It is not an object that I carry in my possession, but one that I have glimpsed once with the collective excitement of my immediate family. The intergenerational mysteries locked in by the passing of individuals, and the uncertainties of all my family histories were unbound in the moments which we viewed the documents. Unbound, perhaps only temporarily, as there can never be names to match all the ancestral groups. There exist no voices to tell the stories behind the genes carried by those bodies, moving across oceans and continents so many generations ago. All we have are genetic markers, genotypes, pulled from a saliva testing sample, partially SNP genotyped and then posted to an online database for customers to access.
My mother, her father, and my father all submitted samples of their DNA to be sent to the biotechnology company in Mountain View, California. There were no pressing needs for a DNA test to be done; my family, like most others had a handful of hereditary illnesses, but none of which would be deemed to be immediately life-threatening. The price of the genetic test was comparatively low for the extensive knowledge that could be uncovered, with results that contained carrier status reports, ancestry composition reports, wellness reports, and of course reports on genetic traits.
The ancestry of both of my parents was not in itself a complete mystery. They both were raised by their biological parents, and knew certain things about the nature of their ancestral groups. Both had families that went back for at least three or more generations on the island of Jamaica, and both had an understanding that, like most Jamaicans, they had ancestors who were European and African, and possibly East or South Asian as well. Connecting those links was never entirely simple; with colorism and internalized racism being a very visible part of Jamaican culture, there were white passing relatives who would never speak of an a mother or father being of mixed racial origin. With lost histories of bodies, moved across oceans for their potential capital production as slaves, or paid laborers in the colonies, it always seemed to me that there were some parts of my history that I could never fully access. In a certain sense, in that moment I realized I was wrong.
With my maternal and paternal haplogroups analyzed and laid before me with percentages, I could see the traced movements of my ancestors through time. From east Asia, northwest Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa to a singular Atlantic island, and now to my own body. It felt strange to seemingly have the answers to those questions which had been asked so many times before; and yet have no clear details at all. In that sense, I felt as though I was somehow both inside a version of a future reality and looking back through to the past through a murky scope. I was in the position of being able to know all of my traits, risks, and ancestral groups, and would even be able to know them precisely if I were to take the next step and test myself. I was in the place of being able to know that which those before me couldn’t know; to know where one comes from, not just back a few generations, but spanning all of human history.
But what does it mean to know something like ancestry, aside from genetic risk factors and traits? Being racially ambiguous had always meant something like a constant negotiation for me; a game that is played between subject and viewer. In this game my body is made to be applied to other characteristics of those visual categories of that great system of social constructs-racial categories distinguished by phenotypes. It meant negotiating with others through rituals of both exotification and interrogation. Now, sequenced and laid out before me were the answers everybody had been seeking for the whole time when they asked me where I was really from. I was looking back into the past, but with these percentages there was no ability to discern exactly the truth of the bodies that had made me. Slaves and slave owners, sailors and indentured servants, venture capitalists and bodies that held capital; in truth I know all of those individuals are there somewhere. At the same time, looking so far back into the past made me acutely aware of that moment where I stood; a future where you get to know where you came from, but perhaps not one where you get to know who exactly brought you there.
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