"In all of us command": Notes of a Second Generation Daughter

Something happened that was unforgiveable, something irremediable. I always assumed it was sexual but now I will never know. In truth, I don’t need to know. She spoke of an uncle who stayed in the house, in the basement. She began telling me that something wrong had happened, something she never told her mother, and then there followed a stillness that was only broken by the movement of her tears. My mother insisted she was Canadian, sometimes Scottish, seldom identifying as Macedonian, except when surrounded by her large Macedonian-speaking family. She spoke Macedonian fluently and was proud, like her mother before her, to marry a Macedonian boy. Mom became a Traicheff and had three children with her volatile, doting, alcoholic husband. Graydon claimed our father hurt our mother during sex, that apparently Mom would cry out in pain, a cry that only Graydon heard, not me or our oldest brother Griff. Graydon often got things wrong, often had memories that did not align with those of anyone else. My mother in an intimate and personal conversation with me told me Graydon had it wrong, but he was convinced she was covering. 

The threat of eviction was real. I remember being filled with dread. The notice was one-and-a-half pages single spaced detailing all the transgressions. But Graydon never took these things seriously. He insisted he was like a Zen priest, and he believed this made him immune to the social codes by which others lived. Fornicating with his girlfriend in the backyard of our townhouse, where all the neighbors could see, was perfectly acceptable to this Priest, as were his chilling screams unleashed with each 200-pound bench press and his Doors music played at the highest volume on the stereo. There was also the inexplicable matter of urinating out the second floor window of our home. All of this was normal in Graydon’s universe, and any negative feedback from neighbors and our landlord was in his estimation undoubtedly an ethnocentric attack. Instead of heeding our mother’s request to curb his behavior, Graydon stooped at our living room window shouting, “Turn down the fat” at any passerby who was less than svelte. His obsession with body image led to a disdain for anyone having more than four percent body fat.

“We could all tell who the new kids were at school because you have bushy dark hair, dark skin, and exotic noses.” She said this in a singsong voice that belied an ease with categorizing the “other.” She did after all have the surname Moodie, a pioneer, colonial family in Ontario. Amy was a theatre geek. She did not associate with the cool crowd at high school, but she had an unusual cocky confidence that one would expect from someone much more popular. Her braless walk to the stage in the auditorium to accept an award was legendary. Preppy high school girls spoke about it for years afterward. Everyone remembered her unharnessed breasts, but nobody remembered the award. Was it as simple as a name? I remember how exhausting it was going to dances at the boy’s private school in Wakefield. Yes, I would be asked to dance, but the second question was always, “What are you?” I would look at my blonde-haired, blue-eyed girlfriends laughing and dancing with a weightlessness that I could not know. I would tell my mother at the end of the night that I was tired of being asked what I am. “Just tell them you are Canadian,” she would say. Of course, because I had been taught this, I did say that I was Canadian, but I was always rebuked by the dancing white boys with, “Maybe you were born here but your parents weren’t. Where is your family from? You’re clearly not from here.” My older more historically astute self wants to tell the unthinking twerps that they are not from here either, that they stole the land from the First Peoples, but my teenage self lacked both knowledge and courage. 

There were days I was convinced using ivory soap was whitening my skin. I would shower protractedly and scrub and scrub hoping for a more socially acceptable outcome. I deliberately used my acne lotion untinted even though it was several shades too light for my skin. Wally Greenbold, my high school English teacher, once asked if I was OK because I looked “sickly pale.” I was hoping I would blend in better, hoping I could avoid the unrelenting questions about my identity. I was tired of answering the questions put to me by kids at school, boys at dances, supply teachers, and parents at friends’ birthday parties, “What are you?” Sometimes the adults asked, “Are you a little Indian girl?” I remember cringing, knowing this line of questioning was wrong, but I was incapable of articulating why. I used to feel a sad affinity with Pecola Breedlove.

Mom hung out the driver’s window of our Volkswagon Beetle as she followed a dazed adolescent bully around the middle school parking lot shouting, “You crappy! How do you feel, you little crappy?” We had gone to collect Graydon after a soccer practice. He entered the car with evident dejection. When asked what was wrong, Graydon said Doug McDonald had harassed him throughout the practice, calling Graydon “Paki.” The effect of the sun on our already olive skin led to a variety of racial slurs directed at us. Doug never expected a parent to follow after him in the parking lot yelling disparaging epithets, and his surprise and fear were obvious. I remember slinking down in the back seat of our small car feeling a strange intermingling of embarrassment and relief. Somebody was finally doing something concrete, however inappropriate it might have been. Although I was keenly aware that I was never protected in this same way, and this differential treatment fostered a metastatic sense of unworthiness, I was, in this instant, glad just the same. 

Baba Sophie truly was an extraordinary woman. She spoke broken English, and I spoke only a handful of Macedonian words, so the verbal chasm was considerable. We understood each other through looks and gestures and the primordial lexicon of the heart. We sat on the sofa side by side unwittingly in the same half-lotus posture until Teta Triunka drew everyone’s attention to this idiosyncrasy. Baba Sophie and I laughed. She was strong in a household that was patriarchal. She was daring in a culture that told her to be otherwise. Everyone responded well to her because she had an innate goodness that elicited the best in others. Even plants thrived in her care. She lost her first-born child, a loss from which she never recovered. A loss she never spoke about. Louis wasn’t miscarried. He died as an infant after Baba had grown to love him. She carried that sadness with her, a sadness that my mother inherited. When I was raped at fifteen I wanted to talk to my Baba. I felt she would have something soothing, something wise to say, but it was a conversation that would require more than gestures. How could I tell her about the date-rape drug? How could I explain without words the terror I felt waking up with a strange smelling fluid dripping out of my body as I walked to the bathroom in a stranger’s apartment? If only we had a common language, I know Baba would have held my young hand in hers and offered a modicum of comfort. Mom told me not to worry. I could have an abortion if necessary. We didn’t talk about it beyond that. It was reassuring to know my mother wasn’t angry with me but odd that our conversation wasn’t longer. My period came. I never reported this to my mother and she never asked. We just never spoke about the incident again.

The sound of an explosion woke me from a deep sleep. It was a startlingly loud noise that triggered an immense sympathetic nervous system response, yet there was no apparent physical cause. I was sleeping in my Baba’s house. Immediately I looked at the clock. It was 6 am I sat up in bed unable to fall back asleep. A few hours later they came home, my mother and my aunts and uncles. They were all weepy. Baba Sophie had passed away gently at the hospital at 6 am. She did not have a specific disease or condition. It seems she was just weary and her body gave out. My uncle’s sexist best friend who had sexualized me at the age of thirteen said the only reasonable thing I have ever heard him utter, “A great woman, the matriarch of this household, passed away today.” She was never really the matriarch but she was strong. She was the light gleaming through the interstices of muddle marring our family.

At Dedo’s funeral a year later, my uncle Dimitri called Mom a whore. I was dumbfounded. My mother was ill-prepared for such a public attack, especially at her father’s funeral, and felt deeply wounded. There was so much family dysfunction, but this expletive was a new level of impropriety. Mom had unsuspectingly gone to give her brother a hug and was quashed by his misogynistic response. I remember nothing else about Dedo’s funeral. Griff remembers people eulogizing Dedo’s important role in the church, how active he was in theatre, and his part in facilitating the immigration of numerous Macedonian families to Canada, helping them to resettle in the Macedonian community in Toronto. I didn’t hear any of this, as I was still reeling from my uncle’s insult to my mother. Mom’s denial though damaging and frustrating on many occasions was in other instances facilitative of graciousness. She could receive such an insult and then, minutes later, be warm and welcoming with other relatives. Her skill at denial was reinforced by her vast and varied ability to compartmentalize, a skill I lacked epically.

Occasionally I dream of a white tiger. It is fierce but not menacing. It looks me in the eye with intensity but not hunger. I am not prey. These dreams are comforting, reassuring, but I don’t know why. My mother tells me Baba and Dedo often had shared dreams. They would wake up and tell each other their dreams, and they had been in the same place in the dream world. Mom thought it indicated a special soul connection. I enjoyed hearing about their shared dreams. A couple of years after Dedo died, I dreamt of Baba and Dedo. They came to visit me in a golden chariot drawn by white horses. Baba was dressed in a beautiful royal blue gown. She stepped out of the chariot and told me, “We are OK. We have crossed over and we are in a good place. You don’t need to worry. We love you.”

Miguel Clementine was born in St. Lucia. His family came to Canada when he was still a toddler. He was proud of his African roots and had a disdain for academia and its perceived irrelevance to his life. Our friendship evolved quickly and deeply despite my being a university student. We met at the Vinyl Archives, a store with a clever name and a fantastic collection of LPs, where he worked part time. Miguel would set aside rare Dylan, Baez, and Fariña albums for me. We would spend hours listening to and talking about folk, funk, soul, jazz, and hip-hop. Mom never liked Miguel as a partner for me. “It’s not because he is black,” she would say. I would point out the inappropriateness of the comment. “You know I’m not a racist. It’s because he lacks ambition. What sort of life would you have?” The other day I was visiting mom and got lost in grief briefly at the sight of myriad veins surfacing through her translucent skin. She interrupted my moment of sadness exclaiming how much she likes Miguel as a possible partner for me. “He was always such a polite and joyful soul.” Some days it is Miguel, others it is Chet. Chet Davenport, who is white, musical, and grew up in a suburb adjacent to the one I grew up in, bought me my first Esma Redzepova album from the Vinyl Archives. “You don’t look like the Macedonians I know from my neighborhood,” he told me when we first met. “You look Gypsy.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I looked like all the Macedonians in my family and extended family, and they were all the Macedonians I knew. Miguel and I had a shared dream in which we were swimming in surreally blue water with all the same objects around the pool, the same clouds in the sky.

Melody Papin lived in a group home. Her parents conceived her at the psychiatric ward of a hospital. Her father struggled with addiction and regularly masturbated in his sleeping bag next to her when they went father-daughter camping. Shortly after Melody was born, her mother ran off with the Hells Angels and only returned when Mel was fourteen. “It feels like someone is watching us,” I said. “You’re crazy, Mogun. There’s nobody here,” laughed Mel. We were at a public campground and all day there were three creepy boys who had been ogling us. The following morning we noticed our tent had been cut in the night while we were sleeping. When we stepped outside our tent, Mel and I found our bathing suits hanging on a tree with white, crusty deposits all over them. We notified the campground manager and he said three young men had left early and hastily that morning. He also said one of his staff had discovered a ladder leaning against the outside wall of the women’s washroom and shower facility at a spot where there was a view into the building. The manager assumed these boys were responsible. Mel and I only had one bathing suit each and we were too poor to replace these with new ones, so we washed our swimsuits. She cursed the whole time and I cried quietly. Why us? I wondered. 

I remember the first time I saw the flag my heart danced. It was new yet so familiar as if it had always been hammocked in my bones. The way the blue of the heaven meets the green of the earth with a red chakra in the centre was captivating and comforting. I had been a student of related things for years: environmentalism, Indian Buddhism, the yoga tradition, dharana, dhyana, and social justice. I ordered a large-sized flag online and hung it on my wall. 

“I’m sensitive, too, you know. I’m sensitive, too.” I had neither attacked nor questioned Betsy’s sensitivity nor asserted my own. This frenzied declaration of her sensitivity was puzzling. Nobody I know has ever described Betsy Turner as sensitive, but I had never really given this much thought. She had many positive qualities but sensitivity was not among the most prominent. When she was young, she was edgy, prickly, and daring. She once rolled a cucumber into a room full of teenage boys. The boys, men now, occasionally allude to the phallic experience. She dated a young man who lacked a moral compass socially, economically, and romantically, but they had fun together. Once when we were swimming in his family’s indoor pool, Betsy laughed at me when I emerged from swimming underwater. “You look so dark!” I was taken aback. We had known each other for over a year now. “Dark?” I asked. “Yes, you look like Mona Lisa. No, I know. You look like a goddamn Gypsy.”

It’s amazing what you can learn these days from a cheek swab. My best friend Matt Alisappi chose not to swab. “Those fuckers just want to use it against us, so they can say we’re just another group of immigrants, so they can discredit our creation stories and discredit our political status.” I absolutely respected his position, but not being First Nation myself, I wanted to know. There had always been such silence around our identity. I had always been told to claim my Canadian identity and to downplay my Macedonian one. The results arrived. Deep ancestry: Northern India; Recent ancestry: Romani matrilineally. I have Romani ancestry that comes from my mom’s mom, my Baba Sophie. I am grateful that I learned this while Mom was still fully cognizant. We have had many conversations about our discovered ancestry. Baba Sophie always told Mom to “avoid Gypsies. They’re dirty.” I’ll never know if she was trying to pass as non-Roma or if she herself did not know. Some secrets, like choices and words, are meant to protect, some meant to harm.