Cultural Identity: Does it have to be connected to your family? What happens when your a past abuser dies? and Lomatium Root
September 10, 2014 at 2:24pm
Hello Folks,
Some things on my mind today.
First, I'd like to discuss the connection between some sort of middle man and various forms of identity. There is the person (the subject of the identity), their identity, and usually some factor that connects them to that identity.
But what happens when that factor disappears or fades away? Dies even? Do you lose that identity? Which begs to ask the question: How can your identity persist without some person/community/culture/or other factor connecting you to that identity?
One example from my own life is being genetically Palestinian and Guatemalan, but having relatively few cultural experiences in my lifetime to link me to those cultures. Outside of a community of Arabs or Latino people, how do I connect to my identity? Can I choose my own identity and connect to it without typical connections?
Typically I would have arab friends, and family, who I share this identity with, but outside of my immediate family, I have no one. And how connecting to my identity can one Arab, and 2 Arab Americans be who they themselves do not have a community to share in their identity?
I believe one can choose their identity. I can choose to be Hispanic, and Arab. I struggle with this concept a lot because I have Arab relatives, at least, who are around the US generally (although 2 of my cousins live in Lebanon and Dubai), BUT I barely know them and we have no report between each other, no connection, no familiarity. (My parents were both Pariahs in their respective families, although I'd say no longer, as of recent, for my Dad).
I then thought, well, there is at least my mother, in all of her Arab-ness which seems fairly intact since the past 29 years or so she has lived in America. But even then, DO I need her to maintain my identity? Is it she who links me to my heritage?
If we allow ourselves to choose our identities, we can avoid feeling isolated in our particular unique cultural (or whatever) circumstance.
So I find this connecting to the identity of being a victim of abuse.
What happens when your abuser dies? As mine has in the past years.
I will say there really is a similar feeling of loss of identity, as in the above description of not having a clear connection to my cultural identity.
As my Palestinian family falls more apart, I still feel like a Palestinian, just a Palestinian who has really only one other Palestinian to share in their identity as a Palestinian. And I find, that that connection is really inside of me. But that the transition from finding identity in community to inside of my own singular being to be awkward.
Just as I found it awkward when A. died, and the person who i hated, who i tried to understand from a distance, who in his last phone call to me sounded like the devil, was gone, literally gone from Earth.
What is interesting in both these situations: When i realized I no longer had an abuser to have been abused by, and when I saw my family fading farther and farther away from me sharing less and less about our culture, instead of losing my identity, I actually found it even stronger within myself.
So many years, seeing myself as Half-Arab and never Full anything, left me feeling culturally isolated. And even though I cannot take away the feeling of being different, alien, alone in my own personality, separate from many in the society I live in, it truly feels better to let yourself feel the person and grab the identity of who you feel you are, even if you cannot prove it on paper.
Telling myself I was only half-Arab kept me from allowing myself to participate in activities in the various cities I've lived in that were for Arabs. I was afraid that I wouldn't be accepted because I couldn't speak Arabic or because I dressed very American. Now I don't care if I'm accepted. I feel who I am alone, or not alone. My identity remains regardless of approval or comraderie.
And when A. died, at first I thought, how could I feel so abused if my abuser was gone? But I found that the experience of what all happened was inside of me. I could grow from allowing that experience to be real and present in my life, to let it transform me in a positive way, without being attached to the past circumstance.
Actually, in both situations the lack of an external connecting factor to my identity, strengthened the connection to my identity from and within myself.
I feel that maybe I am even lucky to have any familial connection to my identity at all, but I also feel like if anyone wants to have a connection to their heritage, whatever they feel it is, that they can do so within themselves, and they don't need approval by some external community. They don't need to fit in, to be like the others who share their identity.
And if an identity of yours is one of circumstance, it is interesting, that that circumstance stands alone even without its players around in the present moment. The story lives.
These both are different sorts of identities but both can be seen as based in one's personal story and the stories one chooses to feel connected to.
When I read the Popul Vuh (the most famous Mayan sacred text and creation story), i felt so connected to its imagery, its movement, the archetypes, the feeling of the spiritual nature of the story, and I went to the National Museum of History in NYC and I stood in the gallery about the Maya. I stood in front of a Torquise necklace that had belonged to a Mayan princess, and as I stood there in front of the glass it reflected onto My Neck, and I became that princess, and that culture became a part of me.
There may be a myriad of unknown identities within each one of us. I would highly encourage anyone who feels like it to allow themselves to feel any identity they want to feel. We don't even accurately know our cultural histories, we are each so mixed. Why not allow ourselves to feel connected to any identity any culture? and Peoples? Any language? Any Pro-Sport community? Any music scene? EVEN IF WE DON'T FIT IN WITH THE REST.
Please read this article if you want another perspective of what happens when your abuser dies: http://www.buzzfeed.com/leighstein/piecing-together-my-troubled-exs-last-days
and this, "I come from both sides,” I screamed at him. “How can I choose one?”
“You have to choose,” he shouted back. “Or else you’ll be alone. A child who doesn’t share her family’s values has no family.”
(i cry when i read that last sentence, because there are parts of me who feel like that)
from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/11061569/What-is-it-like-to-grow-up-half-Jewish-and-half-Palestinian.html
JUST THE AUDIO:
Onto...
LOMATIUM ROOT: The herb that saved native peoples in the Pacific Northwest during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
(to be continued...)
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