“You just can’t be sure what you’ll find when looking at Latino DNA,” Bennett said to me. “I mean, really, it’s just a genetic crapshoot.”
For a myriad of reasons, many Latino-Americans can’t trace their roots beyond their parents and grandparents. For one, we’d have to travel back to our parents’ respective countries of origin, and once there it’s likely that we’ll hit major roadblocks because the definitions of race throughout Latin America are often radically different from those here in the United States.
Here, the notion of race is static and forced; in Latin America, it’s fluid. Our parents could live for decades as one race in their countries of origin and become Black or Other once they immigrate to the United States, with or without their consent. When we, the second generationers, come into some kind of consciousness, we are expected to choose sides or risk being labeled sellouts or seen as being out of touch with the cultural community. You’re either all one thing or nada here.
To borrow a phrase carried over from the last century, “one drop,” Americans are categorized as Black if they have any African ancestry. On the island of the Dominican Republic, for instance, one can make a sick joke that it’s quite the opposite. If you are born with a drop of European blood, you’re white. If that isn’t confusing enough for someone raised in America, a person in D.R. can fit into several different categories throughout a lifetime. Money can also play a role in how one chooses to identify and how one is perceived. Throughout Latin America, racial and economic hierarchies are entangled: The higher you climb up the economic and social ladder, the whiter you become.
What we learn at school can’t possibly foster a sense of pride in our heritage and the parts of our selves that aren’t visibly European. If Latino-Americans accept what we’re taught about our history as truth, then the indigenous peoples of the Americas were godless primitives given salvation by the grace of missionaries and their other European benefactors. And if we believe what we’re taught about African history in elementary and high school every February, then we have to buy a version of the story that omits the complex and rich narrative of the transatlantic slavery experience. The truth is usually left for us to hunt and gather independently, if we are so inclined.
* * *
“Why do you need me for this?” Dad asks, cutting me off. “I know where I come from, and you’re American, so why do you even care?” Djali and I say nothing but smile knowingly at each other. Dad left himself open for a barrage of disses we would have hurled at him had I not needed VIP access to the historical book he carries within his genes. Given that he has the upper hand, I’m going to try my best to answer his questions in a way that won’t result in yet another screaming match. Trying to hip Dad to the overarching “why” is like trying to explain civil rights to Clayton Bigsby, Dave Chappelle’s blind, Black white-supremacist character: It’s stupid complicated.
Being right or winning an argument with me is never Dad’s main objective. Pissing me off and embarrassing me in public is what makes him happier than a dog with a bone. Dad is sitting across from me, smiling, knowing that he has something I want so badly he can get away with saying almost anything today, and I’ll just sit here and take the punches while my heart races out of my chest.
Something else is even more bewildering about Dad than the crazy shit he says: his actions. One of his favorite people in the ’hood is a West African woman, and his tennis buddies are mostly Dominicans similar to those he used to antagonize a couple of decades earlier. He lives for my daughter, Djali, who is half Black-American, despite threatening to cut me off back in the day if I even thought of dating a Black man. And Dad likes my husband, Sacha, whose mother is Haitian and father was Black-American, more than he likes me.
I know it’s borderline nauseating to write that my husband is my best friend, but I don’t know how else to put it. We started dating in 2003, nearly a decade after meeting each other at a Spike Lee party in Brooklyn. Sacha, a tall and painfully shy Queens native, was already writing and editing his own newspaper back then, and I was performing poetry while transitioning into journalism. He offered me my first big break—interviewing MC Lyte for his magazine, Beat Down—which I totally botched. Throughout, Sacha and I remained great acquaintances, reconnecting several years later when he became my editor at another magazine. We started dating soon after I invited him to submit an article about a graffiti writer that was first published by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University for an anthology about hip-hop journalism I was editing. It didn’t take long for us to fall in love. During the few times we split, Dad always encouraged me to give it another chance. “Believe me, I know I wasn’t too good a husband,” he told me one afternoon during lunch, “but that guy, dat guy is good to you and better to Djali than her own fath’a.” On one of those rare occasions, I listened to Dad. I’m glad I did.
I drink another whole cup of café con leche, contemplating how best to win Dad over. How can I begin to explain how empowering it is for us as a collective to explore and define our own selves to him? Dad’s identity, or lack thereof, hasn’t tortured him as much as it has me all these years. Alice walks in and joins us at the table. While Dad doesn’t get it, curiously enough, she does.
“Wouldn’t it be interesting for Dad to take an ancestral DNA test?” I ask her.
“I wonder if Finns have Mongolian blood because of our eyes and high cheekbones,” Alice says. “Even those ‘white’ boxes on the census don’t seem right to me.” Alice doesn’t consider herself white but, rather, Finnish and European, interchangeably.
* * *
Hip-hop—my participation in the culture as a magazine editor, critic, and documentary filmmaker—has been the proverbial key that’s opened the door for me to roam this breathtaking planet. And traveling, when my racial origins almost always come up, has reinforced my desire to know where my ancestors came from, beyond my parents’ homeland. When I was a kid and didn’t fit into Dad’s warped bubble, and his screwed-up worldview ended up being a springboard for my own curiosity. Traveling further ingrained my desire to connect to a place other than an island that is slightly older, in a New World way, than the United States, especially after I found characteristics of my face in the faces of the people in my global community.
Admittedly, I’m not the best traveler. I drink the tap water that I’m cautioned will give me Ebola or impregnate me with an eight-pound baby worm. I love buying travel books but rarely crack them open until I’m on my way back home. I don’t take malaria medicine for more than two days, if that, because it makes me crazy-cranky. I go into areas I’m warned are dangerous; lucky for me, they often turn out not to be. I give away my first-aid supplies at the beginning rather than the end of my stays. And I’ve gotten into arguments—none provoked, I swear—with third-world policemen who make our own look like peacemongers.
Thank Buddha, Jesus, and Olofi that I possess three gifts that oftentimes cancel out my vices. I pick up languages with relative ease. I can blend in to the point of passing for a local or, if I’m dressed like a Westerner, a returning expatriate. Following my intuition has, above all else, saved my ass more than once.
The first time I visited Sierra Leone was on a preproduction trip for my documentary Bling: A Planet Rock, about American hip-hop’s obsession with diamonds and its intersection with the country’s decade-long conflict. My mission in Sierra Leone, the small West African country partially settled by repatriated freed North American slaves, was to connect with the hip-hop community there. I also wanted to hear firsthand accounts of the conflict from anyone who’d talk to me, from all sides of the divide. Just as important, I wanted to go out and experience my surroundings and see where my spirit would take me if I went with the flow.
An acquaintance who visited the country regularly warned me beforehand that I might be called “white woman.” Hearing that was a shock to my system, especially because white privilege was something I’d never experienced in the United States,
where I’ve been classified racially as an Other. He told me to brace myself, because allusions to whiteness had been made about his own light complexion despite him being an internationally renowned Black-American actor. I waited patiently for the subject of my race to come up. Somehow, it always does.
Our guide sort of brought it up in the truck after I mushed his face away from mine. He explained that he couldn’t help trying to kiss me because I looked so much like his Brazilian ex-girlfriend.
Several days later, when I was venturing downtown to a beyond chaotic street in Freetown, it came up again.
“Ey, how de body?” said a local on lunch break from laying pavement under the intense African sun.
“De body fine-fine,” I responded to the man’s greeting in Krio.
“Where you from?”
“New York City.”
“I mean where you from?” he said.
“Oh, yes. My parents are from the Dominican Republic, an island in the Caribbean. Why you ask?” I wondered why he singled me out. I wasn’t the only foreigner in the group.
“I had a feeling you were mixed, maybe Italian and Salone,” he said, “or maybe Lebanese, but then you would not be here.” The man handed the clerk a card from the wall behind him so I could buy what I was there for, more cell phone credit. “There is a shade in you face that is familiar.”
The man was right. If I were Lebanese, I probably wouldn’t have been here. Freetown isn’t exactly a melting pot. The Lebanese and Chinese communities lived in almost independent homogeneous states within the city, equipped with their own restaurants, neighborhoods, and nightclubs. The Italians had also left their mark here, as missionaries and doctors came over to volunteer during and after the conflict.
There was a subtext in the words “shade” and “familiar” that were spiritual to me. Perhaps he felt something spectral, like we do back home in New York City, throughout the Caribbean, and in South America. Maybe what he saw was the shadow of the africana I often dreamt about as a child, or one of my spiritual guides walking with me.
Being “read” by fortune tellers, self-professed seers, and spiritual people is another event that occurs frequently when I travel, be it at home or abroad.
“I have had a feeling since I arrived,” I told the man, “this place is so familiar—the food, the rhythm of life and music, the culture.”
“Everything started here in Africa, you know,” he said.
“It doesn’t feel so far away in my memory,” I said.
Maria taught me to believe in the power dreams, and Casimiro in spiritual guides and destiny, when I was still a teenager. And today, my spiritual self still identifies with the mythos, the transcendent qualities found in Jewish Kabbalah, Sufi Islam, Indigenous and West African mysticism and religion. My rational self is drawn by the potential of ancestral DNA testing—the logos—to work in tandem with the incorporeal to help us make sense of our whole selves.
I ask Bennett if he can dig where I’m coming from.
“Well, as a guy who believes in evolution and metaphysics, I don’t ascribe to that belief,” he says, “but I have spoken to about a hundred people who have had experiences similar to those you speak of.”
“What do you attribute that to?” I ask.
“I cannot explain why some people have that pull, but,” he says, “you should look into the concept of gilgul neshamot—that may provide you with some answers.”
Part of my journey will be to explore whether not the mythos and logos can jive holistically on this genetic mission.
* * *
I know I’ll lose Dad if I delve too deep into the whole mythos versus logos thing, so I digress.
“Well. I’m interested in finding out more about where our people came from,” I say, “before they went to the Dominican Republic.”
“Are you sure you’re not trying to see if I have any more kids out there?” Dad asks. He isn’t buying my sudden interest in his family. “Or are you just trying to find if I’m from Matanga, like on dose shows that the president’s friend hosts?” Inexplicably, Dad uses the word “Matanga” when referring to Africa.
“That’s a good point,” I say. “Yes, President Obama’s friend has created a show where he traces the ancestral origins and genealogy of important Black-Americans, many times identifying their tribal affiliations.”
Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has successfully bridged popular culture with science since 2006, with his PBS miniseries African American Lives, followed by its sequel, African American Lives 2, in 2008, and on other shows. In African American Lives, he traced the ancestral lineages of prominent Black Americans by conducting ancestral DNA tests and isolating his subject’s direct maternal and paternal lineages.
“I feel like, in a way, we have something in common with Don Cheadle, that actor who was in Ocean’s 11,” I tell Dad. Cheadle discovered that he had a paternal linkage to the Chickasaw Indians through slavery. Although the Chickasaw freed their slaves in 1866, they were not offered citizenship in the Chickasaw nation. And because the Indigenous-American communities governed themselves, Cheadle’s paternal ancestors weren’t recognized as American citizens, either. The Chickasaw Freedmen remained stateless, in limbo—en el aire—for decades.
“Tha’s so terrible,” Dad says. “This country has been unfair to many different people.”
He’s finally starting to get it. I explain that many of us are finding ourselves in similar situations. American-born Latinos from dozens of countries such as Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Honduras, and many others, are marginalized and made to feel like they cannot claim this country as their own. What’s worse is that many of us are rejected as inauthentic and called gringos when visiting our parents’ countries of origin.
“Last time I was in Santo Domingo, this guy said I was almost a Dominican—I don’t even know what that means,” I tell Dad.
“I see,” he says. “All right, let’s do the test, already.”
“The ancestral DNA kits are on my kitchen counter,” I say. “Let’s go there ahora.” He rolls his eyes.
I don’t want to waste any more time now that Dad is on the road to being sort of healthy and finally believes that I won’t draw blood or reveal his results on some smutty talk show like Maury.
Once we’re home, I tear open the ancestral DNA kits Bennett sent us. The contents are quite underwhelming, especially to Dad. There are no syringes or surgical gloves. Each kit consists of two individually wrapped cheek scrapers that look like long Q-tips without cotton swabs. There are two tiny solution-filled vials to place the samples in. There’s some paperwork and instructions on how to use the kits, and a small padded self-addressed envelope to Family Tree DNA’s world headquarters in Houston, Texas.
I go first. I scrape the insides of both cheeks as Dad watches, wearing a deadpan expression. Our kits are identical, but the information we will receive is slightly different. Because I’m a woman, Bennett tells me beforehand, I will be taking an mtDNA Plus test.
The processing of my mitochondrial DNA kit will underscore the mutations, or differences, resulting in the designation of my haplogroup, or genetic population group. When the results are in, I’ll be notified by email to visit my profile page on Family Tree DNA’s website. There, I’ll be able to read information about my direct maternal ancestry and consult Bennett for further analysis.
The only genetic information I’ll be able to receive is my direct maternal ancestry. Because Dad is a man and mothers pass their mitochondria to their daughters and their sons, we’ll be able to discover his direct maternal ancestry and more. We ordered the mtDNA Plus Y-DNA Plus test for Dad because men inherit something else women do not—the Y chromosome, unchanged—from their fathers. This will allow me to obtain genetic information about Dad’s direct paternal lineage.
My father will also be able to confirm whether he has Jewish ancestry, which is passed down through mothers. Bennett has offered to provide further analysis, he say
s, to confirm any suspicions we may have about Dad’s background.
After Dad takes the test, I notice a look on his face I’ve rarely seen: melancholy. He looks as if he’s wandering miles and miles within his own mind, even more than he did at the hospital before his surgery.
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
“Nothing,” he says. “I just need to take a nap.”
I get the feeling that this, our cosmic trip, is about to go into warp drive, and there’s only looking back. I’m thinking Dad may already have regretted his decision to join me.
I’ve been told that people don’t change after forty, but I don’t think that’s true. Dad is in his late sixties and, admittedly, has already come a long way in the last ten-plus years. And yet, there’s so much I don’t know about him. I wonder if and how the results, whatever they turn out to be, will reveal how Dad arrived at his notions about race and identity.
I never quite understood it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Things Come Together
One never knows anything about one’s father. A father . . . is a passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a way out.
—ROBERT BOLAÑO, 2666
THE RESULTS ARE TRICKLING IN.
Dad, Bennett says, is of Semitic descent on his father’s dad’s side: haplogroup J2.
“Doesn’t that mean my father descends from Sephardic Jews on his direct paternal line?”
“There was a chance, because many Arabs and Jews fall into the J2 haplogroup, but ultimately, no,” says Bennett. “That was the very first thing I checked for. We reviewed his entire Y-37 DNA sequence and compared his results with the massive Jewish database we sit on, and there were no matches.”
Bird of Paradise Page 17
