Today I am musing on the idea that the way to honor some ancestors is not to build an altar to the memory of who they were in the lifetime that we knew them, but instead to dream about the lives that they might have now that they are free of the life that they had to live.
I’m thinking particularly about my paternal grandmother, and how we don’t really talk when I come to the altar. She’s not that communicative with me. She will pop in from time to time, but she has no interest in being around me on a consistent basis or sitting on the council of elevated ancestors that has spiritual custody of me. My paternal grandmother does not have spiritual custody of me. My paternal grandfather does. He is actively here all the time. He is actively someone that I speak to and call on.
And part of that is because in their lifetimes, my grandmother birthed nine of his children, raised these children, never got a chance to do any type of professional work. Although she did a lot of community work, which is still work. And she was honored by the city of Detroit for her work, specifically with Operation Get Down, which is a very important community organization on the east side of Detroit (look it up). But she labored a lot in her lifetime doing child rearing. So now that she has transitioned, she has no interest in rearing her grandchildren from the ancestral altar.
My grandmother was also a Sagittarius. I suspect she had a lot of fire in her that she wasn’t able to use and explore in the ways that she wanted to. Because she said that every time that she would get ready to go back to work, she would get pregnant.
And so I say all that to say that I think, as an archivist, as a Black femme, I think that honoring her spirit is not so much about endlessly talking about and remembering everything that she did while she was alive in that lifetime. I can remember those things for myself and utilize them for how I want to move forward and things that I want to do (or not do). It’s not about the memories having no function. They can still have a function for me. But in terms of ancestral veneration, I don’t believe she gets anything out of that. Because she has pretty much said, “I don’t need anything from you”. I don’t need you to be at the altar giving me anything or any offerings or anything like that, because I’m not even here for real. I’m out there. I’m St. elsewhere.
And she’s not the only one of my feminine ancestors that I feel this with. Most of my ancestral court is men. And I’ve talked to people about this before. That’s largely because the women were the ones doing all of the work when they were here. The men, spiritually, emotionally, were very absent. And so them being in the ancestral realm now and having certain insights that they were blocked from while they were in the flesh, they now have the time and the energy and the wherewithal to do for their children and grandchildren what the mothers were always doing. And even if [the mothers] didn’t do it, what the mothers were at least trying to do or tasked with doing when they were living.
And so I wanted to say that sometimes honoring an ancestor isn’t about remembering them - it’s about forgetting. Sometimes it’s about laying to the side what you knew about them and allowing them to live so fully through you in a different direction. Sometimes it’s about dreaming them forward rather than remembering them.
I don’t really think about time linearly or anything like that, so we know that their experiences and that these timelines can be layered on top of one another. It’s not just about backwards and forwards. But this is about the philosophy of how we think about ancestral veneration and the technology of memory. Dream technology is also a thing.
Sometimes the function of the memory is for us to realize that they don’t get anything out of us just going over it again and again, talking about it over and over, and giving energy to a version of themselves that they’re done with. That is not serving their spirit.
These are things that you will only come to these kinds of realizations through the work of relationship with with your dead. This is not something that you can apply across the board to all your grandmothers. This is something you will only know by showing up to the altar and talking to them or trying to make contact, honoring them and then listening to hear from them “I’m not really here for that”.
And then you will start getting revelations about how the DNA they passed on to you wants to operate through you right now. And if it wants to operate through forgetting versus preserving those memories, at least as it pertains to veneration, which is supposed to be for them, then you need to honor that. Your relationship with that ancestral spirit could get stronger through you listening and honoring something like that, honoring the space between you and who they are now.
This made me think about my trans sisters, people who were assigned male at birth and then transitioned into womanhood or my trans brothers and trans siblings who were assigned a gender at birth and transitioned into someone else. This is why some of y’all relationships with y’all ancestors is not going to go very far or be very fruitful if you’re transphobic. You don’t have the right mindset to honor people’s autonomy.
It’s not about whether your granny was secretly a trans man or whether you had queer ancestors. If there were parts of them that were queer, not necessarily in the sense of who they wanted to sleep with, could be that, but maybe that they lived a very traditional type of life, but there were parts of them that didn’t want to live that way, and the only way that you engage with them is by putting the traditions that they upheld in their life on a pedestal. Constantly giving it energy and feeding those memories versus listening for who they are now, who they have transitioned into once they left this earthly realm.
Some of y’all are not going to understand the connection between what I’m saying about the ancestors and our trans siblings, but I was moved to say that for a reason and I’m not going to censor myself. That’s all I really had to say. Thanks for listening.
Check out my other articles on ancestral relationships:
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