Interrupted genealogies.

I read an interview with Brigitte Vasallo where she says she cannot trace her own genealogy — and perhaps, she adds, that’s because the place she comes from has a different kind.
She talks about a parchment in the Metropolitan Museum: the genealogy of the kings of England, a perfect tree, without interruptions, where every name justifies the next.
“I don’t belong to those people,” she says.
Neither do I.
And I don’t think anyone truly does, if they look closely enough.

Genealogy is a kind of imprint.
It grows inside you — in your body, in your brain, in memories that aren’t even yours.
It shapes how you react, the tone in which you love, the fear you feel without knowing why.
It’s both a neurological and symbolic network: a system of memories you never chose, but that you carry like a second skin.

On my mother’s side, my genealogy begins with an escape.
A woman from Puglia flees an arranged marriage and goes to Germany to work.
There she meets an Emilian man, also exiled from his land after the war.
They fall in love, get married, have two daughters — one born in Switzerland, one in Germany — then return to Modena with their suitcases full of dialects and nostalgia.

On my father’s side, the line grows darker.
A grandmother from Turin, a grandfather from Puglia, a noble surname — Iambrenghi — lost in the early twentieth century.
My father grows up among the Salesians, in a world where love is confused with discipline.
As a doctor, he meets my mother in a hospital: she’s twenty, he’s almost forty, already married, with a son.
They fall in love, in secret.
For years their story remains hidden.
When I’m born, I carry only my mother’s surname: my father can’t recognize me.
His wife — daughter of a judge entangled with the mafia — threatens to take me away.
Only later do I take my father’s name.
My parents never live together. They separate when I’m six.
Then he dies.

You grow up among stories like these and realize that genealogy isn’t a root: it’s a fracture that splits you in two.
That family isn’t a value, but a rhetorical construction that turns dependence into love and wounds into identity.
I’ve never understood those who treat family as a trophy.
Family, in most cases, is a damage you learn to heal from alone.
Bonds that teach you early the weight of survival — and that you keep carrying out of duty, fear, or habit.

And yet, family history truly changes us — not in a romantic way, but in a physiological one.
It reorganizes neural connections, forms emotional memory, builds the way the body responds to the world.
We are archives of what we didn’t choose.
But that doesn’t mean we must be defined by what has hurt us.

Genealogy is the subtlest form of power — the one that seeps into feelings.
It’s genealogy that tells us family is sacred, that it belongs to the private sphere, that it must be protected even when it destroys.
That’s how capitalism, patriarchy, and morality hold together: by normalizing the family as the only legitimate space for love and meaning.

It’s the same mechanism that turned the sense of duty into a virtue.
We’ve been taught that staying — in a family, in a relationship, in a structure that suffocates us — is a sign of maturity, altruism, responsibility.
But that duty is nothing more than a device of control disguised as a moral value: a pedagogy of renunciation meant to keep linear genealogies alive, even when they generate trauma.
In a society that labels as “selfish” anyone who chooses to save themselves, obedience becomes a form of emotional servitude.
We stay out of duty, not love. We inherit out of inertia, not choice.
That’s how genealogy reproduces itself: through guilt, gratitude, the fear of hurting.
Breaking that chain isn’t selfishness. It’s a political act.
It means giving life the chance to be something other than what was handed down to us.

Real lives never resemble those perfect parchments.
They are irregular stories — made of silences, distances, people who loved each other the wrong way.
And right there, in that discontinuity, another kind of inheritance can begin: not the inheritance of blood, but of transformed pain.

Pain as legacy — but also as language.
A language that isn’t inherited: it’s learned, disarmed, reinterpreted.
Because if all we receive is trauma, what we can choose is how to make it breathe.

I know that who I am is born from that story — from escape, secrecy, distance — but I refuse to be defined only by it.
My task is not to perpetuate the genealogy, but to interrupt it consciously.
Not to glorify the family, but to translate it, transform it, disarm it.

And I think we should stop saying that only family saves us.
It’s not true.
We save ourselves.
We save ourselves every time we recognize pain without inheriting it as destiny.
Every time we choose to exist outside the line.