Communing with our ancestors to sever the past

Responding to Dear Omolore by Mojereoma Ajayi-Egunjobi

Dear Omolore, 2022 (Film still)

Journeying through dense forest into open fields, Mojereoma Ajayi-Egunjobi calls on Omolore, her mother’s mother who she never knew. She does not need a conversation partner, but a witness, an accomplice on a path paved with pain and promising freedom. Dear Omolore is testament to the power of poetry and film to distil otherwise indigestible emotions. This story, told in two minutes and 40 seconds, imprints itself on my mind. It invites us, over and over again, to interrogate our connection with our ancestors as this defines our connection with self.

In the poem, Ajayi-Egunjobi explores her ancestry which is represented by inherited stories, heirlooms, health conditions and attitudes. She reckons with the discomforting notion that we, in the Black diaspora, are the embodiment of the hopes, dreams and defiance of our predecessors. And, as such, we must now move forward with the daunting task of imagining fresh futures, against a backdrop of precarity and othering. We cling onto the fragments of family histories that survived their journeys overseas, forming from them hybrid identities in honour of lives and legacies we may never truly understand. Communing with ancestors provides relief from that untethered feeling and the opportunity to express the grief of merely existing so far from home.

Dear Omolore mounts the ancient practice of convening with ancestors, not as a spiritual quest for redemption, but as a revelry in the impermanence and imperfection of the human condition and the immortality of spirit, as it exists in us and those who came before us. It is inspired by Dear Senthuran, the epistolary memoir by Akwaeke Amaezi which chronicles the contradictions of life as a self-proclaimed Ogbanjé, a curse personified: a child who is born only to die and be born that way again. Historians believe that children marked Ogbanjé in Igbo, Abiku in Yoruba, or Hindamaí-lui in my ancestral language, Mende, were mostly children suffering symptoms of chronic illness. Igbo and Yoruba traditions dictate that those children should be mutilated, lest they return unrecognisable to wreak havoc on a family once more.

What does it mean to descend from people who declare evil over children simply for existing with a body that’s different to their own? What does it mean to tread foreign land in a body that might have been damned by your foremothers, and to connect with those very foremothers while doing so?

As she recounts the story of her great-grandmother, Ajayi-Egunjobi centres this conflict, this mutual disapproval that can exist between ancestor and offspring. She reminds Omoloré that her own mother was cast away by her great-grandfather’s people for the sin of childlessness, while carrying a pregnancy yet to be discovered. In doing so Ajayi-Egunjobi concedes she and Omoloré are as much connected to the heartlessness of those who did the banishing as they are to the bravery of the banished.

Without apology, Ajayi-Egunjobi goes on to tell Omolore that she is more than her “crescent [blood] cells” and that sometimes, she is tempted to be temporary, to be nothing at all. Her words echo Amaezi’s musings on feeling unbound by their humanity, “The flesh can be dead if it likes but the god who animates it will be louder,” and the suicidal fantasies they describe in Dear Senthuran, “I felt very strongly the need to die. It would be in service of the work.”

Both Dear Omolore and Dear Senthuran also share the idea that nature is a site for grounding, healing and regeneration. Dressed in white and walking on crutches, Ajayi-Egunjobi opens the poem by considering the pawpaw fruit Omolore once grew, a fruit that is now memorialised in her mother’s anecdotes. The garden may be “all gone now” but the stories remain and will hold meaning so long as there is an audience for them. In being that audience, Ajayi-Egunjobi replaces the pawpaw as a physical manifestation of her grandmother’s hard work. Omoloré is always with her, as she searches to make meaning of her own story, seeking the seeds that might one day grow into her own garden.

Towards the end of the poem, Ajayi-Egunjobi laments on the dichotomy of stillness and change, which robs from us our roots and forces us to grow new ones. We are living proof that there is as much to be gained from the severing of roots as there is from preserving the past. Unlike other deities, our ancestors do not demand veneration without criticism, nor do they demand to be known fully. The blessing and the challenge is in acknowledging them anywhere, and in any way we can.