ANCESTORS OPENS AND
CLOSES with stories by authors who are now ancestors and each, in its own way, blasts the reader into the heavens. We could think of no better place to start than with a story that describes the birth of an ancestor: in Binyavanga Wainaina’s (1971–2019) recently rediscovered “Binguni!,” we are led through a psychedelic fantasia of the African afterlife which reassures that death is only a beginning. And then Izumi Suzuki’s (1949–1986) newly translated “Night Picnic” concludes Ancestors in a distant future in which the characters ask—and are at a loss to answer—the question: What does it mean to be human?
When we first began imagining Ancestors, the second annual Arts in Society anthology, Toni Morrison had recently died and we’d been rereading her essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984). In it, she suggests that a defining characteristic of African American literature is what she calls “the presence of an ancestor.” And for Morrison, the ancestral presence leads directly to “the community . . . an implied ‘we’ . . . which is to say, yes, the work must be political.”