My journey to visit home—India—will be about spending time with family, and locating ancestral sites where women held primacy as spiritual, economic, political, social participants. Primacy is not at the cost of another, but unto ourselves. While this question has now become a part of my doctoral research at the California Institute of Integral Studies, it has been an unnamed longing within me for a while.
It catalyzed my proposing a borderlands research methodology that calls for connecting with the ancestral strata of experience and memory through poetry. (The second method I proposed towards my methodological praxis is autoethnography, where the autobiographical comes together with the ethnographic. I see both as part of a decolonial feminist research paradigm.)
And now I must go and bring forth that poetry of knowing!
I will not deny the fervid terror this visits me on occasion. Can this happen?
But there is also a serenity, which comes from the sense of guidance I feel flowing clearly from the ancestral realms when I am willing to hear. The motherlines will speak.
A diviner’s task is to be willing to hear the voices of the ancestors and carry them back to the community. This was also the ancient role of poets. Through my Ph.D. dissertation, I am hoping to remember that indigenous role for myself—amidst the breaks, pauses, stutters, interference in frequency in the timespace of eurowestern modernity/aesthetics. This task that is almost unbearable in what it is demanding is, in a very strange way, something I have been preparing for a long while.
Writing is self-authorizing, even as it must emerge out of a density and generosity of self-permission. All of this—claiming authority, claiming voice, the precarity of self-disclosure, being seen—is at the core of wounds that make my myth mine. This research project will enter them again in the stream of time—which is nothing but a way to resacralize.
The path of learning and growing is luminous.
