What does it mean to engage with your history?
I’ve been doing the long drawn out middle aged work of examining the patterns of my twenties and thirties, a potentially toe-curling experience of cringe when viewed through the grounding reality of day-to-day adulthood. Of revisiting things long wished away; regrets and lessons, but successes not fully claimed as well. There’s a lot to mine for wealth if you want to, if you can accept facing up to both shame and accomplishment without getting swamped by either.
There’s further back work to be done here too, often without an easily identifiable social container to guide you. Here in New Zealand this kind of exploration often comes about through learning your mihi pepeha; where you come from, your genealogy, your whakapapa and connections to ancestors and legacies.
I remember standing to give my first pepeha at reo class one Wednesday evening and being overcome with a crashing silence about what I could say. How is it that I got into my 40s and can barely string together the names of my grandparents, to say nothing of which corners of the globe my family once inhabited. The severing of connection to history and lineage can run deep in neoliberal western culture where it’s often all about personal choices in this one lifetime.
The Measure of My Blood is a new collection of art, still in the process of creation, by my wife Meredith Marsone, inspired by years of rubbing away at this and other questions about identity: We are all the intertwined products of woven ethnicities and histories. Today I can tell you that the Norse-Scandinavian thread of my Viking forebears met and mixed with the river of my ancestry from the Saxons and the Scotts. In this generation it has woven with Māori and other Anglo-Saxon threads. In the mix of all that vibrance, which aspects do I get to call home?
Many of us at some point come to wrestle with questions about what our histories mean for our choices today. What we get to keep, what gets backgrounded, and what gets passed on. For me this is an ongoing narrative that ignites the past where once it was dark and distant. Parts of me that were rejected get justice and a worthy place in my story.
The Measure of My Blood is an invitation for others to consider what is in their history, and what that all means for their legacy.
cjG
#mygroundtruth
For more of Carsten’s writing visit www.mygroundtruth.com