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Transcript
4 clock ticks
“It’s past time to broaden the narrative” (said by Sequana Murray)
Intro Music
Introduction: Hello and welcome to another episode of Broadening the Narrative. This is a podcast where I talk to some of my favorite people who have broadened the narrative for me. I'm your host, Nicki Pappas, and I'm so glad you're here.
Transition Music
First Segment
Nicki: On today's episode, I am joined by my dear friend Sequana Murray, or Bandy as she is known by her stage name. We will be discussing intersectionality regarding race, gender, class, and sexuality. Before we get into that, I just want to say that Sequana is one of my favorite people because of her passion for justice and the conversations we have because of her passion. Thank you, Sequana, for spurring me on to love and to seek justice, and thank you for being on the podcast.
Sequana: Aw thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Nicki: I’m so glad that you’re here. Well, let’s jump in. Tell us a little about yourself and your background.
Sequana: Well, hello to all the listeners. You know me as Sequana, but others may know me as Bandy. I am a recently divorced mother of four. I write poetry, I sing, and I rap. Originally I’m from Charleston, SC, though you can hear that I don’t have the Geechie accent. I have served 8 years in the United States Army Reserves. I am a Bisexual Queer and a certified introvert.
Nicki: I wanted to begin by asking what's your experience in the church been like because of your identity as a Black woman who is low-income, Queer, and a single mother?
Sequana: Whew. So growing up, I went to either Pentacostal or Baptist churches, and as an adult, during my college years, I ventured off and began attending more evangelical churches that had like a Calvinistic twang to them, and this time frame was from 2009 to about 2018. In those early years, I was around a mixed group of people of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds. Initially, I felt welcomed since there were people there who had more things in common with me in terms of their musical choices and their attire. Like you could go to church in some Timbs and a snapback and nobody would judge you. There were just other things that linked us together. But when I had my oldest child in 2011, I had her out of wedlock and things just started to change for me. By that time, I had dropped out of college and I was back at home with my family and poor and lacking in a lot of emotional support. I was struggling and depressed, and it stayed that way for some time. So just fast forward to about 2013 to 2015, and I was married and I had two children and one on the way, but I was still poor, still depressed, and still a functionally single parent. My ex-husband and I had separated a few times during that time and even when we were together, I just didn’t have that support from him that I needed. And so now, being in the church during this time was pretty heart-wrenching because I often just felt excluded from participating in a lot of the events that they had going on, particularly for the women, because I usually didn’t have childcare and a lot of events would be just for adults, they were catered more towards the adults. I also wasn’t able to serve in the areas I wanted to serve in, and a lot of people in the church that I was attending at that time just kind of weren’t in my age range. Either they were just getting out of high school or they were 30 somethings. And furthermore, just economically speaking, many people were just well off, and our economic brackets just kind of weren’t on the same level. Plus, if they were married and had kids, their spouses were present. And it wasn’t until the end of that time period that another single parent even started attending that church, so I was really just the only single parent at that church. Even though I had expressed throughout this time to the different leaders and other members just how difficult it was for me being in that position, the response was either no response or it was very underwhelming or just kind of like the same two, three people kind of visiting or helping out in some kind of way. And it wasn’t even that I sought a lot of attention, but I just felt so isolated and like I was on an island of one and that not a lot of people could relate to me or understand all of what I was going through. And on top of this, in the ways I did express wanting to help and offer myself for what I could offer, whether it was to the individuals or to the whole, I would get overlooked or told no. And when my ex-husband actually did cheat on me in 2015 and I had the proof, the leaders didn’t do a whole lot to support me emotionally or to help guide me through next steps or where to go from there. They kind of just left me hanging, and the last meeting that I was supposed to have with that pastor to address a lot of things, including like how they just responded to me and just other issues that we had, that got overshadowed by another meeting that they scheduled for somebody else in its place without my consent, and I was just done with that particular church. By that point, with regards to just my queerness, prior to like late 2019, my expressions of that were mostly muted and very few people even knew that I had same-sex attractions, so that wasn’t really so much on my mind during that time period.
Nicki: So, what was the narrative you were taught either implicitly and explicitly about Godde and other people and yourself?
Sequana: So, just coming up in the church, some of the core things that I was taught were that God is holy, we the people aren’t, and our righteousness is the equivalent of filthy rags to Him. It was implanted in my head that we don’t deserve anything but death and hell. Implicitly, it was also taught, or expected, that men primarily were to lead and women were to follow. Another thing that was in my head at the time was that we receive value once we’re saved but we simultaneously should still think very little of ourselves. And for me, this obviously was just very confusing because when I came into the faith, I already had very low self-esteem. I was ashamed of my dark skin and my hair and had very little confidence. I was naturally a quiet person and had believed that I had to behave extrovertedly in order to effectively share the gospel, which meant doing an excessive amount of talking and approaching people or maybe being willing to hand out gospel tracks or flyers to random people on the street. In terms of race, it was also implicitly presumed, or at least I felt that to embrace my Black culture would have been an act of idolatry and that those around me who did do that kind of thing simply just didn’t love God enough to have a more neutral outlook on race. When it came to just anything LGBT, I was always taught that same-sex love and attractions were abominable and that those who partook in them were destined for hell.
Nicki: What prompted you to begin broadening that narrative you had been taught?
Sequana: Everything really pinpoints back to the shooting of Alton Sterling in 2016 and that really just broke me. When I saw his son crying out on television just wanting his daddy back, that was the catalyst for me just desiring more for my own kind. It’s like God just used that moment to help me to begin to see things that I just didn’t see before. It’s like my eyes were opened to the prejudice of the world and the fact that racism was very much alive and it gave way to the idea that my skin alone could cause someone to devalue me, to belittle me, and to even want to cause me harm, and so my net of safety just broke, and it was beyond just a quick fix kind of repair. This unleashed a new wave of tenacity towards injustice as well as self-love. My confidence in my own skin began to grow. Fear began to make a departure as love for people and self and God began to take over like never before. I began to realize that it was not sinful to love and partake in my culture, that distancing myself from who God etched me out to be from the inside out did more harm than just lovingly embracing and utilizing it to advance His kingdom, and I could finally exercise self-care without feeling shame or guilt. I could enjoy Caribbean music or simply behold the beauty of another culture and not feel like it was a betrayal towards God. On the Queer side of things, it’s just been an uphill battle. A couple of months before my divorce was final, I found out about this ministry called Revoice. Mind you, up until this point, I had not dealt with this part of me at all. My divorce was final back in December of last year, by the way. At one point in my life, I was actually in denial that I even had same-sex desires, and my ex-husband was aware of them, but we never talked about them in much length. So this ministry Revoice just took my breath away because I witnessed a group of believers from different parts of the LGBTQ+ spectrum who were at ease in their identities and at the same time connected to Jesus, and it was just such a marvelous and beautiful sight. And I wondered how this could be so if all my life I had understood that even an inkling of the homosexual thought was horrifically evil and demanded immediate repentance. So this suppressed curiosity and these desires just began to reemerge and my soul just was not at rest and it would not have peace until I could reach some kind of resolutions or some solid conclusions about this, and so I decided to take a deep dive into this new territory and heard from people like Bridget Eileen and Sam Allberry and Wesley Hill and these perspectives helped me to get started and at least be able to reconcile the fact that my identity and my attractions were indefinitely a part of my fabric. However, it stopped short of letting me know what all I could do with them outside of being celibate for the rest of my life, even if I didn’t feel called to singleness. And so, my head was filled with questions of the nuances which were not so easily answered, like, “What about those who are exclusively attracted to the same sex?” or “What exactly was the sin of Sodom?” or “Can I have a celibate same-sex relationship?” and the list goes on. And so I began to get discouraged, and I actually had almost given up until I had passively discovered an interview that the late Rachel Evans had with someone by the name of Justin Lee where many of these questions were answered and what was different was that he backed it up with scripture, and I could clearly tell that he had a love, a deep love, and passion for Jesus. And so the longer story short of that is I ended doing my own studies on top of what I had compiled and have landed where I am today, which is being fully LGBTQ+ affirming. I came out publicly on Facebook shortly afterwards, and it did end up creating a small stir among some old friends of mines. They tried to trip my faith away and talk me out of where I had landed, but yeah, that’s the long winded version of that.
Transition Music
Second Segment
Sequana: On the racial reconciliation side of things, it’s been very, very revitalizing. I’ve discovered a new world that is just brimming with authors and theologians and sheologians and musicians and activists and speakers and historians who look like me and it’s just been such a joy seeing the truth being spoken to power by such a colorful array of voices and leaders in our day and age. It’s definitely expanded my thinking in unimaginable ways, ways I may have deemed before as distractions or as unbeneficial to my faith. By no means do I think that I have arrived, I kind of feel like I’m at the teenager stage. I’m carving out my own identity amongst these greats but still ready to sit down and listen and take notes. On the Queer side of things, it’s been pretty exhausting, and a lot of my relationships with people, or certain people, are forever changed. That’s just something that I’ve just made peace with whether or not they decide to come along with me on my journey or whether or not they need more time to understand it. It’s just something I’m leaving in the hands of God. My family hasn’t really said much about it since I came out. I’ve just taken care not to get into conversations about my sexuality unless I’m directly asked about it.
Nicki: Well thank you for sharing about that as well. Kind of switching gears here, could you tell us about your music? What shapes the music you create and has that changed over the years?
Sequana: Yeah, absolutely. Since 2016, I have been writing songs and compiling them for what is now known as Bandy’s Notebook: Volume 1, and every song that I write is very personal and ultimately has a strong message that I believe can resonate with people across the board. My experiences are what shape my music. I don’t really find comfort in talking about things that add little value, remedy, or healing to a listener or that I have little to no experience in. The very first song that I wrote during this season was “Sanctify,” and it was written during a time when I was separated from my ex-husband and fully engulfed in a single parent lifestyle, but at that time I had learned to find contentment in where I was and to trust in God that He would provide for our needs and vindicate and validate me accordingly. And then out of nowhere one day, I remember I was riding down the highway and this hook just came to me, this melody, and I recorded it in my phone, and it just kind of stayed on my heart and next thing I know a few days, or a week or two later, the first verse came, and then the second, and then the bridge one day which went through a few revisions. And it was about the realities of being separated from my husband and facing exhaustion as a single parent and for me it was an authentic display of where I was, unsugarcoated, and that song concludes just with encouragement for how I was being sustained by God throughout it. And honestly, this process, this is pretty much how a lot of my songs come about. Like I’ll just be doing something mundane, and I’ll just get inspired. But my songs, they talk about depression, my depression, or my woes as a socially awkward quiet person, my divorce, my bisexuality, and just how Jesus holds me all together in His hands with all of these different dimensions that are a part of me. Each song has its own vibe. They range from gospel to hip hop to even a little Indie pop. And that’s why I call it a notebook, because these are journal entries to my life, the good, the bad, the ugly, and just different moods that I find myself in.
Nicki: That’s really beautiful, and yeah, I love “Sanctify” and all of your music, so thanks for sharing about what has shaped your music and how that’s changed. I wanted to ask you about this. I don’t know if you want to talk specifically about “Confessions” since I know that I was going to play a clip of “Confessions” at the end of this episode, so I didn’t know if there was anything you wanted to say specifically about that song from what do you hope for that song and what is your heart behind the song.
Sequana: Yeah, so that song, it’s definitely, it’s very personal. It dives into just my story of just discovering myself and again just being true to myself, and it starts off just talking about my attractions and then when they emerged when I was a youth, and what I decided to do with them. I decided to bury them because I was afraid of them. Based on what I understood at the time with my faith, I thought that they were sinful, and so I did everything I could to squash them, hide them away. And really, the overall message of the song, it’s definitely a song about this self-reconciliation because by the end of the song, as it notes in my journey, I begin just discerning more and more about what these attractions and how they are knit inside of me and they are part of me. So there’s a line in there where I say, “I’m automatically fashioned.” And that’s just talking about the fact that, you know, there’s just overwhelming evidence that anything that’s ex-gay, any sort of conversion therapy type things that people have immersed themselves in, it just doesn’t work and that people end up still having these attractions. So this has caused me to believe that our attractions are just a part of us, this is a part of our DNA, our fabric, and we can’t do anything to change them and we shouldn’t do anything to change them. So, that line just speaks to that. I'm automatically fashioned. So however we’re made is however we’re made, whoever we’re built to be attracted to. It’s a message of self-reconciliation, but it’s also a letter to the church because I then begin to talk about just how this ties in with our faith and just an invitation for this conversation and just the church to be more welcoming to people like me and really just across the whole spectrum in the LGBTQ+ community because there’s just so much that they’re missing out on by excluding us from a lot of things.
Nicki: I was going to say specifically for you Sequana, I’ve always seen the fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things.” And so seeing that fruit of the Spirit borne in you, overflowing from you. Yeah, it’s evident that you love Jesus and that this fruit is growing in you, and so I’ve always, always seen that fruit in you and just never doubted, no matter what point in your journey you’ve been on, that you love Christ. So thank you for sharing all of this with us. What advice do you have for others who are broadening the narrative?
Sequana: My biggest advice would definitely be just be true to yourself and your convictions and that you don’t have to move at the pace of the next person. If you need to just sit and dwell on a topic for a while and wrestle through it, then do so. I would never advise anyone to act against their conscience. For me, when I’m tackling a new subject, I like to ask every question imaginable and then get answers from varying perspectives. This helps me to be in the best position to defend whatever view I land on because I feel like I’ve allowed myself an angle that is closer to 360 degrees to be able to either dodge or affirm or challenge arguments that may be preposterous or incomplete or incoherent, and I say closer to 360 instead of fully 360 because like it or not, we all have blind spots and it’s not weak to admit that. And I think acknowledging that will just help us to stay humble. So yeah, just stay humble, ask questions, and be true to yourself.
Nicki: I love that. I love that. So, what is your hope for others as the narrative is broadened for you?
Sequana: My hope is just that more people would expand their listening choices in terms of who they’re letting influence their lives. I hope that churches would welcome and promote more voices of people of color as well as voices from the LGBTQ+ community. I don't think that Voddie Baucham should be the only Black preacher that we know of who can teach the Bible. I just think that the world abroad, I hope that the world abroad would take the testimonies of people in marginalized communities to heart, to stand with us.
Nicki: What is one action people in privileged positions can commit to in order to bring your hope to fruition?
Sequana: So, if I were speaking directly to them, I would say many people like me, we’ve listened to your preachers, we’ve gone through your workshops, we’ve studied up on dead theologians who don’t look like us, and I would challenge you privileged, you who are the privileged, who have never strayed outside of your respective bubbles of influence, to pick a medium that resonates with you whether it’s books, music, podcasts, movies, whatever, and in that medium, just commit to one month of reviewing the work of someone or an organization that talks about everything we talked about in this podcast. I feel like we never stop learning. There’s never like a ceiling we can reach and say, “Welp, I’ve learned everything I could learn.” There’s always room for learning. And I think if we just expand who we’re learning from, it will do us more of a benefit than the harm that we think we’ll receive. So yeah, I would challenge people to commit to 30 days of listening to and learning from something different.
Nicki: Last question. Where can people find you on social media?
Sequana: So, social media. I have on my Instagram you can find me @bandythenomad. On Twitter, you can find me @MurraySequana. I have several songs available on most major streaming services, like Apple Music and TIDAL and Deezer and Spotify and all those fun things. You can find a lot of my singles on there. You can also look for me on Bandcamp at bandy17.bandcamp.com.
Nicki: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Sequana, and for sharing your experience with us. I am grateful for your voice, friend.
Sequana: Yeah, I’m so happy that you had me on here.
Nicki: Well, I’m definitely going to have to have you back on the podcast, and we can dive into more of these topics and anything else that comes up that you just want to talk about as the narrative is broadened.
Sequana: Yeah, that’s dope, that sounds really good. Awesome.
Transition Music
Stick around until the very end for a clip from Bandy’s song “Confessions.”
Closing: I want to thank Sequana Murray for the voice clip she sent to me for the episode intro. You can purchase her music on Bandcamp at bandy17.bandcamp.com. Her music is available on most streaming services under the name Bandy. I also want to thank Jordan Lukens for his help with editing. Please subscribe and review the show, but only if you’re planning on leaving a 5-star review. Otherwise, you can just skip this part. You can access the Broadening the Narrative blog by visiting broadeningthenarrative.blogspot.com, and you can find the Broadening the Narrative page on Instagram by searching for @broadeningthenarrative and on Twitter by searching for @broadnarrative. I hope that if you know and love me you can engage with the Broadening the Narrative blog, social media accounts, and podcast, as well as any recommended resources. Then, you can share with people who know and love you, and little by little, person by person, we can broaden the narrative. Grace and peace, friends.
Outro Music
Now, here’s a preview of “Confessions” by Bandy.
Clip of “Confessions” plays to end the episode
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