Genealogy
by THE EDITORS
in Spring 2022
Ani Lacy, Within Our Gates, 2022
Everyone loves stories of rebirth. Butterflies. Christ. Inanna. Heru. Babatunde/Yetunde. Breathing life into dry bones. A drought ends with the return of a lake. River banks flood. Spring springs. We love it all, until it is time to die again.
Then it seems we forget the promise of spring; we forget the beauty of the reborn. When all around us crumbles, we sometimes forget that death is part of the process. The sun still sets and rises over a burning city, but sometimes all we choose to see is the smoke and ashes. Fires must rage. Our foundations must shake, sometimes crack and crumble. How else does one rearrange a room, an Earth, a Universe?
Genealogy is but a reminder that we, the living, are connected to the dead and the unborn. That what we bear has been borne. That what we endure will determine how it is endured. Life is a cycle. So we gather together all the fragments of ourselves, of our existence, so we can make life whatever it must be.
Such work can feel tedious. Greg Carr writes about the hard work of “translation and recovery” as a reimagining of our intellectual genealogies. It requires more than simply retracing our ancestors’ steps—though this is a critical first step. Seeking our ancestors means understanding who they were and how they were connected to their ancestors, their worldviews, philosophies of life, and cultural practices.
This is necessary in the face of the disruption of the “West.”[1]
As we try to live our lives, we have to face conditions most of our ancestors did not (if we truly take the long-view), including antiblack racism. Yet, if we seek to know them—and thus ourselves—the death of that racist order becomes realizable.
There is great beauty in the undoing: an awesome power that topples us all over and makes everything uncomfortable. That same source can offer us solace that carries us through the darkness, the uncertainty, the grief. If we ask, we can find reassurance, peace, joy. If we pay attention, we will remember that life always follows death, because death is a symbol of great transformation. And life is the end and the beginning of that change.
In these times, “nothing lasts forever” becomes a praise song instead of a lament. As we continue to celebrate a half decade of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal, we invite you to participate in this collective, weheme mesu—the repetition of the birth, the extension of our genealogy.
References
[1] Greg Carr, “Towards an Intellectual History of Africana Studies: Genealogy and Normative Theory,” The African American Studies Reader, ed. Nathaniel Norment, Jr. (Carolina Academic Press, 2006) as well as his “What Black Studies is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work,” Socialism and Democracy 25 (March 2011): 178-91.