Learning to Live from the Ancestral Dead

One of my favorite essays, reposted

(My Sicilian nonna with my great-grandparents around 1932. Unrelated to the essay except that these beloveds continue to speak to me.

*

The ancestral dead are speaking to us and many of us do not hear; those of us who do cannot bear it. In the beginning, we think we are crazy or have a mood disorder. It might take many years and pills and hours in therapy, many months of clinical depression before we surrender to the rare insight that we are in but not of this world. To accepting grief as gravity, as a grave, as a call from the dead. Not because we have more yet to mourn, but because the dead have something we need.

*

Death is ubiquitous as entertainment. The Netflix thumbnails are telling. Visually, most of them are stills of white men with guns. Thematically, many are about serial killers of women. About detectives investigating “brutal” or “horrific” or “shocking” murders. Or murder-rapes. One after another. Stories not about the lives lost but about the detectives.

Don’t we have better stories to tell? I wonder. Then I realize these stories are purgatives. We dabble in death and the satisfaction of a murderer brought to justice. But we sidestep the subtext. The shadow side expressed by writers, directors, and actors who cash in on stories of deranged men crushing the life out of women.

Real women die by far more banal means than serial killers. Poverty, inequality, overwork, lack of medical care, childbirth, war; the way racism weathers a body. Misogyny is the true serial killer…but it doesn’t make for must-see TV.

I hear dead women. Some I knew in life, some not.

I stop trying to stay afloat and let myself sink. It is a tranquil amniotic sea, the domain of the dead. What do you want to tell me? I ask and wait for a woman to appear, unprepared for that someone to be a child. Darlene from my tap-dancing class. Red hair, long pale limbs, eyes like old pennies that once darted furtively, scanning for danger. We were warned like all children to beware of strangers offering candy. Darlene--a year older--walked me to school until, in seventh grade, she ran away from home. Her body was found in a garment bag that washed up on a Florida beach. Unlike the cases on Netflix, her murder went unsolved.

A dead teen, another runaway.

Who cares?

Darlene’s house was dark and shuttered to keep out prying eyes. When she spoke of her father, her voice dropped to a whisper. He was “messing” with her and I understood because a trusted adult had messed with me. It was her father, not a stranger, whom she feared and fled, only to be used and killed by some other man. Because to be young and traumatized and a runaway is to be marked as prey. This I also know from experience. I wish I didn’t.

Darlene’s long hair floats in the currents like dulce as she hovers, her body a ghostly white. But she is neither sad nor pitiful: She has the sleek muscle of a fish.

Believe, she says at last. Believe the body.

My body, or hers?

The unwavering gaze tells me: both. Her once-darting eyes and that wordless knowledge that lived and lives still in my gut. Two school girls bowed by cruelty. The same weight that bears down on my students. On girls and young and old women in the grocery store, on the subway, or at the beach. Their bodies tell their histories, as my body tells its own.

Fifty years after Darlene walked me to school, I understand not only discernment but also intentionality, which also lives in the body. How, where, with whom I move. How I speak. What I permit to reach my ears. Those from whom I walk away.

Yes, that’s it, she says.

When you perceive what others carry, you know the commonness of cruelty. Most of us are bowed. Those who aren’t inhabit the beige of the so-called “best life” with its relentlessly streamed commodities. Lawn products and leaf blowers and plastic kayaks and Ka’Chava. Butt deodorant and face yoga and wellness retreats and “fine dining.” Often in service to muting unhappiness as easily as turning a dial. The dead alert us to the false promise that these elixirs can deliver a life of meaning and depth. I don’t want more meaning.

I want silence.

Get quiet and return to the body.

Notice the tide of grief.

Sink.

Nothing earthly can mute what you will feel in your bones.

*

The Palestinian song Ya Tale’een ‘al-Jabal (“To Those Climbing the Mountain”) has been in my ears for almost an entire year. It snagged my attention with syllabic gymnastics that, despite my rudimentary understanding of Arabic, I discerned. I looked up the lyrics, thinking I could learn them. I could not. Ya Tale’een ‘al-Jabal is an ancient folk song that dates from the Ottoman empire, an example of taraweed or Palestinian songs embedded with secret codes. It carries history, which means it also carries messages from the dead.

[Taraweed are] believed to have been passed down through oral tradition from one generation to the other, and [were] once sung by women who would walk to the Israeli occupation prisons to inform the prisoners that the “fedayeen,” or Palestinian nationalist fighters, would be liberating them soon. To prevent the soldiers of the occupation from understanding the true meaning of the song, the lyrics would be prefixed with the letter “L” at random intervals.^[1]

Hence the verbal tongue-twisters. I played the song for Palestinian friends, and they were unable to comprehend the lyrics. That’s when I decided simply to listen. Taraweed as a kind of objective correlative, an acoustic ladder of repeated sounds. Such songs transmit the promise of liberation, but the dead women who sang them are transmitting a second message. I listen to the feminine harmonies and tumbling morphemes and in them I hear

Ingenuity germinates in the wounds.

Yes, yes. When I sit in the grief of loneliness, misunderstanding, or betrayal and witness what has been denied -- presence, dignity, love, compassion -- I arrive at the freedom of indignation. I find my power. It burns away the obstacles to imagination and reveals the forward path, most often in words like those I am setting down at this moment.

Taraweed is itself an apt metaphor for listening to the dead. The alert ear detects urgency driven by repeated sounds and an anthemic tone. A call to arms not of weaponry but rather, an insistent “Be ready! Keep sharp! Wake up!”

Wake up, wake up, to the ancestral dead who have seen, experienced, and know all.

Heed the music and follow if you dare.

*

Last May, I hiked the coast of Grand Manan in search of elusive warblers. A mist floated in and dotted grass and flowers that seemed to pulse with vitality. I halted when the path delivered me to an imposing skeleton stooped like a beggar and encrusted with lichens. A dead evergreen, one of many I have seen in the Maritimes. I don’t need research to know what kills them. Climate change and the attendant storms and fires, and the pests that now arrive earlier in the spring and depart later in the fall. I have been going north since childhood. Gone are the forests of soft green that supplanted old growth, razed long ago by colonial farmers. The spindly green pines that replaced it are thin and sick, choked by capitalism’s exhaust. The clouds rain down microplastics from discarded single-use bottles. The birds and animals flee bulldozers and powerlines, retreating to smaller and more polluted habitats. The fireflies are nearly gone, victims of street lights that thwart their reproduction, and peepers too are diminished. I remember chasing tree frogs, feeling their cool perfection in my palm. Frogs are sentinel species; when they go, we all go.

This dead tree told that evergreens are sentinels as well. Its bare branches rattled a little in the wind, eliciting shame in my face, I imagine, because that is what I felt. Abject shame that I belong to the species that killed him. And grief that this old king was gone.

I closed my eyes and listened. To the foghorn from the lighthouse that blared, pay attention! And the bright twittering of the secret warblers.

We aren’t here for you, said the birds. If the trees die, we may soon die too.

Trees are movers of water to air with roots that seek and find. They absorb carbon dioxide and exhale the oxygen I breathe, though this deceased evergreen exhaled nothing. The army of lichens had nearly consumed it, the branches ending in points like fleshless bones. I was late to nature’s funeral, and heartbroken.

Therein lay the message.

The dead tree said: Heartbreak attests to connection, and reverence, to hope.

*

I read recently about how survivors of relational trauma need to expand attachment beyond the human realm. Healing by digging, planting, harvesting; by cultivating reverence for the natural world. I no longer have a yard in which to garden, but I visit the woods regularly because I love trees. Love them as dearly as if they were human. The green light through the leaves, the might of their trunks, their soaring canopies that hide the twittering birds. For a time as a younger woman, I regularly retreated to an off-grid cabin; upon arriving, I built a fire. Then I sat on the stoop and listened to the trees. So many branches, so many leaves, so much life uninterrupted. An hour or two could pass before I roused myself for supper.

I have often pressed my cheek against a tree seeking the comfort of touch. Skin hunger is real. When human touch was absent or scarce--when I was a teenager--I often snuck out at night to lean against a tree and inhale the cool night air. Younger even than that, I climbed a beloved maple tree to sit in her lap and read. I had no mother--no real mother, as mine was mentally ill and emotionally violent. The trees were my mothers and fathers. Perched high enough to see the church steeples dotting the horizon, I was reminded: I was small and the world is enormous. The trees belonged to a larger landscape than the puny one in which I lived, and that made hope possible.

Trees live in community. The deceased evergreen was family.

I did what one does when honoring the dead. I touched it with my hand, thanked it for its life, and promised to honor it with my own.

Amen.

*

Gaza.

What speaks more urgently on the lessons of the ancestral dead than this hellscape, bulldozed and bombed beyond recognition, with perhaps 150,000 decaying or incinerated bodies beneath the exploded concrete of collapsed houses?

Pieces of children?

Where the sole certainty of each day is that people will die?

No water, no food, no shelter, no medicine, only constant displacement to tent cities that are erected swiftly and just as swiftly taken down--if they are not incinerated--when the IDF issues the next arbitrary evacuation. Children with shredded limbs, children crawling with scabies and lice, children starved and pockmarked with shrapnel, children blistered by white phosphorus, children without heads. Children whose skin bears their names, written in Sharpie by their parents, in case the child is orphaned. Children who are labeled WCNSF for “wounded child, no surviving family.” The word genocide does not adequately convey the depths of the carnage, the despair, the imagination-defying means of extinguishing of human lives.

A month into the genocide, I watched the clip of a young mother writing her children’s names on their bellies and arms. One child was still in diapers. Within a week I had a tattoo on my own arm, near my wrist. The word “Gaza” in Arabic letters. My urge to put it there was inexplicable and urgent.

I see that tattoo in the mirror each time I brush my teeth or wash my face. My students see it when I pass out papers or write on the board. I don’t tell them what it is: a message from dead children. Not only from Palestine, but any ground that cradles them, whether it is Gaza or the graveyard holding Darlene’s remains.

My grief for dead children is relentless and suffocating. It steals my breath and crushes my resolve. To do, to work, to get shit done. To find purpose in a world that slaughters babies. The grief pulls me down into the darkness of killing. Nefandum, the unspeakable, where ash hangs in the air and everywhere are the cries of the dying. It is easy to drown in nefandum by brutality that shocks one senseless. But I am uninterested in killers. I want to reach the children. Sometimes the price of admission is a day of crying--no, sobbing. Sobbing until my eyelids bulge. Sometimes not. The key is to let the grief take me. To stop flailing.

In the graveyard of children, the babies and newborns are as perfect as pearls. One infant is reason enough to persevere, but a sky’s worth of children is heraldic. I want not to leave them, but I dwell with the living. What do they want me to know?

It is there on my wrist, indelibly stamped in blue ink.

Gaza.

The land whose children revealed the hypocrisy of the world. Where freedom, justice, and the American way met its demise in bodies not yet old enough to crawl. Where hell isn’t the afterlife: It is this life.

What do you want me to know? I ask the babies, though my sole desire is to hold them. To kiss hair that smells of bread and soot and rock them with hummed lullabies.

Babies cannot speak. Children have few words. “I want to play,” or “I miss my dad,” or “I am hungry.”

Ah. Speak for us, the dead children are saying. Remind the world. Heaven is a father’s lap, a bowl of rice, a red ball and a place to kick it.

Heaven isn’t “after”; it is here, in anything that elicits joy. Play, a kiss, a full belly.

Be joyful, the dead babies say. Remember to sing!

Because joy is contagious, from Latin con- ‘together with’+ the base of tangere ‘to touch.’ To touch people with what they have forgotten they possess.

Gaza, I will call the place where all dead babies eternally reside.

Because some of them do.

*

Tarweeda Shmaali is an ancient Palestinian song that expresses the longing for a lost love.

Northern is the wind of home…
Tonight, I will send [a message] with the northern wind
It will look for the loved ones and reach them, yaba [oh father]
Our exile has lasted too long and we miss them
Oh bird, go to the loved ones and tell them…

And greet my beloved when you visit…^[2]

Songs call to us urgently like flocks of birds against the autumn sky. I offer my own words to the sky, a prayer to the ancestral dead.

Northern is the wind of longing to belong,

a grief beyond words. Oh bird of longing,

fly to the domain of the dead, all the beloveds,

and return to us with the wisdom of life with joy.

May I one day be a good ancestor awaiting those birds.

Believe the body, I will tell them, and intentionality in all things.

Ingenuity is born of wounds.

Heartbreak attests to connection, and reverence to love.

Remember to sing.

And more than that--the wisdom yet to emerge out of the grave, out of grief.

For all those climbing the mountain.

---

^[1] https://fanack.com/culture/features-insights/palestinian-taraweed-a-disappearing-art~249955/

^[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/dont-leave-songs-palestinian-women