ancestral memory + time
how '1984' speaks to soul contracts and why you chose to incarnate now
Have you ever asked why am I here?
If you practice an African Diasporic Religion, then you may hold (or at the very least, be familiar with) the belief that before you were born, you made a pact (or soul contract) to incarnate into this particular point in time & history in order to fulfill a purpose and a mission. We believe you are here because you said yes.
Last week on Threads, there was discussion about such soul contracts. The question online shifted from why am I here? to why did I choose this timeline? Why would anyone choose to incarnate into a time when the American empire is collapsing and taking many lives and livelihoods as collateral? This is a time where we are seeing multiple genocides live-streamed on our phones that also happen to be the product of the Congo’s blood and suffering.
If we chose this moment in time to live out a human experience, why this one? Why would I do this to myself? Because the reality is this shit is gut-wrenching and heartbreaking, collectively and individually.
Millennials and GenX’ers alike have been complaining that we’re tired of living in unprecedented times. I get it—it feels like all our lives we’ve had to fight, but my belief is that we are actually not living in unprecedented times at all. (I’ll admit there’s a unique goofiness and absurdity happening now, yes, but stick with me.)
Today’s global political tyranny, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and emotional/spiritual unrest are reflections—ripples of ongoing and persevering psychological and racial violence and anti-Blackness that have existed for far too long.
I recently read 1984 by George Orwell—and oh my God!—it was a frightening read, much like the late great Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series. It reads like a prophetic promise of what’s to come rather than a dystopian novel.
If you haven’t read it yet or in a while, here’s quick primer. (Spoilers upcoming!)
Winston Smith is living in London at a time where state surveillance is at an all time high. He believes the year to be 1984 but one can never be too sure.
Big brother is watching you. Everywhere you go. At work, in town, inside your homes, even inside the bathrooms and bedrooms. At any time, you can and will be monitored to maintain control and compliance.
As we follow Winston, he commits the ultimate “crime” of having original thought and questions about why things are the way that they are. But it seems the most threatening question is when did this begin? How long has it been this way? Big Brother and the Party are weaponizing curiosity and free thought through controlling memory. And when you control memory, you control reality.
And so we see Winston inconspicuously battling the questions, trying his best to criticize or maybe even conceptualize the world that he's living in without being detected and vaporized by the Thought Police. In his world, if you’re caught thinking treasonous thoughts or having feelings—you’re cooked. Big Brother doesn’t condone any thought, only obedience. For instance, pleasure and sexual attraction are banned. Fuck around and find out is literal in 1984. But even when Winston suspects that he won’t escape the Thought Police for long, he cannot get rid of this feeling—an intuitive inkling that life has not always been this way. On page 33 of my copy of the book, we explore some of what Winston thinks about this:
Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?
He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient — nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
Read that last sentence again.
Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
Ancestral memory.
Those words stood up off the page for me.
Ancestral memory.
Winston is discovering that ancestral memory is not only possible, but persists. Even if it isn't something that he could fully grasp, even if the acknowledgement of ancestry alone is dangerous. (There were very few elders in 1984’s London—folks did not make it to old age.) The fact that Winston is uncomfortable in his current circumstance; the fact that he has questions; the fact that he’s unhappy and discontent is enough for him to suspect there must be something that came before this. And if there is a Before, therein fuels the hope that there can be an After!
In another passage, we find our protagonist on the other side of town where Big Brother cannot easily find him. He wanders into a room on the second floor of a vintage thrift shop he enjoys frequenting.
He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting… the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
Ancestral memory is conjured twice now: when he’s noticing extreme lack and emptiness of life and then again when he finds a place that feels like a home he knows he’s never had yet vividly remembers.
The last image we see in this scene is the ticking clock. The clock should remind us that time goes around and around and around, not in the straight line that whiteness taught and forced upon us. For we know time has always been circular, cyclical, rotating, crashing like water against rocks, only to recede into the sea again. As Dr. Brendane A. Tynes1 teaches, “Whiteness broke [the circle of] time,” straightening the circle into a flat, linear expanse of dread. A cliff for your adversaries to push you off of. But when time is as time has always been, as our Ancestors intended, in a nonlinear and unbroken circle, the ticking of the clock is not a death march, not ominous.
It is a friendly ticking. Ancestral memory frames times as an ally, not an adversary.
So what does this have to do with soul contracts and our pre-incarnation agreements? I believe that we are all here, you and me, because we are the manifestations of ancestral memory in the land. Though you may not have consciously experienced racial violence and fascism in this particular way, in this particular body, you have imprinted on you ancestral DNA that has seen this before. And not only have you seen this before and, thus, have access to the ways through which we survive and make it through, you also have access to embedded ancestral memory and DNA of the times before these systems ever erected their evil heads.
You have access to your pre-colonial ancestors.
You have access to your ancestors who lived in a time where the matriarchs led with love and courage.
You have access to a time before whiteness and capitalism broke time.
You have access to a time before patriarchy decided it would put its demonic forces upon us.
You have access through your bloodline. And in your own wisdom, you chose to come back here now so you could remember in front of us. So your remembering triggers our memory. So you could remember in this timeline. So that the memory persists and keeps going.
We need to remember!
Why else do you think whiteness separated Black and Indigenous folks from their spiritual traditions?
They wanted us to forget, but we remember!
We said yes to this timeline right now because we are the portals and the pathways through which the ancestors from other times and timelines can come now and be here, right here, right now, with us.
We are also active in the timelines that are yet to be seen with our physical eyes; we already exist there, too.
The mission that we have right now is to insist that the ancestral memory keep going; that there will be evidences and proof of your existence here; that there will evidences and proof that there was a Before time; that there be evidences and proof for the day our descendants look for us
and they ask, has it always been like this?
And we will tell them No, it was not always like this.
So when they ask, Can it change and be different?
We will say, Yes, you'll change it. You will be different.
And when they want to lay down and die and give up, they can look to us as their North star…
…and then we will turn and look to our ancestors as our North star…
…and then they will turn and look at their ancestors as their North star…
…and they will turn and look to those ancestors as their North star…
And we will turn
and we will turn
and we will turn…
…until we find ourselves right back here in the future!
The ticking of the clock is friendly. It is not our adversary. Time is our ally. It is proof that we exist in the future and futures, and you came here now to do the work that you are doing and the work that you are yet to discover.
Because you are ancestral memory wrapped in flesh, blood, and bone.
Hey there! I’m Jeida, a spiritual empowerment coach who helps MaGes sever the savior & embody self-sovereignty.
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Interested in this Topic?
Enjoy these References and Recommended Reading List:
Sankofa Shadow Work: Diaries of a Diasporic Diviner by Sara Makeba Daise
Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time by Rasheedah Phillips
Survival Marvels: The Portal Poetics of Cheryl Clarke by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The Black.Loved.Free Podcast by Dr. Brendane A. Tynes
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This concept was taught by Dr. Brendane A. Tynes in her talk titled “Introduction to Transformative Black Feminist Resistance Practice.
This is such a powerful remembering and activation, Sister. Thank you. 🙏🏾
I am Winston. And this whole article is giving confirmation. Two days ago I was in the shower singing an impromptu song. The lyrics were simply “I remember” over and over again like a chant. Thank you for sharing this.