Avoided

So was reading a piece about The Black Panther that included the following:

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored.

As much as I understand that I cannot access what so many other people hold so dearly, to call it The Void seems pretentious in the extreme. Mainly because I perceive no such yawning chasm in my life. And while this may be due to an indifference to what would lie on the other side, it also strikes me that many other people live with this same sort of phenomenon without seeing themselves as desperately incomplete.

As I understand the world, The Void is a function of an American (although likely not limited to the United States) concept that centers identity as much, if not more, on prior generations, than the here and now. In other words, people are understood to be not simply the product, but a continuation, of some arbitrary number of prior generations into the past, depending on when they finally lose interest in their genealogy. And while it's true that for many Black people in the United States, the trans-Atlantic slave trade severed their ability to trace their family trees back as far as they might like, we are not the only people in this boat. There are any number of people, whom, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to trace their family trees back as far as they might prefer. And in areas where genealogy is less important to identity, they don't perceive a yawning darkness where their understanding of their selves should be.

In the end, I realize that my own lack of perception of The Void comes from the fact that genealogy wasn't a big deal in my family. The focus was more on the present. My parents never spoke of their grandparents and to this day, I don't know my mother's birth father's name. He may as well have never existed. Being cut off from much closer generations in this way meant that my identity didn't extend much beyond my own parents. And while some people would clearly see this as a loss, I view it as a benefit, if for no other reason than it leaves me unwounded, psychically or culturally, by The Void.