Roots Prompt – Real or Imagined?

Hidden Roots – Personal History – Nature Prompt Last week of December

Do you feel spiritual, angry, or neglected when you see roots?

[1] Dr. Preeti Singh, ‘Are you Proud of your Roots?’, Reciprocal’, Medium, December, 2022

Reader Response

Since Ireland has such a history with its neighbour Great Britain, (or do I mean, England?), I find myself at odds with my heritage. Not through choice, you will understand, but through an accident of birth.

Coming to terms

I must come to terms with being a descendant of the Irish, and yet wearing the tag, ‘English’. No amount of pretense would convince you that I am Welsh or indeed, Scottish. My accent (a west London accent) instantly betrays me. Of course, if you know your history, perhaps you will call me a Celtic.

So what?

Well, I suppose this is diaspora. A term bandied about in academic circles. I must embrace this part of myself that will always feel orphaned, an outsider, and Other, a term coined by Edward Said in his work, Orientalism, 1978.

What does this mean?

I am forever and always a bastard. What an ugly term. But it serves its purpose. I always find that word strangely onomatopoeiac. I am forever and always on the outside. I am neither one nor the other. And it is the same with my privileged sounding west London accent. I am neither the one nor the other; neither privileged nor its opposite.

What is privilege?

Depending on your perspective, privilege may be time or money, or even environment. Currently, I have a little of all three. Perhaps you envy me.

Is it Relative?

But I have learned something. Things are relative to experience. Having grown up in a wealthy area, I have found that, even though I thought my experiences were difficult, finding work after failing my exams due to a difficult period in my life, despite being in the top group academically, they were less so than I imagined, purely by dint of the area I lived in. In this area, it seems, there were more opportunities.

Proud moments

Therefore, yes, I am proud. I am deeply proud of growing up in the leafy, energetic part of London that I grew up in, and I am proud of my roots in that sense. Being the daughter of parents who did not see colour, I grew up unaware of it, until somebody pointed it out. Living in such beautiful surroundings, I was unaware that others lived in less desirable spaces.

I was also unaware that I was in the least bit poverty-stricken, until someone at my girls’ school pointed it out with horror, saying

“You live in a council house”

In disgust.

Projection

One thing I have learnt, dear reader, at university studying the humanities (so, history, philosophy, language, literature, art, poetry, religion, etc.), which, incidentally, I paid for myself with my job as a bookseller, is that we live with this thing called projection. We all live with it, and there is nothing whatsoever we can do about it.

What I think about my roots

Therefore, it doesn’t matter what I think because, as Roland Barthes pointed, out in his famous essay, ‘The death of the author’, and as a story teller who wrote the Biblical parable of the rider on the horse observed before that, it is the reader, or observer that is in charge of what is written. As soon as we write or act we are observed through a lens or judged by somebody as right or wrong, good or bad, wealthy, or poor.

This surely makes roots something that lie beneath the surface, as obscure as the fact that it turns out from a DNA result that my mother is 90% Jewish, and I still have no idea where my father was born.

A Happy Ending?

Which suggests that we all came from one root, and we are merely branches of the same tree that will soar if we are given light, and love and nourishment.

Take a look at this story with some insightful ideas to help you manage anxiety. A real gem of a story from a writer on ‘Reciprocal’ : Carmellita

Follow that with this story and prompt this week from another ‘Reciprocal’ writer and our editor, Dr. Preeti Singh :

Follow that with this adventure around history from Madelyn :

And finally, this one all about the writing journey on Medium from Sahil Patel, an open and honest writer:

Happy holidays 🎄🌲🏡

Hermione. X