Storytelling in my Life

Personally, I don't know much about my family history. Not that I haven't wanted to learn about it, but more so for the fact that much of it wasn't documented. For example, none of my grandparents know what their actual date of birth is. None of them have true birth certificates since they were born in obscure villages where documentation was not seen as important. There are very few pictures from my parents' childhoods because the only cameras available to them were in studios that required appointments to be made. This leaves a great deal of mystery for my relatives and me. After all, we want to learn more about our past, but how can we do that if we have nothing to lead us?

Aside from my past, I wonder how my posterity will react to me. If they want to learn about their past, they'll have the opposite of me: an abundance of information. From my Instagram profile, to my Snapchat memories, to even my VSCO profile, social media will provide them with as much information as they want. This makes me wonder, how will my future relatives react to all of this?

If social media is really the "best projection of my life", will all of this really give my descendants a proper view of me? However, the same idea can be argued for my past. If the only pictures I have seen of my ancestors are those that were posed and taken in a studio, is that really what I should be going off of to judge the past?

Perhaps, we shouldn't view our past simply through documentation and images. Ultimately Milkman was only able to connect his family's dots through a song:
"Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone; Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home." - Toni Morrison
Similar to this, my parents have been telling me stories about my family, since I was young. I know that these stories are more reliable than any picture I've seen because they represent real experiences, not formal memories. Hopefully, when I'm older, I can pass down these same stories to tell my children about their past as well as add some of my own experiences. Through storytelling tradition, the past will never be forgotten.

My cousin, brother, and me with my grandpa:)

Comments

  1. Esther ChoiOctober 28, 2018 at 10:12 PM

    Dhatri, I really like this post! I agree with the fact that it is questionable that what we put on the Internet is actually an accurate representation of our lives. This ties into the whole debate on whether social media should even be used if mostly everything on it isn't authentic or real. I also think that storytelling is the best way that we can remember the past and that it is something precious that we must hold on to.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

tbh!

I'm going to be honest; there's no one that I'm completely honest with 100% of the time. Now, that might sound terrible, but let's think about it. I've lied to my parents about how much money I spent at Taco Bell in a week (it's SO good), to my brother about losing his sweatshirt (oops), and to my friends about how I'm almost at their house when I'm actually fifteen minutes away. Some of these could be considered white lies, but would it have made a difference if I told the truth? We seem to advertise the truth as a divine virtue. As children, we are taught to be honest, while our parents tell us about Santa Claus. In school, we are told to never waver from the truth, while our textbooks emit information from the darker portions of American history (I didn't learn until internment camps of WW2 until 8th grade). This "hypocrisy is a human universal", making it almost socially accepted to relieve the truth in favor of "what looks best...
Read more

What's in a Name?

Image
In our day to day lives, we use names to identify not only ourselves but also everything around us. For example, my name is Dhatri, which means "mother earth" in Sanskrit. My parents chose it for that reason, as well as the fact that it matches my brother's name: Dhruv. By standards, my name is my primary identification factor, just like anyone else's is for them. However, this leads me to ask the question: how powerful is a name? "...the avenue...had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street." - Toni Morrison Perhaps, the power doesn't only lie within the name, but also within the people who are deciding on a name. In "Song of Solomon", the black community members wanted "Mains Avenue" to be called "Doctor Street" in order to remember the first black doctor who lived on that street. It was a symbol of cultural and historical significance for them. However, the legislators were able to o...
Read more

#Relationshipgoals?

Image
Seeing as it's 2019 now, I want to start my post off with the discussion of goals. But no, not the kind that you set out to achieve each year, rather the kind I constantly see on my social media pages. As I scroll through Instagram, Pinterest, VSCO, etc. I'm bombarded with posts about how someone's boyfriend is #relationshipgoals or how two people are #friendshipgoals; the list goes on and on. Despite how "cute" these posts can be, they lead me to wonder what unrealistic expectations they can often set for people. Viewers tend to forget that people who have #lifegoals have low points as well. For example, a YouTuber named Sierra Furtado became engaged to her boyfriend, Alex Terranova, with the pictures being reposted hundreds of times with the #relationshipgoals. It was seen in some of Sierra's later videos that she wasn't wearing her engagement ring - an observation that caused people to speculate whether the couple had broken up. Truth be told, the cou...
Read more