Tears of the mummies

Being moved by Inca mummies, Mandy Patinkin, and life

The Inca mummies in Andrew Mroczek and Juan Barboza-Gubo’s “Momias de los Cóndores” photographs at Gallery Kayafas raised the hair on the back of my neck. More than 200 are housed at the Leymebamba Museum in Peru after their 1997 discovery in a cliffside overlooking Laguna de los Cóndores. Their handwoven shrouds have faces stitched on them. They were mummified in a fetal position (going out the way they came in), hands bound up by their faces.

Many of the dead have been removed from their shrouds. Barboza-Gubo and Mroczek photographed the embalmed remains up-close-and-personal: gaunt, skeletal but covered with leathery skin, they look daunted, as if they’re meeting their maker. Here’s my review in the Globe.

The mummies were on my mind during my contemplative movement practice today. My own creaks and aches made me aware of my age; I thought of the mummies, bound up for centuries, desiccated in a fetal position. I held my hands up to my face and felt the binding, the stuckness of a mummy. I groaned.

The Inca ancestors played a crucial role in the world of the living. Christopher Heaney, assistant professor of Latin American History at Pennsylvania State University, has said the embalming and wrapping of the dead imbued them with stillness and solidity that “give the mummies their ability to move through time and continue to shape the lives of the living.”

Many Andean societies turned to mummified ancestors for counsel. Sometimes the mummies were taken from their resting places on important occasions to be consulted as wise members of their community.

But ancestors aren’t always wise. This week I watched Mandy Patinkin on “Finding Your Roots,” Henry Louis Gates’s genealogy show on PBS. Gates revealed that several of the actor’s relatives died in Nazi concentration camps.

Patinkin burst into tears. His father and grandmother had never told him.

Andean cultures such as the Inca saw death as a transformation from the brief, soft and juicy state of life to the eternal, hard and old afterlife, writes anthropologist Frank Salomon in an essay in “Tombs for the Living: Andean Mortuary Practices.”

We harden and stiffen as we age, emotionally as well as physically. To continue to be soft and yielding in a world wracked with loss, hatred, and fear takes constant practice. Many ancestors, like Patinkin’s father and grandmother, went through hell and never talked about it. In some ways it’s easier to wall away the softness. Sometimes that’s simply what survival dictates.

Moving, I felt my way into the hard, desiccated, mummy place inside myself, and I thought of my mother. She died in 2013. Without her wisdom and depth I would never have developed as a writer, as a thinker, as someone (as she would put it) with an inner life. She gave me many gifts. And she walled off some of her soft places. She had shames and secrets, things she would never speak of. I thought of them as her no-fly zones. I grew up guarding them. I was shaped by negative space.

In the movement studio, I tensed, hands in front of my face. I grunted and mewled. I teetered like the undead across the wooden floor.

The deeper I drop in a movement, the more I am led somewhere. In an instant, I sensed I was holding something in my hands. I looked down and knew it to be my mother’s secrets. I began to feel alive and young and soft; I felt that this hard, unknown thing that shaped me – her no-fly zones – needed only tenderness. I teared up. I thought of Mandy Patinkin, crying for his ancestors. Perhaps generations of unwept tears streamed from his eyes.

When they happened upon the Inca mummies, Mroczek and Barboza-Gubo were photographing sites of hate crimes against LGBTQ Peruvians for their book “Fatherland,” hallowing ground that had been desecrated by unspeakable violence.  Again – the soft violently shuttered by the hard. The Inca ancestors were elites; upon death, their bodies were treated with care. The bodies of victims of hate crimes, marginalized people just being themselves and loving each other, were brutalized.

This world can harden us. We fiercely patrol the no fly zones in our societies and in ourselves. At the end of “Finding Your Roots,” Mandy Patinkin expressed relief and healing. Learning the truth of his family’s loss, he was thrust into the negative space that shaped him. He found pain there. He was equipped to feel it, to accept it, to love it.

Our ancestors are wise and can provide counsel even if only in our own heads. But whatever hardness they had in life stiffens within us, too. Soften around that. Grieve. Move. Welcome the unknown in.

Photographs © Mroczek and Barboza-Gubo from the series “Momias de los Cóndores”