The non-English text is sourced from Kimbundu/kiKongo language sources from Christian missionaries in the 19th Century who were translating the Holy Bible into the indigenous languages of present-day Angola. Nzambici is a celestial creator goddess, the female half of Nzambi Mpungu (God Almighty), whose divine bodies stand at the center of all creation on the Congolese Cosmogram, representing the continual flow of existence through cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth. Kalunga, the spiritual fire at the center of the world that gives it its structure, is also the watery line between the world of spirit and humanity, which took on new meaning for descendants of enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic by the Portuguese, Spanish, English and other European powers during their ongoing political conflicts with many African states and civilizations. The inclusion of this element represents the worldview of spiritual traditionalists, the Banganga (medicine men), who often served in the court of Nzinga as advisors, many of which were sold into slavery by her machinations as she sought to expand Christianity’s influence into her kingdom for political purposes of maintaining social and economic relations with Spain and Portugal. Through this, the poem seeks to explore the possible mindset of someone in her political position, with each stanza representing a different emotional stage of reckoning with the world. This involves beginning with Biblical text written in kiKongo that sings the praises of Nzambici and Nzambi Mpungu and ending, ultimately, in acceptance of what her political career costed her personally and how it impacted the future of Angola and the Atlantic Creole world in centuries to come. 

—Jay Saint Flono