The Itch Unseen

by Lillian Hammerstrom

Those powerful ancestral forces that are more potent when unseen, 

but felt. 

The tide pulled in by the moon 

behind the clouds that I know are there, but not visible. 

So are these ancestors I do not know, 

in sharp contrast to those I do, who offer me nothing, 

but are so present, presenting nothing. 

The sterile lights of a hospital room that produce no warmth. 

Not a sun that nurtures, 

that loves, 

that lasts, 

even after it explodes, flashes into supernova, 

dies. 

I reach for my phone more often than I’d like to admit. A phantom vibration buzzes within the well-conditioned neural synapses of my brain and I ultimately find myself scrolling through apps mindlessly. 

But there is one app I peruse mindfully, my mind full of imaginings of individuals I have never met, connections I have never understood. I am staring down the barrel of the gun that my family wields carelessly in my face. The Ancestry app that, with only a teaspoon of my saliva, sets my identity into concrete, constructs a convoluted version of myself made up of thousands of people I can’t even name. 

Wendy Rose put a feeling into words that I have never been able to describe. Though I am cognizant of the fact that I am very different from Rose in that I do not possess even an inkling of Native American heritage, her lamentations on her complicated identity seemed to call out to me and I was exhilarated to engage with her text. 

Nestled on the pullout couch in my dorm suite living room, I ravaged the pages with my eyes and trusty mechanical pencil, digging holes into Rose’s visceral poetry with the point of my lead, the sharp graphite dancing among her steady poetic lines. 

A sigh, a nod, a shaking of the head. So much excitement emanated from my body that my roommates looked up in confusion, but when they realized my exclamations were merely over a book, they quickly went back to whatever they had been doing before. 

In the afternoon every Monday and Wednesday, I had the opportunity to sit down with people who wanted to discuss literature with me, who wanted to understand the authors we read, not just the content they produced. Such illuminating conversations with my fellow peers allowed me to recognize that there is so much more than just the plot, so much more than just the style, the form, the words on the page. There is a person behind that page, and even though I already

knew this to be true, I truly felt a change in my heart when I felt like I could reach into the words and shake hands with Wendy Rose. 

But I decided that this initial exploration of Rose in class wasn’t enough. This year, I knew that I wanted to do my senior research project on a subject that combined my interest in both Spanish and English literature. As I pored over Rose’s poetry and her conversations with imagined ancestors, I reflected on some of the readings from my Hispanoamerican Literature class with my research mentor, in which we discussed the poetry of Afro-Cuban authors who grappled with an ancestral identity marred by centuries of systemic oppression and racial injustice. Rose’s words resembled Nicolás Guillén’s ballad to his white and black grandparents, her poetry reminiscent of Georgina Herrera’s outcry to her African foremothers. 

My passion for this topic transcends mere academic interests. The constant yearning I feel for the comforting screen of the Ancestry app on my phone is in part tied to the feeling that I am very disconnected from my culture and family. For most of my life, I did not have a close relationship at all with my father, and my maternal side of the family harbors more secrets than truths. Like Wendy Rose, I have found myself digging into imagined genealogies more than the real ones, because more often than not, while the limited information I have of my extended family is not ideal, it is still mesmerizing to reflect on the what if…? 

What if the Hammerstroms had never left Sweden? What if the Lacazottes had stayed in Basque Country? When the what-ifs are tied to non-actions, are they even ifs, or are they what should have beens…? 

Wendy Rose, “Who should go back?” 

Should I go back? Because when I went back, when I stood upon those rocks, those rocks on which those who came before me had once stood, I felt nothing. I felt nothing but the longing to feel the feeling I should feel, the what should have been, but wasn’t. 

So I come back to the present. I come back to my body. And I realize that over the past few weeks, I’ve started to itch…like really itch. 

At first, I thought I had been bit by a mosquito, that there was a tiny pest flying around my room, caging me in with its blood-sucking prowess. I can’t stand bugs because I can’t stand the idea of something so small, something so seemingly insignificant, being the catalyst of my discomfort. 

It seems as though I have some sort of eczema issue, which might be worse than the supposed bug bites. A bug you can squash, kick out of the room, move away from. A condition you cannot escape. A condition becomes you, whether you like it or not. 

Or maybe it’s just the cold. The dry, frigid environment that characterizes a Central Valley winter. Maybe this is temporary, a fleeting reminder that change is the only constant. 

Has something gotten under my skin, or have I?

Maybe it would be better if I could scratch myself so hard that I could peel back my skin, that I could feast my eyes upon the fat blue veins that pulse beneath my surface, that I could scarf down all my insides, bones and all, chewing up all that I am. 

But I think that then I would run into a bit of a problem. Because the more of myself I digest, the less of myself I become, the less I have left of me. Perhaps my selfhood is a simple fact of being, something I cannot take apart and reassemble in a misshapen Picasso portrait. 

And what does Wendy Rose become, who does she turn into? Or is she just herself, but dissected? Has she killed herself to dissect herself, to work out what should have been left untouched, unscratched, still itching, yet in that, profoundly ignorant…and satisfied in the unsettled? 

Was Rose disappointed in what she found? Was she disappointed in what she imagined? Did she imagine what she found? She certainly did not find what she imagined. 

As I sit at family gatherings, gathered round are the faces of the people I am told to love, and I do. I open to them a loving heart, a forgiving mind, but I sometimes feel that I am giving away a part of myself in order to gain this family. 

Daniel, Pierre, Daniel, Pierre, Daniel, Pierre. Down the family line their names go, down the line their connection with alcohol goes too. I can trace it through each Thanksgiving; an uncle on the floor, a grandfather passed out on the living room chair. I need not pull out a diligently crafted ancestral tree, mapped out by the careful hands of my aunt or grandmother. I can already see that liquor has married into our family with each passing generation, a blood marriage, indivisible by the law, by the church, by the countless secrets that seek to erase its existence. 

O Elders of the world 

Red Gold Ebony Alabaster Elders, 

tell the children the truth. 

Tell them that if they give in 

to the insatiable itch, 

their roots will break open, 

expose tender flesh 

to blowing dust and searing heat, 

may not set seed 

in the crumbled dark earth 

of other lands. 

Maybe it was better not to know. Maybe it was better to not scratch that itch. “Mom, why does…?” 

“Mom, what is…?” 

“Mom, how come…?”

“Come,” Wendy Rose called out to me, “Come see that you are not alone. Come see that this feeling is normal. Come see that you are certainly shaped by those who came before you, but come see that they do not have the power to define you, to scare you, to make you feel small.” 

“I am the family karma kickback. I guess it’s true, because the deeper I delve into the various family histories, the more I find that the people from whom I come were the perpetrators of those very acts that ignited my rage (and my art).” 

I want to remember what she said. I want to listen to the silence. 

“That’s why silent places are so important–the knowledge pumps in our hearts, and if it is quiet enough we can even hear and feel the electricity in our brains [...] it was too difficult, too depressing, too complicated to keep on trying to figure out this tangle of families who are always disguising themselves as something else. So I began to listen for the electrons and the heartbeat instead.” 

And now I am done writing, done talking. I am listening to the silence.