One crisp fall afternoon in a park in Berlin, I was walking with a friend who identifies as white. They spoke of their desire to do ancestor healing work and the challenge of this, since they have little connection with their living ancestors, let alone the ones who came before. My friend expressed some envy about my ability to connect with my Yoruba, Guyanese, and Celtic ancestors, to know my lineage and be in relationship with it. This sparked a rich conversation between us about grief, colonization, loss, and the violence of the Void—the sense of internal emptiness that many white people feel; a sense that they have no culture, no richness, no ancestral wisdom to connect with or lean upon. It is this sense of emptiness that I believe is the driving force for cultural appropriation and other intersecting harms rooted in extraction and domination. As Stephen Jenkinson writes in Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble: “So many Westerners are ready and willing to throw their mongrel history over the side for the spiritual smooth sailing they imagine comes with imbibing an ‘intact culture.’”
There is a violence in the Void. The emptiness is a hungry, cannibal-like erasure that has consumed many Indigenous and traditional cultures over the last five hundred years. Do not mistake the Void for nothingness—lying beneath it are the tendrils of pain, the stories of Empire, and conquerors whose ancestors at one point were the conquered. Other manifestations of the Void can be seen in behaviors of domination, whether this is anthropocentrism, ableism, racism, sexism, transphobia, or homophobia. A feature of this space can be the ongoing sensation of being incomplete, of needing “exotic” rituals or cultural practices to take away the gnawing feeling of not being spiritual, kind, or open-hearted enough.
People experiencing the Void often have an urge to consume excessively, hoping that the next peak experience will result in a lasting sense of satisfaction. In new age and psychedelic communities, this can result in an endless circuit of tantric retreats, festivals, and plant medicine experiences in the jungle, all dressed in the notion of doing “the work.” These communities often pay lip service to oneness but rarely move beyond the dominance of the individual. They take what they need, believing everything to be theirs anyway, to temporarily bypass the feeling of emptiness, the Void churning underneath, untouched and unprocessed, strengthened by the need to extract and consume. They get a quick fix, potentially in another dose of peak experience—ignoring the shadow that cries out for integration.
What would it be like, instead, to submerge ourselves in this feeling of Void—to really listen to what it needs to heal? To reconnect with stories of our ancestors who practiced ritual and moved with the seasons? This may seem lost to us, but their memories live in our bodies—they are woven into the fabric of our DNA. Try speaking to them and see what emerges. Know that their whispers may at first appear as sensations in the body.
This kind of inquiry asks for more nuance than the written or spoken word—it requires deep listening, space, and time to learn the signals or language of the body. The intuitive “gut feeling” is an example of this. Working with ancestors is also important on an intellectual level as it puts our lives into context. No being is an island. We are created from deep entanglements, rich histories, and lineages filled with joy and loss, trials, tribulations, and triumphs. We are alive because a community of people willed and nurtured us into existence. Even on the scale of the so-called individual, advances in microbial science demonstrate that the idea of a “purely human” body is an illusion. Many of our collaborations with bacteria are essential for daily functioning. As just one example, according to a study published in the journal Cell, “90 percent of the serotonin in our bodies—the neurotransmitter that when abundant makes us feel happy, and when depleted makes us feel depressed—is produced in our guts, and gut microbes play a major role in regulating its production.”
As many Indigenous peoples, such as the Anishinaabe, know to be true, we are deeply interconnected with all other beings on this planet. The sense of disconnection, or Void, is a wound that needs to be tended to if we are to be in right relationship with the earth and our kin. Once we can acknowledge this, we can begin to ask deeper questions such as: What harms did my ancestors experience and how does this impact my life? What harms did they perpetuate on others, knowingly or unknowingly? How do these legacies live on through my body and in relation to other bodies, including the land?
In thinking and feeling into the Void, I have become curious about where it emerges from and how it impacts people within my family. I have found it useful to learn more about the construction of whiteness as an identity and the harms that led white people to develop this sense of internal emptiness, having been so separated from their ancestral roots. Three key events have made themselves known to me: the colonization of European Indigenous peoples by the Roman Empire; the witch burning times; and the actions of plantation owners in the 1700s, which birthed the white identity as we know it.
The colonization of Europe and Britannia by the Roman Empire led to the destruction of many Indigenous peoples within these lands. My Celtic ancestors fought against the encroachment of Rome with blood and fire as the Romans proceeded to eradicate any spiritual practices that did not conform to Christianity. This was forced assimilation. (Yes, assimilation happened to people who are now considered white, too.) In some ways, Rome was a template for the colonial project led by European nations five hundred years ago, as well as for the universalism that is taking place today under the guise of “globalization”—this pressure for peoples around the world to assimilate into the logic of the market and the relational dynamics of Western rationalism that come with capitalism.
In Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, Jenkinson speaks to the impact of the Roman Empire on the Indigenous peoples of Europe. For these peoples, the forcing of Christianity on their culture was the apocalypse—their ancestral practices were banned and stigmatized and they were forced to assimilate into a universal way of living, without authorized access to their ancestral knowledge. Jenkinson writes, “European peoples in the fading Roman period were awash in dislocation, speaking the tongue of their conquerors, already homeless in their home places, traumatized by culture loss, and the Christian missionaries cannibalized that homelessness, and made it a prime attribute of the soul.”
The cycle of violence continued, with European peoples becoming the bringers of the same apocalypse to many other people centuries later, including my ancestors in Nigeria and Guyana. Both of these legacies live within me: the stories of those recently colonized, as well as the stories of those who have recently enacted colonization. Those who have recently colonized had forgotten that a similar brutality had swallowed their ways of living some time ago.
The emptiness left by the fading of the Roman Empire led to what is commonly known as the Dark Ages or Middle Ages (roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE). In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem references the trauma that the European ancestors of people who identify as white experienced during this time due to widespread torture and mutilation which were akin to spectator sports. Medieval historian Sean McGlynn notes in Violence and the Law in Medieval England, “Throughout the whole medieval period there was popular demand for malefactors to receive punishment that was both harsh and purposefully terrifying…Mutilations sent out a message of warning and deterrence…With few prisons and no police force, severe punishment was deemed invaluable as a deterrent to crime.” Menakem argues that the epigenetic impact of these centuries of mass violence and brutality came to resemble culture for European peoples, writing: “Isn’t it likely that many of them were traumatized by the time they arrived here? Did over ten centuries of decontextualized medieval European brutality, which was inflicted on white bodies by other white bodies, begin to look like culture? Did this intergenerational trauma and its possible epigenetic effects end with European immigrants’ arrival in the ‘New World?’”
During the Middle Ages, the witch burning times also created a huge wound and rupture within communities in Europe and later in the newly-formed colonies on Turtle Island. Generally those with a comprehensive knowledge of herbal medicine, midwifery, and healing practices, often within peasant communities, were targeted as witches. The witch burning times lasted for more than two hundred years, and they are estimated to have killed more than forty thousand women, though documentation from this period is limited, so the number of deaths may have been higher.
During this time, a culture of fear arose. Families, neighbors, and communities turned against each other; people began to accuse others just so they would be saved. In addition to those in power doing away with the commons, the place where a community would gather to farm together, the practice of hunting witches was instrumental in shaping capitalism as a system; it helped the powerful form a political and social set of relationships within the economy that denigrates, yet relies upon, women’s unpaid and reproductive labor. As a political strategy, the witch hunt was a horrific and effective way to reduce dissent. It served to limit the power that women healers had, to wipe away Indigenous cosmologies and herbal knowledge systems, and to ensure that power over healing the body could be centralized and authorized by the hands of the newly formed, male-led medical profession.
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici speaks to how essential the witch burning times were for the economic elites. The horrible disruption of the witch hunts allowed state officials to usher in capitalism and regain control after the Black Death. The plague had severely depleted the number of workers in Europe, which had given them more agency to set their fees and working conditions. The church, alongside economic elites, regained power by taking control of women’s reproductive labor by forcing them to bear children, whose numbers increased the workforce. Dissent was suppressed through the witch hunts by disciplining or killing anyone who would not conform to this agenda. In looking at our ancestral past, people of European descent cannot avoid this history of pain, betrayal, violence, and a deep severing from land and plant knowledge systems they had once known. It is a painful yet necessary wound for us to touch into—to notice the ways this history has conditioned our bodies and social relationships in the West.
Despite the horrors white people experienced at the hands of one another during the witch burning times, and despite the fear that permeated for generations as a result, some superficial unity was created in the 1700s with the advent of the white identity. Prior to the “eighteenth-century boom in the African slave trade, between one-half and two-thirds of all early white immigrants to the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere came as unfree laborers, some 300,000 to 400,000 people,” according to Nell Irvin Painter in The History of White People.
At the beginning of this period, these European laborers differentiated themselves based on which countries they came from, rather than identifying as a unified mass of white people. Painter writes that many were poor and stolen away from their homes to work in harsh conditions on foreign lands, meaning that they had a lot in common with African enslaved people.
According to Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez, the white identity came into existence as a means of destroying coalitions between enslaved African people and indentured laborers of European descent on plantations. There were many revolts, notably Bacon’s rebellion in 1676, and these were a concern for the economic elites in Virginia, who were outnumbered by enslaved African people, European indentured laborers, and Indigenous people.
As a way to address this, the classic tactic of divide and conquer was applied, says Ira Berlin in “Race—The Power of an Illusion.” The plantation owners gave indentured European laborers more power, and this was attributed to them being white and free, rather than destined for servitude—the label given to enslaved African peoples. This created a sense of superiority amongst the now white indentured laborers; it broke apart coalitions and installed the white laborers as middle-manager oppressors on behalf of the planter elite, who were ultimately exploiting them, too.
This instilled superiority and the dynamic of being the middleman oppressor for the elite has been passed down for generations, leading to what we still see in the West today—gray-space societies that center convenience and comfort rather than connection and collaboration and who code legacies of domination into notions of safety and order, dictating which neighborhoods are “good” or “bad” and which bodies are regarded as safe or dangerous.
I wonder who and what this serves? I sense that economic elites continue to dance jubilantly to this chess game of divide and rule. Ultimately this is harmful to everyone, white people, too, who are conditioned to trade their humanity and empathy for little scraps of power, following the rules, staying safe.
On an embodied level, the Void has created a sense of being numb, of being unable to feel deeply or empathize with others who appear to be different than our kin. From the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade to the present, disembodied knowledge has become the dominant
social paradigm in the West. Disembodied knowledge, according to Yvonne Daniel in Dancing Wisdom, can be defined as “intellectual knowledge without concomitant integration of somatic, intuitive understanding and the spiritual wisdom their combination yields.”
Western institutions of power have historically viewed this type of knowledge as superior and the general public has been encouraged to embrace it as part of progress. Cartesian dualism also refers to this mind-body split that has become dominant in the West; it creates a sense that the mind is the essence of who human beings are, and the body has no wisdom to provide other than being a fleshy vehicle for the mind. As a result, we have been socialized to ignore or numb any sensations or embodied signals that convey moral rights and wrongs; instead, we rationalize the deep injustice we see unfolding around us.
Somatic educator Madelanne Rust-D’Eye speaks to this pervasive numbing in her series “The Roots of White Supremacy Are in Our Bodies.” She says, “We must explore the ways we relate to the sensations and emotions that arise in our bodies in relation to our life experiences. Only then can we actually learn to notice, and feel, the Implicit Associations—the meanings and associations our bodies make, beneath our conscious awareness—that underlie and result in behaviors and attitudes that marginalize others. We must then learn to tolerate the discomfort of not acting on these associations long enough for alternative (ideally, more collaborative) relational outcomes to arise. Another dimension of discomfort that I suggested white Allies must learn to welcome is tolerating the discomfort of emotion—and of change, and the unknown—moving through our bodies. Being present to these experiences connects us to our own experience of life in all its textures, and makes us capable of acknowledging and truly caring about the life experiences—in particular, the suffering—of our fellow humans. I shared my belief that this is a requisite energy source for our wholehearted participation in personal and cultural transformation at this time.”
I hope these important threads of history, and how they relate to the people who call themselves white, will become widely discussed in the years to come, especially amongst the younger generations. I hope people will begin to reckon with their wounds, take responsibility for the legacies they are entangled in, and repattern superiority, which is built on a house of cards. When we acknowledge the historical processes our lives have been shaped by, and when we touch into this on an embodied level, we can cultivate the agency to repattern behavior from old wounds and create new stories and ways of being, rather than unconsciously reproducing the violence of the Void.
How do we learn to collaborate in a way that sustains the web of life for the next seven generations? This is one of the big questions I am sitting with. One pathway I see is to acknowledge and grieve the violence of Empire and the Void space that exists in many as a result of it. Feeling into this wound—and allowing it to compost—can make space for us to remember ways of existing that are in balance with the earth. To weave in cultural practices, rituals, ceremonies, and knowledge systems based on collaboration rather than domination. To become accomplices to the mycelial networks that sustain lifeways.
This excerpt is from “Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community” by Camille Sapara Barton, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2024 by Camille Sapara Barton. Printed with permission of North Atlantic Books.
*This excerpt appeared in DoubleBlind Magazine Issue No. 11.
