The ManicaPost
DID you see any subtle differences between eating a vegetarian cooked diet and eating raw, in terms of your consciousness?
Muta: Yeah, man! Definitely. The raw thing is a higher level. It’s like you walking a line, but it’s not a line really, because it makes you so balanced. I don’t know. Things start to feel more to you. It gets you more aware, quicker. You don’t sleep as much. You’re not as sluggish. I remember when I used to be raw, I didn’t want to sleep.
It was like I was starting fresh. I didn’t want to sleep, but you’re supposed to sleep. I had to realize that there was nothing wrong with me. Sleeping is not a thing where you have to sleep??eight hours.
You eat less. You definitely eat less when you eat raw food.
Three meals a day is a crazy thing. It’s a western thinking. Three meals a day is a man who is soon dead.
And it’s kind of ridiculous to eat three meals a day when people don’t eat one meal. When you’re a vegetarian and you start eating tofu and gluten, it’s almost like you’re eating meat. But it’s not as sluggish
. But the raw food thing—you eat less, you’re not as hungry. You just eat when you feel like you want to eat. Sometime I eat because I afraid.
I didn’t really want to eat, but I didn’t eat for a long time so I feel I should eat something. It keep you alert.
How have you seen your music and poetry develop and mature? In your relationship to—?
Muta: Eating? Well, the poetry that I write now is just looking around me and seeing things that are happening around me.
My poetry mostly is social, political, African-centred. My thinking of black, Africanness, was there before me start to go into this raw food. We were more aware of our blackness before. So it just continued that way.
What the vegetarian did was put it into perspective more. You wear Africa, you eat vegetarian, anytime you talk it’s African. You kind of get a respect for that. It’s what white people say is “wholistic.” White people say everything is wholistic. It gives you a wholistic approach to Africa.
Everything has to be directed toward an African-centred perspective. So what we eat and what we wear and what we think has to be in relation to our Africanness. So, my poetry now is just an expression of my Africanness. What I believe African people should do and what?
I think white people are doing. So my poems go against white supremacy. We are Marcus Garvey people. Anytime we talk, its about Africa. It’s a way to fight against white supremacy. So the food is just a next aspect.
It’s not really the aspect because we are talking the liberation of African people, whether we eat meat or not.Is that liberation external or internal?
Muta: Liberation in every way. Marcus Garvey say, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”
The mental slavery right now is more damaging than the physical slavery that we was once in. Black people get complacent right now with slavery. They think that there’s no slavery. So they get very complacent.
But the slavery right now is more devastating than the slavery of old because our fore-parents could see the chains, so they took out the chisel and they break off the chain on them foot. We don’t see them chain, so we think no chain is there.
So we get so domicile and so complacent in the European mentality. So we don’t really feel it.
Part of the thing that is the matter is the food. McDonald’s is one of the biggest drug houses in the world right now, but people don’t see it as that. It’s white supremacy.
Americanisation of mind. It’s more than just eating a burger. It’s all about an institution that is inculcating a culture. So we have to understand it even more than just the physical. It’s a mental thing.
A man don’t hunger but go have a McDonald’s. Why you don’t hunger but want to have a McDonald’s? Because them advertise it that way. They portray it that way. That we are fighting against.
And we use the poetry to do that and we use just our own lifestyle to do that. Every time we move, every time we act, that is what we do.
Well, thanks very much for talking with us. — sparksofdissent
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