Bhanu Kapil

“The ancestors. To communicate with an ancestor. Make an offering. Is this true? Yesterday, I visualized a giant egg. In my culture. Please translate to your own. The great void, the great lining of the universe is compacted, you can say, in this egg.”

– From Bhanu Kapil’s response to: “How can we move across time, history, and space to reach our loved ones, our ancestors, even our strangers?”

“What it is to speak up about racist practices in the communities that one is a part of … There is this reminder when we are entering difficult situations, challenging situations, to call on the ancestors before we cross the threshold into community. To ask for their protection, support, and guidance.”

This fall, I want to paint something. I want to drink coffee in London, and I want to make the Decolonization seminar into a Neurodecolonization seminar. I want to write a memoir. I want to transmute the legacy of trauma and abuse in my family, in my culture, into a seed of gold light. And I want to press that gold seed into my heart so that when I die it will become a part of the earth.

Read more at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, reprinted by permission of the author.