Page - 19 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt 19 were drawn to carry out. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller write of the “seduction of the quest for a direct link to deep roots and family bloodlines”, and they ask “how in particular does a feminist subject negotiate the intensities and contradictory impulses of diasporic return?”10 Inherent within this impulse to journey back to places of origin is, Hirsch and Miller argue, a contradiction, which they present as, on the one hand, a performative cultural self-construction that would seem to allow for the self-construction of a roots story, and, on the other hand, “the elaboration of new identities secured by the evidence of science and genetics” that would seem to suggest a roots journey as directed by orthodoxies of race and specific locations of origin.11 Departing on this trip, I was aware of certain contradictions between my present situation and those of my ancestors in the past, between our (my own and my sister’s) known identities, and the uncertain identities we hoped to connect with. In the context of this journey, Rebecca and I were travelling as independent, unmarried, working artists and academics. Although ostensibly a roots journey, the implicit difference was our interest in uncertainty and in the contradiction described above between genetic roots and self-constructed roots. We both felt that finding out where we came from would not necessarily give us answers to our current iden- tities, and that the present state of the places we were travelling to may hold little connection to their pasts. On my father’s side, our family story had dual origins. On Woolf’s side, the family’s origins were in Eastern European Jewish shtetl life, a life unknown to me; for example, I knew little about how a woman of my age would have lived and the roles and identities which she would have assumed. That shtetl life was long gone, and the Jewish community had been devastated by the Holocaust in the 1940s, so that the reality of these places held an uncertain image for us. On Edith’s side was a relatively successful St Petersburg-based Jewish business family, which later managed to sustain a middle-class lifestyle, first in Hull, England, and then in Pretoria, South Africa.12 Hirsch and Miller use two key terms to develop a critical dialogue within these contradic- tions between a cultural self-construction and a genetically evidenced, historically based identi- ty. Hirsch’s idea of ‘postmemory’ understands the legacies of the past as “always already inflected by broader public and generational stories, images, artefacts, and understandings that together shape identity and identification”, while Miller discusses how the ‘transpersonal’ recognizes that the personal is necessarily political, and emphasizes links that go not just backwards but also sideways in the present, as ‘a zone of relation that is social, affective, material, and inevitably public’.13 Hirsch and Miller also refer to the poet Adrienne Rich, who wrote in the mid-1980s: “I’ve been thinking a lot about the obsession with origins, it seems a way of stopping time in its tracks. Don’t we have to start here, where we are?”14 Rich’s comment suggests that, in thinking about journeys of return, we need to start from where we are and understand how our own identities and social relations in the present relate to, and shape, our ideas of origin. Subsequently, I want to ask: how do our auto-ethnographic explorations into familial, pri- 10 Hirsch and Miller (note 3), Rites of Return, pp. 2-3. 11 Hirsch and Miller, Rites of Return, p. 2. 12 See figure 1: Family tree. 13 Hirsch and Miller, Rites of Return, pp. 4-5. 14 Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes towards a politics of location’, in Blood, Bread and Poetry (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 210-32.