Ancestor Rituals
We visit the Jewish cemetery in Malmesbury, and wander among the headstones, finding our great-grandparents Woolf and Gittel’s graves covered in dust and fallen bark from the bluegums which tower overhead. We collect bark, twigs, earth and weeds from the grave; a plant is growing that is reminiscent of tarragon, a herb that originates from Southern Russia. I imagine the bodies of my ancestors containing seeds from their homeland, growing up through the red African earth. It is bakingly hot, and I shelter in a small derelict building at the entrance to the site and notice a line of stones which lead to the graves. I have a distant memory of being about 4, sitting in a hut in rural Transkei, and staring out at piles of white stones which marked the burial places of the village ancestors.
In the Suku of south-western Congo, ancestors are appealed to at times of crisis. The elder men go to sit on the graves at night, or at a crossroads. “The old men ‘feed’ the dead certain foods considered to be their favourite: particular kinds of forest mushroom and wild roots, palm wine, and sometimes even manioc, the Suku staple. A small hole is dug in the ground and the food is put into it. Communication with the dead takes the form of a conversational monologue, patterned but not stereotyped, and devoid of repetitive formulae. One speaks the way one speaks to living people: ‘You, [such and such], your junior is ill. We do not know why, we do not know who is responsible. If it is you, if you are angry, we ask for forgiveness. If we have done wrong, pardon us. Do not let him die. Other lineages are prospering and our people are dying. Why are you doing this? Why do you not look after us properly?’ The words typically combine complaints, scolding, sometimes even anger, and at the same time appeals for forgiveness.1”
Looking for traces of our family, I am reminded of Hilary Mantel writing about ghosts: “for some years I lived in Botswana and people there used to say that to see ghosts, you need to look out of the corners of your eyes”. 2 At Trevor’s house in Malmesbury, surrounded by the possessions of his long-dead ancestors, I feel the presence of ghosts, as if they are holding him to ransom. I think about collecting, about our need to keep hold of artefacts as justifications of our own identity. In ‘On Collecting’, Susan Pearce writes that “heirloom material..is a kind of ancestor worship, where part of the point is to participate in the power which can flow from the mighty dead of one’s own kin and partly, in a more limited sense, to enjoy the prestige which accrues from having ancestors at all”3
Perhaps the material objects are unnecessary, they are merely a conduit, a channel to keep the lines of communication with our ancestors open. Ghosts don’t respond to the direct approach.
Katy Beinart
1. Igor Kopytoff, Ancestors as Elders in Africa, 1971
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/era/ancestors/kopytoff.html
2. Hilary Mantel, Ghost Writing, 28th July 2007, The Guardian Newspaper.
3. Susan Pearce, On Collecting, 1995, Routledge
