My family is the result of circumstances of migration and family’s leaving where they started—leaving their home every generation—and me, who also left, to be in Montreal, in this class, here wondering about this colonnade, borders, migration, lost languages, culture, my position in Tiohtià :ke and the many other places we find ourselves transported from here.
I think of my father's mother's ancestors that existed within the Northern border of Ireland. In Canada, my relatives were proud to be Irish; they were probably sent to Ireland generations before from Scotland by the British—McMechans. They crossed the ocean, that mythical causeway connection of Irish-Scottish. They made their home in Ireland, leaving eventually for a lost-through-time reason to Canada, crossing the ocean again, still Protestants, still proud to be Irish. Yet what violence they left behind, what violence occurred with their arrival. How does leaving that violence play out in me unconsciously? What do I suppress of myself or that was suppressed by my family and carried on in our bodies and actions?
Belfast, 2021 -movie written and directed by Kenneth Branagh