How Generational Sagas Helped a Reader Set Roots

Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy a long read in this special Sunday edition of Today in Books featuring Book Riot’s director of content and longtime fan of generational sagas, S. Zainab Williams. A great generational saga is immersive and rich in family history. For Williams, these books inspired a deeply personal genealogy journey.

Generational sagas are as niche a readerly passion as historical fiction, and it’s no wonder these books are so popular. We’re all questing in the dark for connections and good fiction immerses us in the making of our world, our civilizations, ourselves. It doesn’t always have to be personal and the benefits of casting the net far from our lived experiences, to understand the makings of others, are innumerable. But sometimes it is personal. Sometimes we seek out generational stories that hover among the vestiges of our roots. We scarf these holograms to momentarily calm our hunger pangs. After turning the last page of Nikesha Elise Williams’ The Seven Daughters of Dupree, the most recent of many generational sagas I’ve sought out over the years, I was startled by the realization that this was core to my passion for these books.

I’m an African American and diasporic Southeast Asian woman yearning to push beneath the surface, deep into the rich soil of history, but I had to be beaten over the head with a recurring device before I understood this about myself. In Charmaine Wilkerson’s Good Dirt, it’s an antique clay vessel, in Essie Chambers’ Swift River it’s old and new correspondence, in The Seven Daughters of Dupree it’s a passed-down Bible with a handwritten list of names. Characters are bequeathed a relic connecting them to those who came before. Many of us don’t have these relics of remembrance. Enslaved Africans were entitled to nothing, including their families and children, and who could afford to be precious about scant heirlooms when survival was so hard to come by? Even oral histories, the connective tissue of many cultures and families, are too often frayed, lost, neglected. The absence of an heirloom and one potent scene at the end of Williams’ novel finally inspired me to take matters into my own hands and research my genealogy.

I’ve run exhausting marathons trying to glean what I could from my parents about my estranged paternal African American and Trinidadian side of the family only to get fragments of information. On my maternal Malaysian, Malayalam, who knows what else side of the family I get inconsistent and heavily-debated tales. I gave up the inquisition, paid for an Ancestry.com swab, and waited with bated breath.

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