My Own Story

We enter into a family story, and then other stories based on our tribal clans, on tribal towns and nations, lands, countries, planetary systems and universes. Yet we each have our own individual stories to tell.                                                                                                          Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir 

When I read these lines from Joy Harjo’s memoir, they made me think of James Joyce’s description of what 6 year old Stephen Daedalus, the semi-autobiographical character in his novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wrote in his textbook:  

Stephen Daedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe  

Confused and lonely at boarding school, he is trying to define his place in the world.  

Perhaps neither of these, the lines I just read and the ones I remembered from a college English class I took almost 60 years ago, would have resonated as much as they did if I weren’t, even now, thinking about my own story, my own place in the world. 

As I was reading the election news, I wondered once again about the people who have embraced MAGA. Part of me understands that they are angry with a world rapidly changing around them, which they cannot control, and which threatens the truths of their gender/racial/religious superiority. But I can’t put myself in their place. The chasm is too wide. And then I wonder, if I had not been born into a middle-class Jewish family in New Yok City, had not grown up seeing pictures of FDR and JFK on my grandfather’s bookcase, and had not attended a liberal arts college in the ‘60’s, who would I be now?  

How much of my “own” story is my family and tribal story? I fought against much of what I perceived as the narrowness of my upbringing, and yet it was that upbringing that gave me the strength and self-confidence to forge a new sense of self. At lunch the other day, friends and I talked about the difference between “where we’re from” and “where we live now.” We never really leave the former behind.