Where All The Wild Beasts Lay *ORIGINAL*

A young Black girl sits in silent contemplation before a stained glass window of the Virgin Mary. Her delicate frame dwarfed by the holy image rendered in pale tones, symbolic of the European ideal imposed through colonization. Her presence is bold yet vulnerable, challenging the space she occupies and the histories it holds.
This painting wrestles with layered intersections: race, religion, gender, and the enduring scars of slavery. Christianity, introduced through the brutal hand of colonization, served both as a weapon of oppression and as a balm for the enslaved. The stained glass Mary; blonde, delicate, untouchable, stands as a symbol of whitewashed sainthood, far removed from the lived experiences of Black women whose strength, divinity, and pain have gone unrecognized. The Black girl's positioning in front of Mary is not incidental. It is a reclaiming of sacred space, of womanhood, and of spiritual authority.
Much like the inclusion of Job 40:15-24, the passage about Behemoth, evokes deeper symbolism. “Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee...” God speaks of a creature both feared and formed by His own hands, immense in power and impossible to tame. This echoes the fear colonial systems held toward Black bodies, particularly the defiant and divine strength of Black women, both demonized and denied spiritual humanity. Like Behemoth, the Black woman is framed as dangerous, yet of God. Her strength is not a flaw but a creation of divinity itself.
There is a cognitive dissonance captured in this image: a Black girl taught to find salvation in a faith historically used to enslave her people; a woman taught to revere a purity she was never allowed to embody. And yet, she stays. She watches. She questions. She endures.
"Where All The Wild Beast Lay"is not only a portrait, it is a mirror, asking: What does it mean to carry a sacred legacy through generations of distortion? What does it mean to believe anyway?