Where does your name come from? 

What story does it tell? 

Who gave it to you? 

Why?

My father was raised by simple folk in South London.
His mother May was the youngest of six children… Alf, Ernie, Edie, Rose, Aida and May.
How did we get from pearly Kings and Queens to Absalom?
Despite dutifully enunciating the vowels of that name my entire life, I hadn’t for a second questioned how such an undeniably biblical name had crossed into our family. 

Absalom is an Old Testament name meaning Father of Peace.
The son of David, he is driven into banishment for the murder of his half brother Amnon; revenge for the rape of his full sister Tamar.

I was 24 when May died. Soon after my mother huddled my brother and I into the kitchen of our family home and much to my Father’s dismay, revealed that he had been adopted.
It had been kept a secret up until that point; to protect May’s enormous heart from breaking, should we start to love her less.
My father’s view was simply: “No parent leaves a child in the gutter.” 
There was no other explanation and therefore nothing further to be shared.
So secretive and unwilling was he to show any part of himself, his need to erase history as he saw it, eclipsed our rights to know ours.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

- Dolly Parton

Turn the clock back a number of years….

It’s Christmas and my maternal grandmother Pamela Collins (Mami to her grandchildren because Grandma is only for the masses) has discovered fortified wine at a family friend’s festive drinks.
Our Mami was a royalist, not the flag waving kind but the wannabe noble blue blood type.
Queen and country, tea and little fingers, staccato declarations of t’s and g’s coming up hard at the ends of our words.
Owner of the iciest toilet seat in all of suburban Manchester, master of the art of defensive attack, (a trick so deeply woven into the fabric of my maternal ancestral line we might as well have a coat of arms made out of it), maker of ‘vegetarian’ soup crammed so full of animal inners you’d be fishing cartilage from behind your molars for days.
A proud woman. A confident woman. A righteous woman. And a manipulative woman intent on social climbing.

It transpires that my great great grandfather John Farrell had been a member of The Fenian Brotherhood; an organisation dedicated to ending British rule in Ireland. A synonym for revolutionary Irish nationalism and the precursor to what we now know as Sinn Fein.
In 1867 a group of the brothers, including John, attempted to rescue prisoners from a horse drawn police vehicle in Manchester.

“The rescuers, after an unsuccessful attempt to burst open the van with hatchets, sledgehammers and crowbars called upon Police Sergeant Brett, who was inside the van with the prisoners, to open the door. Brett refused to give up his keys. One of the rescuers placed his revolver at the keyhole of the van to blow the lock, at the same moment Brett put his eye to the keyhole to see what was happening outside. The bullet passed through his eye and lodged in his brain killing him.”

(- an excerpt from my Mother’s written account of our family history following Mami’s revelations.)

Three of the men were executed in front of an apparently enormous crowd.
John escaped and as the story goes, somehow managed to flee to America and plant new roots.
He sent a letter to his wife written with “drops of his blood” and she never heard from him again.

The shame and secrecy of our lived experiences are inevitably enveloped in the gnarly roots of our family trees.

My mother was in her 40’s herself when the fortified wine loosened Mami’s lips. She knew nothing of her own heritage, save the dressed up, palatable bits.
To use her words, my family were “dirt poor”.
Potato farmers with no education, very much an under class, they arrived in England hoping for a better life but had to settle for one of extreme poverty.
My great grandmother would beg on the streets with her eldest.

My grandmother would have done anything to wriggle out of her lower class Irish heritage and get a foot on a ladder spiralling up, and as a result so much of the truth was hidden, reframed, retold, reimagined.

As I write this I’m reeling somewhat at the enormity of it all.

How nobody thought to mention to successive generations clearly hell bent on a mission to make sense of themselves, who their real life ancestors were?
The absurdity of a 40 something year old finally calling home after years of looking elsewhere, effectively asking:

“Who am I?”

But there’s also strong emotions.
Sadness for how difficult life was for these people, compassion for their survival instincts, grief for not possessing the emotional maturity or vision or even respect to speak at length with my grandmothers whilst they were still here, and wonder for how these crazy under stories continue to inform and place responsibility on all of us, no matter how much the visible branches are pruned.

Being British it’s easy to not think of yourself as having any ancestors.
A lack of facts and hard evidence, a reliance on oral traditions of story telling, the influence of personal perspectives in the retelling of the tale.
Who in their right mind wishes to embrace Imperial roots?
As referenced in Zakia Sewell’s podcasts in the links below '“It doesn’t take too much digging to find the violence in this nation’s history.”
I think, I hope, we all know or are at least beginning to learn how those stories begin and end. 
 There are big wounds that need to be redressed and healed.
It’s going to take humility and heavy labour to acknowledge the extraction and exploitation that runs through the under story of this green and pleasant land.
That’s not a delightful undertaking, it seems all too easy to hack off the roots, upend and reestablish again elsewhere.

I’m forced now to reflect upon the delight I felt at the idea of an Irish activist ancestor, it made sense - my friends called me Activist Absalom anyway and it meant I could start to draw lines of inquiry from a place of evidence.
But it was also convenient. It fitted a narrative.

I suppose my journey to far flung places in search of depth, meaning and answers has really come full circle of late;
Lockdown has planted my wanderlust feet and made me face some uncomfortable truths about what it is I’ve been looking for and how easy it’s been to take only what suits.

Looking back and understanding the past is doubtless important. Knowing who you are seems essential these days.
For certain, it’s given some answers to a few of my most pressing whys.
But the search for identity can easily become another vast rabbit hole to disappear into, yet another activity and distraction away from the truth of the now.
If I’m brutally honest, I am left with sadness about how much shame and secrecy has plagued all branches of my family tree.
Digging into the understory and discovering more of the truth of who I am, the challenges my family faced beyond the acceptable layer presented to the world has felt like grieving.
For what so very nearly got lost, for time wasted, for that which will never be told, and for that which feels like it will never be healed.

Perhaps what is required now, instead of a search for identity is a place based response.

I like the vision for what an understanding of identity could become.
How each of us can reimagine a radically alternative future, one that leaves our children with a sense of what desperately needs to be rebuilt and how.
One that honours the past but also centres the land, our present and resolutely takes constructive steps forward.
One that asks us all to slow down, open ourselves to listening attentively to each others stories so that future generations grow up not just with a strong sense of who they are but more importantly - a commitment to who they can and should become. 

I think this is really why I have become a story teller.

In my mother’s written account of our family history there is a section on Mary Ellen Farrell, John’s daughter who came to England.

“She met and married a Scotsman in the vain hope he would rescue her from the same grinding poverty.
He was in fact a drunk and a womaniser who she grew to hate.
She had five children with him, two twin boys who died at a very early age and whose names are unknown, Frank, John and Thomas who also died aged eight of malnutrition, an event that was to be Mary Ellen’s lasting sorrow.
She recalled giving birth to John while her husband lay drunk under the bed.
It was a relief to Mary Ellen when her husband also disappeared out of her life and later on hearing of his death she fell on her knees and cried,

“Thank God I am rid of him.”

I’m laughing. Here I can see the humour which has always ran through the under story of our family.
For that, I am truly thankful.

I hope you enjoy this month’s Creative Muse.

Next month I’ll be taking a break from writing it and handing over to Ana Muriel for a few months.

Much love to you all and thank you for being here,

Naomi x

 What is your Understory?

This new moon we invite you to explore your roots with us:

What is your name?

What does it mean?

Where does it come from?

Who gave you your name?

What do you know about your ancestors (familial or from the land you are based?)

*

A New Moon Ritual to connect to the spirit of place:

Each New Moon we invite you to place a hand on your heart and ask for guidance from your ancestors and the land.
Let your feet find the ground, stand still and listen with intention.
Listen to the stories your feet tell you about this land you are on, what ancestors lived here?
What secrets does the land have for you?

You might use the following words to help:

"I call upon my higher self, my ancestors and this land I am in for guidance"

Take a walk, touch the earth, hold the soil in your hands, let your feet find the rocks and the grass.

As this lunar cycle unfolds, take time to explore your own unique ancestry, either by family or by land.
What can you reimagine now for the future?