Absinthe

A Bar at the Folies-Bergere

Manet, 1882

 

 

Three weeks ago I received an email from a distant cousin requesting information on a mutual ancestor after viewing my tree on a genealogy site.  Born in 1944, this male cousin hails from a side of the family that has distinguished itself with producing boorish abusive alcoholics with a sense of humour that rarely deviates from references to genitalia and rectums. 

 

 

I think it is official now that when it comes to  relatives, close and distant, from this particular maternal line, the capacity to address other family members with respect or courtesy is completely absent.  The trait is to presume too heavily on the existence of  family connection and its privileges without having nurtured or maintained them: it is a sense of entitlement that has always been a one-way street.   There seems to be an hereditary cruelty that has been passed down through the generations and it shows up in a multiplicity of ways.  Mostly it comes as a stab in the back delivered during a time of crisis: funerals seem to be the agreed upon occasion.

 

 

I hope to divest myself very soon of the vestiges of a conditioned belief  that I must tolerate being spoken to and treated like I am a hole for the male relatives on my mother's side to take a dump into.  The Australian side of my family seem to be people who could never be accused of exemplary behaviour or responding with compassion and intelligence to their own kinfolk.  More and more I understand that my mother's side were little better than gutter-snipes, deeply envious and resentful of those who had what they did not. 


Factor in the Australian propensity for cutting down tall poppies and one is really behind the 8-ball in a family who literally eats their children.  Parents who sacrifice their children to preserve the lies they have told and are utterly devoid of a moral compass or a sense of integrity.

 

 

I do not know what a loving close-knit and safe family network looks or feels like. I definitely hold the Elders one-hundred per cent accountable for being too self-absorbed and short-sighted to consider how their love for interpersonal and impersonal conflict would contaminate the future they claimed they wanted to be better for their children.

 

 

It is always good to brush up against what I have left behind.  It is like receiving a vaccination needle that boosts my immunity to a poisonous pedagogy that runs deep in my culture and has so many torch-bearers.