Imagine to Remember

There is an Akan aphorism, Sankofa. Sankofa can be translated as “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten”. Its symbol is a bird with its feet facing forward and its head turning back, an egg in its mouth, the representation of what has been retrieved, what one went back to get from the past and bring to the present.

The significance of Sankofa for the African diaspora is obvious, it has long been a symbol of connection, continuity and history. But there is also the personal journey to retrieve “that which you have forgotten”. Or maybe that is its own kind of fallacy, the separation of the personal and the communal, the personal and the ancestral. The kind of fallacy that only a certain kind of mind, western, industrialized, sterile, could conjure up. An idea that, to other peoples, in other places and times would be a blasphemy, antithetical and hateful to life itself. 

I find myself reflecting on my younger selfs, revisiting people and places, an old song loops in my head, I walk through the long corridors of memory, I mourn the dreams I’ve long abandoned, I wonder what ever happened to so and so? What could have been, what almost was, it is a fruitless exercise. But I cannot help the feeling that there is something I am looking for, except I am not sure what it is. Something I missed, something I left behind, a wrong turn, a stone left covered. There is even the possibility that it may not be my own personal misstep, but something older than myself, in a place far away. Rumi said that “You walk from room to room, searching for the diamond necklace that is around your neck”. And maybe it, whatever it is, is that close. But it’s not the eyes that do not see but the hearts, so there is something in me that fails to see, blocked and blocking, just beyond my reach, unable to go back and for what I, what we have forgotten.