Unraveling Bloodlines: How "Relative Strangers" Redefines Family and Belonging
Which is why Relative Strangers is so meaningful. It offers a comprehensive composite sketch composed by 28 artists each making their own attempt at hardening their experience into a definable phenomena. The result is, if not hardened, at least a three dimensional hologram of the experience of unknowingness. An unknowingness, as editor B.K. Jackson asserts in her introduction, that “can be bewildering, isolating, shame-inducing, and deeply disquieting.”
Reading Relative Strangers can, at times, feel like reading someone’s diary. Each contributor has at one point been at best befuddled, or, at worst, completely in the dark regarding their origin story. Each tries to work that befuddlement out on the page, much like someone works out in their diary whether their crush likes them back. These writers have lived their whole lives with a lurking secret — something unsettling and just beyond their reach. Try as they may to fill the gap with fictional narratives, to make sense of their personal history, and to make themselves feel safe and accepted, they can’t until someone hands them the key to the hope chest where the truth hides. (Often that key is saliva in a test tube sent off to a DNA lab.) Not knowing the truth leads several of the contributors to fantasize, be it an image of a biological parent they create in their mind’s eye or a story about why they were given up for adoption. In some instances, the truth (i.e. a revealing clue or person) stared them in the face and they unconsciously ignored it so as to maintain the protective bubble that surrounded them.
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