Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family

Writing the Black Family Home

78 Writing the Black Family Home faith adiele As a memoirist, I am called to track down, research, and write about family members. As an African, I am wired to define family in the broadest, ever-widening sense—nuclear, extended, ancestral, clan, village, region, tribe/ethnicity, nation, continent, race, gender. As the female descendant of Finnish and Swedish villagers who immigrated to America then migrated west, the descendant of Nigerian villagers who stayed home and got colonized for their trouble, I am heir to family-group histories that have been at best underrepresented , at worst misrepresented. My job is to wield memoir as the corrective . Before my birth, my white family pressured my mother to dispose of me, a mixed-race fetus. They couldn’t have known that I would spring from the womb ready to exhume and engrave our various family groups onto history, but they sensed I was trouble. becoming After my narrow escape, I grew up in exile, separate from the clan. In rural America, Mummi, my Finnish grandmother, and I sat at table , baking and crafting, while she tallied family members lost. It was costly: the process of Immigrating and Migrating and Becoming . Costly becoming Amerikkalainen and middle class. I learned we should remember family pioneers, all of them, though the ones who didn’t survive the Becoming didn’t get ink. Their names were whispered , not inscribed in family albums, their pictures few. I didn’t yet 79 Writing the Black Family Home know that my own un-photographed birth was one such whisper, that Mummi as she prepped me was herself caught between two erasures—her father declared dead and disappeared to a mental institution for forty years, her daughter declared wed but disappeared to a home for unwed mothers, secret for forty years as well. Across the ocean, the father I’d never met had adopted the opposite strategy: silence. His reticence began in the late 1960s, during the bloody pogroms against our tribe. In the last letter we received before Nigeria descended into civil war, when I was three, he included rare family detail: I find it extremely uncomfortable to narrate my story regarding the mass killing of Easterners in Northern Nigeria. The Northerners just liquidated all Easterners living in the North and of course I lost a score of relatives there. . . . You remember that I used to have eight sisters and one brother. Two of my sisters plus my mother plus my father are all dead. After four years of silence, we thought he too was dead. But finally , in the summer of 1971, he resurfaced. After writing several detailed letters about the war that we never received, he conceded to the nation -state, declaring his intention to start forgetting: [M]y monthly pay can hardly sustain the large dependents I have acquired as a result of the civil war (orphans, cripples and all sorts) all for a week! . . . The degree of damage and devastation is so great and so overwhelming that whatever is being done is only a drop in a limitless ocean! . . . We lost quite a number of dear ones to air-raids, bullets and shelling! Tunde died. Mercy died . . . Quite a number of our “clan” passed away and it is quite a torture to remember them and I would rather let the sleeping dogs lie (if I can help it). I find it quite unbearable at times to have to recall the tragedies we had to pass through and I wouldn’t be doing Faith any good sending a catalogue of dead relatives! When she is older it will become part of the history she will have to piece together, I suppose. 80 Adiele Unbearable to have to recall. Nonetheless, I took his charge to history seriously. At age twenty-six, I got on a plane to Nigeria, pockets stuffed with copies of his letters and little else. Nine months later, I, my mother’s only child, was now the eldest of my father’s four. Long the sole black member of my Nordic American family, I was now the sole white member of my Nigerian family . But stranger than the sudden accumulation of family were the politics of an African one. This family ran on roles and group goals, not personalities and individual desire. I was Becoming . . . a Member . Member of the powerful eldest daughters association, member of a clan that regulated our family...