by Francine Hajilou
Content warnings: grief, a brief account of visiting a body in a morgue, unpleasant descriptions of the remains of a dead seagull, mention of climate emergency, climate grief, allusion to depression, use of the word ‘mad’ (not my words) in the notes and mention of undiagnosed mental health issues. ( I don’t know if I am using incorrect terms, and I won’t speculate about the causes of the episodes when he experienced distress and his struggles with his mental health)
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On my kitchen shelf, next to the bowls is an altar, of sorts. It’s made from a small pinkish shell, an old sprig of wild oregano, and a skeletonised leaf. Picking up the remnants of the leaf, I hold it to the light from the kitchen window to admire it. I could have left it on Holywell Fen where I found it and it would have given up its frail lacework of cellulose and lignin to the microbiome of the fen from which it grew. Instead, it’s on a different path desiccating amongst coffee grounds, breadcrumbs, and other detritus from my life. I am a habitual collector of objects from the natural world, the lifeless body of a fat bumble bee, or a pine cone that sheds its winged seed pods when I nudge it aside to clean the window sill beneath it. The ritual of finding and living with these objects tethers me to the natural world and its rhythms – its cycles of life, death, and rebirth. I haven’t always thought of them as altars but I believe they always have been.
A few years ago, my good friend Anita, invited me to join the reading group she was running, its focus was African Spiritual Traditions. Curious about the cultural and spiritual beliefs of my ancestral heritage, (growing up on the fringes of my Jamaican family I had gleaned a little knowledge of Jamaican customs and beliefs: Nine-Nights, duppies, the pouring of libations at a funeral) I joined the group. While reading a book about Santería, a Caribbean syncretic religion with Yoruba roots, certain aspects of the religion surrounding nature, and the ritual of making altars for worship and protection resonated with me. I started thinking about my rituals in a new way and I tentatively began calling the feathers, stones, skulls, and herbs I’d gathered and brought into my home altars. And although they are not devoted to a religious deity they are still potent and meaningful on a personal level. I also now see them as an intentional move towards reclaiming and embedding elements of my ancestral cultural heritage in my life.
I don’t only make altars though. I also keep lucky talismans. During a particularly anxious period of my life (I had just completed a master’s degree in creative writing and had no idea what to do next; the COVID-19 pandemic had hit; and the value of the lives of Black people was once again up for global public debate) I began keeping with me at all times a small black, triangular stone. It was about the size of a £2 coin and had a minuscule, white fossilised sea urchin in its centre. I couldn’t believe my luck when I spotted it among the millions of pebbles and stones on Mermaid Beach near my home in Folkestone. And the joy of it. At the time, I remember feeling like it had found me, or that we had found each other; either way, I was certain Fate had gifted me something beautiful and precious at the time I most needed it. Just the weight of it in my hand or having it in a coat pocket where I could touch its familiar ridges and smooth surfaces would put me at ease as I got on with my day. Looking back, I’ve been transforming objects into totems for a long time.
Some finds are not for keeping. Twenty-six years and six months ago as I was walking home from the mortuary at Kent and Canterbury Hospital I found a severed seagull wing in a gutter next to the pavement. I had been saying goodbye to the man who, over the years, I’d fallen out of love with. We had children and we’d been trying to work things out when he died. I’d visited his body daily for almost two weeks – perhaps because it had been a deeply problematic relationship with too much left unsaid or perhaps because, no matter what, it takes time to come to terms with an unexpected, avoidable death. When I arrived that day, a nurse told me it would be the last time I could see him. She also told me not to touch him because it was no longer hygienic. His body had become host to microbial lifeforms that belong only to the dead. Seeing that wing at the side of the road, torn and bloodied where it should have been attached to a body, was too significant, too profound to ignore. I gathered it up and carried it home in my hands, just crying and crying. I left the wing in my garden overnight and the next day it was gone. There are stages of grief and we all have to do what we can to move through them.
I place the leaf back on the shelf and inhale deeply, meditatively. I bring my awareness back to the rhythms and cycles of the fen. It’s one of my favourite places to walk and think. I love how, after heavy rainfall, ephemeral pools spring up all over it, and how its sodden ground, weeps, sucks and belches when I walk on it. I love the fen in the summer when it becomes a meadow of long grasses and daisies and I love the high-pitched calls of swifts as they dart about high above me feasting on insects. I love its ancientness. There is something about being in a place that is over one hundred million years old that puts everything in proportion and even forever doesn’t seem so daunting. In physics the law of conservation of energy states that energy can’t be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another.
And there it is like the sun on my back. Acceptance. I hope it stays with me for a while.
About the author
Francine is currently developing a memoir written in hybrid form. Its working title is Lacuna: Notes from Nowhere. For this project, Francine is experimenting with using poetry, autoethnography, nature writing, speculative memoir writing, and personal essays to communicate the complexities of her lived experiences of childhood sexual assault, generational trauma cycles, domestic violence, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism. In this memoir, Francine focuses on her body as a site of joy, pain, trespass, and freedom. She is interested in using experimental, fragmented forms of writing to reflect the physical and psychological landscapes of trauma. Questions central to this work are what it means to thrive as a survivor, notions surrounding recovery, and cycles of silencing and shame.
Tokens, Totems, and Abstractions is part of her enquiry into using nature writing and personal essays to explore embodied knowledge and connection to Place as an act of reclamation, reinvention, and resistance.You can find Francine on Instagram.
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