Ancestors and Spirituality

Books by Marvin X

Love and War: Poems / In the Crazy House Called America / Woman: Man's Best Friend / Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality

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Ancestors and Spirituality

By Marvin X

They are in the land. We ask permission to come on the land. We bring the medicine man, the Yoruba priestess, the imam to ask permission, to bless the land. We know they are there. We hear them, we know they hear us. Ancestors speak, speak to us this day. Forgive us our sin of not liberating the land, of leaving you unfed, unacknowledged, as though unwanted, yet you carried us all the way to this moment, you were there, are yet there, in the creek, swamps, rivers, oceans, forest, woods.

I see you now as I sit on the train. I look out the window at you running through the woods, the forest, swimming the lake, I bathe with you while sitting on the train. I see you on the plantation, in the hut making love to your lover man. I see you making love to the master. You fight as he rapes you, you resist until he is gone, you resist. I hear you in the hut, there is hate in the hut.

I see you in the window of my train coming through the South, heading West to my home. The trees speak to me and haunt me. I turn away in tears. I cannot bear to look at the pine trees, the moss-wood in the swamp. I am transfixed, cannot move, frozen in time, in centuries of time, of cotton, rice, sugar cane. I must make peace with you, O trees, O ancestors buried in unknown graves. For I have sinned, I have forgotten you. I have not talked with you, even when you spoke to me, tried to make me understand all that happened, how you got here, the terror, the red flag leading you down to the shore, to the boat out to the big ship, the Middle Passage. You screamed and I screamed, screamed in denial because I didn't want to hear, hear the truth, the pain, the fire, the bones, ashes, the wail, the toil, the sun, moon, stormy nights, words in your language, forbidden to utter a sound in our Mother tongue.

I cannot look out at the trees, there is guilt, for what am I doing now to avenge you, what? Only of late have we made the Maafa pilgrimage to the ocean, dressed in white to let them know we know, only now have we said forgive us for we know not what we have done by forgetting you.

We forgot ourselves, and so our children forget us, do not acknowledge us, disrespect us, for the chain is broken and must be repaired. We hold hands and pray as the ocean tide comes upon us, as our white robes become wet in this baptism by water in remembrance of those many thousands gone, the millions gone whose shoulders we stand upon, without whom we would be nothing, less than clay, sand, mud. Yet we are what we are today because of you and all you did in the night and in the day, from can't see to can't see.

Such is the gift of ancestors. There is no spirituality without ancestors. Without ancestors there is nothing, no air, no sun, no bone, no blood, no night no day.

We can imagine we are all that and all this but we are not. They are the reason for our season. So we salute them and let them know in our daily prayers, in our food, in our walks and talks for they are talking to us and most of all, they are listening.

They want us only to be our Divine self, nothing less, no animal, no beast, no fiend, no dog, no bitch, no pimp, no ho, but Divine self, beyond human, Divine. That is why they came, that is why they endured all the terror all the trauma, to raise up a Divine people for eternity, not fools, clowns, buffoons, toms, Divine people who see with the Third Eye, the eye of the Spirit that cannot be deceived.

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Marvin X has given permission to Harvard University to publish his poem "For El Haji Rasul Taifa" from Love and War: Poems by Marvin X (1995). The poem will appear in The Encyclopedia of Islam in America Volume II, Greenwood Press, edited by Dr. Jocelyne Cesari of Harvard's Islam in the West Program. Mr. X is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Muslim American Literature, University of Arkansas Press, edited by Dr. Mojah Khaf. He is also in the forthcoming Muslim American Drama, Temple University.

posted 20 June 2006

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update 29 July 2008