DAHOMEY Got It Right!

My thoughts on the Mati Diop film Dahomey, and its cultural relevance in the United States today.

Shortly after I touched down in Columbia to work on a new independent film I started receiving Instagram DMs from friends and family about another independent film simply called DAHOMEY.

Some of you may recall that as soon as I released my book Da Homey in Modern Dahomey in 2022 the trailer for the movie The Woman King immediately came out along with the unveiling of the Dahomey Amazon warrior statue. Right after that, we saw the Black Panther 2 trailer revolving around Atlantis—a purported civilization that I discussed in my book about Dahomey—along with my firsthand experiences in the modern Republic of Benin, home of the Dahomey Kingdom.

I say all of this to say that your day-to-day life is a divination reading once you take the condom off of your mind and live. The world is begging you to hit it raw but we often walk around desensitized to the subtle phenomena around us that would fully stimulate and inform us of our true selves within compounded dimensions of existence.

You’re constantly being pointed to subtle synchronicities that offer insight into your future, but you’re so locked into what other people are doing instead of what YOU are supposed to be doing. As a result, you miss the lesson, which are your marching orders from the Creator that select ancestors assist in directing you towards.

This weekend my wife and I saw the new movie DAHOMEY and it was a powerful experience for both of us. It explores the return of 26 royal artifacts to the Republic of Benin. What is amazing, is that the film’s narrative literally comes from the perspective of a King Ghezo statue that experiences being smuggled out of Benin into France before going back to Benin again. A haunting voice emanating from the King’s statue says “I am torn between the fear of no one recognizing me and not recognizing anything,” upon returning home to the land he once ruled.

In my book Da Homey in Modern Dahomey I discussed how these African instruments of spiritual technology are relegated to the status of mere art when they are stolen by Europeans who are unable to penetrate the psycho-spiritual depths of the people that they stole the technologies from. This mentality extends itself into how humans interface with one another in Western society today.

Heterosexual Black men in America are living instruments of technology made by God, but they are minimized  to be pieces of art. Folks like the way the Black man looks when he dunks a basketball on a fast break. They love his posture and mannerisms when he clutches a microphone on stage at a rap concert. They are intrigued by how he talks, walks, and dances because they are enamored with the simulacra of what the Black man is, not the smokeless fire at the core of his spirit, which is too hot for most to handle.

In this U.S. presidential election season God’s organic technologies have been reduced to mere means to a political end by former president Punk Obama. He brow beats and repeatedly speaks condescendingly towards this segment of the Black male population as if they do not possess the intelligence to assess what is, and what is not, in their best interests as human beings politically. 

For Obama to say that Black men are not turning out in droves to vote for Kamala Harris FOR NO OTHER REASON than the idea that they’re misogynists plays to racist troupes about Black men. Quite frankly, Obama’s stance is foolish based on the U.S. voting data available to all of us at our fingertips. The overwhelming majority of Black men in America voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, NOT Donald Trump. Were Black men misogynists then?

If heterosexual  Black men are not voting in the same, or greater numbers for Harris in 2024, then maybe Harris doesn’t have a clear agenda that is appealing to these Black men. Black men in America are not getting dumber. We’re getting smarter. If Harris cannot inspire Black men to vote for her then that is a reflection of her desire and capacity to serve that segment of the American population.

It doesn’t mean that she is a horrible human being. It means that she doesn’t have anything for Black men who don’t read The Root or subscribe to liberal politics. Unless your gay, a drug misuser, or live some type of alternative lifestyle you have no reason to be married to the Democratic party as a Black man in the United States.

Punk Obama has yet to brow beat the 53 percent of white women who voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Obama knows that if he goes at white women’s neck he will risk offending his white male handlers who are more manly than he could ever be. They protect the most vulnerable political demographic within their own community. Obama could learn something from his masters.

The only presidential candidate that I would have seriously considered voting for is Marianne Williamson. I don’t owe the Democratic or Republican Party that supports a terrorist regime in Israel anything. I am not a piece of work for you to conveniently hang on your living-room wall or put on display in a sterile museum to satisfy the politics of aesthetics (which is Identity Politics rooted in superficial representation). I am one of the millions of organic technologies made by God attempting to find his way Home like the three Kings Glele, Ghezo, and Behazin in the wonderful new film, DAHOMEY.

Over 95 percent of the people in the movie theater with my wife and I were white. I must admit that it was the first time I had ever gone to a movie and the audience did not clap once the movie ended!

It was dead silence as the audience walked out from what may have been a post-Halloween horror film for them. My wife found this hilarious as she laughed “run for your lives!” as they pretended they didn’t hear her.

The Beninese young people in the film did not bite their tongues about how they felt about Western imperialism.  It may have scared the audience to hear people from the continent with the largest youth population in the world express itself the way that it did. The brand of White Male Patriarchy that we’ve become accustomed to over the last 500 years is dying and giving birth to something far more humane. I love it.

The wise Norse men of old Europe were proficient in divination readings, and they told you this would happen through the tale of Ragnorok, the Twilight of the Gods. If you know that story ask yourself what the recurring totemic iconography you see in Vodun culture is? It is the Black Serpent. The end is near.

I highly recommend that you see the movie DAHOMEY. I don’t think that Mati Diop, the film’s screenwriter and director, read my 2022 book. However it is clear and evident to anyone who reads my book, and watches her great film, that we both explored similar themes while using different mediums. I wrote my thoughts, while she expressed hers through film.

The final product in both cases is a distinct and unique cultural benefit.