for this person. I respect her humanity and whatever heartbreaking stories she’s carrying that resulted in such deep trauma, that she would treat me and others this way. I hope that she has since or one day will have what she needs internally and in her environment to address those deeper issues.
The hardest part for me was to leave on that note. After everything that I gave to that space, with my creativity, my softness, my strength. Myself and my creative partner, we truly made magic together. We opened our community up to the beauty and power of Ancestor healing and dreaming. And you know what, that is probably why things got really ugly in that moment. Both him and I, as genius and imperfect as we were, are both firmly committed to abolition at its roots. We want that for our lineage, and for everyone. We always have. So to open up that space for our Ancestors to come through, our Ancestors were like, cool let’s dismantle this shit. Let’s uproot and expose all the gnarly stuff under the surface. Let’s build something better.
Why does Nikki Wood reminde me of this: because the reason my boss gave to justify why I should be “let go” of my job is because “I wouldn’t talk to her.”
One, that wasn’t even true, because I was still talking to her about work, just not about personal stuff. She framed it, though, to mean because Shaunga is blocking me from pursuing an intimate relationship, and I wasn’t responding to any personal texts or requests or whatever, that means Shaunga’s “not talking to me.”
That’s the story she told about me, which makes me look like, I’m a brat. I’m a young, immature queer femme of colour who is so inundanted by my own trauma that I’m not acting right. When the reality is, every story she told me me, was actually about herself.
Two, look at how that energy is rooted in Anti-Blackness. That you feel so entitled to someone’s voice. That you would push them out of a job and sabotage their financial well being, just because they won’t give you friendship or intimacy.
In that arts collective, I was a young community mother. A young queer, gender non conforming women of colour community mother. It is a deeper and bigger generational wound that we extend this kind of entitlement toward our Storytelling Community Mothers. We never fucking let them rest. If they rest, we retaliate. We feel entitled to their constant energy and attention, and we punish them if they don’t give it.
This energy extends back to Kitchen Table Press and what I’m sure Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith experienced in stewarding a Black, Indigenous, women of colour storytelling publishing house: community mothers who make it possible for me to do what I do.
It extends to Hollywood. I remember Asian people saying things like “Why didn’t Ava DuVarnay cast more Asian people in her film, where’s the solidarity?” Because it’s not her job to do that for us!
It extends to Hollywood and the Music Industry that makes survivors out of young women artists who are coerced into physical, sexual and emotional intimacy with their directors or producers in order to keep their jobs and if they refuse they are awarded with a whisper campaign that blocks further career opportunities because they are “difficult to work with.”
It extends to the Toronto Dance and Theatre communities, where Black artists will so often be fired from jobs or “Black Listed” from career opportunities because they don’t give what white supremacy wants them to give.
It happened to me again a few years later again, after my Dad died in 2016. At that point I had been a fercious powerful, and yes still imperfect force in queer community, volunteering my time, dedicating my heart to creating dance, burlesque and theatre spaces for queer and trans people to perform and tell their stories. As well as working as an astrologer, a trauma counsellor, reading the birth charts of everybody in the community and their dogs too. I had been working non stop for several years, never earning an amount of money that reflected what I was giving to it, and then my Dad died, and I took a fucking break.
I went through a period of time where I was non-verbal in my grief. I needed to be non-verbal to honour my grief, and honour the neurodivergent, autistic queer and trancestors that awakened and were alive in me through my grief.
So I stopped going the extra mile and doing all the extra things, and maybe the way that I did that was very confusing and very abrupt – because my Dad’s death was very confusing and very abrupt. My silence was a huge problem for many people around me. And believe me, I heard about it. I heard from everyone, and their dogs, all about how wrong I was for “not talking to them.”
Thank you, Nikki Wood. Your silence with me has helped me release this grief I’ve been carrying, and speak about it, out loud in public. You have no idea how healing it is for you to show up on my altar, and not talk to me. Except you do have every idea about that. You understand this, more than I do.
One of the scripts we’ll be studying during my upcoming Ancestors Apprenticeship is Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Which, as we know, is an Asian-centered film, starring the great and wonderful and powerful Michelle [spelling]
Now, people probably assume that I love this film, because it’s about the Multiverse and I’m a Multiverse Historian. But I didn’t love it!
I respect it. Listen, I’ve watched Stephanie Hsu’s audition on youtube only about a million times because it’s so brilliant! And so captivating. I’m glad that it won so many awards but…it’s really telling. That the Academy Awards decided to celebrate this Asian film in 2023, had one main category where a white woman from that film was nominated instead of an Asian person. And the white woman gets the award, instead of the Black woman who actually truly deserved the award and so much more – and she’s not just a Black woman, she’s a Black community mother, AND she’s a Black grieving mother.
For those who aren’t up to date with pop culture, I’m talking about Angela Bassett in the Black Panter, Wakanda Forever, a movie that internally and externally mourning the death of a Wonder Child, Chadwick Boseman. No disrespect to Jamie Lee Curtis, but her performance doesn’t hold a candle to Angela Bassett’s performance, not to mention her entire career.
Asian folks, we want to heal our own stuff, we want success and we deserve it – but we have an edge that we don’t cross, emotionally and spiritually. For us, many of us, it’s not about “we have to do more” because that takes into the perfection, the overworking, the constantly striving that supremacy cultures have taught us. For a lot of us, it’s not about “doing more” it’s about “going deeper.” It’s about crossing that edge. It’s about rooting down – which is one of the principles on the Earth’s Altar for 2024. That’s what it would take for us to move into true solidarity with Black liberation.
When follow our healing and we get close to that edge, but instead of crossing it, we follow it, and then BOOM it gets diverted. Supremacy culture snatches it, steals what it can from our medicine, and uses it to feed white supremacy and capitalism instead.
There’s a desparation that many of our Ancestors felt like, we just have to keep our head down and assimilate. That’s how we get safety, that’s how we might even get belonging.
We won’t find what we need, truly in life, unless we cross that edge. Unless we root down.
When we do the script study of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, I will show you where that edge is in the script itself, and where they don’t cross it in the character and story development. Because that’s why I didn’t like it, that’s why it didn’t speak to my heart. It almost had something, but it stopped, right at that edge.
To close out, I just want to say…
I wrote and recorded this transmission about 1 or 2 weeks ago, I have no concept of time anymore, but I do know that as soon as I finished recording it. I popped on youtube, and I saw a video of Angela Bassett receiving an honoury oscar.
I had no idea that happened while I wrote and recorded this. In fact, I looked closer at the date, and realized that I wrote and recorded this piece at the exact same time that Angela Bassett was receiving her honourary oscar live.
I kid you not, the exact same time. File this under – you can’t make this shit up.
File this under – Ancestors are making moves.
File this under – hollywood won’t save us, but this woman still deserves her flowers and so much more. She deserves to be recognized and celebrated and given accolades and loved in public.
File this under – the deeper healing work we all do with our Ancestors, has ripple effects that we cannot comprehend in our current consciousness, but we can believe and trust in its power. We can invest in that, and know with certainty that we are doing our job as birthers of freedom.
Like I said, Hollywood isn’t going to save us, but the energy healing work we do with our Ancestors, and with fictional characters will continue to pave the road ahead for us to create long lasting ceremonial spaces for us to live, breathe, thrive as ancestral artists.