The topic for October 1, 2003:
Ancestral Place
We invite your thoughts on this topic! Dicuss this topic at DiscussAncestralPlace.
[Mulubinba Moments] Ancestral places are not just old places, they are places where we can feel a connection with the generations that have gone before us. Ubirr is an Aboriginal site in the Kakadu National Park of the Northern Territory of Australia and it is truly ancient. Thanks to Bill Neidjie and his people, when I stood and gazed at the rock paintings at Ubirr I could clearly hear the voices of his ancestors from thousands of years ago...
[Fragments from Floyd] ...Nevertheless, with the quick passing of decades, I do feel some need to find roots. If I am to know ancestral places, lacking any of the old-fashioned kind, I will be happy to adopt them: this old house, this patch of land, the Blue Ridge Mountains... and the people who have loved them long before I did. If they will have me, my belonging will be here to these places, these hills, these people.
[Laughing~Knees] I came across my first copy of "The Fellowship of the Rings" from J.R.R. Tolkein's "The Lord of the Rings" in 1974, when I was fourteen, while browsing a musty old used bookstore in London with my father. He mentioned the book in passing and I picked it up, curious. Since we were headed for Germany in a few days, I decided to buy the entire set, so that I would have something to read while in Germany. Little did I know that these books would turn over my world and grab a hold of something in my heart that to this day has never left...
[Bowen Island Jounral] I think we resonate with parts of the land that live in our genes. I felt at home the moment I arrived in Saskatchewan for the first time, having never been there before. My great grandparents farmed that part of the world and as a result gave me a piece of that place for my own. Other relatives lived in Toronto, Port Perry, Grey-Bruce and a myriad of other Ontario towns and villages, some for thousands of years, some as recent immigrants.
My ancestral place is not here. As much as I love it here, the ancestral place draws me home at this time of year.
[London and the North] I'm looking out for more exhibitions on artwork coming out of Germany.
In London, tomorrow, opens the Sigmar Polke exhibition at the Tate Modern, Bankside.
In Liverpool, also at the Tate, until 11th January is a Rebecca Horne exhibition.
But it's Anselm Kiefer's work which takes me (a)back the most.
Contemporary Berlin is, for me, an ancestral place. It's where my family lived. And quite a few family members still do live there.
I have no ancestral place, to speak of — or else I have at least a dozen. My ancestors are scattered from Cork (maybe) to Tunis (maybe), depending on how far back you go, and I know of only one of their many places, a hamlet in Sicily that Gen. Patton once roared through. In my woodpile I can claim a mainland Italian as well; a Huguenot; a Welshman and some Scots; it was an Irishman who made my mother eligible for the DAR; while one of the Germans fought at Gettysburg.
I claim the northern African by way of the family name, which might mean “assassin” and might mean “soldier” and might derive from Arabic.
Years ago, an old woman in a sun-splashed, noisy London laundromat quizzed me on my ancestry and concluded, “Well, you’re all mongrels over there.” I suspected she was insulting me, but I had to acknowledge she was right. It wasn’t till later that I realized England itself had hosted enough immigrants for her to be somewhat mongrel too.
And where, I thought, is the shame in that? From my mother’s line I inherit stubbornness and a small nose; from my father’s, a measure of intelligence and big teeth. Somehow, all the ancestral grievances went to purer lines of the family. And I can love rouladen and tortellini, Beaujolais and scones without feeling it’s anything but “mom food.” I decline to learn the Tarantella: Blood is meant to be stirred, not distilled, but I draw the line at shaking it.
-- P.
[Feathers of Hope (Pica)] My Ancestral Place is sort of a guessing game (I get asked where I'm from at least once a week).
[O'DonnellWeb] When I stop to think about ancestral places, a spot on the earth where I know my forefathers walked before me, a place where I can still see what they saw, feel what they felt, connect with my past, only one place comes to mind.
Fenway Park
[alembic] Ancestral place, for my family, is a tale twice told, an imaginary land, a landscape of bones, blood run dry in the sepia-toned photograph, the rusty ridge in the scrimshaw frieze of stories we have been carrying with us from town to town, from country to country, from continent to continent ... from language to language.
[Feathers of Hope (Numenius)] A note on Ohio roots.
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