{"id":16690,"date":"2022-03-28T17:24:59","date_gmt":"2022-03-28T17:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/?p=16690"},"modified":"2022-03-28T17:24:59","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T17:24:59","slug":"our-african-ancestors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/our-african-ancestors\/","title":{"rendered":"Our African Ancestors"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I am still hers. I am still hers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Its best to receive our African Ancestors as they appear.\u00a0 I\u2019ve learned it\u2019s best not to try to control how the memories of my mother show up, or what emotions they are wearing when they enter. This one is dressed in a rare crossbreed of inconsolable laughter and a stabbing sob, and it\u2019s seeping out of my iphone from wherever the speaker is located on this godforsaken device. I put one end near my ear and then the other, trying to get a better listen, but neither seems to bring me much closer to her voice\u2014the words shivering slightly with static as if rubbing up against stubby hair follicles on a head freshly forced into shaving by cancer. \u201cJust thinking about you, son,\u201d my mother says softly, after singing the chorus of Stevie Wonder\u2019s \u201cI Just Called to Say I Love You\u201d in one of her voicemails I started saving after her diagnosis.<\/p>\n

And right here is the memory of how my mother always referred to me as \u201csun\u201d with a \u201cu\u201d in writing\u2014which is funny because if anyone was like the sun, it was her. If anyone was the thing that kept me warm even when it sometimes burned\u2014was proof of something greater and life-giving, was what everything in my world revolved around\u2014it was my mother. And now she\u2019s gone. So I laugh. And I cry. And I wish I could hear her voice just one more time a little bit clearer.\u00a0Please<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned there is always someone listening to your pleas, and no one you love ever really leaves you, completely. Mata taught me those things. They are core tenets of the Hare Krsna religion, a branch of Hinduism to which she converted at twenty years of age alongside her mother in 1972, when they were some of the first Black Americans to do so. I have never known anyone else to believe in anything as strongly as my mother believed in Krsna and the boundlessness of His love for our eternal spirits. Everything she did was related to her belief in something greater than this life. Including pushing me away when I told her I was queer. Including putting in the work to get me back when pushing me away didn\u2019t do the job of expressing the love she knew her god wanted her to express. I didn\u2019t always understand her beliefs. I still don\u2019t, but now that she is gone I think I understand much more.<\/p>\n

It was my mother\u2019s belief that made the impossible possible. She raised her ten children as a stay-at-home mother struggling alongside a working class Muslim husband in Cleveland, OH, and homeschooled almost all of us until high school. She always made sure we were fed and were generally safe despite often having no money, because she never stopped taking the next best step, assured it would lead her where she wanted to go, even if not within this lifetime.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t always convinced of her destination myself, but finishing the life she led in the way she did is proof enough. Even if there isn\u2019t anything beyond this life on earth, the place to which searching for something greater took her is surely enough of where she wanted to go. She died lying in a great new home her eldest daughter bought her, surrounded by all of her children\u2014some of us having quit our jobs and packed up everything to come to North Carolina and take care of her in the middle of a pandemic, all of us loving on each other and her more than we ever thought possible. \u201cIt\u2019s okay,\u201d my brother chanted as I held one motionless hand reduced to skin-covered bone and he held the other, \u201cit\u2019s okay,\u201d and then her labored breathing stopped right where there couldn\u2019t have been more love even if you tried to force it.<\/p>\n

If you had asked me a few years ago what my spiritual beliefs were, I would have responded with some canned answer about not being very religious and then changed the subject. For most of my adult life, I associated spiritual beliefs not with what my mother accomplished, but with what was taken from her, including integral parts of her relationship with me as we clashed over my queerness. But having experienced these last two years of her slowly dying of cancer, I\u2019ve had the opportunity to think more deeply about my response to this question as thoughts of an afterlife became unavoidable. In doing so, I understand that perhaps my previous perception of my mother\u2019s spirituality was skewed. What if what I was attributing to her spiritual beliefs was actually when they faltered? If my mother truly believed we were not this body, if she and Krsna truly loved me, then how she treated me during those fraught times wasn\u2019t evidence of her belief in something wrong, but evidence that her belief, however strong, was sometimes not strong enough.<\/p>\n

As a police and prison abolitionist, I believe other worlds are possible. I believe we are more than mindless monsters who need cages and abuse in order to live in community with one another, and so I am not afraid of a world without state-sanctioned punishment and death. But my mother\u2019s passing finds me on a mission to believe this at least as strongly as she believed in her most unfaltering moments\u2014to understand this within the context of something bigger than me\u2014because she proved this is one sure way to begin to create the world in which you want to live. And today creating that world is more pressing than ever, because I don\u2019t think I could stand to live another second in one where my mother is not here.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0<\/b>Finding our way back to the religions stolen from our ancestors<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

A few years ago, I began exploring Hoodoo, a Black American spiritual practice rooted in African traditions, after I reached out to my friend Myesha Worthington, a priestess and creator of\u00a0Cognac & Conjure<\/a>, who encouraged me to set up an ancestral altar. As someone who grew up with sacred altars, creating another felt less foreign than a close childhood friend who has hurt you so you don\u2019t speak anymore. Before a lot of the healing work my mother and I accomplished prior to her death, I associated these spiritual rituals with the harm I\u2019d experienced at her hands, but it was through Hoodoo that I discovered I could make these associations with the love I\u2019d experienced from her too. I could create from the still standing foundations she established, rather than only parsing through the rubble, if I believed I could.<\/p>\n

Hoodoo is rooted in the idea that Black people are more than the abuse we experience, and we have not lost our connection to our history and our power. Central to the practice is ancestral veneration, a way of connecting with something bigger than yourself by connecting deeper to your own personal history. Besides my childhood associations with religion, I also feared possibly doing ancestor veneration wrong before starting this journey\u2014and by making mistakes somehow inviting negative spirits\u2014and so it took many months after speaking to my priestess friend for me to follow her guidance.<\/p>\n

But Hoodoo has taught me that there is no wrong way to honor your ancestors, if honoring is what you are doing; there is only starting and getting better. Just like there is no wrong way to fight for a better world, there is only starting and getting better. Just like there is no wrong way to grieve.<\/p>\n

A few days ago, my brother noted that my mother has probably been grieving the entire time I\u2019ve been alive. Since before I was born, my grandmother struggled from an intense and for a long time untreated bipolar disorder, and my grandfather, whom my mother rarely discussed, died long before grandma, who passed in 2014. I guess I didn\u2019t really see what my mother was experiencing as grief because she always exuded a type of joy that is hard to explain, a type of joy I never knew could be compatible with such profound sadness of loss. But I am finding bits and pieces of what feels like my mother\u2019s joy in this new grief of losing her\u2014in listening to this voicemail, in recalling how she referred to me, how she loved me\u2014and it is deeper than anything I\u2019ve ever felt before, even as my world seems like it has fallen apart. This is a power that only comes from knowing there is still a connection between me and my mother, a connection that can never fully be severed, regardless of death.<\/p>\n

As an amalgamation of over\u00a040 different African traditions<\/a>\u00a0passed down orally and adapted over time through only the best possible tools when slavery made many impossible, Hoodoo is what happens when Black people start their journey toward making themselves whole and get better. Hoodoo is where my Black mother\u2019s power to find joy in grief, to make the impossible possible came from, even if she didn\u2019t call it that.<\/p>\n

I became an abolitionist because I saw this world which is so deadly to Black people crumbling many times before this. I saw Trayvon Martin murdered, then Michael Brown, then Tamir Rice, then Korryn Gaines. It was tempting to see such copious death through one of two lenses of misery: either there is just nothing we can do but make small, hardly effective changes toward \u201cprogress,\u201d or nothing will ever ultimately change and so we might as well succumb to nihilism. Before my mother\u2019s diagnosis, I was nearly seduced by the latter perspective, convinced to surrender to unchangeable systems as long as most of the world is against me and may never be on my side. A world without police and prisons is an unreasonable demand to too many in power, and so fighting for it was as much a fool\u2019s errand as believing I could commune with my mother after she died. But the next best step demands more than giving up on what is necessary just because someone might call you a fool.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0<\/b>How I use ancestor veneration to navigate my Mother\u2019s Death<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

So I sit in front of my altar, light a candle, and ask my mother, \u201cHow am I going to get through this without you?\u201d She smiles in the picture in front of me, in the warm blood rushing through my veins as my heart beats in longing. She responds in the noises I hear outside of the window\u2014kids laughing and birds chirping, all screaming life, all screaming\u00a0live<\/i>. She responds in the chills I feel in my skin when anger erupts towards those birds and the people who get to live when she doesn\u2019t. She tells me to listen to my anger, explore what is really at the center of it. She tells me to cry more in a gasp I cannot contain, so I do. She tells me to cry as much as I want to. As much as I need to. My body has always had what it needs inside of it. Has always had her inside of it. And listening to it is how I get through. How, as a people still waiting for abolition, we always have.<\/p>\n

When the sun dies,\u00a0scientists believe<\/a>\u00a0its core will compress while its flaming surface expands, becoming what is known as a red giant. Its fire will envelop all of the inner planets, including the earth, but burn enough to warm the outer planets into potential habitation for another billion years.<\/p>\n

My sun is leaving. The old world I knew does not feel like it exists anymore. But I\u2019ve learned through my mother, through Hoodoo, through rediscovering belief in something bigger than me, through science, that nothing we love ever truly leaves us, that there are other planets, and those are where the heat from this dying sun might allow us to foster life for the next countless years, if we try at it and get better. If we are really intentional about connecting with our ancestors, those are where our abolitionist societies will be created. And I still wish I could hear her voice just one more time a little bit clearer\u2014and maybe I will always wish that\u2014but somewhere on those new worlds my mother also hears me making this plea in front of my altar and she answers, however staticky, with this joy she will never stop bequeathing me. And even after these countless years pass, there will be other suns for other solar systems. Because I am still hers. I am still hers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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TAGGED:<\/h4>\n

abolition<\/a>,\u00a0African Traditional Religions<\/a>,\u00a0grief<\/a>,\u00a0hoodoo<\/a>,\u00a0Love<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am still hers. I am still hers. Its best to receive our African Ancestors as they appear.\u00a0 I\u2019ve learned it\u2019s best not to try to control how the memories of my mother show up, or what emotions they are wearing when they enter. This one is dressed in a rare crossbreed of inconsolable laughter Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16693,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[133,39,52,40,5,58,788,1087,59,51,1025,1],"tags":[1177,1131],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16690"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16692,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16690\/revisions\/16692"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}