On the Question of Identity

Anne Pia Guest Blog

The ancestors are calling for attention.

Quite a time back, my youngest daughter sent a sample of her DNA for testing in order to find out more about her ethnicity. Having established that she is solidly Mediterranean… mainly Italian and Spanish, she encouraged me to do likewise. My results arrived a week ago with some surprises… connections to the Middle East had not been on my radar at all.

This set me thinking about my unexplained fascination with feminist Middle Eastern writing, the way music played on an oud transports me, and how the food of the Levant, yoghurts studded with pomegranates. skewered meats, breads of every shape and size and all the varieties of humus you can imagine send me into a vortex of food lust. The mere sight of a well-cooked chickpea has me salivating. And that is possibly why, when I am not cooking up a storm of conchiglioni or a medley of pesci fritti alla romana with some blistered fried silvery sage leaves, my next food choices always come from a book of recipes from the Middle East.

I have just returned from a retreat on Holy Isle, near Arran, led by the monastics from Plum Village in southwestern France. Coincidentally, to my astonishment, much was made of the link with ancestors; and I was reminded too of Hilary Mantel’s writing and the strong emphasis she put on the spirits and ghosts of our forbearers that we live with each day…  that they are ever present, listening at the door.

What I take from this conflation of events is the many civilisations, maybe as far back as the prophets themselves, the lives and existences which make up who we are; dictating our life choices, our impulses, our sexual preferences and energies, and the gender we choose to define ourselves by. So many cultures, practices and civilisations are present in us right now. They are active within our richly diverse DNA.  We have more to draw on than we think.

For most of us attending that retreat, many difficult issues arose in those four days. I hadn’t intended to be unable to feel anything but disgust at my father who was drunk, often abusive and usually absent. The mere mention of whom churned up a cold anger, even when it was suggested that I consider him tenderly as a little boy.

I hadn’t intended to weep uncontrollably when a mother stood up and told us she wasn’t sure how best to mother her daughter who is physically disabled and suffers as much mental anguish as she does bodily pain. Because almost every day of my own life, even though my daughter is nearing middle age, that pain is like a sleeping tiger within me.

And I hadn’t accounted ever for a life, always looking to be held…to be made to feel safe… to feel able to rest, because never once did I feel safe as a child.

But there is a glory in all of this lack of fixedness, this uncertainty, this unreliability that has defined my life.  From an early age, and on through my life, I encountered, processed and confronted the world from the standpoint of difference and otherness.

While I watched and observed what appeared to be order and conformity in the lives of my peers, I seemed to float from thing to thing. While they were “formed” within a secure family structure, life was settled and had a pattern consistent with that of neighbours, others in the church, in the street or next door, for me, there were no norms. Ultimately what wonderful freedom.

Standing then on the threshold of my adult life, I had so much to choose from; able to work out what I wanted, who and how I would love, the way I would present in the world and what my lifestyle would be. Who would I emulate? What did I value?  And what, if any, were my taboos?

With hundreds of years, of civilisations, of lifestyles within my blood and from the wellspring of the absence of parameters, of precepts of not feeling rooted, I have summoned, pieced together my own lifestyle… ultimately not without struggle, defining my own sexuality; creating safety, and making those around me feel love my rough, raw way and not in any way I had experience of. 

For many people, there is a set order to society; a set way to live a life. I had none of that. My life guides were how I understood what I observed and what I carried from those who had existed before me. I was drawn to others who seemed unfixed like me… fascinated by difference.

To make a living while being constantly drawn to and spellbound by non-conformity, I chose conformity. But that sense of moral freedom, of constant choice about how to live and who to be, has always run deep.

As part of these generations living in the twenty-first century, I am happy to witness challenges and to be disruptive… at times subversive. I am proud of my daughters who as modern women have challenged norms, and questioned values and conformity. Irrespective of age, as a society, more than ever, we increasingly take responsibility for ourselves… self-declaring, self-defining, self-directing in terms of sexuality and gender.

Ultimately creating an identity that is authentic.

The old order I think, is hard to shift. But I am joyful at its fragmentation. And consistent with our ancestors maybe as far back as from ancient Rome, or Persia, I see myself as the inventor and architect of , as solely responsible good or bad, for each day of my own existence.

ANNE PIA