In Search of the Things Behind the Things: Onaje X.O. Woodbine

Our guest, Onaje X. O. Woodbine, has created a moving spiritual portrait of a powerfully spiritual woman.

Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an alternate dimension she refers to as the “spirit realm.” In this other place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States. Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel, Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual warfare against sexual predators, and tends to the souls of murdered Black children whose ghosts haunt the inner city.

Take Back What the Devil Stole centers Donna’s encounters with the supernatural to offer a powerful narrative of how one woman seeks to reclaim her power from a lifetime of social violence. Both ethnographic and personal, Woodbine’s portrait of her spiritual life sheds new light on the complexities of Black women’s religious participation and the lived religion of the dispossessed.

Onaje X. O. Woodbine is assistant professor of philosophy and religion at American University. He is the author of Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball (Columbia, 2016) and coproducer of a forthcoming documentary film on sacred space in New York City playground basketball, Hallowed Ground & Cracked Concrete.