The Found Link

My generation in my family is composed of nearly a hundred of my brothers, sisters, cousins, and me. My Irish grandparents had nine children and they all had big families. I am the last of ten. As mentioned previously, only my mother and my Uncle Jack really showed a true interest in the land of their parents, making recurring trips back to stay connected to the family there. Often, the family from that side of the Atlantic would make trips here in order to keep in contact. I was the one of my generation who travelled back and forth to Ireland.

I remember one time sitting in a pub in Dublin with my mother, uncle, and their first cousin- the man I stayed with for the summer as a youth. They asked who would take the responsibility of keeping the families on either side of the Atlantic connected when they no longer could. It was agreed that I would be the west-Atlantic representative and that my second cousin, whose room I shared that summer, would be the east-Atlantic representative.

After that year abroad I went back once or twice, before I began travelling in earnest. When I moved to Africa and then back and forth to Asia I became embroiled in my own nuclear family’s needs and affairs, and I didn’t go back. My uncle and his first cousin have both since passed away, and I have only been in contact telephonically. My cousin came to the U.S. for my uncle’s funeral, but could only stay for a day or two and had to get back to work. He came to visit my house and met my wife and daughter and showed pictures of his daughter, about the same age. We took our leave from each other promising to stay in touch, but we did not live up to our promises as fully and completely as I had intended. Things back in Africa seem always to divert our resources and attention, and daily life got busier and busier as my daughter got into school and my wife took a full-time job. Eventually, I reached critical guilt and told my wife that I felt that I had to go back to Ireland, and she told me to go.

I was pleasantly surprised when one of my brothers decided that he too would come. It is to be a trip of just us two; both of us will be leaving our spouses and children in the U.S. and going to visit the family, not the country. I remember being around the older generation when they would talk about the old days. They had stories that tied our hometown in America to the places and people of the old country. When I was very young I could hear the recounting of these stories as anecdotes intended to entertain and as reminiscences to be re-enjoyed over the shared context of a common history. When my cousin came for my uncle’s funeral we went over some of the old times that we had had, and retold the old stories leaving out significant pieces that we didn’t want the women and children to hear. Between the lines were couched the understood statements, “Man, we were so drunk,” or, “How did we ever get out of that one alive?” These stories had the same power to connect and to bind as the stories the old folks told when I was young.

Now, when I talk to my mother about our upcoming trip she wants to recount the old stories in a different way. She recites the bloodlines and marriages between the people that I never knew in a rote fashion, as if the knowledge of those connections is what makes a family. I remember listening to the oral history of the executioner clan of the Kumawu branch of the Ashanti tribe, and my mother’s recitation of who is related to whom and how reminds me very much of that. I feel that my mother wants to preserve the diaphanous connections of the old family by turning the threads of the dimming memories to trans-Atlantic cables by their codification and preservation. It is a sentiment that is common to all peoples. It is our attempt at immortality.

I, too, want to preserve the family’s history. It is important to know from whence you come in order to understand the constituent influences that make you who you are. But I feel that there should be a separate endeavor to accomplish that. The upcoming trip of my brother and me should not be intended to solidify the family’s past; it should be intended to solidify the bonds that the family shares now. It must do this by building context between the separate branches of the family and forging connections between contemporary members of the family not by playing on a debt to our common ancestors but by our unanimous election to maintain the ties for ourselves and what is in it for us, as far as relationships go.

I know my parents and my cousin’s parents understood this too even if it was never said aloud. That is the reason they had agreed to send me to live there at such a young age and for such a prolonged period. I’m sure they thought that I would build a rapport with the family there that would persist long after the experience was over. The fact that my brother and I will be going over soon to sleep at his house is testament to their foresight. Perhaps in a few years our daughters will take the opportunity to stay together for a summer either in the U.S., Ireland, or in Ghana. In this way my brother and I are acting as links in the evolution of our trans-Atlantic family, and this is a service to generations past and future. If you know someone who knows me, or if you hear any talk about this trip as a “vacation” be sure to speak up quickly and loudly that it is only in the performance of my duties to the ages that I would go and roll around a foreign country drinking stout with old friends, and that I should be commended for my Herculean efforts.