The New World
a column on the politics of culture and the culture of globalization
2008-04-07
By Jennifer Brea
When I was a little girl growing up in Queens, NY, I played house like any other girl, but my house was almost never in America. I’d pretend I was a Russian peasant woman burrowing for seedlings during the Polvolzhye famine; a little girl in Sudan, washing clothes at the bank of the Nile; a Qing Dynasty Empress; an Egyptian Queen commanding vast armies.
If I were a runaway slave, risking all for freedom, I could have been fleeing a plantation in Georgia, or, just as likely, a rich merchant’s house in Istanbul, when it was still the heart of the Ottoman Empire.
These were, I now believe, the early signs of a wanderlust so intense, it could only be genetic. Consider the following: Fong Sam, my great-grandfather on my father’s side, sold herbal elixirs and snake oil in Canton. Then one day, for reasons buried and forgotten, he boarded a steam ship for London, then another for Kingston, deciding to stand still somewhere in Port-au-Prince. He opened a laundry and a Chinese restaurant, ending his days the widower of a Haitian woman named Coradin Saladin, like the 12th-century Kurdish Sultan of Egypt.
Ernest, my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, left his home in London to take a post as a railway manager in Argentina. His people were Cornish coal miners. He married an Irish woman named Emmy, and they had two girls and one boy. They flitted between London, Buenos Aires, and Brooklyn, but lived, as far as I can tell from the sepia portraits, a relatively quiet life of middle class respectability—until my great-aunt ended her days the only white woman in a musty apartment in Spanish Harlem, mourned by seven cats.
Of course, it’s never about what you know. It’s the unspoken that tantalizes. It’s about the holes in the middle and the vanishing edges of the map; the lands you have no choice but to imagine.
My father’s side never talked about why they, and almost all of our extended family, fled Haiti in the late fifties and early sixties. There were whispers of poisonings and assassinations. I know my grandfather’s father was murdered. I know that some of us were much too involved in politics to chance staying, once Duvalier was in power; others simply wanted a better life.
I don’t know if it was the cold shock of racism in America or Haitian colorism, well intact, but they never talked much about our African roots. My grandmother emphasized our Catholicism. My grandfather, a big brown man, took pride in obscure European origins. He used to hold me in his lap and tell me stories of how we were descended from King Phillip III of Spain, that the Breas were really Italian and French.
But then there was that tale of a particularly malevolent and powerful vodoun spirit, who followed my grandparents all the way from Cap-Haitien to their first house in Queens, knocking over photographs and slamming shut doors for no good reason. My grandmother became convinced someone had gone to a houngan and put a hex on her, in revenge for some past wrong. Magic was real and dangerous, even all the way in America, and she would not rest easy until she called an Irish priest to come over and sprinkle holy water on the walls.
I never quite understood why my grandmother refused to teach me Creole—the language of slaves—but still feared the gods her ancestors brought from Benin and Ghana (and who knows where) to Saint Dominigue, the New World, in the bowels of schooner ships.
When I was a child, I struggled with how to fit my family’s stories into the strict racial categories I inherited along with my American citizenship.
White as I am, boys on the playground still called me nigger. I felt safer shopping at the grocery with my white mother, though I hardly knew why, but was always more comfortable in the company of black folks. My grandparents endured, without ever quite believing in it, all the racism of the Leave it to Beaver era, not to mention the challenge of adapting to a language, a culture, a pace of life that were all alien.
On long road-trips, my father would read to me from Why We Can’t Wait and The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality? by Cheikh Anta Diop. We never went farther south than the Outer Banks of North Carolina—“They used to kill people down there,” he’d say.
I suppose he was actively instilling in me all the pride and possibility of Blackness, but I never felt I could call myself African-American. Biracial maybe? But I wasn’t caught between two traditions or two colors. More like five or ten.
Always somewhere in between, and perpetually restless, I was an expatriate in my own country. America felt too new, ruptured from the rest of history, as though we had all sprung from the ether 300 years ago. I wanted to travel back to the places where my ancestors had lived and died for generations, to learn what—or who—had driven them halfway around the word,had made such different people fall in love again and again, and what all it meant about my family, my existence, and what Barack Obama keeps calling,“the unlikely story that is America.”
So, when I was twenty-three, I bought a one-way plane ticket to Beijing. Two years and two-dozen countries later, I still haven’t found my way back to that mythical point where all this began, I still haven’t found the center of the earth, but I do have some stories to tell, stories of how the world is ‘globalizing,’ and always has been, since the first tribes spread from the Horn of Africa and, after 60,000 years, came to populate the entire planet. Stories of all the myriad ways to be black and brown, around the world.
Jennifer Brea is a writer based in Beijing. The New World is a new EbonyJet column on politics, travel and global culture.