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We dive as deep into history, science, and spirituality as we delve into Newton’s family tree. Genealogical research becomes the research of his own genealogy, a subject full of hypotheses, and a perpetual social aspiration he calls “ancestral hunger.” Newton ponders epigenetics, neuroscience, genograms, forced sterilization, kinship, spiritual practices, and “deeper connections, deeper questions” of material objects once held close by their ancestors. He discusses ancient thinkers such as Pythagoras who may have believed that sperm absorb vapors as they passed through a father’s body (“instructions for childbearing”), and contemporary writers such as Alexander Chee and Emily Raboteau, who have written extensively on the subject such as Newton. their families. Traveling through hills and troughs, exploring and hitting roadblocks, his narrative parallels his own internal oscillations as someone at the “lower end” of the bipolar spectrum. When a search reaches its natural end, it pulls back and begins another route. This method makes sense—which becomes the structure of the book—because curiosity and lives never go on straight paths.
What will Newton do if he completes his mission? what would it be Noone what if they were completely enlightened about who they are or how they are? Can we reinvent ourselves if what we find is ugly or undesirable? And how does our DNA fit into all of this? Newton tests his own. While the results showed that his muscle composition was compared to that of “elite strength athletes,” Newton was uncoordinated and asthmatic, a “little, lazy, ghostly boy” who was “allergic to mangoes, citrus peels, most pollen, and most detergents and soaps.” Genetics is important, but it’s hard to say what we will inherit and what we will not. Human traits are as predictable as roulette. To what extent are we finally autonomous, considering our genetic legacies, our environments and experiences, and the whims of chance? My questions demonstrate the power of Newton’s work: It asks questions that make you ask more, but also how genealogical studies came to be.
Perhaps there is something mystical and inexplicable about identity, as Newton proposes and explores through his love for Maude, whose story is the source of his pseudonym, which is covered throughout the book. Maude becomes a touchstone, a reflection, a possible “kindred spirit”: a thinker, a writer (“kind of”), a warrior, perhaps a feminist! But a discovery about Maude forces Newton to admit that “I accidentally honored the parts of my family history that bothered me the most.”
Newton’s quest turns into a fist of agony as he traces and confronts the “monstrous wills” of racism, from a Southern ancestor who enslaved people to a Northern ancestor who helped drive the natives of western Massachusetts from their villages. “What can I do concretely every day?” he asks. He realizes that this is a question that cannot be answered simply; Even asking it causes discomfort for some. “When I tried to discuss my family’s background with other white people, they were eager to change the subject,” Newton writes.
One tangible thing Newton did is write this book that grapples with the past and is “as clear as possible” about painful history – a strong admission. “Ancestral Trouble” is also a literary achievement that simultaneously constructs and scrapes identity, and is a blueprint for making something of the cultural, intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual and genetic legacies often littered with scattered debris. And this is the story of each of us, of identity. – a complex configuration of chromosomes, evidence and accidents; internal and external traumas; global and local pressures; fixed and floating selves; spiritual and environmental modes. Peaches cut on your grandmother’s table, the cigarette smoke that made your mother’s head turn up, or the abusers by your bed. With knowledge, persistence, and an open heart, we have some control over who we want to be, as this extensive research shows, even if we accept a name without the letter “e” that acknowledges the legacy of print or honors an ancestor. proper burial.
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