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I have come to believe that every personal story is a landscape story. We frequently forget that our lives are not only our own but a contribution to a web of stories that shape the history of the land. Personal stories of life that make us who we are and our landscapes what they are, often are lost if not documented or passed down to other generations. What stories does the landscape hide and which stories does the landscape reveal? The only way our histories can survive is if we share them. The memories and stories we stow away in our landscapes, come back to us in other circumstances: they reflect us, and we reflect them.
So, what are the stories of life? And how are these stories a metaphor of a landscape? The possibility to trace the stories of a life through the land, the soil, the plants, and the water inspires this exploration. Historians, theorists, artists, and environmentalists have explored the phenomenon of connection between human and landscape. The bond of life and land exists through our strong family ties, like that of a woman who stays constant in our stories like the landscape. Women are the life, strength, and stability of our legacies. The aspect of deep genealogy is an exploration of oneself in the landscape. What do we find when we explore it? Our discovery of self in the landscape touches on the notion of what we call home and what we come to find as our identity.
Being a participant observer of one’s own genealogy delves into the topic of topographies of memory, meaning, loss, and discovery. When we embed ourselves in the land, it creates a different kind of ecology; one that is closer, more intricate, crucial, and not always rational. Creating a family archive allows for the exploration of one’s life and the purpose behind it. You discover parts of yourself, when you uncover truths of your family; hidden memories waiting to be recovered through the telling of a story. We create new relationships through this journey, not only with people but with the landscape. A river is a place where these connections come together, with the combination of complex concepts of culture and history. As noted by Irine J. Klaver, there is a notion of the atmosphere of a river or “riversphere” as a concept that contains social, cultural, political and emotional dimensions of life by combining hydrology, biology, and ecology with lived experience. Intertwining environment with the experience of life through storytelling is what enriches the atmosphere of rivers and reveals hidden histories.
My exploration of these thoughts began when I was walking to my maternal Grandmother’s house in the Southern Serbian city of Nis, I passed a tributary river to the Nisava that was barely flowing, moving slowly with green muck and miscellaneous trash. The sight of this river prompted me to take a picture before going on my way. I began to think about this river and how its contents are connected to a larger system. I pondered the deeper meaning behind its connectivity: how do collective histories, known and unknown, forgotten, and erased, all contribute to the circumstances that we have today? The composition of invisible traces and transparent ones are revealed through the existence of a river. The color of the water, the shape of its bends, the intensity of its flow is inclusive with the course of a life. Visible form of land is harmonious with the occurrences of our daily lives. The riversphere holds our secrets, revealing some and keeping others buried deep in its sediments; rivers hold the truth about us. This fascinates me because it enters a realm of undocumented stories of history. The idea of tracing history along a river prompted me to begin my personal journey of loss and discovery through deep genealogical archival research along the waterways of Serbia.

ETD_9769

doi:10.7282/t3-p4fv-z311

M.L.A.

Includes bibliographical references

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.