“Modernity promises each of us the opportunity to define our own identity. It gives us the freedom, at least in theory, not to be boxed in by those who’ve come before us. We’re no longer obliged to glorify our ancestors and take on their customs uncritically or to view their lives as destiny, which is all to the good. But in turning away from practices that encoded into familial memory the people who came before us, we’ve relinquished something enormous.”
— Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble
My Grandma laughs as my Partner stirs together the ingredients for her famous goulash, remarking how many have tried themselves to recreate the recipe that she also measures absolutely nothing for, and simply, cannot make it taste as good as hers. My own Mother has said she believes it’s the very pot these goods are made in that hold the flavors, the key to the difference that makes it just worlds apart from our own renditions. Yet, we all know, it’s the person, it’s her that makes it best—and maybe the farm fresh tomatoes grown by my Grandpa in the yard.
This sounds magical, because these parts really are that sweet. I am still eating leftovers out of the recycled ice cream plastic tub and thinking of when to go see them next. However, it isn’t also the full picture. There aren’t very many words for the exhale of our breath before pulling into the driveway, grateful that the “TRUMP 2024” flag is now removed, though not ideologically, as we hope no harsh words are said. The home I’ve always known on the bumpy dirt road that refuses to be paved holds many memories, my family both broken and whole, with a whole lot of nuance in between. But I wonder in the midst of these stories, histories, what we choose to be important, and how those things change and move through each generation, creating great tension.
Growing up in this world means that when I think of ancestors, my AWANA sword drills kick in, and Hebrews 12:1 flashes on the screen inside of my head, pushed to the tip of my tongue and lips. My own journey into ancestry began a few years ago, wondering “what kind of white” I am in rediscovering my origins (Scottish!), recognizing I could barely fill out a family tree. I also recently finished the book Jewish and Christian Women in the Mediterranean by Sara Parks, Shayna Sheinfeld, and Meredith J.C. Warren, and began to wonder what it means to claim these women as my own ancestors as well. Muddled all together, recognizing that specific point of what we choose to be important, whether known or unknown, certainly makes a home in the body itself, even as current culture remarks that what we think is important to be less so. I’ve always just been “white,” the details unimportant to a culture that wishes to burn all difference away. Facts and stories about women have simply been written over, as history has often been just that: his-tory.
As reproductive justice clicks to the forefront of my mind because of recent SCOTUS discussion, considering the many ways in which women's bodies have been considered property, secondary, unequal both goes back to those times of my ancestors in the Mediterranean, and explicitly not so far back into my own family tree. The pain of being seen as less than person, womanhood tucked into a small, defined-by-men box that you were not to venture from, is also ancestral. Sexual assault has been a part of the stories of every woman I belong to, a tight grip clasped onto my genome. And yet, this cannot be and will not be what we are defined by.
Are women important?
How do we look for what Parks, Sheinfeld, and Warren call slippages: what we must seek and search for as what we may call important is not what would have been in other spaces and places. Where are the fluid-ones, the rule breakers, the troublemakers? How do I fill in the gaps, begin to wonder, wander, into spaces of knowing that have been lost to us for so long? How do we work for liberation when we were not the creator of these wounds?
“Reliving our ancestors’ pain allows us to reference the traumatic past as a way to imagine a possible future, a trajectory from chaos to order, from helplessness to agency, and from destruction to re-creation. In that sense, our work is a way to process and recall past liberation, and also look forward to future redemption.”
— Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance
We must let those from the “slippages” lead. They have long been speaking, and we have long been writing and speaking over them, considering them as unimportant. May we hear their voices. May we consider them important.
I am made up of all of these pieces, these complex, imperfect people.
We mourn the wounds our ancestors have held before us as we work towards abolition.
The great clouds have always been, and guide us toward a fluid future.
“we are infinite
fractal
timeless
when blood spills
we are the wounded place
the sensitive scar tissue
protecting life
from death
until death
we are tattooed
by grief
that love language
our rage and our weeping
show where we fester
where the fight is
that bile, that grime in the fold
that stench
that’s a warning
there’s a standard
we still need to set
we cannot stagnate for long
we are the river
we are the droplets that
spill through the soil
to quench at the root
we are overflowing
your structures
your cons
feel our pounds
your borders so waterlogged
and fragile
we the seep
we the slow creep of holy flood
through your ceiling
the rising rapid tide within
each liberating question
rushing under every skin
we are the deepest place
the light cannot reach us
unless we choose
the mountain path for an age
it’s all archipelago
to us
we ancient
we the patient ones
we carve our fury
with knives made of bones
we are the nightmare
that wakes you to leave
this burning house
but you must recall
we are also the matches
we are the balance
not only the flame in the dark
but each silhouette
against the bright
we are the
spark of life that shines
we are also the shadow
we are everything
you make
live in shadow
you who eat only
sunlight and death
we are underground
we are the dirt
we know who we go home to
we are not lost
we cannot lose
we know death is a portal
we are the black hole
through which all life must
burst
we know life is a miracle
we who
spin on an axis
pulsing like a heart
we
still
beat
we go pray in the dark
we know
where god lives
but tonight
we just shadow on sunlight
eyes closed
against the glare”
— adrienne mares brown, we are also the shadow