from poltergeist to teacher: healing ancestral relationships
Dearest Ancestors,
I have been speaking about you all to others a lot lately and sharing gratitude for this beautiful relationship we've been creating ever since I participated in Queen Afua's Sacred Woman program. Queen Afua speaks of ancestors with such ease that in her presence I noticed my unease. On one of our calls, I confessed, "I don't too much trust my ancestors." I was expecting to be scolded, but she acknowledged the pain I carried embedded in the ruptures of my lineage and encouraged me to spend more time at the site of the rupture.
Now, I love the way my eye twitches when y’all want me to pay attention to something. It's a nudge that announces all of you saying, This right here! This part!
One time the spiritual nudge was so pronounced that my friend could see, at a certain point in our conversation, my right eyelid had its own dance. The twitching became too disruptive to physically see so I closed my eyes and continued speaking. The twitching intensified. Then, I became silent, excused myself, and began taking notes because there was something in the conversation you wanted me to remember. The twitching calmed. I returned my attention to my friend.
I didn't know how much of a resource y’all could be. Oftentimes you were a stranger. Other times, I was just afraid of you because of how much violence I was born into. I started to wonder how you became a poltergeist because no one ever spoke of you in the household or the Housing Projects. If no one spoke about my estranged father, then of course no one knew the name of my father's father. I also never considered my own roots, or the soil my people returned to, but I remember a movie where the soil was cracked open by a skeletal hand greedily reaching for signs of life to consume. Hollywood was my first teacher about the ancestral realm. It was frightening.
While in my MFA program some students wanted to go to the movies together to see the film Hereditary. I declined. "Oh come on?! It'll be fun." "Fun? Nah, I'm good." When continually asked why, I shared that I barely liked one grandmother and barely knew the other. "Why in the world would I want to see a film where the fear of my grandmothers would increase? Do I not carry enough fright from the memory of who they have been, or not been, in my lived experience? I will pass."
I don't recall seeing any films of the beyond that weren’t blood curdling. There are so many undead things about Hollywood. Then the fact that not even death could contain the malevolence embodied in whoever was doing the haunting was even more disturbing.
Death couldn't contain the Christ either, but the Slave Bible made it clear that the Christ didn't come back to liberate our kind. The missionaries wanted Africans to know submission, but never know sanctuary so "about 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing [and] 50 percent of the New Testament is missing." There was slavery, but no sanctity; bondage, but no deliverance; obedience, but no exodus; fire and brimstone, but no freedom. "Take and eat; this is my body."
The Slave Bible was the first book in the horror genre.
Dearest Ancestors, I would like to know, "How did you learn of freedom?
Teach me.”
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