Making peace with our ghosts

Running errands on a particularly hot day last week, I decided to put on a strapless adire dress that I hadn’t worn in ages. It used to be a full-bodied dress with sleeves, and it belonged to my grandmother. When she passed away, it was one of the few things of hers I took and had it tailored into something I could wear.

As I strode out from my apartment, I kept catching my reflection in the windows of boutiques and cafés. Seeing myself in the blue tie-dyed fabric, my mind soon drifted to thoughts of my grandmother. She died 16 years ago, and so much has happened in my life since then. I found myself wondering what kind of conversations we could have now if she were still alive. In that small moment I touched the fabric of the dress, and felt a smile spread on my face. Wearing her old dress, I imagined that in some way she was with me even as I walked. 

I think all of us are haunted, in one way or another. There are people and experiences that have had such an impact on our lives that somehow we can’t quite let go of them. Or things that we can’t make peace with or tie up emotionally, so they live in our consciousness and affect our lives. 

The etymology of the word haunt is tied to the Old French hanter, meaning “to visit frequently or regularly”. But it’s also tied to the Old Norse word heimta, which means “to bring home”. So a haunting does not necessarily have to be about ghosts or spirits, but rather something that visits us regularly or that we bring home with us. 

In the abstract painting “Insomnia II” (2022), the Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura fills the canvas with brushstrokes, splatters and blotches of paint. It looks like a surreal vision of a landscape: a sky of white, teal and fire-orange clouds; a purple fog encroaching on to the canvas from the left; a torrent of aubergine and blood red paint to the right, as if a volcano had erupted. Blotches of black paint look almost figurative: a person with a large egg-shaped head darting across the ground, dodging bright white bolts of paint.

The things that haunt us often keep us awake at night with an unsettled mind. But I like the colour palette of Ikemura’s picture, the warm purples and bright teal. It’s not entirely dark, dismal and frightening. And to my mind, hauntings too do not have to be negative. Some things that plague us can be for our own good in the long run, prodding us to examine our lives and address situations we have been avoiding.

If we cast a light on the things that most frighten us, we may discover patches of light that illuminate corners of our minds

When I have my own bouts of insomnia, I’ve found that it feels worse to remain in bed, unable to sleep, than to just get up for a while. The middle of the night always seems conducive to reflecting on things with more vulnerability and honesty. So I might write in my journal, noting down what I’m feeling and thinking, and seeing what insights emerge from that. Or I talk aloud to what I perceive as God. 

In the 1990s a British historian called Roger Ekirch, researching a book on night-time, discovered that many people in the Middle Ages practised what is called “biphasic sleep”. He suggested that they slept in two phases, and in between sleeps was “the watch”, when they would get up and do all sorts of things including ruminating on life’s big questions.

What if — like the strange figurative form in Ikemura’s piece — we too walked through the hauntings that keep us up at night? If we are willing to cast a light on the things that most frighten us, we may discover surprising patches of light that illuminate corners of our minds and spirits.

Often something haunts us because it is unfinished business. The 1901 painting “Hamlet and the Ghost”, by British artist Frederic James Shields, depicts a barren seascape where two figures meet under a blue-grey sky filled with eerie shapes cast by a bright moon. One figure is a dark silhouette, the other a transparent apparition. It is a version of the scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet where Hamlet meets a ghost that appears to be his father, who tells him that he was murdered by Claudius and asks his son to avenge his death. 

The painting of the two Hamlets meeting made me think about how the things that haunt us are often connected to a much larger narrative or story. We might carry with us the history of things that happened to our families — parents, siblings, even grandparents. It can be tempting to evade or deny these burdens, but the fuller truth of things is often discovered only when we have the courage to face them. We don’t get to pick the things that haunt us, but we do have a choice about how to entertain them.

There’s something relatable about the seeming normality of Russian-American painter Morris Kantor’s 1930 work “Haunted House”. It shows the interior of a house in New England, with a large fireplace, ladderback chairs and floral wallpaper; paintings of a sailing ship and a white-haired man hang on the walls.

At first glance, then, it’s just a regular room that the inhabitants have momentarily left. But look again: to the right of the canvas, a dark, transparent figure floats through the table. We can see the outlines of lit-up houses reflected in the figure’s body. We also see more of the outside world on the left of the canvas, as though another painting is overlapping this one. There is no clear boundary between the house and the hauntings.

A house can be a metaphor for our lives. We try to furnish our homes to be calm and orderly, decorating them with the images of loved ones or cherished experiences. But they are also records of our histories that may still need our attention and can’t necessarily be exorcised away. None of this should make a home unliveable, our lives unliveable. The challenge rather is to address the parts of our stories that need to be reckoned with, and to find ways to co-exist with what remains. Maybe the shift is to consider moving from being afraid of these things to learning to face and question them. Who knows where the answers might lead us.

enuma.okoro@ft.com

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