I'm Not From Here, Really
Everyone in my family has changed their name, so my name change isn’t unique. But when I have to explain my family’s name in depth, it gets confusing. So confusing, in fact, the New York Department of Health recently denied my mother a copy of her own birth certificate because she’d gotten her own mother’s name wrong when applying for it.
My grandmother was Joan in Ireland, but Hannah in America, and Joanna Mary on most legal documents. Her maiden name was Looney, but her married name was Corbett. My grandfather was James Corbett in America, but in Ireland, he was Seamus O’Corbain. He changed it at Ellis Island. My Great Aunt Brigid went by Bridey, and my Great Aunt Silé–pronounced Shelia–is a nun and was renamed Sister Mary Ida.
My mother writes her books under the name Sue Corbett, but prefers to be called Susan. My Aunt Mary Jean is simply MJ. My legal name is B***** **** ********, but I changed it to Jet Jameson when I was nineteen. Jet, as a nickname for my given name, and Jameson, because it sounded good with Jet and was still Irish.
There were eight children in my grandmother’s family. Every time I try to list out their names and birth order, I have to call my mother to confirm: It’s Jim, Bridey, Joanna Mary, Eileen, Mary, Margaret, Silé, Kathy. There was another baby, Nora, but she didn’t live past infancy.
My grandmother was born in 1929, we think either on December 9th or 10th. We don’t know, because she was born before the British Kingdom issued birth certificates to Irish citizens.
My grandmother’s childhood is mostly a mystery, but we know she had a reputation with the boys and little respect for my great-grandmother. Sometime after the war, she and her two sisters, Eileen and Mary, left Ireland for America.
I’ve visited the New York Public Library, and I’ve tried to find my grandmother’s name in the Ellis Island passenger records, but we’re not sure what year she came over, or what name she would’ve given them. She and her sisters lived off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. She met my grandfather at an Irish dance, the night before he left to “fight” in the Korean War. (I put fight in quotes, because he, an Irish farm boy from County Clare, was an army ski instructor stationed in Colorado.) My grandparents were married in 1957, and my mother was born in Flushing, Queens.
Their marriage wasn’t a happy one, to say the least, and my grandmother squirreled away enough money to eventually leave him and buy herself a condo in Florida. When my grandmother left Ireland, she had little more than an eighth-grade education. In America, she worked to get her GED, her driver’s license, and a sense of autonomy.
Her daughter, my mother, went to college and then graduate school before becoming a journalist and author. My Aunt MJ is a college professor and writer. My Uncle Dennis is a therapist.
Throughout my childhood, my mother would casually remind me, “You know, we’re not really from here.” We weren’t from Virginia, we weren’t from Florida, or California–even though those are all places where my family lived. My mother would tell you, yes, that she’s a New Yorker, and she certainly passed that gene down to my oldest brother and me. But really, we’re from a small town, a few miles east of Killarney.
Growing up, I’d hear her refer to herself as the daughter of immigrants, and people would nod in understanding. I tried out the declaration myself during an AP Government debate in high school. A boy I had an ill-placed crush on was arguing against open borders. When he finished his case, I blinked at him. His chest was proud like a puffin, his head high with superiority.
“You know I’m the granddaughter of immigrants,” I said quietly, just loud enough for him to hear.
He balked. “Oh, sorry, you didn’t look like an immigrant to me.”
The room erupted, and I couldn’t help but laugh. He spent the rest of class walking back his statement.
I often think of the phrase, “Why don’t you come back from where you come from?” I benefit immensely from white privilege, so much so that no one ever tells me to go back. But I want to go back. I am lucky that I could. But something keeps me in America. So, I visit my home when I can.
I visited Ireland last March and found myself sitting on a curb, with my phone like a brick in my hand. Every few minutes, the Wifi from the closed cafe across the street was strong enough for me to receive a call from my mother. Otherwise, I was staring into the distance, blinking past hot tears. My boyfriend paced behind me.
“Well, it has to be one of these doors.” He said, with his hands on his hips.
“I know. I just don’t know which one.”
My phone rang, and he walked back up the long gravel drive that leads to the nunnery. I answered, my voice thick. “Hi, Mom?”
“Hi, sweetie.” Her voice was sweet and familiar in the receiver.
“I’m in Mallow.” It’s the small town where my last Irish relatives live. The few that stayed.
“That’s great!”
I sighed. “But mom–which nunnery is it?”
“Um–the one in Mallow.”
“There are two.” I laughed. It’s a one-road town, with two nunneries.
“Huh. It’s the one with the school.”
I cast a look over my shoulder at the small middle school and primary school, which were both attached to separate convents. “Ok–” I rubbed a finger against the corner of my brow. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Oh, and remember, Aunt Silé’s name there is Sister Mary Ida.”
“Got it. Ok, I love you.” I stood up and brushed dirt off the seat of my jeans.
“I’m so glad you’re doing this. Love you too.”
“If I can find her!” I yelp.
We said different variations of “love you, bye” ad nauseam before we hung up. I walked towards the primary school’s playground, where a Sister pointed me in the direction of my Great Aunt’s quarters.
We were let in through a sliding door, where a woman who introduced herself as Sister Agnes said, “And you’re Brigit!”
My boyfriend’s hand tightened around mine. It’s an automatic response to my legal name. But I just nodded my head. “Yes.”
My great aunt joined us for tea. She thought my partner’s name was Leonard, and we did’t correct her, because Lennon was an odd name to her ears, and I would rather let her speak. Like the rest of the women in my family, once she starts talking, she doesn’t stop. Lennon, in his ever-greatness, recorded the conversation on his phone.
I listen back to it now, as I write this, and predictably, can barely decipher my Aunt’s words through her brogue.
She repeatedly tried to reheat the tea, and every time we had to assure her that really, the tea was boiling–it needn’t be reheated. Several times through our conversation, she referred to me by my mother’s name, and I let her, because after almost ninety years on the planet, you’re allowed to mix up the generations.
We took a photo, our cheeks pressed together, and when I look at it now, tears spring to my eyes. The left side of my face is slimmer than my right side. The left side has a dimple, and my smile hitches a bit higher. I’ve been researching dermal fillers to correct the near imperceptible asymmetry, but looking at that photo with my Aunt Silé, with Sister Mary Ida, I realize that asymmetry is a mirrored reflection of her face, and my grandmother’s, and my mother’s.
After Lennon had taken the photo, she placed her shaking hand in mine, her eyes brightening. “You look just like Joan, don’t you, Bridey?”
She laughed as I asked, “Do you think so?”
“Ah, but she had so many boyfriends, Joan.”
I laughed. “And I only have the one!”
She nodded. Eventually, she led Lennon and me to the church, where she prayed over us. Lennon isn’t a baptised Catholic, but I’ve taught him to make the sign of the cross, which we both do, dutifully. We left Shelia with hugs and kisses, and repeated goodbyes.
I sobbed in the passenger seat as Lennon drove us out of Mallow. We drove through the town I’m really from, Rathmore, and Lennon asked if we should stop by the farm my family runs. I shook my head and squeezed his hand over the gear shift. (Yes, I made Lennon drive on the left and in a stick.)
“Next time. It’s all too–” I gestured to my puffy eyes.
“Ok, lady.” And he drove us to Killarney, where we stayed in a hotel.
There is a unique quality of being both American and other. I know I am not the only one to feel it, and I know I feel it less intensely than others. There is so much to fear here in America. But no fear consumes me more than the fear of losing where I come from.
It’s something Lennon and I have discussed at length. His grandfather, a Chinese-American, didn’t teach his children Mandarin, for fear of otherizing them. He wanted his children to be American, and now his grandchild longs to know the other half of himself.
When Lennon and I first met, he asked me if I spoke Irish. I shook my head, solemnly. Because no one in my family did, not even my grandmother. My grandmother was born just six years after Ireland became a free state, separate from the United Kingdom. Still, Irish didn’t become the national language until 1937. Today, after decades of Irish being part of national schools’ curricula, less then 40% of the Irish population can speak it conversationally.
So I don’t speak Irish. And we left the Catholic church. My mother tried desperately to have me sign up for Irish Dance as a child, but I preferred Jazz and Ballet. We baked soda bread on New Year’s Day, but I always picked the raisins out. My mother tried to teach me to fiddle, but I didn’t like the callouses the strings left on my hands. I couldn’t stand the feeling of wool sweaters or the rain. As a child, it was like I was determined to contradict my own ancestry.
None of it mattered much to me until I got older, and I realized the sacrifices my family had made to leave our country. It’s a shame, but I’ve learned more about my country through movies like Brooklyn, Claire Keegan’s and Sally Rooney’s novels, and even Netflix’s Derry Girls. (Though, they’re Northern Irish, and that is different.) Oh, and through listening to a lot of Hozier.
I saw Hozier at Madison Square Garden a few years ago. He opened the show with the first song of his album, Unreal, Unearth, “De Selby (Part 1).” I think Lennon must’ve known what was coming, both from my having played the album on repeat in our home and because of the way my hands clutched at my heart. He slipped an arm around my waist and swayed gently with the music as the last verse rang out.
Bhfuilis soranna sorcha
Ach tagais ‘nós na hoíce
Trina chéile
Le chéila, claochlathie
Bhfuilis soranna sorcha
Ach tagais ‘nós na hoíce
Trina chéile
Le chéila, claochlathie
Is claochlú an ealaín
Is ealaín dubh í
Lennon held me as the tears ran down my face. I turned to him, and he lowered his ear to my lips so he could hear me over the crowd.
“I never thought I’d hear Irish in Madison Square Garden,” I blubbered.
It is a language I’ve never known. But I’ve memorized the words to that song, and they fill every corner of my mouth with an intense sense of belonging. Like my mouth was made to speak the language the British criminalized.
Lennon and I made the joke to a friend, before we moved to London, that we were moving into enemy territory. He looked at us, puzzled. I had to explain, “Well, the British colonized China.”
And he said, “Right, but you’re Irish. Aren’t you guys like the same?”
Mockingly, Lennon put a hand on my chest. “Whoa, brother.”
But I took a deep breath and very simply said. “The British colonized the Irish for centuries. They committed a genocide against the Irish and blamed it on poor farming. Not to mention, the entirety of Northern Ireland is still under British occupation today.”
“Shit.” Then, much later in the conversation, he asked if we wanted to order a round of Irish Car Bombs. We don’t speak much to that friend anymore.
When I meet Irish-Americans, we do a quick exchange of lineage and town names, but typically, when I start the investigation, they say, “Oh well, my family came during the famine.” So a hundred and fifty years later, they’re a little Italian, and a little German, and they don’t remember anything about our country, except they can use it as an excuse to not wear green on St. Patty’s.
But in London, I met an Irish girl, and when I said, “I’m from Ireland,” she looked at me quizzically. I think she was expecting the same Irish-Americanisms I often experience. But I told her I was from Rathmore, and Cranny, and she told me where she’s from, and we made jokes about the British, and when I told her my family came over in the 1950’s, she said, “Ah, so it lives in your bones.”
I smiled and said, “But not the Troubles.”
She nodded, knowingly, and pointed at her heart. “That lives in mine.”
My Grandmother watched the troubles on a TV set in Long Island, but it doesn’t live in my bones as the occupation does, or the famine does. It is a national trauma not passed down, but witnessed. And I watch on my phone as a government-funded paramilitary arrests a five-year-old boy wearing blue bunny ears. His name is Liam Conejo Ramos. Conejo means bunny in Spanish. My brother’s name is Liam. It’s an Irish name.
I think of the boy who told me I didn’t look like an immigrant. I think about going back to where I came from. I think about my grandmother’s name in the passenger log at Ellis Island. While I still can’t find her name in that book, I did find the names of her sisters, as passengers on a ship called Ryndam. It arrived in New York on November 16th, 1954.
I try to imagine how cold it might’ve been that day, or the coats that they were wearing. I wonder if they had good coats. It’s never very cold in Ireland. I can imagine Eileen and Mary holding each other’s hands like they were life preservers as they stepped from the ship onto American soil. I wonder, as they shuffled in a line onto a ferry that carted them to Manhattan, if they’d wanted to go home. I wonder what they thought of the Statue of Liberty.
You can see Ellis Island from the Staten Island Ferry. Every time I took that ferry as a child, my mother would tear up at the sight of Lady Liberty. She’d lean down to whisper in my ear,
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
In that poem, Lady Liberty is referred to as the “Mother of Exiles.”
I am on a run through the West Village, and I decide to run down the West Side Highway. I typically listen to a podcast or audiobook on my runs, but this week, Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl, and his album DtMF is on loop. Powered by the infectious rhythm, what was meant to be a 2-mile jaunt has turned into a 6-mile trek, and I find myself in Battery Park. Lady Liberty’s beacon, in the near distance. Last week, Bad Bunny dedicated his Album of the Year Grammy win “to all the people that had to leave their homeland, their country, to follow their dreams.”
I cried when he said it, and I cry again now, but when a tourist taps me on the shoulder to ask, “Are you ok?” I wave him off and tell him it’s just the cold wind, making me tear up.
I run back to my apartment, to my home, here. Because I can’t run across the ocean, because my Grandmother left her country, out of necessity, and I stay. Because even when this country feels like a too-small jacket on my shoulders, it still keeps me warm. Because I’ve been raised, as the granddaughter of immigrants, to know America as home. And I hope, even though we’re currently fighting an authoritarian, fascist, racist government, that one day the sun will shine again on our nation’s golden door. That more names are added to our passengers’ log.
That I might be able to return home, to where I’m really from, unafraid of what I leave behind.
