I BELIEVE WE are all haunted by the place of our birth – which is chosen without our consent. Unlike a place of residence, which implies some agency in the matter, the place we are born becomes part of the psychological, sociological inheritance that is ours as much as a genetic inheritance is. To understand social life, which is always an aspect of the world-building energy of fiction, one must confront the ghostly aspects of it: the spirits who lingered in that place of our birth, the ones who blessed or cursed us as we were born, the ones pleased or displeased with a new human offering. Writing and reading fiction is the best (maybe only) way I have of exploring the unfinished business of the past, both immediate and deep historical.

A friend once gave me, as a joke birthday present, a session with a modern-day medium. I went along reluctantly. An hour later, I’d been taken on a guided meditation to dance with my white ancestors, the ones I despised, the ones I felt had doomed me to a life of penance for their sins. I’m embarrassed to admit it shifted something for me. I felt much better about this visit when I read that WB Yeats had, for several years, travelled every Monday from his home in Sussex to London to see a medium. This medium put him in touch with the spirit of Leo Africanus, a sixteenth-century traveller and scholar whom Yeats came to regard as his spiritual alter ego after first ‘meeting’ Leo’s spirit in 1914. Yeats was at that time trying to connect his writing to ritual, freeing it from what he experienced as the prison of realism. This too made me hopeful.