Registering for graduate courses has been a tricky intersection to navigate. A typical registration period consists a (thankfully shrinking) list of unit requirements, a cadre of professors with varying reputations, a smattering of obscure course titles and foci, and one or two choices that make sense in life beyond outside the university. It's a crap shoot, really, and what I end up studying often reflects the convenience of time slot more than my own interest. Until this last year, that is, when the cosmos harmoniously aligned and gave me Irish-American literature.
This matters because, at one point during my formative years, I decided--although I likely reported being told at the time--that I descended from Irish lineage. I naively imagined a bloodline imbued by immigrants and emigres. I saw my grandmother's red hair and knew of her Chicago roots and somehow concluded that the old sod was in there somewhere, too.
Now that I think about, I can recall one instance that may have planted the seed of my beliefs. I remember sitting outside the principal's office, staring through tears in a bustling elementary school office, awaiting my punishment. The sole black kid at the school and I had been trading barbs over cadence calls on the football field. His eyes, dry and steeled by the skepticism that others use to regard his differences, stared forward stoically.
The principal did not like the use of the n-word. "You have fair complexion," he said. "Someone might see those freckles and think you're Irish. How would you like it if they called you a Mick, considered your family a bunch of drunks?"
I wouldn't like it, I said. I wanted my punishment. I did not want to cry in front of Jamar anymore.
My mind never drifted from that direction. When my grandmother died, I sought symbols of Celtic remembrance, eventually deciding on a spiral triscele as a permanent reminder of her love and guidance. I matched the triscele two years later. Those around me joined the bandwagon of my myth: a belt buckle from dad; a book mark and candle-holder from an old college girlfriend; a small scroll banner purchased by a friend on his travels; a bracelet. Seeing the symbol gave people a sense of obligation. They bought me trinkets and knickknacks, and the triscele and I became one and the same. I buried any doubts I had about my origins in boxes as I made room for all the relics people kept giving me.
Irish-American literature offered some validation, an academically suitable method of comparison. I could hold my history up to the literary mirror and critique the similarities and differences of the reflection. I quickly realized my naivete, however, as some of my colleagues told of their reasons for taking the course. Some were on pilgrimages, seeking to understand the origins of their mysterious ancestry. Others had seen the green hills, the shantytowns or the Northeast, and needed an educational context for their mind's eye. A few enrolled to avoid good old Catholic guilt. It goes without saying that no one enrolled because it fit into their schedule.
I soon found some fundamental elements missing from my decidedly Irish background. The most glaring seems to be an absence of religion. Catholicism remains the focal point for all things Irish, the marker to which most characteristics--both legitimate and overblown--inevitably link. My grandmother didn't create a clan, didn't put anyone through Catholic school, and didn't implant any fatalist senses in her children or their offspring. She bore no heavy grief, no obligation to educate me on the falsities of wearing green on St. Paddy's Day. The more I considered the content, the more I smelled a rat.
Though I'd known (or learned to know) better, I had clung to an invented identity. As I see it now, it stems in part from the luxuries afforded to a white kid from a small town: I never had to acknowledge that I was a white kid. I had been granted the label of "normal." Only after I grew bored with the complacency and invisibility of normalcy did I undergo a crisis of identity. Only then did I seek refuge in the stereotypical signifiers conveniently available for me to cobble together a heritage.
Like a first draft of a bad term paper, I found myself faced with the (in this case somewhat embarrassing) task of revising my work. So I retraced my steps. I located the only genealogy book I knew of (ironically the one shown to me by my beloved, ink-inspiring grandmother some twenty years prior). And though it only accounts for one-fourth of my familial underpinnings, its contents helped answer my version of the Irish question.
Sadly, my mother's mother did not descend from Irish emigrants. My people did not flee famine or tyranny, did not receive new names at Ellis Island, and did not fortify the strands of the burgeoning urban-American fabric. Members of my family tilled eastern soils in the 17th century, then taught school in the Midwest until, well, now. Turns out I'm more American than America itself. We come from very humble origins that boast pre-Revolution roots. Family lore has it that some of us even helped dumped tea into Boston Harbor.
And so I'm forced to again acknowledge that the truth remains elusive, complicated, and layered. The privileges of not having to deal with racial and ethnic identity (or my social standing, gender, age, ability, or sexual preference) left me with a desire to "fit in" to the ethnic landscape around me. "America is a land of immigrants," the post-racial zealotous overture would have me believe, but I've found it neither rings true nor makes tracing the history of those immigrants any easier.
I'm reminded that the truth is only what one believes it to be. And in just ten years' time, I've managed to invent a history, sell it to those around me, print it on the landscape of my body, and now admit I was wrong. But these actions, these choices, that mindset, they are still who I am. And that makes them true.
(At this point, part of me wants to revisit the issue of my own whiteness and how it gives me the liberty to vacillate between otherwise rigid social, cultural, and ethnic confines without enduring alienation or exile or shame. But if I did, you might think I was making up the truth again.)
