White people, I'm not entirely with you. My mother, yes, had white skin, and her culture was Russian/Polish Orthodox Catholic. But her ancestors lied to get to America to escape religious and political persecution, and were from Vilna, Russia which is also Wilno, Poland, an embattled area known as a Jewish enclave, whose identity shifted to fit each new conqueror, whose maps have been redrawn so many times that even the land my mother's history is rooted in can't be its authentic self. Town and family names were changed to protect the guilty or conjure innocence, a gesture of hope or pattern of rot, disintegrating the material reality of things to construct another. Erasing the past to birth a fantasy of independence via oppression, the placenta of diaspora. I imagine there was a time when it was just an ordinary place with ordinary people living and loving, working and dying, like any other ordinary place, and I wish I knew who my people were there/then. What it became was sick with brutal wars, fascism and concentration camps, horrific tragedy, heroic braveries, an entire universe of loss.
I don't know how to tell this story of forgetting. My entire family vehemently, almost pathologically refused to speak of the past, and now they're all dead. But I do know my ancestors were driven to escape, and changed their name from Panesevich to Pane to do it. So as it lines up, my people may have actually been Jewish. Or perhaps they were decent Catholics and couldn't stomach joining the forces persecuting their neighbors, and knew it was either join or die, so they ran - scrubbing the ethnicity from their lives upon reaching America, in pursuit of the dream of the new. It could be either, all, or neither - plus things beyond my scope of imagining. Other than knowing that one of the massive ancestral traumas I inherit starts here, I'll never have the whole story. And this is half of how I come to you with a ravaged and elusive history that informs how I identify.
Despite this burying and restructuring, I've been able to cull out bits of my familial narrative, like teeth you have to pull with your hands. I'm told my maternal ancestors were creatives and scholars, originating from the territory known as White Russia. At least the men - the women were murderous or invisible. Some of my people escaped, but most perished. My paternal great-grandfather immigrated to America in the early 1900's with his wife, my grandfather Nicholai (becoming Nicholas), (I don't know if he had siblings), and my great-grandfather's one possession - a violin he built himself. It's true that my great-grandmother tried to kill her husband three times, twice with poison, then a knife, before and during their pilgrimage, and he had her committed to a mental institute somewhere on the East coast not long after they landed in Massachusetts. Odds are he was a horrible man and she had an excruciating life. You don't try to stab your husband for no reason, especially when you finally made it to America after escaping horrific oppression. I wish I knew what mental institute it was; it appears she died there. I'll never know her name but I'm on her side, her experience echoes in mine.
This is how my mother's mother's brother, Great Uncle Ron, told me. He and my grandmother Blanche also immigrated to the United States as young children with their parents, escaping the same region my grandfather's family originated from at approximately the same time, landing in the same place. To say he was reticent is an understatement, but he would talk a little about other people. Uncle Ron and I had many conversations, after my parents died when I was 21, leaving me desperate for family and to know anything about where and who I came from. Calling him on his heavy rotary phone, coaxing stories out of him like trust from a beat dog. You could say Uncle Ron was great because he taught me how to throw a strong punch, he was keen on rescuing stray cats and women escaping abusive husbands. Rumor has it he could also be a mean alcoholic and was especially cruel to my brother, though, so he had it in him, too. History, culture, family, grief - trauma on trauma on trauma. Life streams through hands like sand. This is only a wisp of a sliver of a crumb; there's no proving or disproving any of it.
I'm also mixed race, which is the paternal half of my story, making this experience of identity even more complex, complicated by how my father's family's survival depended on them subjugating their Native heritage. The experience of being mixed race while presenting as fully white and benefitting from white privilege in a world of white supremacy isn't easy. Everyone assumes I'm white, telling them I'm not can result in anything from being ignored to being mocked as a liar. I struggle to find community to process this with, so I hardly have the skills to articulate it. And no surprise: my last two living siblings have completely severed themselves from our heritage, so there's no talking with them. Red people, I'm more with you than not, but it doesn't feel entirely right to claim it. This is what it means to belong nowhere, to no-one.
My father was half Chickamauga Cherokee from the lower Tennessee region, and his culture comes with its own power and tragedies. As I was told, some of my Native ancestors resisted the Trail of Tears by fully acclimating, and made an art of repressing their identity in exchange for being able to stay on their ancestral land. They became share-croppers and whisky runners, lived in poverty, owned nothing, wore white man's clothes, spoke white man's language, adopted white man religion, buried their culture deep, and never spoke of Native life or relatives again. Tradition, language, memory sacrificed. Their diaspora was internal, spiritual, psychological, and created its own rift/reality.
As with my mother's ancestors, many of these relatives of mine perished in obscurity, fighting or trying to endure the colonizer's world. Their lives are lost to me. Additionally, I know nothing of my father's father, from Scotland. I know nothing of my paternal grandfather, or either of my great-grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, achievements, romance, talents. They became America, the family tree splintered. In so many ways, both sides of my family mirror each other - for all their differences, they deeply internalized systemic racism and trauma like it was air; it became their lungs, humid with shame, crafty breathers. They all pretended to be something they weren't to stay alive, and it only gave them a small measure of freedom. Was it worth it? They had no choice.
My father died before his mother, so when I began yearning for stories of my people, I went to her. Grandmother Lydia clung to her white Christian narrative, sanitized of all indigenous heritage, but I was able to thread some of her Native-ness out. She was an herbal healer, treating herself and her community with herbal remedies - she rejected "artificial medicine", and remained strong even with severe heart disease until her late 80's. I inherited this affinity for natural medicines from her and her relationship to flowers, roots, herbs and food. We shared a deep capacity for spiritual practice, a reverence for nature expressed through a simple, daily way of being. But who was she really, underneath it all - was she who she was? Who could she have been? Who was her husband? How did this make my father?
Fleet Willis was an absence in my life, handsome, a fighter pilot in the Korean War, a bonafide grifter, gambler, Formula One race-car driver, alcoholic, cheat, thief. I'm pretty sure that by the time his familial code-switching made its way to him, it produced a sociopath. He had no conscience, which was, in its way, spectacular. His heart exploded when he was 50. My mom, Sylvia Eleanor, also died at 50 from a heart attack. I can't put her life into words yet, but I can say that in its poetry, heartbreak and violence, it made perfect sense. My parents were bound in death, the weight of their ancestral narratives something they performed but couldn't transcend, and their stories burnt with their bones.
I know how my blood runs, what turns me on and off. I recognize myself in history, hear it, certain, and can sing it back in melodies that come to me unbidden. I know what triggers me to isolation, soothes me to sleep, fuels my power. Ancestors surround me, speaking through crow, tree, wind, moon, rain. Cabbage rolls, borscht, babka, fried hominy, bean bread I make without recipes, nobody taught me. They showed me how to read, write and pray, how to be in the woods and fresh water, how to speak with animals, befriend birds, be of service, protest injustice, question, hustle, coffee, blueberry pie. Visions travel through time, I channel spirits. It's true I'm one in a long line of spell-casters, a cosmic trickster whose biggest trick is me. My knowing is grounded in nothing more than my own self-generated confidence, conjuring. Honestly, you could think that much of this me is make-believe. Because throw all this up in the sky and it comes down to make a creator, I make and believe, come to/construct identity. Spirit flies while the body wants earth, yearns to return to earth, eat dirt and be rooted, concrete. Names make things real, I want to be real, home. Decide you are true and you are. My truths drift underwater like reeds and algae, they cling to the skin but after heating up in the sun, you begin to forget. Sensation lingers. I admit I don't know while comprehending I am, neither here nor there, not either/or but liminal, singing ambiguity.
Living without anchor, without clear knowing or belonging, does things to the soul, yokes it to clouds, ethereal. Packed in are special powers, gifts and handicaps particular to being the daughter of enigma. It's true I don't fully understand how to live in this world. Normal things that make sense to other people are elusive, I can't crack the code. Ownership? Don't understand. Material reality? Crumbles in my hands. My psychologist tell me this is a byproduct of my childhood traumas, that I lack basic conventional skill sets because of abuses I endured. Might it also be my ancestors' inherent character passed on to me, communal and not personal? Inherited or created? Is it because of how this world forced them to be? There will never be a final answer. Boundaries dissolve, the diaspora is real, can I tell me who I am? As a result, I believe that identity is fluid, because this is my embodied experience. I exist, and am ghost/s. Identity is inherited and constructed, fiercely personal. And true freedom never encroaches on identity, on one's personal choices regarding how to live, who to live, why.
Freedom is the specific thing lacking from my entire ancestral line, is the very thing all sides of my family lacked and died for, and that lack is my inheritance.
For me, compassion is the only sustainable response, is the most useful tool for making sense out of all this. Learning the hard way how to love, love beyond the body, beyond time and history, borders, tribes, words, requires feeling with your whole being that all life is worthy, all lives are valid as they are, as they choose to be. To feel threatened by anyone else's reality requires absolute knowing, and absolute knowledge is impossible, unattainable. If we're honest, if we're connected to our humanity, we allow that we are as unknowable to each other as we are to our selves. This is the best of humility. How can I say how anyone should live? True freedom admits its limits, is defined by what is not its domain. What one person's heart knows is that heart's domain. You cannot govern another's heart. Another thing I know, I will fight to defend a woman's right to live her own heart.
I know I enjoy certain privileges, walking through a world of the white man's making, that I accept my white ancestors had a hand in creating and profiting from, while fully presenting as white. I work to deconstruct, dismantle, and take responsibility for that privilege. And I know that my authentic identity is my culture, which has nothing to do with privilege, and everything to do with how I survive.
Somehow the bloodline survived to me, the only living person who cherishes it. I've no children, so it will die with me. But it will die with me with honor. Because for all of these layers of mystery and tragedy, battle and surrender, deception and hope, I'm the one who survives, unashamed. That makes me the heroine, which is what they dreamt we could be/if we could be free -