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The idea of ghosts was not far off from my childhood imaginations, as I suspect was the case with many people. The ghost of my grandfather lurked in the hallways of our old flat, under the creaking double bunk of my bedroom; his head shaping into the abstraction of clothes piled on the floor. The adults in my life did not make things easier, having the tendency to exacerbate my fears and enjoy it—it was the kind of haunting that crippled me but also made wonderful dinner time anecdotes. And though now, I have come a long way from tiptoeing through silent corridors in fear that I would attract the grimy attention of long buried things, I still find, as a fiction writer, that ghost stories are particularly compelling, concrete in that immediate and tangible sense of realist stories.
After a recent conversation with colleagues, I found myself thinking about how ghost stories are told, how they come to shape the fabric of culture, or affect our daily imaginations of the world—essentially, how we come to accept the things we do not see. The context for this discussion with colleagues was Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, a novel that follows a family haunted by the loss of a son, a grim past in prison and a grown daughter in the clutches of drug use. It was also a family quite literally haunted by the ghosts their dead son, and another ghost, a young boy who dies violently while trying to escape prison. The book is filled with all kinds of presences—culture, tradition, religious beliefs or what some would call superstition. During that conversation, a colleague had mentioned that the novel fell under the realms of magical realism, fantasy, as if there is a fixed space on a ground where we can draw a line to distinguish what is real from what is not. Some people might argue that it is true, that any introduction to a non-scientific element naturally pushes the work into the realms of fantasy. However, I did not think the presences of afterlives in Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing blurred the markings of realism any more than Toni Morrison’s Beloved did. Besides, science as we know it has been colonial in nature, advancing along the same route in which western imperialism shadows the world. Sometimes I wonder, what –exactly—is science and whose science do we imagine? Yet, I admit that these are tropes I can only explore in fiction. Such conceptualizations in the everyday life of an adult woman struggling to find meaning is a different matter entirely.
If there’s anything that ghosts give me—whether through their presences or absences—it is an expansive understanding of the world as a place of mystery. We are often resigned to the fact that there are things we cannot explain, things that spill messily out of the borders of our understanding—things that suggest that life itself is a performance of and towards the unknown. I like how Bayo Akomolafe puts it, that ‘life is too real to be merely literal.’ However, resigning to the mysterious is different from living in the mystery. It is another paradox of life, that we humans accept the inherent inexplicability of things and at the same time, insist in answers that are finite and complete.
I call easily to mind, as I often tend to, my own Christian context. Being a person of faith means that my contemplations about life are anchored on the non-concrete. Yet, when someone very recently engaged me with questions about the afterlife, my answer was: I do not know. It is not the first time I share my ambivalence about heaven or hell, the tropes of eternity, and it is not the first time I have wondered if such ambivalence is rooted in doubt, in which case my concern is more the fact that Christian theology seems antithetical to doubt. It has been my experience that much of Christian doctrinal focus is fixated on concrete answers, clearly imagined pathways in which prayers become formulas to solutions, and morality is this exclusionary path to attaining heaven on earth. My response typically is, Okay, yes, but also, what if not?
The thing is, I think, there is uncertainty that has the outlining of doubt and fear, those in which the beatings of life teach us to disbelief everything we see. But there is also an uncertainty that simply means an incompleteness, an ongoing-ness, the idea that we cannot know because we do not know all that is knowable; it is the kind of uncertainty that is an invitation and a question, a hope, and a disturbance; an expected end in which the journey itself is the end; so that heaven is not always a sense of the arrival, but living in the questions, the interruptions, the mysterious.
Everything in my adult life has pushed me into this notion of mystery, though I have spent more time resisting it than waking to it. It asks me to set down the old carved ways of my Pentecostal childhood and to find God again in strange and sometimes stormy places. To trust the disturbances and forget the arrogant contraptions of what is good or what is evil. I bow my head in prayer, learning in it as much as I am unlearning it, what it means to connect with God even when my life does not seem like the most likely site for grace. I think about mystery because I have gone through some needless stress points in my own life, experiences that have been extremely disturbing and yet recurring, experiences that Pentecostalism would insist are a prayer away, as if grace really is to the highest bidder, or as if trouble are ever fully knowable. I also think about mystery in the sense of the next phase of my life, how much of it is rooted in the fact that every decision we take is another question in the making. Was this right? Was this good?
‘We can never really know.’I say this to myself while I pack up boxes and make another decision. Whether it will be good in the sense of what we think is good, or whether it will be bad in the sense of what we learn is bad, at least, maybe, it will be God. Maybe, like ghosts, we are ultimately surrounded by God.
How are you doing? Seriously, I want to know.
Also, wishing you the best of life this November.
Also again, where is this year speeding to? #Deepsigh
Xo.
Tochi.
This made me think deeply about the mysteries of following God daily.
Thanks for writing this.
Tochi🥰,
I'm becoming expectant of your mails every 1st day of the month.
How am I doing? I lost my earpods yesterday and it felt like I've been broken-hearted, such attachment to a non-living thing.
On ghosts, when I was younger I was so afraid of the dark to the point that someone once asked if I killed my Dad who died when I was 8.
Adulthood and enlightenment has also made me question religion but not God as a being.
My detachment from the ownership rights to my life is freeing. It makes me know the limits of my control. That I could pray and still die, but I need to acknowledge I don't own this life, it's the time I have been gifted.
Thank you for sharing your writing gift.