Heritage and Identity

My full name is Gabriel José Parkinson Garcia. I was born on December 14th, 1979, in southern Germany. I am the second of three sons. My parents are José Rodriquez Garcia and Ann Elizabeth Parkinson Garcia. I am an American citizen who has spent almost all of my life living in Germany, Europe. I grew up bilingually, speaking English and German, with English as my mother tongue. The quality of my German has fluctuated over the years, depending on my environment and how much I used the language, but it has been consistently fluent and accent-free for roughly the last 20 years. Ironically, despite my name, I cannot speak any Spanish, but am able to follow conversations in both Spanish and Portuguese, thanks to my wife. I have an American passport, within which my permanent residency permit for Germany is noted. This can be revoked at any time, should I spend too much time out of the country or break the law to any larger degree. I am a so-called “cold war kid” and the origin of my identity is a heritage of movement, history, politics and cultures melding with one another to create new and temporarily modern ones.

My first name, Gabriel, is of Hebrew origin and means “God is my strength”, though there are dozens of versions of this name, thanks to Gabriel being a message-bringing, apocalypse-heralding archangel in all three Abrahamic religions. José is a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese form of the name Joseph, but can also be found and traced back to medieval origins in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and England. Parkinson is my maternal grandfather’s surname and my mother’s maiden name. It originates from the medieval given names “Parkin” or “Perkin”, which are diminutives of “Peter”. Parkinson, as in the “son of Parkin”, first appeared in the 15th century in England and bears witness to the influence of the Danish-Norse invasions and settling of northern England in the early Middle Ages (see other names such as Stevenson, Peterson etc.) Garcia is of Basque origin and has been traced back to the High Middle Ages north and south of the Pyrenees. It was normally found in medieval records in the Latin form Garsea, with some tracing it back to a pre-Roman origin. Now it is, of course, extremely common throughout the Americas and other former Spanish colonies such as the Philippines. My father heard an alternate version of the origin story from an old lady selling beer in Barcelona. According to her, it originates from the Germanic word for spear, “Ger” or “Gar” (the word “German”, or “Germannen” as they were known, meaning the “Spear Men”). Through the so-called migration period, Germanic tribes moved through Europe for over four centuries. First, south-east into Eastern Europe and then, as the Huns invaded, they moved west spreading their culture, names and heritage through Europe, east to west, destabilizing the Roman Empire and settling everywhere from present day Bulgaria to Spain and Northern Africa. The histories of all of these names are surely much deeper and more varied than those short descriptions, but already they allow insight into origins founded out of a heritage of movement, history, politics and cultures melding with one another to create new and temporarily modern ones.

My mother tongue is English. English is an Indo-European language, belonging to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages and was first spoken in early medieval England. English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. Modern English descends from Middle English, which in turn descends from Old English. Old English was a set of Northern German, Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century CE. Middle English began in the late 11th century following the Norman Conquest of England which brought with it the significant influence of the French language. The Normans (or “North Men”) were themselves descendants of Norse invaders who had settled in northern France. I speak English with an American accent, which is actually closer to older, Shakespearean English than modern British-English. The American accent is rhotic, meaning that all the R’s in a word are pronounced, as this was the English spoken in the Britain of the 17th century which the first settlers of the “New World” were leaving. Since that time, the pronunciation of the R has shifted and changed in England due to cultural-societal trends. The English I speak is a product of Germanic, French, Latin and Danish-Norse influences and many various shifts and changes in dialects. I also speak German fluently. German is a West Germanic language as well, deriving its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is heavily influenced by Latin, as this was the language of the church, law, academia, state bureaucracy, international diplomacy and large parts of the literary world for over a millennium. Beginning in the 17th century, German states were often trilingual, with French playing a major role for centuries and dominating architecture, horticulture, academic disciplines and philosophy. The specialist vocabulary that both of these languages provided are firmly implanted in the German of today. It is this influence, strangely enough, that made German a helpful tool in my understanding and navigating of my wife’s native tongue, Portuguese. More recently this trend has turned towards English as it is the “international” language of our day, and many anglicisms can be found throughout modern German. The type of German I speak is High German, as this was the language that Martin Luther spoke and translated the bible into. This translation caused the first push of a standardized, printed German as a common denominator for the many and varied German peoples and states. As Germany was so divided, with a wide array of differing cultures and dialects, the only force that worked for unification or standardization of German for several centuries was not some heroic drive to unite a people, but the wish of German writers to be understood by as many readers as possible. This coincidence of history has made High German, “German”. And so the origins of the languages I speak are themselves also a heritage of movement, history, politics and cultures melding with one another to create new and temporarily modern ones — with these being just two out of the thousands that have existed.

As a person made up of national identities, I am 50% Irish-English immigrant, Scottish immigrant, Polish immigrant and German immigrant on my mother’s side. The Irish-English part has been in the U.S. since before the American Revolution and some distant ancestor of mine fought with the then Colonel George Washington in the French and Indian War. The Scottish part came over in the mid-19th Century and died, fighting for the Union in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the American Civil War. The Polish and German ancestry came over in the late 19th century, part of the huge swell of European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic escaping famine and persecution that had been brought on by a mix of environmental causes and political unrest. I am 50% Mexican-American, though part of my father’s family has been in California since it was Spanish, making it more native than most American families. The other part came to the U.S. in the form of my grandmother, as a baby, and her family crossing the border on foot around one hundred years ago. Between them, all of these immigrant ancestors of mine have served in the U.S. military in every major U.S. conflict, with the Mexican side taking over the majority of the burden from the latter part of the 20th century onward. History and politics brought them to the U.S. and history and politics had them go back out into the world to fight, and die, for the U.S.

The cause of my being a person who grew up outside their country of citizenship is as historically and politically informed as that of my genetic make-up. My father, as well as some of my uncles and cousins on the Mexican-American side of my family, was drafted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. However, my father was lucky enough to be sent to West Germany as part of the occupational force stationed there after World War II, which had by that time become the front line of the Cold War. He ended up staying in Europe through chance and as there were job opportunities and benefits to be had there. My mother came to West Germany in the late 1960’s to do an exchange year, as she was majoring in German at university. She ended up staying and working for the U.S. military as a secretary and later became a teacher at an international school. Working for the military, you lived on small American islands — the bases and their housing areas — buying American products cheaply, watching American TV, listening to American radio and paying for everything in American Dollars. It was this radio, the Armed Forces Network (AFN), that played a large role in making American culture so appealing in the post-war, Cold War world, as it exposed English, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean youth listening in to their local military radio stations to American rock’n’roll and soul music. These origins of my personal family history are tightly entwined with global historical and cultural shifts, and I am only alive because of this heritage of movement, history, politics and cultures melding with one another to create new and temporarily modern ones.

I have been living in Berlin, Germany, for a decade now. Theories about the origins of its name claim that it, like Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin, is derived from an old Slavic word for swamp or moor “Berl” (in Brandenburg’s case “Brenna”), and that it was given to the location by the Slavic fishermen who settled there in the 7th or 8th century CE. Some give Flemish settlers the honor, while others attribute it to the German word for bear, “Bär”. Berlin is the capital of Germany. As a country, Germany has had many names and these relate directly to its history with other nations. As mentioned above, the name Germany stems from the spear men “Germannen”. These were the people Julius Caser mentioned as Germani as he encountered them along the borders of the Roman Republic in the 1st century BCE. Many countries refer to Germany in reference to a later coalition of Western Germanic tribes, the Alemanni, who battled later incarnations of the Roman Empire and others from the 3rd to the 6th centuries CE. Allemagne, Alemania or Almanya allude to this history. Other Germanic tribes of this time included the Franks (as in France, or “Frankreich” in German, meaning “Empire of the Franks”), or the Saxons who had begun migrating to Britain around this time. The German word for themselves — Deutsch — is itself a hybrid, a combination of the Old High German word “theod”, meaning people, and the Latin ending of “-iscus”. Deutsch, teutsch, tiusch, diutsch all originated from the word “theodiscus”, meaning the language spoken by the common, indigenous people of the Germanic region. As a country, Germany has rarely been a united nation, having spent most of its history as a loose aggregate of states of varying sizes. It has had countless forms and has had dozens of separate histories, languages and states. It has been ravaged by war numerous times and completely levelled more than once. Its recent history has forced it to face the darker side of humanity as manifested within itself, followed by the absurdities of meticulous, global power politics. More than other nations it struggles with ideas of identity, with the origins of its names, regional and national identities constituting a millennia-long heritage of movement, histories, politics and cultures melding with one another to create new and temporarily modern ones. This is perhaps one of the reasons I feel an affinity to it, though I so often find myself at odds with the idea of an identity associated with it.

The fact that all of these references, theories and facts can be, and are, disputed, alludes to the highly subjective nature of histories and cultures. National identities, as much as individual identities, are subjective and diverse. Identity, then, would seem to be in the eye of the beholder and objectivity near to impossible. Digging into these pasts, both national and personal, excavating what one can from all of these thousands of histories, you tend to find one constant throughout, that one constant being change, diversity and shifting ideas throughout all of humanity.

Who, then, am I? Identity has always been a concept I have struggled with. The country I grew up in, West Germany, no longer exists. The community and neighborhood I grew up in, the U.S. military housing area, no longer exists and its very specific, unique culture disappeared with it. Money I once used, the Deutsch Mark, no longer exists. My name, as a cultural identifier, is completely disconnected from this role through my own personal history and regularly leaves me explaining why it is that I can’t live up to its heritage and speak Spanish. So what can be said to constitute my life and identity? The numbers I use are Arabic, the names of the days of the week in my calendar are a mix of Germanic gods and the names of planets leftover from the Roman calendar (see also the names of the months). The calendar that I use to plan my life, the Gregorian calendar, based on its Roman predecessor, is one of hundreds that have existed. The knowledge I use to navigate my emotional, personal and social life is made up of scientific, mathematical and philosophical concepts that have been passed down, cross-culturally, over thousands of years, being adapted to fit new and changing times and societies. Every aspect of my identity and person is a product of cultural change. I tend to piece my identity together from this patchwork and try and feel at home wherever and whenever I can, though I know I cannot ever have the same feeling or understanding of home as others do. Yet, I also know that the places, names, languages and ideas that others feel constitute their strongly-founded identity are also products of longer-stretching trajectories of change and are, themselves, historically temporary. Identity, culture, knowledge and our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in are always a matter of interpretation, which, in turn, is dependent on the subject and object of observation. Through this, my identity and place in the world would seem to become a matter of opinion, an attitude, a temporary fact, no matter who I am or where I might come from. The friction then lies in the simultaneous power and transitory nature of the temporary facts that make up our identities. They are both strong and vulnerable.

I am not that old and yet I’ve already seen global political orders crumble, shift and take on new forms. Wars carry on, end, or take on new names. Massacres and genocides come and go. Beiruts are replaced by Sarajevos which are replaced by Aleppos. Baghdads become Kabuls and then Baghdads again. Some places and names seem to never leave, staying and taking on different, shifting forms of tragedy over the decades. Countries have been united, others have disintegrated. Old archenemies are replaced by new ones. We get blindsided by diseases, conflicts, technologies, ideas and an ever-shrinking world. We become worried, questioning ourselves, our ideas and our very existence. This has happened to societies and civilizations over and over again throughout the many histories of our world. The short-term solution is usually to grasp at whatever straws may give us the feeling of stability and consistency. Maybe this is why identities are so soothing for us and any questioning of the values, ideas, or their nature, incites push back and oftentimes rage. If there is change, then there is uncertainty and we buck at the fear of having to think about what that might mean for our personal identities. The one constant throughout all of this, however, precisely is continuous change and a diversity of ideas and people, shifting and moving into the future. In this way, I see that my own individual history and the reasons for my existence and identity are no different than any other story in the short history of human kind. They are woven together from a heritage of movement, history, politics and cultures melding with one another to create new and temporarily modern ones.