In 2002, my mother Carolyn James (1936–2023) and I traveled to Berlin, to Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, to Danzig, to Suwalki, to Warsaw, and to Auschwitz in search of our ancestors and relatives. This essay, from 2002, reflects on what I, a descendant of these lands but also of Africa, found.

There is a different view of Europe when you look at it as if it were North.  The month I spent this spring crisscrossing the continent was not my first encounter with semi-post-imperial Europe as an African.  But it was definitely the first time I was traveling to find my way home. 

The trip was something my mom had been dreaming of for a long time — back through months of Saturdays we spent tracing the pathways of our family before microfilm machines or hitchhiking her amazing record-keeping on my computer skills.  I inherited or learned the need for detail, for stories, for a map to the past, and threw in history, sociology, and mysticism. 

I needed these tools not just to assist my mother’s effort to create an almost-encyclopedic genealogy of both sides of my family, but to truly get a handle on what I inherited from the past.  Jewish, Polish, German, and African; Kabbalah and animism, goddess and Christ; resistances and fascisms: by high school I would summarize my background and then add “Most of them one of wanted to kill each other.”  When you know your most intimate identities are a battlefield, walking about on disputed territory is almost a sacred experience — pushing these forces out of your head and into history. 

***

Two years ago, visiting my Alaska Native friend who is a college student in Brussels, I came across the park monument to the colonization of Central Africa.  There was no update since the days of imperial triumphalism, and the chiseled statement to eternity praised the service rendered by the Belgians who had gone forth to civilize the Africans.  The truth of severed hands, brutal whippings and eight million dead Congolese was nowhere to be found.  Alone, beneath a canopy of green trees, I provided an editorial of spit to the surface of lies. 

Colonialism means a tiny nation like Belgium or the Netherlands has a capital with palatial luxuries.  It means dirt roads in Kinshasa and submerged ring highways in Brussels.  It means Belgian killers have monuments and the Congolese dead have unmarked graves.  Neocolonialism means something crueler — it means watching your hopes fall before firing squads, slaves branded with an iron that mockingly reads “Black Power”, CIA agents ruling with suitcases of cash.  “If I am killed, it will be because a White has armed a Black,” said the first Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who foresaw his own death at the hands of the West.  Belgian crowds line up to pay for Raoul Peck’s film of his life, but their government lines up the European Union against reparations.  Neocolonialism also means such chaos, such dispossession, such violence, that Congolese become refugees in, of all places, Belgium. 

In German eyes, I became a refugee too.  At least in the eyes of our translator, a well-dressed conservative from Bavaria.  He spoke, privately, in racial code words to my mom.  I appeared to be “an asylum seeker” and therefore “threatening”.  Here I was, walking on the lands tended by my ancestors, feeling secure in my home half a world away, and I was being seen as desperate to sneak in, to steal a share of what others were so sure is not mine.  My mother confided that our interpreter was himself afraid of me — even knowing why I was there. 

The German concept of asylum is unique.  It starts with the Pan-European, or perhaps white, confidence of living in a civilization envied by the world.  Beyond that is the elevation of German ethnic identity: Germany is just 131 years old, but is the child of a string of empires.  These left an archipelago of “orphaned communities” across Eastern Europe — pockets of ethnic Germans from the Baltic to the Black Sea.  They are alternately used as a source of homogenous immigrants (encouraged to “come home”) and as outposts of German power (from invasions to investments).  The European Union treaties made Western Europeans effectively equal to German citizens.  For the rest of the world, the only entryway is asylum.  Seven million asylees live in Germany without political rights, and even their children will not be born into citizenship.  Of course, I meet the German ethnicity requirement, but for those who meet me I’m one generation too Black. 

The next time others’ definitions of me intruded, I was in a Polish Jewish graveyard.  For all I know, we were the first Rubensteins or Gottliebs to come back to the Suwalki Jewish cemetery, a place that was wrecked by nazis and their allies during the occupation. 

Even cleaned up, it was a hard place to be in.  The emotional work was byzantine.  I wished I could read the Hebrew inscriptions.  I pressed my hand against the wall of broken gravestones that had been cemented together as a memorial by the town’s Polish gentile survivors.  According to the records we had checked, none of Suwalki’s Jews survived the Shoah.  My body was off-balance: I was having the worst allergy attack of my life … I think even my sinuses were compelling me to experience inescapable physically estrangement.  It was an important, if overwhelming, gift. 

But our Lithuanian/Polish interpreter pulled me aside for a minute just then, as my mother too was examining the stones.  He was polite, professional and (I think) did not fear me.  But he did have questions: was this woman my mother-in-law? My mind flashed to my lover in Chicago, also Polish — she has called me “mi paisano” occasionally since we told each other of our ancestry.  “No,” I answered.  “Are you adopted?” “No, [pause] she’s my birth mother,” — I had searched for the word that would be unambiguous and translate easily.  “Your birth mother?” “Yes.”

I could return to being dizzy and overwhelmed.  His was an old conversation for me — the confusion of those whose categories are blurred by the multiracial, who find more and less polite ways to ask “What are you?”  Keeping myself in one, multicolored piece give way again to viewing the ruins of this solitary ancestral community. 

My allergies physically seized me … they were carrying me and throwing me out.  This was not somewhere I could linger, fall in love with, enjoy the beauty of.  Walking three blocks to a restaurant that night proved insufferable — we ate behind the glass of our hotel’s cafe as I battled my own breath for control. 

Over dinner and between sneezes, I read Edward Said’s Covering Islam, tracing the media’s few of 1 billion human beings as a single entity, “Islam”, with shared personal characteristics and a common political project.  Beneath and all around me, Jews and Poles had died trapped within a similar image, a “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” to destroy Germany, the pinnacle of civilization. 

As an American in a world of empire, as a citizen of the West — whose lenses frame world history, as a Jew on a planet with a militarized Israel, I have obligations to understand what is done under the banner of my clashing civilization.  I was reading to scratch my away from the image of the confrontation of faceless billions, to reveal the reality of toxic graveyards I might never visit. 

I slept fitfully that night, but slept for 11 hours.  I awoke feeling that this was a purposeful experience.  That something needed to tie me to a bed and explain to me over and over again what it meant to become a refugee from this place.  That you could see or know anything about it — but you just can’t stay here.  Haunted by genocide, it was pushing us away.  There was no complete picture of justice without refuge for my people. 

***

My history, my skin, my body crosscut empires — I am an exile with a passport, a prisoner of safety, and a vulnerable free spirit.  My people invade my people, string them from nooses, and scratch out their languages.  Each line of power divides me; each turn of the screw tears me apart, like a single creature trapped in the mirror shards of a kaleidoscope.  I strive to pull my broken image together.  I pull firmly to turn the knobs of power.  I rely on the provisional hope that straining toward my own wholeness can make the image of the world less fragmentary as well.