Gone Before to Grace
In These Dissenting Times
To acknowledge our ancestors means
we are aware that we did not make
ourselves, that the line stretches
all the way back, perhaps, to God; or
to Gods. We remember them because it
is an easy thing to forget: that we
are not the first to suffer, rebel,
fight, love and die. The grace with
which we embrace life, in spite of
the pain, the sorrows, is always a
measure of what has gone before.
—Alice Walker “Fundamental Difference”
Charlotte SHOUT!, April 2022.
It’s the last phrase of the final sentence that draws us into the time loop, the never-ending wheel of life. The very place where the poem ends is where we find the beginning of understanding.
“The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what has gone before.” A measure of what has gone before. Gone before, the last two words of the poem, form a ringing bell that runs the expanse of time from the past to the present and well into the future.
It calls us backward to our history and asks that we turn our attention to the people we come from. We are because they were. There’s little, other than the construct of time, that separates us from their reality. We are their blood and flesh and bone. The ancestors, too, suffered, rebelled, fought, loved, and died. They, too, worried about food, shelter, and the children. They, too, breathed this air, sweltered under the same hot sun, pleaded with the same moon, and gazed upon other galaxies shining through constellations.
Gone before also beckons us forward into the future. True to the sacred nature of cycles, that future begins again through a direct action in the first line of the poem. “To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves.” This is the power of Sankofa: to have our feet planted in the direction of the future as we look back to carry forward the wisdom of those who have gone before. By going back to get the wisdom, we allow the ancestors who came before us to also go before us, to petition on our behalf, to clear the road and make a way. Through acknowledgment, the wisdom and spirit of the ancestors become fluid and transcend time in all directions.
And why wouldn’t it? We, ourselves, are time. Our DNA, our collective memory, our physical bodies all serve as markers of time that knit us together along our ancestral lineage. This fabric stretches, loops, and bends—never breaking—all the way back to the beginning. Our present, this dissenting time is unique, specific, and special to our moment in history. It is also a reflection of and inseparable from those dissenting times of our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers—all the way back to the first dissent, the initial struggle, the first manifestation of love and rebellion, the initial pain of grief and suffering.
To trace this far back is to measure, and the act of measurement is an act of observation. Therefore, the grace with which we embrace life and its tumult is based on prior due diligence, of observing that which has gone before. Through the act of observation, gone before returns the mirror to the present, to the work we're called to do in these dissenting times. To measure, as a form of remembrance, is to insert our unique perception into the timeline of history. To measure, as a form of reflection, is to do the spiritual work of acknowledgment, to wake up to the expanse of time within us. To measure is to hold this memory. It is a sacred act that begets grace.
It is this body–spirit memory, the ancestral acknowledgment that guides the path forward—breaking time, splitting open the egg into a wellspring of potential. And what is grace but the gift of new possibility in spite of it all?