Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem has been integral to my creative process and the basis of my final DMin project at Howard University, where I will be exploring theater and, more specifically, the choreopoem as a form of preaching in the public square.

As the new semester begins, I am excited to start a contemporary iconography series that showcases preachers, poets, playwrights, dancers, and musicians whose work will inform this project. 

I am familiar with the story of Joseph as told in the Book of Genesis from the Torah. The differences between it and the Qur’an are mostly in narrative details rather than themes. For instance, readers of the Qur’an do not learn about the colorful coat that Jacob gave to his son, but do receive the story about the brothers throwing him in a ditch and bringing back a piece of clothing with fake blood. Another distinction that stood out was the Qur’an’s addition about the women who joined Pharaoh’s wife in trying to seduce Joseph at dinner, for a second time. 

This sura meets themes of abandonment, injustice, and connivance with perseverance, compassion, and reconciliation. It grounds these themes in Allah’s knowledge and mercy, who wills and removes as or when it deems fit. While this has the potential to raise anxiety levels and mistrust, the reassurance of Allah’s love for the oppressed is seen not only in Joseph, but in his brothers as well towards the end of the text. This reminds me of James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation, where he argues that oppressors themselves must be experiencing a type of insecurity or oppression to enact such harm on others. 

The text tells us that Joseph’s brothers were afraid of competition–one could speculate that this was possibly due to the historical context of journeying through the cities in competition with other cultures, competition amongst themselves prior to Joseph coming into age, or ancestral wounds of competition embedded in their DNA. By the end of the sura, they were experiencing famine in the land and had to reconcile what they did to their brother to receive goods to sustain them. This all indicates that Allah, in Allah’s mercy, reproves and corrects, while also extending compassion, for Allah is all-knowing (a repeated phrase throughout the sura).

Surah 109’s central theme is the object of one’s worship and the importance of the Prophet Mohammed in distinguishing worship of Allah from other gods or idols. A. Yusuf Ali’s translation suggests that the unbelievers had heard the Prophet’s message, but chose to “reject” it. This matters because it speaks to the Prophet’s role not to coerce or force the faith on anyone. It also raises questions about what worship is. Who were the unbelievers, and what or whom were they worshipping? 

The sura’s literary structure shows an oral quality of repetition, highlighting emphasis on the seriousness of worshipping Allah alone for the Prophet. The constant refrain of worship in the ayas demonstrates that the Prophet is making the distinction between Allah and the gods/idols of the unbelievers’ choosing and that their actions are a binding to a spiritual path that is not the path of the One true God, who alone is to be worshipped in the religion that the Prophet is proposing.

The tasfirs/hadiths further reveal that this sura was revealed after an encounter with a group of Quraysh people. They sought to get the Prophet to serve their idols for a year and in turn, they would serve Allah for a year. The invitation to exchange forms of worship was rejected because God knew that this could have harmed the Prophet and/or blurred his message. However, from the text alone, in Allah’s mercy, he left the unbelievers to their own way for the time being–for he could have destroyed them immediately afterward.

When applied to the contemporary context, Allah’s justice for the widow and the orphan throughout the rest of the Book comes to mind, as some from the tradition have caused harm and oppressed others in the name of Allah. The very act of worshipping idols and false gods can be applied to things like money and gender identity—and is something that is happening throughout the culture. Allah is waiting for people like the aforementioned to heed the Prophet’s message—to remember that worship of Allah alone includes and considers the best for all beings within a balanced whole creative plan set out from the beginning.   

I visited a Zen Buddhist monastery in Brooklyn, NY, in January 2025. Although I missed the memo that I shouldn’t wear “straight-from-the-package-fresh-white-socks” because we would have to walk around barefoot, I was awakened to new possibilities for engaging the Christian religion of my youth. My hunger for quiet rest amongst the demands of New York City student-artivist life, read alongside Jesus’ retreats to the mountains after preaching and teaching to the disciples and large crowds, led me to apply and accept a 6-week residency at the monastery’s sister location in upstate NY. As a multidisciplinary artist, I began to document my experience through mixed-media collage and soon found myself exploring Byzantine mosaics and iconography. In this regard, I pursue doctoral research in early Christian monasticism and iconography and its benefits for contemporary settings. 

St Basil of Caesarea’s Long Rules will tell us that service to our neighbors grounded in communal prayer produces fruits of justice, “perfect and manifold,” according to the kin-dom at hand. The cenobitic monasticism he and others advocated provided a place of respite not only for ascetic converts, but for the surrounding communities impacted by social and religious turmoil. I imagine reading works by Basil and others to ground the artistic commitments of monastery iconography as a prayer-filled work of justice for the re-memberance of self and the undoing of what does not serve communal thriving.

My practice in Black cultural aesthetics prompts me to ask how Cervenak’s black eco-feminist lens on oikos can lead my iconography research to connect the transcendent commitments of common interpretations with the social commitments of the monks who filled the space. This eco-feminist construction of space begs one to consider the visual politics that informs identity and cultural meaning-making–a full sensory approach developed by Tina Campt, who requests the sacred gaze of Black Fine Art to start with and/or return to the lived realities of the Black artist and their community. Therefore, I am curious how Black feminist theory can be read alongside the wall paintings, frescoes, and apses of contemplative spaces, where monasteries such as St Catherine’s at Mt Sinai suggest that any place in the building with wall paintings is deemed especially sacred, and therefore perhaps necessary for the personal and communal thriving of the cenobitic community. 

This study of both contemplative activity and physical space leads me to other questions like: how might Mary Farag’s work on res sacrae and the early church help develop language for the ritual image writing found in monasteries? How does reading Shively Smith’s womanist approach to the mystic and contemplative preaching ministry of Howard Thurman as interlocutor help build an analysis between Black cultural aesthetics and early Christian monasticism? How is archival research at early Egyptian monasteries read alongside contemporary Coptic iconography and its role in present-day Eastern Orthodoxy?  

I anticipate Stephen Davis’ research in early monasticism and Coptic Christianity will inform not only the former questions, but also that his archival leadership from the Dayr al-Suryan project might expand research for theological interpretation of icons and mosaics. I anticipate it will assist in artist profile building based on images like St. Colluthus located at this monastery, whose icon image resembles Medieval to contemporary images of St. Luke, the latter assumed by many to be the first iconographer. Monastics like Evagrius followed the belief of imageless prayer and hermetic monasticism; therefore, I am curious how Davis’ research on him and his literature can illuminate some of the tension that early iconographers might have faced within their own practice.   

Laura Nasrallah’s research in material culture, particularly defixiones and ritual curses as prayers of justice, not to be shunned, but as poetics for helping community might challenge and/or support research on early iconography that sought to foster the counter-cultural movement of monastic life from not only the socio-political realm but the shifts in church dynamics as well. I inquire on how this research along with other studies in Byzantine material culture may help in constructing a comparative analysis between commissioned art of the basileas that soon reflected imperial motives and the ritual prayers of icon painting in early monasteries that served as sources for human agency grounded in equity and justice. 

My goal is to travel, conduct research, and participate in slow-looking retreats at early Christian monasteries still inhabited today, to strengthen my academic work, personal iconography, and mindfulness practice. I anticipate this program will help me further develop a framework for contemplative art initiatives within contemporary social institutions, advocating the benefits of mindfulness as an act of sustainable justice. I would also like to teach comparative studies in global contemplative movements and write and present on scholarship about early Shi’a iconography, contemporary Christian iconography like Gracie Morbitzer’s Modern Saints and Mark Doox’s collection The N Word of God, in conversation with the resulting research proposed for doctoral study.