A Reverse Inheritance
Preparing for my move from Toronto to Baltimore, my advisor warned me of how easily graduate students grow lonely—a gentle reminder of the necessity to make and maintain community as a practice of black feminist survival in the academe. Despite forewarning, I don’t think anyone could have prepared me for the isolation that a global pandemic would bring. I had booked my flight home months in advance for Spring Break and like many the onset of COVID destroyed any chance of me going home. Now, six months later, with periodic, sometimes even neurotic flight searches, I have yet to make it back to Toronto.
This week I was guided to an article by Sasha Turner about grief, loss and kinship. Turner offered a reading of grief that registers climatically. Grief registers in the body as cold, on the other hand, reconnection and kinship, project warmth. I haven’t experienced a loss per se, however what I have lost is time. I am an auntie, and every day without my nieces and nephew’s feels like a growing loss—it is a pain that swells in my chest. Turner’s analysis on the embodied feeling of grief, has made me ask how does the body feel when you miss someone(s)?
Turner finds her warmth again through sojourns home, ritual, and spiritual connection to her ancestors. My parents migrated from the post-independence British West Indies to Canada. There is very little talk of a “back-home.” Their time in the Caribbean, remains a history that both my parents have quietly refused to revisit. These quiet refusals have erected a barricade between myself and our family’s history. An unnamed obstruction that has often makes it feel that my ancestors are too far away to touch.
I guess this is what happens when your lines of descent are wayward.[1] Partus Sequitur Ventrem, offspring follows belly, matrilineality—the slave’s lineage is always backward, corrupted and tainted. Matrilineal lines of inheritance negated the possibility of kinship, the enslaved woman could transfer her dispossession alone.[2] Racial slavery marked black women’s wombs as sites of subjection, where kinship became ruptured. What is the afterlife of matrilineal inheritance? What do these wayward lines of descent offer us?
Matrilineal inheritance has so often been read as what we pass down, namely, our dispossession. Equally important however, is how Black women respond to the violence of dispossession. How do Black women cultivate technologies of survival to impart on one another? Black motherhood has always been more than the relationship between mother and child. Black mothering, exists within a community of chosen kin, and we do our best to build revolutionary networks of care.[3]
Put differently, matrilineal inheritance is disobedient, insubordinate and unruly. Its wayward lines demand we think of a maternal inheritance that attends to its fluidity. One that isn’t imparted on, but is rather an inheritance that moves across, upwards and sometimes even converges. When my sister’s gave birth, I was brought into this network of care, when I met my babies, I was granted a kinship that pardoned my dispossession. A reverse inheritance. Our daily facetime calls are our shared ritual, same time, every day, without fail. Their arrival bequeathed unto us a new family tradition, it required encoding networks of care that worked across black diasporic digital space. They take care of me.
They make sure I remember to go outside.
They ensure I get dressed for the day.
They make sure I do my reading’s.
They remind me to build a garden to prepare for the end of the world.
Temporary loss isn’t cold or warm, instead it is sizzling. It is an anxiety that bubbles up inside of you in anticipation for the incessant rupture that is slavery’s afterlife. Our daily ritual, however, cools me, calms my fears and delivers me back home. My nephew’s repeated “Auntie Hayiee’s” signals my return. It is the song that narrates my digital sojourn.
Auntie Halle
[1] Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 89
[2] Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors”, Souls, 18:1, 166-173. 166
[3] Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery In Jamaica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., 2017.