Ancestors, Our Blood-Related Strangers A M Y KA NG
As the old saying goes, “blood is thicker than water,” suggesting we generally feel a close bond with those we are blood-related to—our relatives. We often see the reflection of ourselves within our relatives and thus find them somehow familiar, even if we might not know them personally. Accordingly, many of us spend the time to commemorate relatives who have gone before us—our ancestors. We flip through worn-out albums to look at their blackand-white photos, listen to their word-of-mouth life stories, and share their memories with other relatives. However, the more we try to learn about our ancestors, the more distant, lifeless, and foreign they sometimes become. In her poem “Ancestors” (see Appendix), Stephanie Bolster explores the ironic relationship we have with our ancestors and challenges the near-universal belief that we are connected to our ancestors beyond time, arguing that most of them are, in fact, no more than strangers to us. In doing so, the poem goes beyond its surface meaning and prompts us to question our seemingly selfless intention behind honoring our ancestors. Considering that we do not perfectly connect with our ancestors, do we genuinely honor them out of our curiosity or is it rather out of our self-serving desire to figure out who we are and where we come from through them? Bolster acknowledges the duality in our relationship with our ancestors from the very beginning of the poem: “We didn’t know them. They’re in us the way a mirror is” (line 1). The first sentence directly states that we have never personally known our ancestors. Then, the second sentence compares the way our ancestors are in us to “the way a mirror is” (1). The phrase that our ancestors are “in us” may be referring to the dominant cultural belief that we should keep our ancestors near our hearts and in our thoughts (1). This comparison, at first, seems to only recognize how we can see ourselves within our ancestors but paradoxically also points out the inherent limits of how much we can know about them. To elaborate, based on the primary
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