Is the Ancestor in the room right now?

Ancestors, dreamwork, and writing from the ancestral well - craft essay

Photo by Tiago Celestino on Unsplash

I have dropped confession after confession lately, to audiences who come to hear me speak. Confessions I would never make until now that I have danced with ghosts and told their stories.

I confess to rituals, and to spiritual things. What one of my students referred to as “woo woo stuff,” the things we hold on and are reluctant to share on the basis that we might be shamed for it, laughed at for believing in, or worse: for fear of not being taken seriously.

The woo woo stuff, that magic inherited from your mother or father, your grandmother, your great great aunt who tells you to tell your bad dreams to the toilet so they don’t end up in the ether and manifesting. The things you dream say so much about who you are, and on the even of my novel going to print, I enter a dream in which I am lost in a parking lot somewhere in North America. Or maybe I’m not lost, maybe I’m just meeting someone, and when I see the person walk toward me I know we were both meant to meet there. I see Huey P. Newton in my dream.

Sure, I’ve met him before. Or should I say, I have felt him. I have conjured him and Fred Hampton and Stokely Charmichael in the post heated moments of ideation, in the research and writing process of this novel where I center the Black Panthers. I have felt their presence enter the room not just inside my mind, but in the physical realm.

I could feel them there, watching, perched over my shoulder, reading every word and fueling every paragraph.

I have felt them seated in the backseat of my car as I drive down the freeway, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke right out my window.

I could hear their heated debates as they congreated in the living room of my one-bedroom in North Miami, leaving dents in my couch, whispering in my ear when the story necessitated a rewrite, when the plot came undone seven hundred pages later, when I walked away frustrated but still feverishly obsessed with telling this story the right way.

They stayed and waited for me to come back and sit in the chair, and they reminded me of the work I was charged to do. I had to see this done to the finish. I had no choice. I was in too deep, the engagement being that I needed to write the reminder of their existence in a way that would warrant curiosity, surprise, awe. I had to tell the stories the world had contorted, distorted, and tossed aside. Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panter Party, was always there.

But that night, in this particular dream, he came to reassure me that although my panic and fear and reservations about reclaiming the history of the Black Panther Party were nearly crippling me, I was going to be okay. He was here to give me permission. I could tell in the way he held me close, gave me that comrade dap that made me feel validated. And even after he walked away, and I was left speechless, I woke up exhilarated.

That’s the woo woo stuff I shared in a talk once. And that kind of woo woo stuff is the kind I’ve been reluctant to share in the past. Because I had noticed a pattern in the circles I evolved in. Bring up the woo woo and they look at you with a blank stare, and you can feel the judgement: is she serious right now? Dreams? Those things are nothing but the manifestation of our unmet desires. Are we supposed to take those dreams seriously? Those crystals displayed around the laptop?

I once had a teacher/mentor talk to me about dreams. “The rule in fiction is, you don’t write the dream your character had for more than one paragraph, or a few sentences. Don’t go in to deep, otherwise you lose us.” Because, she said, how is a reader to take you seriously and rely on you to tell it a story, if they can’t believe you? Which then begs the question, “Why wouldn’t they believe me? Is my reader’s imagination so limited that they couldn’t accept my dreams as part of my reality?”

If I start to tell the stories where my character washed the fever out of a dying man with an incantation, or a story where a dead woman returns to her community in the living flesh, why would that be unbelievable? Because science tells us it is not possible? Whose science?

Who decides what is believable and what is not? So many writers inherit spectacular gems of knowledge from their lineage, their ancestors, their communities, their families, and are afraid to step into that power or don’t even know they can because of what dominant narratives have done to our psyche. It has tried to erase from us the things our grandparents ingrained: the blessing of a home before you move into it, the cleansing of it through smoke and song, the washing of your floors with Florida water, the incense and the oils, the mortar and pestle with the salt, were they not a gift?

Today, we forget the ginger and the clove to relieve your physical ailments because the new world and its colonizing methods want you to rely in the science that takes place in the lab, not in your kitchen. If the knowlege came from indigenous plants and your grandparents’ hands, and it sustained communities for years, nursed them back to health, fed them, why then would it be suddenly be considered backward and woo woo?

Writing fiction is a ritual in which I will allow no foreign interference. It is the medicine my people have given me, and if I can ever teach any writer coming after me anything, it is to hold fast to the oral tales, the practice of their mothers, the legends of your great uncles, and to cherish the ways in which ghosts visit us in our most private moments.

ANCESTORS IN FICTION

Photo by Wolfgang Rottmann on Unsplash

I used to think of ancestors in fiction, or in literature in general, as just characters who have passed on and somehow have been formative to the main characters alive in present time of the story. An old aunt, a grandparent, great great somebody, maybe.

But ancestors are present in stories for a reason. They validate characters, give them shape and motivation, explain who they are and why they make certain choices. They’re certainly also there as guides or protectors, or memory keepers, showing up in shadows or literal ghosts.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved famously embodies this: a ghost that is both a traumatic past and an ancestor demanding reckoning. Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones whispers ancestral grief into the present-day body. In August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, the piano is a literal ancestral conduit. It is through playing it that Berniece is able to heal the generational trauma of her family — which points to how, in fiction, the ancestor can also be incarnated in an object, or a talisman, a material thing passed on from one generation to the next.

Ancestors visit us in our dreams, so dreamwork in any shape or form may be necessary. Writing down the dreams when I wake up is one way, meditating and saying their names in the sacred moments that I create, is another way.

And here is another truth about ancestors: they are not always related to us by blood. They come to us via a shared bond, whatever that may be. They come and speak to you in your language, to tell you their story, and you will sit and interpret this to give them their voice so that all may hear it. It’s their way of being remembered and we, writers, have the responsibility to make their voices heard. I call Zora Neale Hurston a literary ancestor in the same way I consider Alexandre Dumas a literary ancestor. They left a blueprint that calls to me when I write.

HOW TO CRAFT ANCESTORS IN FICTION

There is no real prescription for this that will come from me. Because ancestor is such a powerful word, and writing ancestors is such a powerful journey, that I cannot think of one prescriptive way to tell anyone to do it except to feel it.

For me, it’s like wrapping your hair in a headwrap. I know there are hundreds of tutorials out there on how to wrap a turban or a headwrap like Erykah Badu or India Arie. But I agree with my friend, author Marie Ketsia Theodore Pharel, who says that “wrapping a headwrap comes ancestral memory.” It should be done the way your ancestors would have done it, and the only way to really do it is to either watch them do it, or to let them guide your hands and trust the process. I have always just followed and trusted the process.

This isn’t to say one cannot learn new tricks. But this knowledge is in my bones. In the same way, I let the ancestors come through the story in the way they want to be manifested. I don’t sit and tell myself that I’m going to use the ancestor archetype and that they will be manifested in the story in the form of a ghost who haunts a family, or in the shape of a piano that carries the violent memories of the past. I just let the ancestor come and I write themselves alive through my prose.

What I do think about when writing ancestors, however, is whether said ancestor is satisfied. Because writing is the ritual through which we honor ancestors, I expect they will want to be honored and served correctly. If this were a ceremony, we would pour libations, call their names, burn candles and herbs, we might even dance. In any ceremony, we would close with the satisfaction that ate the food they were served, drank the librations they were given, blessed and remembered. Why should it be different in fiction?

When writing ancestors, this is the main goal I keep in mind: have I done the job? Have I satisfied that craving of theirs to be remembered? Because being forgotten — and any writer can understand this — is the greatest fear. To be forgotten and to dissolve into oblivion so none of our descendants remember our existence, say our names, pay us tribute, bring us back into the realm of the living so that we may communute together, to be forgotten to the point of erasure is the greatest fear.

ANCESTORS AND RESISTANCE

Writers like Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat or August Wilson remind us that these spirits do not appear simply to scare or unsettle, but to speak, to mourn, to reclaim. They carry memory, history, and unfinished stories.

To write the ancestor is to write in defiance of erasure. It is what Alexandre Dumas did with The Count of Monte Cristo: he rewrote his father into existence and into history after Napoleon had him erased. It is what Maryse Condé did in I, Tituba: she rewrote Tituba, First Black Witch of Salem who was completely wiped out of our memories and consciousness, into history through fiction. She gave Tituba a voice and reclaimed her power.

To write the ancestor is to listen across time, to make space for the voices that history tried to silence. It is, ultimately, a radical act of remembering. And remembering can be subversive. If you don’t believe me, look toward the books being tossed into the banned bin right now and tell me that isn’t about erasure.

And tell me what you’re about to do to resist it.