My husband, A., comes from a village in southern Italy called Viggianello. It’s a small village with a population of just under 3,000 people, mostly farmers and workers. Hidden high in the mountains, it is surrounded by tall green trees and cool air. Getting there necessitates not just a five-hour coach journey from Rome, but also an additional forty-minute car journey from the coach drop-off point.
We are in Viggianello to visit his family. Ten emotional and blurry minutes in front of a civil registry official means that they are also now my family. And they will be part of our children’s family; the hope of which hangs between us as we walk through the village, like so much dew in the morning spring air.
The instructions for the development of life, from parent to child, are found in our DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid). It is the sheet music on which a unique symphony is written and contains the complex beauty that is you and me. When stretched out, a single strand of DNA is six feet long. It is contained within cells, the size of which are on average 100 micrometres - a quarter of the size of the period at the end of this sentence. There are fifty trillion cells in the human body.
We literally contain multitudes.
We are walking on the road which winds through Viggianello when A. stops and points to a distance within the mountains. His father’s mother was born there, a tiny woman whose quick wit still sparks through the fog of dementia. It is a spark I recognize in my husband. We keep walking, following the bend when he stops again to show me a house. It’s barely recognizable. There is no roof, and the ceiling beams have collapsed. What remains of the glass in the window is broken, and you can see the sunlight streaming in through the open doorway. It looks like the type of house that has ghosts, the kind that would be stirred as you walk in, swirling like dust around your footsteps. A. says that his mother was born in that house, that her father’s first wife died there. A. looks like his mother and grandfather. Brown eyes, black hair, that classic roman nose.
He was born here, as were his parents and theirs before them. He knows the location of every family story his grandfather told him, and he can stand in the same fields his great grandparents worked in. Stories and connections, inherited from parent to child, like DNA, for generations. Part of the sheet music stays the same while the orchestra changes, a rich and full symphony. As he stands there, I imagine his roots reaching into the ground, tethering him to the earth, his body lighting up as his connection sinks deeper and deeper. It thrills me, partly because it is his and he is mine. Partly because the concept of an ancestral village is completely alien to me.
I hold in my memory a black and white picture that has been folded. The couple in this photo are both looking directly at the photographer. Their skin is fresh, their hair is black and thick. The woman is reaching out to the camera with a slight smile, her head covered by a dupatta. The elegant lines of her neck visible in its folds. The man to her left is sitting close behind her, cradling her with his body. Curls in his hair transmuted into waves by the alchemy of hair oil. They are my maternal grandparents. Those curls are my curls, a gift hidden in my DNA from my grandfather. It’s a casual picture, taken at a time when my mother and her sister were a distant hope. Promises as delicate as dew.
When I was younger, I would imagine that my grandparents were looking at me. My arrogance was a blunt and heavy instrument then, and I would pretend that it was me who they were pleased to see. Now, I am older than they were in that picture, and my arrogance has lightened and stretched into gossamer, sinking into my bones. As I grew older, I assumed that I understood the truth. That this picture was taken at the spur of the moment, that there was nothing more than youth and happiness. It is the type of arrogance that allowed me to presume that there are no secrets. Only recently have I understood the truth of their lives before this picture was taken.
In 1947, a white British man drew a line on a map of British-held India, and a country was forever divided. Partition, an event so bloody and monumental that it has a capital ‘P’ in the thoughts of every South Asian and their grandchild, was the largest mass migration in modern history. 14 million people are estimated to have made the journey to cross over into Pakistan, to cross over into India. Some made the journey by foot, by train, others by water. Violence, hunger, and fear followed them whichever route they took. 2 million people died during Partition. Everyone else was forever changed.
To fit DNA into cells, all six feet must be coiled. Small proteins anchor to DNA, and with this help, it is coiled again and then again into a new structure known as chromatin. We don’t fully understand how the structure of chromatin can affect the expression of genes, the parts of DNA that contain the codes for life. It is only recently that we have understood that your environment can have an effect on your DNA. Factors from your surroundings can cause small changes in chromatin structure, which in turn can impact gene expression.
The air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink can change us. Our environment can shape us in a myriad of ways, making many little amendments to our music sheets. The symphony is subtly changed, creating a sound that is different in ways that can’t be easily identified.
Our environment changes us, and we are changed by our environment.
My grandparents left their home in southeast India during the night. There was a visit from the local police earlier in the day. They knew that when the police returned the next day, they would be killed. My grandfather had heard the stories of trains arriving on both sides of the divide carrying carriages of dead bodies. So instead of a train, they took a boat.
It was a small boat, crowded with refugees like them. A boat not built for long journeys on saltwater. I see them now, fists clenched, holding onto each other. My grandfather, who let me play in the pediatric clinic waiting room while he saw patients and gave me the eyes that stare back at me from the mirror. My grandmother, who gave me pink and red rupees, quietly pressed into my hand, when I finished the Qur’an for the first time. Their faces illuminated by the light from the moon partially hidden by grey clouds, the night sky washed with shades of blue and black. The tight face of my grandfather while he thinks of the next step and the step after that. My grandmother, enduring as she endured the long years my grandfather was missing as a prisoner of war during the second World War. Saltwater sprays on their hair, on their faces, on the tips of their tongues.
We never spoke of Partition. I did not ask the questions I think about every day. Did it hurt when they left? Could they feel the pull of their DNA calling them back? Do they still dream of their home? Now they are gone, and I am still here, looking for answers I will never find.
Sometimes I fantasize about visiting India. I daydream of visiting my grandparents’ homes, of standing where my great grandparents once stood. Would I feel the same connection that A feels? I imagine it shooting up through my feet, flying through my veins, a giddy rush that roots in my bones. I imagine that I feel nothing at all.
I don’t know which scares me more.
A. and I continue walking up the road, moving further into the center of the village. The village sits at the top of a hill, with tall and narrow houses on the sides. At night, when the lights come on, it looks like a picture on Pinterest. It is the kind of place that young white American women post about when describing their dream holiday. As we walk through the center, we pass four elderly people. We do not see any children. When A was young, the village was full of people talking, shouting to each other across the road. There would be people lining up at the bakery, at the butcher, and there would be children playing in the streets.
When we arrived, A.’s father picked us up in his car at the coach drop-off point. As we drove, we passed a few empty buildings. I asked A. what these buildings were, and he replied that it was what was left of a nearby village. The young people had left a long time ago, seeking economic fortune and better lives in the cities. The elderly had all passed away. It was a ghost village.
There are many empty houses in A.’s village. It is easy to tell an abandoned house, to see the debris at the entrance, the pigeons roosting inside. These houses look as if their insides have been scooped out, like the flesh from a pumpkin. Many people in his generation left the village, and like him, they will not return. In fifty years, this will be a ghost village.
In 2014, Euro-American inflicted crises in the Middle East and Africa triggered the largest modern migration of people since Partition in 1947. Over 60 million forcibly displaced people, all moving for survival. They sold their possessions, gave up their life savings, to put their families onto boats that could enter Europe via the sea. Many of these boats were no more than rubber dinghies, vessels not designed for crossing large bodies of water, or for holding many people. In 2019, Italy enshrined into law a ‘closed ports’ policy. This law prevents people rescued at sea from disembarking in the country. In that same year, the interior minister blocked a rescue coast guard ship from docking. 116 people, with the memory of saltwater on their faces and tightly clenched fists holding onto each other, were forced to wait on a small ship with limited freshwater. It was not the first incident, nor has it been the last.
In 2014, it was estimated that there were 2.7 million empty homes in Italy. That number has since gone up. In 2020, a village called Bisaccia in the Campania region started offering empty homes for 1 Euro in an effort to repopulate the village. Other villages are set to follow suit.
One of the more recent scientific developments has been the realization that accumulated environmentally induced changes can be passed onto the next generation. This is known as ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’, and it is not absolute nor is it completely understood. We do not know which changes are inherited and which are not.
Daphnia is the Latin name for a tiny crustacean known as the water flea. There are several species, each of which are native to countries all over the world, found in large bodies of water such as swamps and freshwater lakes. These water fleas can detect a particular chemical, emitted from predators and carried across the water. The chemical triggers a genetic response in the water flea that leads to distinct morphological changes. Some water fleas develop defensive helmets, others develop teeth in their neck. The intent is to deter the predator by making it difficult to be eaten. Some studies have suggested that these changes can persist through generations of water fleas. The response to danger can be inherited, even when the original event has long since passed.
There are studies underway to determine whether trauma can be inherited by subsequent generations in humans. The impact of mass events, such as the Holocaust or large-scale famine, on survivors and their heirs are being studied to determine whether biological responses to danger are passed down.
This suggests that intergenerational trauma can also be a biological inheritance, integrated into our most fundamental level, our DNA.
That we are fundamentally altered by trauma.
Sometimes I wake from a dream I cannot remember. I am able to catch only the faint memory of waves crashing, my throat raw and gasping, ghost of saltwater on my face. Phantom trails running down. I think of my grandparents in the boat on the ocean, moonlight shining on their faces, tight with fear and worry. I think of Black and Brown people on a rubber dinghy as the waves violently toss them, of the violence that forced their migration, of the violence that refuses them a home.
I think of their grandchildren, who may also wake from half remembered dreams of saltwater.
On our walk through his village, A. leads me down to a freshwater spring. It’s hidden away at the base of one of the small hills surrounding his home, behind trees. Eight years ago, a company descended and started carrying the water away in trucks, chlorinated so that it could later be caged in plastic bottles for sale across the country. The freshwater spring supplied drinking water to the village and its people over the last century before the company trucks came.
It is estimated that 60% of the human body is made up of water. We need water in every aspect of biological function. It is in our blood, rushing through our veins and arteries to transport nutrients around our bodies. The water we drink is always linked to our environment and circumstances, cradling our DNA within our cells, surrounding it, protecting it. Perhaps changing it.
A. shows me the source of the spring, the point where the water bubbles up and out. The water is so clear that I can see the pebbles and plants at the bottom of the stream. It is like looking through glass. There is a particular smell to freshwater, the kind of smell that feels like it will clean you inside and out if you inhale it deeply. He spent the first 19 years of his life drinking this water.
I spent the first 19 years of my life moving from country to country. In England, the water is hard. You can taste the calcium, the lime from the deposits within the pipes. In the parts of North America with access to drinking water, it is treated with fluoride before you open the tap. In Pakistan, the tap water is boiled before drinking. To not do so can kill you. I have even had zam zam water from the well in Makkah; the holy well that was revealed to Hajar, the wife of Prophet Ibrahim, when she was dying of thirst. Even then it was packaged, tenderly poured into old soda bottles, plastic bags, whatever the faithful had to hand.
He asks me if I want to drink the spring water and I hesitate.
I think of our children’s inheritance, of that delicate promise made fragile by miscarriage after miscarriage. I think of my grandparents, of his grandparents. Of what my grandparents left behind and what his have always known. Of the black hair and brown eyes both of our families have.
I think of my sheet music, of the strange and evolving symphony that is hidden inside my cells, coiled within my DNA.
I think of saltwater, the memory of it always on my tongue.
He cups his hands within the stream and lifts them to my face. I close my eyes and I drink.
We literally contain multitudes.
Contributor Notes
Fatima Ann Sulaiman is an emerging writer, currently working on her debut novel as well as a collection of creative non-fiction essays. As a ‘third culture kid’, she has lived in the UK, US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. She now lives in Vienna, Austria with her husband.
