by Je-Shawna Wholley
What does it mean to listen to the ancestors?
I read Octavia Butler’s work for the first time in 2019. I started with the Parable series and worked my way through her catalog.
In the Parable of the Sower, the protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, is living in the aftermath of a collapsed empire, catastrophic natural disasters and a global viral pandemic. While others in her community choose to build walls and wait until things “went back to normal,” Lauren knew that their salvation was not in returning to the past, but in learning from its patterns in order to shape a better future.
This level of conviction comes from the fact that she has been receiving prophetic messages about God that help to shape her perception of the destruction around her, and provided guidance on how to move through it. She wrote these messages down, and these verses became the Earthseed: Book of the Living.
I believe Lauren was receiving guidance from her ancestors. Ancestral spirits who could see the future ahead were guiding and protecting her from beyond. These messages warned Lauren that the time to flee would come and that she should prepare for the journey. That time did come and she made sure to grab this Book of the Living along with seeds, medical supplies, food, water and weapons.
This journal became her sacred text that would be just as essential to her survival as food and water. It served as her moral compass along the journey. It helped her to make sense of the pain and destruction she faced out in the world. It even provided comfort and purpose to other fellow travelers along the way. Lauren would later pass this collection of prophetic messages on to her daughter in the next book, The Parable of the Talents.
How timely. Octavia Butler, now an ancestor herself, awakened something in me that my ancestors had planted a long time ago. It is time to remember who you are and plan for the future you want to see.
The Ancestors in the present
I could see the apocalyptic world that Butler created in 1993 in our current events. With COVID disproportionately impacting Black and poor elders, I could feel the flames of destruction. It was time.
There has been a widespread attack on Critical Race Theory and African American studies as a calculated effort to infringe on the right to learn about and be inspired by the legacy of Black revolution in this country. The “Stop Woke Act” would have prohibited instruction on race, diversity, privilege or oppression. Bills such as HB999 asserts government oversight over all public post-secondary education curriculum.
The systematic use of censorship and erasure has been used to limit access to resources, quality of life, and overall safety for marginalized people throughout our history and it is even more present today. Over 30 states have implemented legislation that have directly, or indirectly, resulted in book bans. Books such as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, and Beloved by Toni Morrison are two of hundreds that have been banned or under attack. These works, and others like it, hold keys to liberation and healing, and there is a systematic effort to eradicate them. It was time to remember who and whose we are, because none of this was new.
Black resistance
Political strategies to ban books and revise our history are not new to us. Criminalizing queer and trans spaces and identity in order to keep us hidden and afraid is not new to us. The Stonewall Riot had Black and Brown trans women at the frontline facing police brutality and government surveillance head on. Our grandparents lived in a world before they thought reproductive justice was possible, fought for change, and now watch as policies are systematically rolled back.
There is no part of this nation’s history of movements that the Black experience and resistance has not touched. Our parents, grandparents, and ancestors have all survived the terror of state sanctioned violence and still managed to build families, a way of life, and a legacy for their line to follow. But how did they do it?
Stories and the future
Like Lauren, I too was guided by an ancestral call to figure it out and create my own sacred text to guide me along the way. I started with my mother. I started to ask questions about her relationship with our ancestors, her experiences as a survivor and how those experiences shaped her mothering. I asked about what she wanted for the future generations and what she’d hope to leave behind. I found healing in her sharing, and she found healing in her telling. It was from this space where I created The Earthseed Black Family Archive Project.
This art based project uses healing justice frameworks to activate and support Black memory workers, cultural organizers, healers, and generational curse breakers who are open to ancestral guidance in the pursuit of justice and liberation for all. As politicians work to police our cultural impact, we are already gathering information to replace what they’ve banned. By focusing on the intimate space (our families and communities) we are able to radicalize our base, drawing connections from our personal histories to the history of larger political movements. By asking questions pertaining to healing and resilience we are able to gather intel on how to resist current iterations of state sanctioned violence.
But the work of alchemizing the past with the present in order to shape a liberated future is not for the faint of heart. This is especially true for Black folks who are descendants of people who are marked by the trauma of state sanctioned violence. This kind of work requires a tender holding and as Reverend Melva Sampson states, a “community that is strong enough to hold your truth.”
Earthseed is that community.
We recognize the emotional implications that come with facing the generations of colonial imperialism and anti-black violence that many of our ancestors had to endure. Our trauma informed curriculum approaches archiving Black stories and creating art from those stories as revolutionary acts. We invite mental health practitioners, trained in transgenerational trauma, to discuss how to conduct trauma-informed oral history interviews. We offer genealogical research support and incorporate grounding practices because having to piece together your family history through land deeds or slave owner receipts is traumatizing and can be an isolating experience. This is why we create. Not only to leave something behind and to disrupt the criminalization of our stories; but to also process trauma and facilitate transgenerational healing.
Where to go from here
I don’t know what the ancestors have for me but I do know it requires surrender. It requires a sacred space and it requires the patience to know when to stay and capture it all. I pray I can provide that sacred space for others along the way. I pray I can lessen the barriers that we face when attempting to learn more about who we are and whose we are. What if our movements require our collective ancestors’ help? What if each and every person that Earthseed gathers or interacts with was guided there because our ancestors knew what the future holds and wanted us to prepare? These are the points of curiosity and spiritual understanding that guide this work.
This project is a community of people looking for somewhere soft, intentional, and sacred to hold their memories and their family’s stories. It is a sacred space to create sacred texts. Like the “clearing” in Toni Morrison’s, Beloved, it is an invitation to “laugh…dance…and weep…for the living and the dead.” Like the Acorn community in Butler’s, Parable of Sower, it is a place to remember who we are, regain our strength and answer the ancestral call to shape change. It’s an outpost on the way to freedom to leave your mark for the next freedom fighter that comes behind you.
I pray that Earthseed continues the legacy of transformative justice and care strategies that are going to radicalize our families into deeper healing and changed conditions. I pray that it is a spark within the fire of today’s Black spiritual renaissance. It is a bold task to face the past with such vigor and intention but without complacency. What would it mean for us if we could take grandma’s wisdom and transmute the pain she had to go through to get to it? How would that shape the future?
All work at The Commons is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Je-Shawna Wholley
Je-Shawna Wholley (she/her) is an artist, independent scholar and community organizer. Drawing from her considerable talents as a critic, leader, scholar, and community. Je-Shawna created the Earthseed Black Family Archive Project to build communities of Healing for Black people. Earthseed seeks to follow in the tradition of Black feminist literary influence and Black feminist action by building intimate spaces of care, mutual aid, and political education around questions of transgenerational healing and liberation.
Contact her at [email protected]. Follow us on Instagram at @earthseed_black_family_project
