family

When I was at home this break, hanging out with my momma reminded me of this poem. The book was at my place in Chicago, so I reread it when I got back and it seemed closer, more relevant this time. I’ve generally thought about generational ties as the passing down of physical traits or even personality tendencies, but didn’t think much else of it. Talking with my mom made me think about how whole ways of seeing things, insecurities, can be passed down as if they were physically a part of you. What do they mean for the next generation? How do they change or stay the same when they move on to the next person? Some umbilical cords are really easily snapped (it almost seems arbitrary what gets passed on and what doesn’t), but others hang on, sometimes you can’t tell until later. 

I listen for your mother in your voice and cannot know
if I find her. Not much lives on, from one generation
to the next. Not much, but not 
nothing: maybe the Paektu mountain tune
you both loved, crags grizzled with pine, rock maple, 
black walnut, their burred and scabrous spines. 
Shagbark or needledust. Gingkos scoured by snow. 
Or cabbage chopped and scummed with pepper, 
stocked in clay vessels, rocked into the soil like seeds.
Buried in fall, dug up in spring, soured, spiced, 
to nourish and to burn. Tell me if this is true.
I want to know what survives, what’s handed down 
from mother to daughter, if anything is,
bond I cannot cut away, that keeps apart what it lashes together. 
And I want to know what cannot be handed down, the part of you 
that’s only you, lonely fist of sinew and blood, 
deep in your gut where cords lash bone, nerve, breath, 
the part of you that first began to sing.
From “Translations from the Mother Tongue,” Suji Kwock Kim

Side note that kimchi appears in the poem! I also love how Agha Shahid Ali, in his book after his mother’s death, says “Mother, / they asked me, So how’s the writing? I answered My mother / is my poem. What did they expect?” What is that - an homage or a matter of fact, something he had to do? To say that someone’s your poem seems so universal and personal at the same time, contradictory. But everything is complex, as usual. Parent-child relationships seem so full of things that are given and kept away, voluntarily or otherwise, that it makes sense that their life, habits, obsessions cut into yours not always in a clean way.