Multi-Generational Stories
“Are we really that independent from our ancestors?”
photo credit: Asli Girgin
I was seventeen when Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits was published in Turkey. I remember locking myself away in my room for hours, completely immersed in the story of Clara del Valle and four generations of her family. As I turned the pages, I experienced the unique pleasure of being transported to a world that was as far away as possible from my own. When I finished reading, I was almost in tears; all of a sudden, I landed back in Istanbul from Chile. I felt lonely. It was as if a summer holiday had ended, and I had to leave the new friends I had made behind.
What makes a long, tangled, multi-generational novel so compelling? Perhaps their heft makes us feel – even if just for a moment – that we have won the battle against time? Or perhaps they give us an understanding of our own trajectory: that our precious lives are but one or two chapters in a long multi-generational story, that cannot be understood without the context of its previous chapters? When analyzing a country’s current politics or social structure, we often refer to its history. Whatever happened a century ago in the Ottoman Empire impacts today’s Turkey. This makes sense to us. However, when it comes to our own lives, we resist seeing the connection between who we are today and the life experiences of our long-buried relatives. But are we really that independent from our ancestors?
In Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Island of the Missing Trees, Ada, the London-born daughter of a Turkish Cypriot mother and a Greek Cypriot father, asks herself whether it’s ‘possible to inherit something as intangible and immeasurable as sorrow?’ In my own novel, The Silence of Scheherazade, after learning the identity of her biological father, the young and rebellious Edith takes Ada’s question a step further: ‘Could the half-realized dreams, the sorrows and hurts, the losses of a mother, a father, ancestors invade one’s heart? If so, she could weed out from it those feelings which were not hers, she could begin life anew, with the fresh breath of air.’
Whenever I begin to plan a new novel or short story, I always start with the character’s family tree. Even if their mother and father are never mentioned in the narrative, I make a note of their ages, their names, where they were born, how they grew up. Without this information, it is impossible for me to fully understand my characters and develop the plot. And it isn’t just novelists taking note of this generational pull. Psychologist Mark Wolynn, an expert in inherited family trauma, writes in It Didn’t Start With You that ‘even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on… encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language.’
Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex addresses this inheritance beautifully. During the Turkish-Greek war of 1922, brother and sister Desdemona and Lefty Stefanides, run away from a village in Bursa, arrive in Smyrna, and barely escape the Great Fire. Finding a new life in Detroit, the siblings bring with them to the New World a huge secret. Their secret, as well as their DNA, is passed to the following generations. Every single thing in grandchild Cal/Kalliopi’s life happens because of this secret, which has been kept so securely from the outside world.
In my latest novel, At the Breakfast Table, Fikret disappears one morning, determined to uncover the secret that has been kept so absolutely by his grandmother. He believes that if he can find out what it is that has been hidden, he can heal the anxiety and alienation he finds not only in himself, but in his sister and his daughter too. As I was writing about Fikret, I had in mind the long chain of sins and secrets entangled in Turkish history, the atrocities that are buried under the very soil that we all live on. Fikret wishes to heal his family by bringing the traumatic secrets of the past to light, so too must Turkey confront its history in order to heal itself for future generations.
…
Read the full piece in our Generational Literature Issue.
