my earliest work orbited around a Hindu Tantric goddess named “Black” (Kali). As it turns out, in an almost perfect display of ontological blackness, there are two major forms of Kali in the Shakta Tantra of West Bengal. Whereas the black goddess Kali is dangerous and terrifying, if also liberating and transcendent (and superhuman, with an emphasis on the siddhis or “superpowers”), and sometimes linked to the marginalized communities of the caste system, the blue Kali is motherly, beneficent, and gentle. Kali’s blackness signals a kind of esoteric intensity, a social marginalization, a secret
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