One of the greatest human curiosities is the inclination to solve the puzzle of one’s family origins. I am in possession of a tattered cardboard box that I thought would hold the answers to understanding my family history. Yet, each time I sift through the records, I find myself riddled with more questions. This project, Silent Suffering, is my attempt to bring to light the narrative that exists outside of what was documented. The silence of indigenous, black, and female voices in the written archive is piercing. Through sonic, genealogical, and ethnographic approaches, I plan to engage in these entanglements to listen to these voices and assemble a new archival perspective for my family.

 

My orienting questions loom large: can the remediation of my family archive deconstruct our understandings of our pasts, as individuals, as family, and as a nation? How do I reconcile with my family’s white, settler-colonial history? What does it mean for me to inherit this family history through the route of adoption? Does the narration and memorialization of a life inflict more violence—or more aptly, how can we incorporate emerging voices in the archive to grieve rather than guilt? 

 

Typically, genealogical endeavors trace a family’s history through the chain of biological descendants, using the physical transfer of DNA as proof of lineage. As a Chinese adoptee who spent half of her life in Washington and the other half in South Korea, I aim to problematize this notion of inheritance. Genealogy otherwise is the approach I will be taking, combining bits and pieces from Foucauldian genealogy, sound studies, and critical ethnographic methods.

 

Michel Foucault’s canonizing essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History”, offers a radical approach to problematize and dispel the “chimeras of the origin” (144). I am aligning my research with Foucauldian thought because of my need to approach genealogy through the inversion and disruption of the origin. Foucault writes, “The genealogist sets out to study the beginning—numberless beginnings whose faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by an historical eye” (146). Although I may be able to trace the lineage of ancestry on a piece of paper, there will never be a true starting point, and I must bring to my research an orientation to possibility outside of the falsity of origins. 

 

Alignment with Foucauldian genealogy positions me to focus on counteracting a narrative of roots by uncovering submerged voices. I feel it is my responsibility to owe the silenced voices a place to tell their stories. I want to discover what Saidiya Hartman refers to as “impossible stories” (10). To do so, I will engage with Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, which is a writing practice to produce counternarratives and re-imagined possibilities. Hartman developed this methodology specifically to address the absence of black slave narratives during the Atlantic slave trade and “re-represent” (11) their stories. As a non-black person, I am hesitant to engage in critical fabulation to re-write the narratives of slaves that were held by my ancestors. I do not wish to tell stories that I am in no position to tell. However, I would like to practice critical fabulation in some aspect to find new perspectives within the scant documentation I have. I hope to allow for a new understanding of the people they were, Mahala, Gui, Charlotte, Henry, Jane, Alfred, Hulda, Fanny, Kitty Ann.  

 

Another methodological access point is through historical sound studies. More than what is written, I want to find oral histories and songs from African Americans and enslaved people to help invert the white-dominant narrative of my family archive. I am interested in learning about American spirituals (known as Negro or Slave spirituals), specifically looking at folklorists and composers like Harry T. Burleigh and Willis James. Spirituals, such as “Deep River” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” offer histories of enslavement and hope, and are also interesting for how they have been modified or composed throughout time. The inclusion of Black, American, sonic histories is a subversion on multiple accounts: the legitimization of knowledge through orality and aurality; the disruption of white narratives which exclude Black history because it is not written; and decolonization by including narratives which were purposefully excluded in the formation of the archive. 

 

The third aspect of my method is conducting critical ethnographic research to link my family’s past to its present. I will be informally interviewing family members to record our living memory. These interviews will practice critical ethnography in the sense that my positioning as an interviewer who is a daughter-granddaughter-sister will be impactful on the discussions that I have. I will bring with me a sense of reflexivity to understand how my identity informs the interviews. My first interview will be with my maternal grandmother, and I plan to also interview my mom, sister, aunt, uncle, and cousins. I also hope to conduct dialogical interviews in which my family members will have a conversation with each other without my presence as interviewer. 

 

The stakes for me are inherently personal. I am haunted by the names without narratives. It is out of self-interest and obligation that I attempt to reconstruct a new perspective for my family’s archive and pursue genealogical research sideways. In Christina Sharpe’s book, Ordinary Notes, she writes extensively about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, how its monuments, the monoliths, are, “The threshold, that phenomena that manifests another condition. They are meant to move the white visitor from guilt to grief”; guilt assuming a “position of non-implication” and grief assuming “a position of relation, one of entanglement” (46). I hope that through this remediation, I can move my family and myself to a place of grief—a position that reckons with all that we are implicated in.

 

I know that reparations for the actions of my ancestors will never repair the violence that our family has inflicted. This project will not be an attempt to absolve myself or others of guilt. Rather, my intention is to confront the archival silences and create counter-histories to finally weave my family and I into the larger assemblage of our shared narratives.