Dinner With Ghosts: Undaunted & Impetuous
Tonight I’ll be dining with Eleanor Addy of Peel, Isle of Mann, intimately known as Nell Addy. Born 1746 and half Irish. According to family historians, “she was a dauntless and impetuous character,” and she supplied her husband, Stout Hugh the Fisherman, with all that he needed to “quit the soil for the sea.” Her resources, a decent inheritance and a tenacious temperament, created the circumstances for Stout Hugh, who had no land of his own to till, to break with family agricultural tradition--the “narrow bounds” from which his ancestors had been circumscribed--and set the family on an adventurous path that eventually brought her grandson to Canada then America. Nell Addy opened the door to the sea, to a boundless expanse, and created an environment that has nourished our family’s sovereignty and curiosity for generations. Nell Addy was not afraid to change course. Nell Addy is this week’s dinner guest.
On Friday evenings I invite my ancestors to my kitchen table. It’s a family meal with strangers. Strangers that gave me my very substance, my body, and my heart. I want to re-member them. To re-integrate them as members of my immediate family because my vitality, my heartbeat, my breath, my movements, and my voice are an amalgamation of the genes they carried, the air they breathed, the songs they sang, the meals they shared, and the people they loved. I do not know most of their stories, they have become dismembered from my mind, though not from the memory that lives on in my body.
Memory doesn’t just live in the mind, but there is a memory I carry still within my skin, my lips, my bones, and all my sensibilities. Perhaps I carry within me a memory of Nell Addy in my own seemingly impetuous and undaunted schemes. I know now that Nell Addy trusted her intuition, she trusted her gut. I know that Nell Addy did not bother with what others thought of her. Nell Addy could assess a situation quickly because she knew how to listen to rhythms others were not attuned to. Nell Addy is in my body, in this embodied memory. I re-member her, and so I know what I inherited: deep ways of knowing that aren’t always obvious to others. I inherited her intuition, and I’m reclaiming her undaunted spirit.
Until recently, I barely thought about my ancestors and where I came from though my time in England and Scotland felt like returning home. I remember being overwhelmed to tears by the earthy smell within an medieval chapel in the south of England a few years ago. I knew that place like I had been there before. Something in my body recognized that smell, and I began weeping for reasons my mind could not understand. But my body knew, my body re-membered. My body is waking up to memories that become evermore tangible to my comprehension. It feels as if I am being summoned. And I am listening. I am feeling. I am re-membering.
The thing is, I’m homesick. And I think my family has been homesick for generations as the trauma from migration never fully healed. I inherited an accumulation of loss and grief that they were unable to process in order to simply survive as they put down their roots in unfamiliar soil. Many of them had to give up their language, their spirituality, their status, their “foreign” ways that branded them as dangerous and inferior in a country that continues to suspect and fear difference. Outwardly they assimilated to a new culture, but somehow the internal rhythms of their heritage have been passed on and live within my body.
Indeed there is some resilience they passed on to me that is quite potent as they left an abundant fertility of land and sea and found their way to the western desert. The desert, where I am living still, some generations later. We have survived. We assimilated and now with privilege we often put other migrants through the same trauma we have not yet processed. And so the cycle continues. We lost something we love, and so we demand that others do the same thing we had to do to survive--to dis-member themselves and assimilate to some bland, homogenized, lifeless drudge of accumulation to smother the grief.
And so I am homesick. There is a longing, a physical yearning, for sea and mist and colder days. For a language that I know on my tongue. I am homesick. And I am undaunted. Impetuous at threshold times like Nell Addy. Perhaps it is she who lives on strongest in my pulse. And so I invite her to my kitchen table tonight. What will she tell me? I’m listening. I am feeling. I am re-membering.
Disclaimer: this is not Nell Addy, but relatives of mine from my maternal line.
Disclaimer: this is not Nell Addy, but relatives of mine from my maternal line.
Disclaimer: this is not Nell Addy, but relatives of mine from my maternal line.