The sound of inherited silence

On unloading the weight of my Icelandic ancestors' burdens

I was never much interested in genealogy. Sure, I took a passing interest in the stories of my ancestors, but they never stuck. Once I had heard them, I tended to forget, or at least mix them up. It was like listening to someone talk about the dream they had last night—vaguely interesting if you were involved, but otherwise not.

Recently this changed.

Photo of Búðir church by Joseph Corl on Unsplash

Now I will fall down the rabbit hole of my family’s history and stay there for hours, soaking up information that previously would have meant nothing.

A few years ago, one of my cousins asked if I wanted to have a bunch of electronic files that he had put together about our family’s history.

I had an instant, visceral reaction to his question: NO THANK YOU, though I did not speak those words out loud.

Honestly? I didn’t want to touch that shit with a pole. In my mind it was a bunch of dark, dusty ephemera that had no bearing on my life and that made me want to run in the other direction.

Yet my cousin had spent a lot of time and effort on those files, so not wanting to seem disinterested or ungrateful I said “sure”, thinking I’d stash them in the furthest corner of my hard drive and not look at them for … forever.

But then that thing happened that changed everything, and suddenly I found myself opening up those files and growing ever-more absorbed.

My cousin, too, seemed unsure of why he was taking this interest, or why he felt compelled to dig so deep. In an afterword, he wrote:

Did I expect more? Some kind of deeper insight into the mysteries of existence, life, and consciousness? Perhaps a little. But genealogy is not a clarification of life’s mysteries. It’s just a bunch of stories, of uncertain accuracy, some more interesting than others.

I think perhaps he was missing the fact that the lives of our ancestors impact us far more than we may realize. Their hardships, traumas, griefs, joys, beliefs and whathaveyou are all passed on to us to some extent—and sometimes to a great extent. When we seek to understand their lives, we are seeking to understand ourselves.

Research now suggests that trauma may be passed on genetically, in which case we would all carry the traumatic experiences of our ancestors within us.

Anyone with Icelandic ancestry will likely know that their forebears endured so much, their lives were so hard. This land, the society in which they lived, the climate, the systemic oppression, the poverty, the volcanic eruptions, the famine—truly, this land was barely habitable for centuries.

There is no question in my ind that they had to dissociate to survive. They had no way of processing the weight of the grief they had to endure, so that was their only option. That dissociation was passed down to their children and their children’s children—as it always is, ad infinitum, until someone decides to stop it.

With dissociation there always comes a deep fear and aversion to the thing that caused the dissociation in the first place. It is usually not conscious, but lingers in our subconscious, making us turn away—as they were forced to turn away.

I believe this was the root of my aversion to those files of family history, that at the time I thought of as mere disinterest, but which I now see as something more profound.