love as an inheritance
“There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth.” Walter Benjamin
Who is time for?
Like many I grew up with no ligneage to turn to. Books would have you believe each of us is a fig hanging from a centuries old tree standing in a beautiful garden. This metaphor is so easy to conjure I can smell it all: the fig, its color, its sweetness, the wasp nestling at its center, each carrying in them the taste of the thousands of figs that came before.
As it is, the trees have been uprooted, or they burned down in a summer fire, or my grandmother had to leave the land which was never really hers to raise her kids somewhere they could go to school.
It’s easy to believe time is not for us. Our past abstract, insignificant. No meaningful names, no rich history. Our present like crumbs lodged in between work shifts. Our future an uncertainty I do not have to tell you about.
It’s easy to believe this, to believe ourselves rootless amongst the rootless. It might even feel freeing, once we let go of any hope. Some Wednesdays I think of that line from New Girl : life is just a bunch of weeks and then you die.
Last fall I read a book and the writer mentioned her grandmother’s Amazigh chin tattoo. The book had been out for a few years, probably passed through thousands of hands by then. Still I stopped at this line and read it again and thought this might be where I come from.
How we take back time is how we take back ligneage, how we take back continuity. There is a rich history, not only of people who have looked like us and our ancestors, but most importantly of people who have hoped like us.
I find solace in reading and researching fights that have been led over the past few centuries. There is an inheritance left for us there, in books, in archives, in oral history. There is a web of continuous hope extending all over the globe, any place someone fought for liberation, for the truth, for their right to dignity or to life. A beautiful tentacular thing, strong threads kissing and joining and spreading out.
There are hundreds of species of fig trees, even though Europe is mostly home to the common Mediterranean fig, Ficus carica. I read years ago about an other group of species, further away, who cannot grow in the shade. A type of fig tree who can only grow if its seed falls onto a treetop, where it can drink up as much sunlight as it needs. From there, it sends out its roots, curling away, searching for soil. These rootless roots weld and melt into each other as soon as they touch, continuing their way downwards. This type of fig tree is called a strangler fig. As it grows, it confines the existing tree, putting it in a slow stranglehold until it withers and dies away.
There is so much left for us, a luxuriant history holding many of us together. So many seeds one of them is bound to be carried by the wind into the sunlight. So many invisible threads who could, like the strangler fig, turn into roots if only they touch. If only they hold each other close. Hands coming together to choke out the poisoned inheritance that has grown on our time, on our soil. Leaves spreading out beautifully, taking their time. Finally taking it back.