Pushed into Consciousness

Abstract:This essay reflects on Laurie Lambert's study Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (2020), which investigates contemporary Caribbean literary reimaginings of the Grenadian Revolution and makes visible how that history impacts Grenada today. Comrade Sister asks readers to wrestle with historical ghosts and uncomfortable truths that undergird liberation movements, including Grenada's. For Lambert, those ghosts manifest as ancestral knowledge. This essay explores ancestral knowledge as an ontological project that, at its core, is concerned with pushing-into-consciousness revolutionary narratives that have been forgotten, hidden, or overlooked because they were produced outside of or do not align with revolutionary rhetoric and official accounts. By retrieving what has been lost, ancestral knowledge demonstrates how revolutionary tales can be told another way and, thus, how revolutions can be enacted differently.