Confronting the world
What would our ancestors say?
✒️ My newsletter this week explores the question “What would our ancestors say?” It is the first in a series of essays produced on this topic by The Grove, a small writing collective I created to work with Anya, Rishab and Jess, three extremely intelligent, thoughtful and learned people in their mid-twenties. Our pieces are the result of our reading and writing together over four months.
My family tree is a violated-looking thing. On both sides, limbs have been snapped clean off by those who used to sit on them. On both sides, branches have been hidden from view or bent out of place or removed and grafted onto some other family tree. There is loss and pain and mistrust on both sides of my family tree; parts of it have been hollowed out by a rot that descended through the ages. There are members who claim they can distance themselves entirely from their roots. And I wonder, sometimes: Do they not know what happens when a limb becomes a log, alone on the forest floor?
Two years ago, my grandmother became an ancestor. When she died, at the age of 94, she was terribly worried about what the future lay in store for her family. That concern was global, watching in horror as what she had believed to be the wave of history lifting the world out of the trenches of the world wars became a curve that rapidly began to descend. This was the fear she voiced most readily and most often, watching the news with an impassive fortitude that belonged to her generation, and one she never wished to see bestowed upon her daughters and grandchildren. But she hid another worry, a gnawing anxiety that would reveal itself only in moments of quiet as she pondered her death. She held no illusions that she could change the world in her early 90s, her health rapidly deteriorated by too many months trapped indoors thanks to the pandemic. But she did believe she could hold her family, and in some way was aware she held us together. She worried about what would happen, when she was gone, to all of us. On her last birthday, which we share, we spoke about this. I told her not to worry, that she had done a good job, that whatever harms had been felt in the past were long healed. I didn’t lie to her. It just turned out that I was wrong.
When I think about her coming back to us in the midst of a geopolitical, ecological and social crisis that has worsened dramatically in the two years since her departure, I know her first attention would be to her family, to the wounds and the separations. She would focus on us because she loves us, but also because this is her locus of power; my grandmother knew how to act to change her world. She would also focus on us because she believed that the world was coming apart because we as a society were not holding onto one another anymore, and if we cannot even hold onto those we love then what chance do we have to hold onto the rest? My grandmother was an avid writer of letters, and kept every one she ever received across the decades from those she managed to maintain a connection with despite the distance of culture, language, geography and time. The strength of my grandmother’s grip was renowned, and indeed it was the force of her commitment which produced her matriarchal steeliness. It was because she loved us that she was willing to confront us. And it was because we loved her that we did not run from her confrontations.
I know what she would ask of me, now, were she to return. And I would say: But Grandma, there is nothing left to say.
In the weeks I spent reflecting on how to investigate what my ancestors would say, I didn’t once consider whether or not they would say anything. It was simply a given, in my head, that those from whom I have descended would have very much to say on the state of world affairs, be it the side of German peasant farmers who immigrated to the American Midwest, or the tough Irish and Scottish labourers who built bridges and toiled in ship yards. My family mythology is the “tough stock” kind—from the boy who left Dundee at 16 to sail around the world, his adventures fighting Dutch slavers and journeying with pirates meticulously detailed in a diary, to the deeper ancestors who stole sheep, fought the Campbells and chose a name that translates to “ruler of the world”. I never once imagined that any of the people that walked this Earth sharing something of my genetic makeup would be silent in the face of tragedy and terror. How foolish, given I have living relatives who run from the confrontations that hold us together.