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(1825-2022)

Over 60 years ago, John McKinley Girvan initiated a research of the European half of his and our family origins. On the death of John, the genealogical baton was passed on to his sister Gloria Girvan Akin. Gloria wrote some profiles of the people whose stories we  know from oral narratives within the Jamaican family. In the early 1990s Garry Girvan published a modest booklet, Girvanopedia, containing biographical accounts composed by Gloria, of the people of the families of the 3 Scottish brothers who left Ayrshire, Scotland and emigrated to Jamaica in 1825.

On Gloria’s death her adopted son and biological nephew Garry, took the baton from Gloria and continued the task of tracing the origins of the extended family and recording the movements of people connected to us by birth and by marriage. Recently and to good effect, others in the family have contributed to the body of knowledge about the genealogy of descendants of the 3 immigrant brothers. Julien and Kirsten from the Feldman branch of the Girvan branch of the family shrub, have done research which will add considerably to the base of information that we now have. The base of information we have will surely grow with the input from emerging new voices from among our far-flung tribe. Deanne has also been a constant help in a variety of ways. Some new information has been added to the base of research represented in Girvanopedia (now re-christened, duly baptized and  called ‘Extended Family Narratives’). Some corrections were made from contacts gained from sources not previously available. (Notably from Inga Margaret Girvan Hunter, an Australian relative who had made contact with Norman Girvan and Gloria Girvan Akin since the publication of Girvanopedia).

Having curated the blog site https://caribbeanrootsca.com/, where the little stories of the people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are kept, and being at an advanced age, I have wondered at the future of these stories. A story after all, has a life of its own. The people whose story we tell, are still invested in their story, through the optics which we lend back to them by relating their stories. We as a collective group have stories to tell to each other and to humanity about the beauty and diversity of the individuals in our widely globally extended family. 

I am proposing some reflections of the 200 year odyssey of the lives of John (1798-1878) and William (1803-1854), sons of Bryce John and Margaret Graham and their descendants. The reflections that I envisage is a series of speculative creations about a few of the people who preceded us in our genealogical lineage and the lives they led in the places where they resided. The larger project imagines a trans generational work of some of our ancestors leading lives that incorporate the difficulties they encountered and overcame as they passed the genetic and cultural batons off to succeeding generations.

The project, already underway, in its broad outlines is aspirational: to create and present an uplifting application from the genealogical research which began in Jamaica. I have entitled the undertaking Beyond the Binary in an attempt to push back against the normal and natural human human tendency to reduce complex and variable realities into simple binaries which tend to distort the beauty of variability: e.g. (there are only 2 types of roses, red ones and the others. All other rose-like flowers are simply wanna-be red roses which can never reach the high expectations of red roseism no matter how hard they try and what flower academies of high performance they attend, since it has been predetermined that red roses are the standards by which all other rose-like flowers must be judged).

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities, has the power to make you commit atrocities. (Voltaire)

Reducing diversity and elevating and promoting the binary lead inevitably to other absurdities in other domains of human activity: of religion and religious expression, (my religion is the one true, all others are null or of lesser value); of gender, (God created only 2 genders, any other expression of sexual union is immoral or perverse and must be suppressed, reversed and eradicated).

It seems to me that in the binary, the malign forces of chaos and division find an easy, well-defined and arbitrarily determined and convenient set of criteria to define all opposing forces in one target. The binary suggests that all problems can be solved simply by eliminating the opposition. In an environment of dwindling global resources, provoked by continuing climate induced disruption and disaster, and in a zero sum analysis where the concept of ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) and ‘blood and soil’ become once again the currency of malign forces, it is not hard to imagine where that trajectory leads humanity: to continuing and increasing conflict! If my side wins, your side loses. Any gain that I make will be at your expense. Collective awareness of and a  return to a globalist perspective, a cosmopolitan vision, could arrest the momentum of the increasingly individualistic current agenda.

A cosmopolitan perspective may not guarantee ethnic and religious tolerance but it may be the start of reinstating the notion of the ‘social contract’: it may alter the momentum of intolerance and narrow minded individualism which have fostered cantankerous and volatile factions in our social/political cohesion. We will see more attempts to sabotage communities; malcontents like the recent truck convoys will again invoke the ideal of FREEDOM while pursuing a narrow minded anti-social self-serving and paranoid agenda.

The project that I propose would fit within the reach of ‘Docudrama’, the genre which Lyn Manuel Miranda has so successfully highlighted recently in productions of Hamilton and In the Heights. The bulk of my research for the project is finished for one of our ancestors. Bryce John Girvan (1798-1878).

I now start writing as a literary toddler learning to walk, unsure of my gait, proceeding slowly, unevenly. I wonder about the impossibly difficult task I have given myself:  the task of finding spiritually uplifting and creative ways to address a family’s history in a balanced fashion. Given the range of behaviors available to humanity, the project could prove difficult to execute; but persist I will! And so I vacillate from moments of soaring enthusiasm about creating a product for and about our extended family, and moments of lesser enthusiasm pondering the depths of corruption expressed in some facets of our human experience.

To be less cryptic, I have read 3 books in preparation for writing: 1) The Colonial Caribbean, a Cambridge University publication: 2) Blood Legacy, written by Alex Renton, and 3) Olaudah Equiano’s (an African slave)’s memoirs written and published in 1789. These books have led me to the almost inescapable conclusion that the brothers who emigrated in 1825 from Ayrshire to Jamaica were complicit in the brutality visited on my/our African forebears by my/our European ancestors.

The second book, Alex Renton’s Blood Legacy, has had the greatest impact on me. It has catalogued the extent to which the relatively small region of Ayrshire, Scotland, had a disproportionate role in the traffic in and exploitation of slaves from Africa for plantations in the Caribbean. Renton’s families in Ayrshire had important property holdings in Jamaica and in Tobago; plantations which were the source of income for the British Empire and for the affluence of a few Scottish families who built castles and mansions in South Ayrshire from the profits from those plantations.

 The Girvan brothers undoubtedly exploited their social connections in and around Ayr to acquire property holdings in Jamaica. Between them, they were in possession of at least 6 fairly large properties in Jamaica in the nineteenth century, close to 1,000 acres of land. Having had a 40 acre piece of land some years ago, I know that one would need hundreds of workers to work and gain an income from the land. Slaves provided a free or nearly free pool of workers for their plantations. In our times, human labour can be replaced by technology, but two hundred years ago that was not available to owners or managers of plantations. Of course those observations have led to the conclusion that my Scottish forebears were somehow engaged in the brutal enslavement of my unknown African ancestors.

Renton is very honest, forthright and courageous in condemning his ancestors in Blood Legacy, and in exposing the cynicism inherent in humanity.  Institutions, the factors, that distinguish humans from their animal, feral and lesser-developed antecedents;  governments, laws, general and specific sanctions and moral codes and religions, in an ideal world, should act as guard rails against amoral and anti-social human proclivities. The absence of those guard rails allowed individuals and family entities of that era to reduce other humans to the status of animals to justify their greed.

Of course, morality in those times and in those places reflected humanity’s limited, parochial reach, as it must. We are unable to see beyond the near horizons of our wants and the needs of today. We cannot see around corners, as they say. Until hubris stops us in our tracks, we go on assuming that all is well with the world. Then, when the reckoning comes, the bills from our past neglect have to be paid. This scenario seems eerily familiar. It resembles this moment in our times, on our planet!

Evidence in our times of the results of actions, policies and behaviors from the era of European global expansion by means of Imperialism and Colonialism, again calls us to reexamine the notion that our so-called advanced civilization gave us some higher moral ground than those whom we destroyed or displaced in our mission to spread enlightenment. Greed and the quest for power, of course, were and still are the real motive forces behind much of humanity’s boundless ambitions. An impartial observer of humanity’s conduct in recorded history should be at a loss to distinguish which humans were the savage ones and which the noble ones in the phrase ‘noble savages’. The phrase, used in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, the so-called Age of Reason, (or Age of  Enlightenment), was the expression used to underwrite policies and actions which injured and destroyed indigenous peoples, policies which assuaged the populations of Europe who were to profit from the exploitation of resources in the lands that their emissaries, missionaries, explorers would exploit and plunder. Despite professing to hold high moral principles, in their zealotry they displayed appallingly barbaric actions. “We (the enlightened who exploited other peoples) have judged their usage (qualities) by ours,  because we carry the prejudices of our contentious spirit to the end of the world.” (Voltaire as reported by Zeev Sternhell the Anti Enlightenment Tradition, 2010, Yale University Press, Page 126.)

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Olaudah Equiano

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The third book of preparation for this project is a fascinating read: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. One could call it Olaudah’s Odyssey, in and out of slavery, across many Caribbean Islands, repeatedly to the Colonies of the United States and frequently on trips across the Atlantic between the New World and Britain, and finally to eventual freedom and marriage to an English lassie. Olaudah, the erstwhile slave, now author of his autobiography, displays great linguistic skills, fine psychological insights into the individual and into the classes of humans with whom he must deal in his many roles as slave, as sailor/navigator. He displays great perspicacity in understanding the totality of the human condition.

For all that, he makes repeated appeals to God, the spiritual authority and to Queen Victoria and the English Parliament, sources of temporal power, to deliver African slaves from their bondage. In the end, the 8 year old child kidnapped from his natal African village evolves into a full blown colonial citizen whose spiritual existence is defined by his European white Christians sponsors; his internal space, so-to-speak, conforms to his European location; his physical representation, on the other hand of course retains his tribal African origins. Binary tensions are guaranteed. Especially in the late eighteenth century; Something’s gotta give!

(More on Olaudah Equiano next week since his story is instructive and this post is getting a bit long and preachy.  He deserves and will get more consideration as the project advances).

In the meantime I persevere. I have now started the process of writing. I have not gone very far in that process but what little I have produced so far satisfies me. I did give myself 3 more years to learn how to execute and attempt to complete the project since the two hundredth anniversary of the emigration of the Girvan brothers to Jamaica will be 2025. I also have a built-in escape valve, so to speak; There is the small matter of my ability to survive until 2025 in the face of chronic disease, the ongoing pandemic and the other known and unknown susceptibilities, physical and cognitive, of advanced age.

Garry

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N.B. See a tease, the first episode of the project called Ingarvan

In the post of the same name following

this post.

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 Inclusion Zone:

Beyond the Binary

For our Ukrainian brethren:

Illegitimi non carborundum

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Peace be

Upon all our long

Departed ancestors from Africa,

  From Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australasia and beyond.

And Peace be upon our beautifully diverse tribe of

Category defying, amalgamating humans.

We defy the tyranny of those who

Need to find adversaries in

Order to define

Themselves.

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Circles:

Beyond the Binary

ooo

He drew a

Circle that shut me out

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout

But love and I had the wit to win

We drew a circle and

Took him

In.

Edwin Marham

(1852-1940)

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