Ancestors: Our Blood-Related Strangers – Amy Kang PHOTOGRAPH: Before They Sail Away Usman Ali

Ancestors, Our Blood-Related Strangers

AMY KANG

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

characteristic of a mirror to reflect an image of our physical selves, the poet implies that our ancestors, like a mirror, oftentimes do resemble us at least on an outward level, and this resemblance can lead to a greater sense of familiarity with them. However, a mirrored image is one-dimensional and can never wholly capture our three-dimensional and multifaceted reality. We sometimes mistakenly assume that it can because its main function is to reflect whatever is in front of it. This sheds light upon the other side of the comparison, which is that we can never fully know what our ancestors were like, similar to the limited extent to which we can see and know from a mirror. We sometimes think we can, but we can never know our ancestors’ warmth, thoughts, personality, feelings. In essence, Bolster suggests that although we are indeed related to our ancestors and might find them familiar, as if they are the mirror reflection of ourselves, such a perception is extremely limited. We are, in some way, tricked into believing that we are connected with our ancestors in the same way we tend to consider a one-dimensional mirrored image of ourselves as an accurate representation in a three-dimensional world.

The mirror-to-ancestor comparison also provokes us to think that we yearn to learn more about our ancestors in hopes of answering two of the most difficult conundrums in our lives: who we are and where we come from. As explained above, we can often see bits and parts of ourselves in photos and life stories of our ancestors. Since we share genetic and cultural roots with them, many of our traits are often similar to theirs. This is precisely why we seem to find our ancestors familiar to some degree. For this reason, we are prone to look to our ancestors when we try to better understand who we are, just as we look at ourselves in the mirror to get a clearer reflection of what we look like in the real world. Because we are aware that our ancestors’ lives have formed the path that has led to where we stand today, we might be trying to connect with them to get some clue about our origins. This leads to the conjecture that we might be commemorating our ancestors not solely for their honor but rather to use our knowledge of our ancestors, as limited as it is, to learn more about who we are and where we come from. In other words, we honor our ancestors out of our desire for self-discovery and not necessarily for our deep-rooted reverence for them.

In the following four lines, Bolster focuses on describing how distant we are from our ancestors, and, by making conscious literary choices, characterizes this estrangement with helplessness and an ache. These sentiments of loss come from our supposed inability to connect with our ancestors then trigger us to further ponder why we desire this connection so much. Bolster mentions that we have never known whom our ancestors have loved and have never “kissed” their “mouth[s]” that have “a certain heat” (2-4). In other words, she suggests that we do not know the things we would have known about our ancestors and that we have never experienced what we would have experienced with them, had we ever been so close to them. And, when making these remarks, Bolster purposefully chooses which grammatical tense to use, sometimes deviating from the convention. For instance, the phrase “whomever they loved we never knew” utilizes past tense, even though using present tense seems to be more natural in this context since “we” refers to ourselves in the current state (2). Through this, Bolster may be stressing that we have never, at any point, gotten to know who our ancestors’ loved ones are because we live in times far removed from our ancestors’ times. Similarly, Bolster’s remark that our ancestors’ mouths are “whose we might have kissed had we been then” is grammatically crafted to imply that we could have been close to our ancestors if we had lived in the same time as them (4). In both cases, the difference in time is what keeps us from truly knowing our ancestors. And, due to the linearity of time, we cannot simply break down this barrier. We cannot go back in time. In essence, due to this unbridgeable gap of time, there is no way for us to truly connect with our ancestors, which we long to do. Through her conscious grammatical choices, Bolster successfully captures this sense of helplessness and ache in the nature of the relationship we have with our ancestors. But this in turn brings up a suspicion: why is Bolster expressing helplessness and sadness about our inability to connect with our ancestors if our ancestors are, as she claims, no more than strangers to us? Then comes the conjecture that the sense of emptiness and ache that she refers to does not stem from our love for our ancestors, but rather from our desire to gain something from our connection to them. In other words, this situation is sad, not because we cannot know more about our ancestors, but rather because we cannot know about ourselves through our connection with them as we wished we could.

Bolster incorporates imagery and literary comparisons to further highlight the distant nature of our relationship with our ancestors. And by doing so, not only does she achieve this purpose, but she also reinforces the aforementioned speculation that our remembrance of our ancestors might come from our selfish intentions to know about ourselves. For example, Bolster compares our ancestors to “stone[s],” “ghosts,” and “dolls they played with” (7-8). The overarching quality these three objects share is their lifelessness. All three of them can easily be manipulated, ignored, and neglected by us because they are lifeless. We kick around stones and ignore invisible ghosts. We play around with dolls but forget about them soon after we’re done. They are rarely ever that important to us; they are merely supplementary aspects of our lives. By equating the three objects to our ancestors, their essential qualities of lifelessness and relative insignificance are also attributed to our ancestors. Despite the fact that our ancestors have once been alive, they are simply too lifeless, cold, and almost object-like in our eyes today. They are often as invisible as ghosts are to us, and we often treat them as if we are dealing with a stone or a doll. Even if we neglect our ancestors and “lie them back” like we do with our dolls after we play with them, they won’t respond, leaving “their skin the dusty grey of dust” and “their hair past gloss” (10-11). This shows that the attitude we take in our relationship with our ancestors strikingly resembles the ones we have when dealing with non-living, non-significant objects. This fundamentally contradicts the way we form and maintain bonds with people who we are close to, such as our relatives. In other words, contrary to our surmise that we really do care about and honor our ancestors like our other relatives, the actual behaviors we exhibit when we interact with them arguably fail to prove this point. This then supports our conjecture that we are, in some way, playing around with the identities and memories of our ancestors, as we do with a doll, to mainly form our identities. Our seemingly selfless and respectful commemoration of our ancestors turns out to be, again, self-centered.

In her poem “Ancestors,” Bolster adroitly suggests that our ancestors are more foreign to us than not by making conscious grammatical choices and deliberately using metaphor, simile, and imagery in her lines. However, this

is not the only message we can get from the poem. Through the particular way it characterizes our perception of our ancestors, the poem provokes us to deepen our understanding of the dynamics behind our relationship with our ancestors. We get to consider our dominant practice of remembering our ancestors in another light as a self-centered attempt to solve our own existential dilemma rather than out of our deep reverence for them. As limited as our information of our ancestors is, we still strive to use it in order to better understand who we are and where we come from as part of our so-called journey of self-discovery.

WORKS CITED

Bolster, Stephanie. “Ancestors.” Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 99, 19 August 2019. http://pbqmag.org/steph-bolster-ancestors/

APPENDIX Ancestors

We didn’t know them. They’re in us the way a mirror is. Whomever they loved we never knew. There is a mouth in a photograph that has a certain heat but we do not know that mouth. It is whose we might have kissed had we been then. It is a stitch missed or loosed a twitch resisted. They held their heads still which gave them the look of stone or ghosts. Eyes held open so they are the dolls they played with, porcelain, chips hidden under the hair. Lie them back and they’d shut into their carriages without a hum their skin the dusky grey of dust even their hair past gloss and pulled so taut it hurts.

- Stephanie Bolster

Whether it’s capturing moments, recording history, or documenting feelings, photographs communicate stories. This photograph depicts a moment in the last few days of a fisherman’s life at Mina Port as he is forced to leave his workplace. Whilst documenting the silence and emptiness they leave behind, this photograph also attempts to preserve the fading culture of the fishermen. A memory saved; a narrative uncovered.

“Before They Sail Away” by Usman Ali