The Stories of the Ancestors
Many generations ago, my foremothers were Vandals. Before that, we were Magdalenian wanderers. In a way, I still follow the Old Ways.
I can feel my ancestors living inside me as if I’m a living Babuszka doll. That is, inside me is my mother, and her mother, and her mother before, all the way back to our first mother. I can feel their stories pressing out against me. There are too many layers, too many dolls-inside-of-dolls. In the very middle it, at the beginning of time, it is so dense that it has reversed course and started pushing out again. Sometimes I want to tell the old stories.
The women I think of as the first mothers weren’t really the first. They had to have come from somewhere, but they are the first to leave behind representations of themselves. So in a way, as the first artists, they were the first of me. Although there is no record of the language they spoke, the first mothers must have also told stories. AFter all, the stories my babcia told me must have come from somewhere.
Babcia told me if I was bad the old hag, Baba Jaga, would come in the night and eat me up in her iron teeth. Baba Jaga lived in a house with chicken feet and flew around in a mortar and pestle, punishing the wicked. But I never thought of her that way. Instead, I thought what a life Baba Jaga must have! She can fly, her pet is a house and she commands such power. What does she think, while she’s out seeing the world from the driver’s seat of a magickal mortar and pestle? What kind of flower beds does she tend in her quiet time? Does she ever take the house for a walk?
In the folk stories, the old hag is reviled: ugly and old, husbandless and childless. She steals the children of more socially acceptable women because she has none of her own. How did this come to happen to her? Was her exile self-imposed and later misinterpreted? Is her malignancy solely the propaganda of early patriarchy’s excesses? I don’t know how to answer these questions as to when the women became the monsters. I do know that the old hag is my ancestor.
Just as my babcia is inside me, Baba Jaga is in there too somewhere and the woman who made the sculpture. As they are inside of me, they are also me, wound up in my genetic coding, sharing my thoughts. While I imagine holding the Magdalenian statuette, Baba Jaga is holding it too. We are all of us, touching that silver thread which connects us to our mothers. And their mothers, and their mothers before. All the way back to the first mother.
“baba yaga goes for a walk. with her house” can be viewed through November 18th at the White Rabbit Galleries, 571 W Tuscarawas Ave, Barberton OH where she has recieved a “best in show” award at their “Creative Folk” juried exhibition.