The call of the ancestors

When they come for you, the ancestors that it, it is very hard not to respond. They come in many different ways, mine whisper in my ear or wake me up. Like the time I awoke, with that little cut on my left hand burning. It felt hot and intense and uncomfortable. I lay there and heard my Uncle Alfred, calling…. “Sonya, Sonya, I’m flying, I’m flying!” a tear coursed down my cheek.

The next day my cousin What’s app’d me with news, my Uncle Alfred had died at 1.30 am, “Oh”, I thought “he was waving to me”, in transition, on his way to the other side. Later I went into Bridgetown and entered a shop selling material. One of the rolls of cloth fell in front of me and as I looked down, took stock of the blackness, explored its hue and shade, the shop assistant announced, “someone just died.” I looked up at her as she turned away, looked ashamed and acted as though nothing had been said.

Other ways of knowing

I felt a bit spooked, but in truth much of Diaspora life, in the Caribbean, in India, in the Middle and Far East is full of these ‘other ways of knowing!’ Full of what is called ‘superstition’ in the West and ‘those old ways’ in the Caribbean. I mean people know, you can see it in their looks, furtive eyes shifting, a turn of the head to see who has heard, who has noticed, that they know that you know!

When I first heard the call, I was at a family constellations workshop. The facilitator said, put your finger on a toy animal and see what message you get. I heard the voice of my great grandmother Margaret, “you should do this work”, she said, “it will bring you money”. It was only later, as I laid the ashes of my mother and father to rest, on their land in Guyana, that I realised that the call was to atone for her sins. My father hatred her, never spoke of her, it was only after the workshop, when I asked him that he uttered, but with no kind words, “She was avaricious and greedy!’

Ancestral legacies

In the Caribbean, in small African villages, in the heart of the Guyanese South American jungle, there are many churches. In English colonial territories, there were laws against any kind of African practice. If found you could be punished, maybe a whipping or forced from home and imprisoned. You may be surprised to find, that some of those laws are still on the statue books or have only recently been repealed. When we talk about the repression of ‘other ways of knowing’, we are not talking about what was done, but what continues.

A universal call

It is not just people of African heritage who are being called. In the West, as indigenous traditions have been lost, the young and the addicted, (because one way to get to spirit, is to follow the drugs) are finding shamanism in the Native American tradition, in the hearts of the Brazilian jungle in the South African Sangoma initiation. In the search for the indigenous, when you don’t know what you are looking for, take care not to repeat, what came before you.

We understand wthout acknowledging

One of my Bajan friends with a very Christian mother, told me about the time that her mother had come into the sitting room and saw ‘a ghost’ sitting on the sofa. “She just ordered him out,” my friend said and laughed. I was astonished, not that this could happen, spirits are with us and around us all the time. But that in this deeply Christian society, she still remembered, that spirits are not always in a dark grave, sometimes they are wandering, afraid of being forgotten. Sometimes the spirits have just become lost, they can’t cross over, they want to be heard and for someone to help get them safely home.

Grandparents and Elders workshop

At our Grandparents and Elders workshop on 28 February we will create Witness Pods with small figurines, map places and spaces with felt floor markers and where possible use group members as representatives to explore the messages from our ancestors and elders. If you feel called, come, if you feel resistance you may choose another workshop, not all events that we offer are the same!

In peace and harmony!