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…and with humiliation, and with terror, he understood that he too was an illusion, dreamt by another. — Luis Borges, A Circular Ruin
Last week, my best friend Steve and I revisited the issue by phone. Steven and I grew up in the same hometown, but didn’t meet until my sophomore year in college. After undergrad, Steve went to a liberal arts college down the road where he studied psychology, and I headed off to medical school. Eventually, I moved to Seattle, while Steven left for Korea, where he’s taught English as a second language for the past four years. We’re both African-American males born and reared in the south, but have always felt an estranged kinship to a part of the country that still contains so many "ghosts" for African-American people. Steven called last week to get information on housing and the cost of living in Seattle for himself and his new Korean bride. We somehow didn’t actually talk about growing up in the south, or the issue of him returning home, but as always, I could feel the issue pressing down like a weight: those old "ghosts" of being young and black and living in the south, and dealing with issues of race. But honestly, for Steve and me, it isn’t an issue of fighting the old haunts of discrimination or prejudice. The history of African-Americans in the south is a proud testament to struggle, but our issues center on heritage and belonging. Steven could never quite understand why he felt such dissociation from home, and I realized long ago that I simply never felt an extended sense of heritage outside of my own family. But one night in summer 1981, something interesting occurred. Tropical Storm Arlene was blowing over Florida, and summer meant hurricane season, so storms of this magnitude were common. Arlene had come and knocked out power in most places, but now as the humidity settled in after the storm, everyone from blocks away came out into the streets. I’m not sure why, really, but neighbors stood on their porches and talked about the storm and the heat while children splashed about in the warm rain puddles. I can recall that this was my first real moment of feeling an expanded sense of family. It was my first experience with the idea of community, and perhaps the first time I recognized a common heritage with the people around me. Husbands and wives, children and grandparents, people with different ancestry and different backgrounds, shared a moment as a community during the calm after a storm. That night, the world opened up a little. I understood a little more about community and heritage, but the question that nagged at the back of my conversation with Steven begged a definition of the terms, and a real examination of origin. For all its bad PR, the south is where I’m from, and if a person’s journey begins at a distinct point, then I cannot speak about my heritage without acknowledging where it all began. Origin and heritage are tantamount, if not the same. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "heritage" as "something transmitted by or acquired from an heir: Legacy, Inheritance, Tradition, and Birthright." It cites "origin" as "a point at which something begins or arises or from which it derives: Ancestry, Parentage, and Inception." The dogma, as most people would assert, is that heritage is tradition or legacy that arises from a common point of origin. I was having lunch the other day with my friend Kara, and she raised the point that we all claim ownership to a multitude of origins, and honestly, how many times have you asked someone a question regarding his or her heritage, only to get a multitude of answers? It boggles the mind to hear of the different nationalities that people claim. Some are Irish-German, or French-Hawaiian; Kara even claims to be Hungarian-Swedish-American. How’s that for convention? The idea of multiple origins stands as paradox, but as my friend went on to assert, that is nevertheless how people define a commonality with others, yet remain individual and somehow unique. I was a science major in college, and I can’t always explain away the paradox that dogs the world around me, but I have to agree with Kara. Parentage, legacy, inheritance, and inception are certainly words that convey a common thread tying the ideas of heritage and origin into a single fabric, but with issues of nationality thrown into the fray, there is even more distinction that can be formulated. The fabric becomes a lot more common and distinctive. Paradoxical indeed. As Steve and I talked about my lunch with Kara, naturally the question of gender arose. I honestly was caught off guard, but closer inspection suggests that maybe there are some associations between gender and heritage. For example, the history of the American farmer is well known and storied, from the red barns and dirt fields of Mark Twain’s Missoula to the dairy cows and bluegrass hills of Abe Lincoln’s Kentucky. The heritage of the American farmer is one of quiet struggle and earnest hard work: harvesting the crops, tending the animals, waking at the break of dawn to work until the fall of night. The history of the American farmer is rich in tradition and heritage, and within that heritage, the farm has traditionally passed from father to son for generations. For the most part, women’s role in the story of the American farmer has been excluded. Seattle and the founding ancestors have a similar tale. The plaque commemorating the landing of the Denny party at Alki Beach lists every man by name. Yet, when it comes to the contributions of the women, they are listed only as "and wife." I believe that history has forced women to examine themselves differently in terms of ancestry and heritage. Their contributions to the history of the world have, for the most part, been underrepresented. Steven eventually asked the question of if or when I would ever return home, and, honestly, there is a part of me that thinks I should, if not just to reconnect with relatives, then to assess the energy left, if any, from that stormy night. From that night forward, I understood the responsibilities that we all share as neighbors. The warm monsoons over the African savanna are just as responsible for the tropical storms off the coast of Florida as the ocean current from the Asian Pacific and Alaska is responsible for the cool, rainy winters here in Seattle. The weather is merely an attempt by nature to balance heat and energy equally across the face of the planet, and I imagine that there’s a force to my heritage that acts the same: to focus responsibility equally over generations and across different nationalities and religions. As I concluded my conversation with Steve, we came to a quiet agreement that perhaps defining heritage is more about reconstructing the idea of origin and common ancestry. The heritage of African-Americans in this country is one of struggle with the past. I, along with the rest of the new generation born after the civil rights movement, am the beneficiary of that struggle, so for me, the issue of heritage is more about rethinking the concept and starting over from the cinders of the past. Perhaps that’s the real answer to the challenge of defining heritage: not entirely to find a common ancestry, but a challenge to discover a new origin from a past lineage. There’s a pendulum effect to history and ancestry anyway; it’s much like a parabola. You start out at an ordinate and an abscissa and progress out toward Y, only to fall back toward X. Maybe the idea of heritage should be considered as a grand and glacial movement out toward our eventual convergence. Or as my friend Kara, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, would probably say, "As we evolved from the clay of the earth, so shall we all return." Maybe it’s not where you’re from, but where we’re all going together. |
A
Circular Ruin is a tale of an old man who literally dreams
a son to life. The dream occurs in the ruined sanctuary of a
fire god, and requires an entire year of painstaking effort for
the old man to complete. After his son has taken life and moved
downstream, the old man realizes that he, too, was merely a dream
when the fire god returns to absolve him of his labors. There’s
a certain labyrinthine element to Borges’ tale that I enjoy.
Ultimately, it is a story of how we eventually become our parents.
I think I first read this story when I was 17, and for me it’s
a reinforcing principle that inheritance of my parent’s
dreams and labor is the familial force, which determines my heritage.