My family tree is a violated-looking thing. On both sides, limbs have been snapped clean off by those who used to sit on them. On both sides, branches have been hidden from view or bent out of place or removed and grafted onto some other family tree. There is loss and pain and mistrust on both sides of my family tree; parts of it have been hollowed out by a rot that descended through the ages. There are members who claim they can distance themselves entirely from their roots. And I wonder, sometimes: Do they not know what happens when a limb becomes a log, alone on the forest floor?

Two years ago, my grandmother became an ancestor. When she died, at the age of 94, she was terribly worried about what the future lay in store for her family. That concern was global, watching in horror as what she had believed to be the wave of history lifting the world out of the trenches of the world wars became a curve that rapidly began to descend. This was the fear she voiced most readily and most often, watching the news with an impassive fortitude that belonged to her generation, and one she never wished to see bestowed upon her daughters and grandchildren. But she hid another worry, a gnawing anxiety that would reveal itself only in moments of quiet as she pondered her death. She held no illusions that she could change the world in her early 90s, her health rapidly deteriorated by too many months trapped indoors thanks to the pandemic. But she did believe she could hold her family, and in some way was aware she held us together. She worried about what would happen, when she was gone, to all of us. On her last birthday, which we share, we spoke about this. I told her not to worry, that she had done a good job, that whatever harms had been felt in the past were long healed. I didn’t lie to her. It just turned out that I was wrong.

When I think about her coming back to us in the midst of a geopolitical, ecological and social crisis that has worsened dramatically in the two years since her departure, I know her first attention would be to her family, to the wounds and the separations. She would focus on us because she loves us, but also because this is her locus of power; my grandmother knew how to act to change her world. She would also focus on us because she believed that the world was coming apart because we as a society were not holding onto one another anymore, and if we cannot even hold onto those we love then what chance do we have to hold onto the rest? My grandmother was an avid writer of letters, and kept every one she ever received across the decades from those she managed to maintain a connection with despite the distance of culture, language, geography and time. The strength of my grandmother’s grip was renowned, and indeed it was the force of her commitment which produced her matriarchal steeliness. It was because she loved us that she was willing to confront us. And it was because we loved her that we did not run from her confrontations.

I know what she would ask of me, now, were she to return. And I would say: But Grandma, there is nothing left to say.

In the weeks I spent reflecting on how to investigate what my ancestors would say, I didn’t once consider whether or not they would say anything. It was simply a given, in my head, that those from whom I have descended would have very much to say on the state of world affairs, be it the side of German peasant farmers who immigrated to the American Midwest, or the tough Irish and Scottish labourers who built bridges and toiled in ship yards. My family mythology is the “tough stock” kind—from the boy who left Dundee at 16 to sail around the world, his adventures fighting Dutch slavers and journeying with pirates meticulously detailed in a diary, to the deeper ancestors who stole sheep, fought the Campbells and chose a name that translates to “ruler of the world”. I never once imagined that any of the people that walked this Earth sharing something of my genetic makeup would be silent in the face of tragedy and terror. How foolish, given I have living relatives who run from the confrontations that hold us together.

In fact, that limb of my family tree which has abandoned itself to a slow hollowing out on the forest floor may be more representative of my ancestors than I care to admit: I do not belong to a people who liberated themselves from tragedy and terror. I belong to a people who grew silent in its face, a people who lost their lands and eventually folded their cultures and languages into the dominant Christian English hegemony. My words and my customs are lost to the silent ages, along with the knowledge that kept us proud and autonomous among wild and unforgiving landscapes. I belong to a people who forgot they were colonised, who legitimised the very entity that violated their way of life. I belong to a people who forgot who they are. 

Some months ago, I wrote a piece explaining Fanon’s philosophy of liberation, which emphasised that a colonised people must both attack the material conditions of their oppression and recover their self-recognition by turning away from the identity thrust upon them by the settler-state and practicing their culture. I wrote that the necessity of having something to turn towards explains the revolutionary impotence which afflicts the Minority World, where we cannot imagine ourselves as anything other than subjects of the state, thus legitimising its existence and reproducing the conditions of our own oppression. Admittedly, Fanon was writing about the particular conditions of the relationship between a colonised people and a settler state, but I think in a global economic regime which has set its sights once again on the exploitation of people and extraction of value within its own borders, it can apply to citizens who descend from those who only very recently enjoyed the luxuries afforded by belonging to the colonising state. These are the ties we must trace which can bind our sufferings together, which can unify our struggle. These are the losses and weaknesses we must dare to confront.

The colonisation of Scotland and Ireland (and the North of England, and the Midlands, and Wales) took a different form to the colonisation of Fanon’s Algeria, but the colonising apparatus was forged in Europe against Europeans. That my ancestors never recovered themselves, that their struggles eventually petered out into vague protestations and religious bigotry, means that over time they came to accept the identity that the Christian English state thrust upon them: subjects of the king. Their vision for independence, autonomy, sovereignty and equality must have been erased in order to accept this great injustice as a fact of life, the very fact that I was born into. And how can one speak to the state of the world if one finds allegiance with the state that made it so? 

There is nothing to say. 

When we were filming in Cali last year, we were brought to a rooftop in one of the city’s ghettos where a group of Afro-Colombian grandmothers cook together, sing together, and feed the neighbourhood. They sat in a semi-circle and explained how they had come together, in particular the education programs they had participated in at a nearby community centre which was offering a radical political education for the neighbourhood’s residents. One of the women said to us: “Before doing that course, I would have never been able to raise my eyes to meet yours. I would have never lifted them off the floor. Now I can.” By learning the struggle of her kin, of the descendants of slaves all over the Americas, and learning that the racism she had been forced to live with was a descendant of that absolute injustice, that grandmother understood that she was not what racist ideologies and racist stares wanted to make of her. She found her way into another culture—hers—and in that culture began to see herself differently, differently enough to raise her head and hold my gaze while she talked. 

The ancestors of that grandmother had been ripped from their place in the world. Through learning about their tragedy and terror, she began to recover it for them, and for herself. Once she found her place, her history, she found her words. She found there was a whole world to confront. 

Perhaps, then, the question is not about what our ancestors would say, but what words we, as their descendants, can recover for them? What place for them we can carve out? What truths we can uncover? Perhaps our ancestors will have nothing to say until we do just that? Perhaps they will be unable to find the words if they have nothing yet to give their allegiance? If there is nothing yet worth giving up their silence for? Perhaps that is our task, as descendants: to give them something to say, to confront the world they folded into, like ghosts. 

In the last years of her life, my grandmother said her own mother would not recognise the world. Forty years is both but a moment and an impasse, a long journey for the living that the dead cannot make. I will have no words for the future that my descendants cannot give me, and I am tasked with both sending words back into the past and listening for words from the future. My descendants are insistent and demanding. This world is their inheritance. It is they who stress most fervently that we recover what was lost, that we liberate ourselves from prejudice, and that we promise to never again fold into a complicit dependence on that which wounds us. They will have to live with my choices far longer than I. My silence is their cross to bear; their words are my duty to hear. 

I know what my grandmother would ask of me. She would ask that I take everything good and precious that I was gifted from her and my mother and my aunt and use it all to defend her first great-grandchild. She would demand that I raise that child with steel and tenacity and will. She would ask that I sing that child the song she sang to me every night when she helped raise me. She would want me to tell my child stories about her great-grandmother, and the world she forged so that my little one could inherit a place and a language and a spirit with which she can speak through the ages with her great-grandmother. 

Come child, there is so much still to say.