Identity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vclyRcJyZss

Rummaging around the web I noticed how ninety-four years ago yesterday a handful of Irish republicans declared the island free of British rule taking the Dublin Post Office and a handful of other locations under their control. The reaction was swift and violent. Within a few days the last of the rebels of the Easter Rising had been taken and imprisoned. Nearly all the leadership would be head-spinningly quickly tried and executed.

What was strange for me was that rush of patriotic fervor coursing through my blood as I recalled the event. Frankly, I’m not particularly given to that emotion. And I felt a bit embarrassed at feeling the feeling…

The truth is my connection to this small band of foolish idealists is rather tenuous. My father and both his parents were born in New Jersey. But, all four of my paternal side great-grandparents were born in Ireland. They’d fled their homeland a generation before the Rising.

To make matters rather more complicated to my mind is how a couple of years ago Jan & I gave each other genetic tests for a Christmas present. Through a rather longer story than anyone other than me (and a few close relatives) might find interesting I ended up connecting to a “cousin.” We both share a direct line male great great (etc, etc, etc) grandfather. That is my father’s father back a very long ways and his father’s father back a very long ways at some point is the same person.

And here’s the twist. His ancestor’s are Anglo-Normans. Which strongly, strongly suggests our distant relative was in fact a Viking. His the direct line, mine from a “visit” to Ireland…

To further complicate knowing more about these things, my father was a black sheep and totally cut off from his family. I know no relatives from that New Jersey line of Fords and have only the most tenuous stories passed on to me through my father, a very unreliable resource. (In fact he told me he was the only sibling not born in Ireland. My extremely limited genealogical research revealed the Ireland connection pushed back two generations…)

For me Ireland is a tin pan alley experience such as “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” or the rather more authentic Irish-exile melody “Danny Boy,” and as my father was a bar tender vague memories of carrying the hat around a smoke-filled and alcohol-soaked room where people threw money into that hat to support the IRA. I’m sure that money helped kill someone somewhere sometime…

On top of this, I have to notice how my cultural identity is shaped vastly more by the King James Bible, the language and stories of William Shakespeare, an American public education, and in my youth, lots and lots of Science Fiction. I speak English with a North American standard accent. And other than a few obscene words know no other language.

On my mother’s side I’m as pure a mongrel as we can get…

So, reflecting on identity.

It is some strange longing of our human heart… I think of that stir of sentiment recalling the Easter Rising…

To belong…

To know our people, my people.

And, so each of us seems in one way or another, to embark, at some point or another, to find that home of the heart, to find our people…

‘Tis dangerous, no doubt. I still feel guilt at the thought of that money raised through sentimentality and drunken dreams that almost certainly ended up paying for bullets or bombs…

And, at the same time, I have some sense, that the people of that island are my people, their history, my history…

Seeking my authentic heart…