How Do We Hold Our Ancestors’ Stories

Many of us have lost the stories of our ancestors. Their stories have been lost to us. Whether by abrupt breakage, diasporic scattering, or the here- and-there, wear and tear over time. And yet even the tiniest bureaucratic fragment, even the merest wisp of oral history can be as a seed.

How do we tend to the story seeds of our ancestors?

How might we make of ourselves good soil?

Like living things - these questions beget more questions...

How do our stories come down to us?

How do our people speak to us?

What are the pathways that stories take?

How do they shift and change along the way?

What would it mean to bring our stories into circle together?

What could be made possible?

How do we attune ourselves to the voices of our ancestors?

How do we become good ancestors ourselves?

How do we re-entwine our lives back into the cord of our lineage when so much has been fragmented when so much has been lost?

I think of the ways nations try to construct these grand narratives, to lay claim to the motherland to claim ownership and superiority.

I was watching a documentary - about underwater archeological excavations happening off the coast of Israel. A neolithic site from 6,000 or so years ago, (or was it more?)

The divers found skulls - skulls which had been refleshed with clay and shell and set in the village center.

The way the archaeologist described the ancestor worship of these people was so... loaded. He said they would worship these ancestor skulls - place them in the village center as a way of saying, "Look! My family line goes back this many generations on this land!." As a way of claiming their right to the "property" he said. He asserted. He spoke this story with such confidence. This story of lineage-as-land claim. This strange propaganda story. This story of property rights.

My face screwed up - skeptical. I doubt the people who left those skulls were thinking in such terms... certainly less than some scholar-class Israeli man tasked with digging up their bones.

So, now I'm thinking about the stories we tell ourselves about our ancestors, the stories that get passed down. The Official Lore that makes us feel proud and noble and clever and wise. And then those stories that get lost or hidden because they don't serve the family narrative. Stories of harm and shame and cowardice. Stories of messy complexity. How do we create spaces for the harder stories to be told?

More questions beget more questions... a genealogy of questions...

Great-grandmother reading Rilke while the bombs fell... Rilke who said "live the questions"...

So now, how do we reflesh skulls of our ancestors when those skulls are no longer buried under the mud floors of our dwelling places?

How do we reflesh them when they are scattered ash and the clay we walk on is stolen land?

How do we reflesh the stories of our ancestors without imposing modern maps onto their living landscapes?

How can we reflesh their stories without repeating their missteps?

If trauma occurs at those moments when the sense-making tools we have are rendered useless, when the lived reality is too overwhelming to be felt in our bodies, too Earth shattering to be fitted into our existing frameworks - then the same must be true of generational, and historical traumas, no? How does the family-body make meaning out of genocide, exile, cycles of violence? How do the ruptures and incongruities of life get woven into a coherent story?

The simple joy of sun-ripe strawberries, eaten seaside, during wartime.

What stories did our ancestors choose to tell themselves and their children? How are we living out their narratives? How do their stories live in our bodies? The ones we know and the ones we'll never know. How do we piece together a continuity from the scattered potsherds of the past?

And healing that continuity. What does that do? Why does that matter?

Maybe it matters because without those narrative threads, we are like free-roaming particles detached from any sense of belonging. Each of us trying (at best) to hold our personal and ancestral narratives together as individuals.

It is the continuity of story, more than any blood and bone lineage, that holds us together.