Why So Many Authors Are Writing Multigenerational Stories – Several new books grapple with displacement and diasporic living in ways that feel particularly resonant in this moment
Why So Many Authors Are Writing Multigenerational Stories – Several new books grapple with displacement and diasporic living in ways that feel particularly resonant in this moment
> AFRIEND RECENTLY told me about her daughter’s school project to draw her family tree. The assignment ignited my friend’s interest in genealogy, and what started as homework assistance has become an intricate and rewarding hobby for her. I’m tempted to emulate my friend and spend my free time scrolling through various online databases or digging through archives, looking for who I come from and where my distant relatives are now. But I know, in my case, I’d probably hit a lot of dead ends.
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> Most of my family’s records, if they exist, would likely be in Syria and other parts of the Middle East, and it’s hard for me to know where to even start looking. I’d have to do my research in Arabic, which isn’t my strongest language. I’m certainly not alone in this predicament. In the age of DNA tests and sites like [ancestry.com](http://ancestry.com), amateur genealogy is supposedly more accessible than ever. But it often takes far more work to build a family tree than simply swabbing a cheek or looking up names—especially for those whose families were torn apart by war, colonial conquests, and genocide. In North America, institutional—and often colonial—record keeping obscured the intricacies of Indigenous family relationships. That’s not to mention those whose lives weren’t considered important enough to be documented. Memories are unreliable in many ways; there are those whose family members would rather not speak of the past.
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> Which might be why I’ve found myself drawn to fictional family trees. Last spring, I read Jasmine Sealy’s debut, 2022’s The Island of Forgetting, which is loosely based on the fabled lineage of Iapetus, a Titan in ancient Greek mythology from whom all humankind was believed to have descended. Each character in Sealy’s novel represses a secret that indelibly shapes the next generation in their saga, which is set mostly in a family-run hotel in Barbados. (In May, The Island of Forgetting won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, which is administered by The Walrus Foundation.) I then picked up Janika Oza’s A History of Burning (May 2023), which opens in 1898 with a young Gujarati man who is conned into boarding a boat from India to East Africa to help build a railway there during British colonial rule; decades later, his descendants are forced into exile under the regime of dictator Idi Amin. Christine Estima’s The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society, published in November, opens with a fictional family tree whose roots go back to the Ottoman Empire in 1840.
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> Each of the titles is remarkable, with characters who grapple with displacement and diasporic living in ways that feel particularly resonant in this moment. By this moment, I mean several things. Like me, the authors are all millennials; our generation is now approaching middle age and all the attendant questions about where we’ve come from and where we’re going. While I’ve read plenty of multigenerational family fiction in the past, the genre has taken on new meaning for me now that I’m a parent, worried about what kind of world my kid will inherit. Each story confronts the theme of intergenerational trauma—a topic that’s received heightened attention in recent years—and how it exerts a force that many of us can barely perceive. And each of these stories was motivated, at least in part, by the missing pieces in the authors’ own family trees.
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> AFRIEND RECENTLY told me about her daughter’s school project to draw her family tree. The assignment ignited my friend’s interest in genealogy, and what started as homework assistance has become an intricate and rewarding hobby for her. I’m tempted to emulate my friend and spend my free time scrolling through various online databases or digging through archives, looking for who I come from and where my distant relatives are now. But I know, in my case, I’d probably hit a lot of dead ends.
>
> Most of my family’s records, if they exist, would likely be in Syria and other parts of the Middle East, and it’s hard for me to know where to even start looking. I’d have to do my research in Arabic, which isn’t my strongest language. I’m certainly not alone in this predicament. In the age of DNA tests and sites like [ancestry.com](http://ancestry.com), amateur genealogy is supposedly more accessible than ever. But it often takes far more work to build a family tree than simply swabbing a cheek or looking up names—especially for those whose families were torn apart by war, colonial conquests, and genocide. In North America, institutional—and often colonial—record keeping obscured the intricacies of Indigenous family relationships. That’s not to mention those whose lives weren’t considered important enough to be documented. Memories are unreliable in many ways; there are those whose family members would rather not speak of the past.
>
> Which might be why I’ve found myself drawn to fictional family trees. Last spring, I read Jasmine Sealy’s debut, 2022’s The Island of Forgetting, which is loosely based on the fabled lineage of Iapetus, a Titan in ancient Greek mythology from whom all humankind was believed to have descended. Each character in Sealy’s novel represses a secret that indelibly shapes the next generation in their saga, which is set mostly in a family-run hotel in Barbados. (In May, The Island of Forgetting won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, which is administered by The Walrus Foundation.) I then picked up Janika Oza’s A History of Burning (May 2023), which opens in 1898 with a young Gujarati man who is conned into boarding a boat from India to East Africa to help build a railway there during British colonial rule; decades later, his descendants are forced into exile under the regime of dictator Idi Amin. Christine Estima’s The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society, published in November, opens with a fictional family tree whose roots go back to the Ottoman Empire in 1840.
>
> Each of the titles is remarkable, with characters who grapple with displacement and diasporic living in ways that feel particularly resonant in this moment. By this moment, I mean several things. Like me, the authors are all millennials; our generation is now approaching middle age and all the attendant questions about where we’ve come from and where we’re going. While I’ve read plenty of multigenerational family fiction in the past, the genre has taken on new meaning for me now that I’m a parent, worried about what kind of world my kid will inherit. Each story confronts the theme of intergenerational trauma—a topic that’s received heightened attention in recent years—and how it exerts a force that many of us can barely perceive. And each of these stories was motivated, at least in part, by the missing pieces in the authors’ own family trees.