the last paper I wrote I talked about conjure women as genetic memory & ancestral liberation theology. the idea of the conjure woman flips patriarchy on its side & accepts the realities of what leadership means because that’s usually demonstrated by the women in our communities.

the conjure woman holds a special role that for example in jamaica with nanny of the maroons is linked to ashanti culture & the queen mother. there’s like a conferred status. the idea of ancestral liberation theology is about the process of connecting the dots to our shared past.

whether that is in understanding the stories of our fiction writers & poets like morrison or the lives of artists & public intellectuals. it is an acknowledgment. you fit into a story somewhere. you are not the first or the last to feel the hurt that you do. it is collective.

& if you treat it all, these stories & these ordinary lives, like a mirror everything will make sense to you. it’s a process that happens on layers & levels.

so one of my favorite people is terence mckenna who talks about the power of psilocybin & psycho-spiritual development. a theory, which he said was accepted by evolutionary biologists, that women were responsible for gathering food when we were hunter-gatherers...

so women had to develop communication skills. if they sent one woman to find food she had to come back & explain to all the other women exactly where to find it. that’s the theory. for me that suggests that women had to have a real grasp on plants.

they had to become the memory bank for that wisdom. & the fact remains that no healing can take place without plants. thus, conjure women. at least that’s my personal theory.

this I think holds true for surival in the americas at the dawn of enslavement. the conjurers kept us alive. even the planters would go to African healers. the plants have all the power. & whoever knows the plants...