Our identity, our self-image, is built up through our childhood,
our youth, into a mosaic of all we have learned about the world,
about ourselves and our position in it. But what if a key part part
of that information suddenly turns out to be false? What if, for
instance, one of our parents turns out not to be the person we
thought they were, but someone else altogether? I always thought
that my father was a Canadian, of Irish descent. But in my middle
age, long after he had been taken from the world by a car accident,
and after my mother had died, I made the astonishing discovery that
he was in fact not Canadian at all, that his entire life story as I
and my mother and her family understood it, was a fabrication, a
lie, that he was from the Caribbean, and that his real ancestry was
African. Black. You may ask, didn't you know your father? In a
literal sense, of course I did. But in more existential terms - who
was he "really"? - no, I didn't. You may ask, didn't he look black?
Well, his appearance was...ambiguous. The facts I stumbled on about
his life were not. In a lifelong effort to avoid the shackles of
racism by constantly re-creating himself, my father went to four
medical schools and for several decades shuttled his life backwards
and forwards between the Caribbean, the US, Europe and Canada. He
demonstrated extraordinary resilience, ingenuity and determination
in his pretense to be white - but what was the price he paid? And
if my father wasn't who I thought he was, where does all this leave
me? Am I still the person I thought I was? If one of the
fundamental pillars of my understanding of myself has collapsed,
what is now my image of myself, what is my "real" identity? These
were some of the questions I set out to answer as I embarked on a
journey of discovery to unravel the tangled deceptions of a fine
man's life, to investigate the forces which had pressured him to
re-invent himself, and to face the effect his decisions have had on
me. Along the way, I have had to confront questions of identity and
race, which sadly resonate powerfully to this day, not only in the
US where the scars of slavery remain unhealed, but also in Europe,
and indeed throughout the whole world... Among my many discoveries
was that this was not just my story, it is a universal story of the
destructive power of bigotry and prejudice, forces which we must
resist to the last drop of blood.
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