Where do I come from?
It's like trying to unravel balls of wool that have become tangled,
Searching for an end that you can follow coherently,
One thread that will make it all make sense.
I come from a jumble,
A mess of nationalities and personalities,
Cultures that clash, like neon pink against bright orange.
I come from secrets.
Family stories that were packed into suitcases,
But had to be discarded on the journey,
Too heavy to carry.
From histories purposefully buried, under cover of night;
From silences and best forgottens.
I come from voices,
Some flung with vigour across the sea, but fading on the wind,
Others swallowed down until we all began to choke.
I am untethered,
A leaf blown haphazardly from place to place,
Impossible to reconnect to whatever branch it grew from.
I am a loose screw,
Rattling around in a drawer, no one knows where it belongs,
Where it fits, what to do with it.
A spare part.
- Allegra Chapman
I wrote the piece above in response to the question, “where do you come from?” It was a writing prompt in a course I took. I realised at that point that I just don’t know.
Family histories
My family are a complicated mixture of Italian, English, Danish, Welsh, French and probably a few other nationalities thrown in for good measure. We’re a small family - in terms of living blood relatives, I only have my mother, my father and my brother. And now my own children. Those are the ones I know of, anyway. From Italy, my grandfather’s family moved to England, Australia and Canada, so there are almost certainly distant cousins in faraway places. They’re hard to trace because the records office in the tiny mountain village in Lazio where my granddad was born burned down. My grandmother had to guess his year of birth for his gravestone - he never had a birth certificate, and he hadn’t been completely sure of the year. Don’t ask me how he got into the UK without one, I have no explanation.
And this is the trouble - these stories have been lost. The people who made these journeys are dead. None of them would talk about it when they were alive. After the second world war ended, Italians weren’t terribly popular in England, and my grandparents were getting bricks thrown through their window. They changed their last name, changed the names they’d planned to give their children, my granddad worked hard to lose his accent. He wouldn’t have Italian spoken in the house, however much my mum begged him to teach her. My parents are Nonna and Nonno for my children, but my mum’s parents were Nanny and Granddad to me. They wanted to blend in, to be English. It was a matter of safety, of survival. And after all, the whole point of the journey had been a better life for their children - they wanted to protect their children at all costs, even the cost of their very identity.
On the English side, there are more records available, but still little oral history on who these people are. For various reasons, there’s a lot that simply wasn’t spoken about, and a lot I’ll never know. I’m told there’s a box full of old photographs that I’ll inherit one day, but by then there’ll be no one left to tell me who’s in them. Some of the stories are too painful to tell, others have been deemed best forgotten. But that leaves me with very little in the way of a family tree to hold on to. My little branch feels very precarious in the breeze.
Cultural narratives
Recently I read Amy Jeff’s beautiful book Wild. It explores - both figuratively, in the text, and in literal journeys into the landscape - myths and folktales from early medieval Britain. It occurred to me in reading that book how little I know of my own country’s mythology.
I studied myths endlessly at school - Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese… I devoured them greedily; there was something fascinating about that intersection of story and history. These fantastic tales that contained a hint of truth, or at least deeper meaning. I was enthralled by stories of gods, goddesses, witches and magic. They conjured up a landscape that was deep and elemental, rich with supernatural - and yet also entirely natural in the purest sense of the word - forces. They were the origin of storytelling, and as a budding writer I took the lessons from the source material seriously.
Yet somehow it never occurred to me to look for myths in my native land. They were never offered to me, and these ethereal beings and acts of magic seemed to belong somewhere grand and exotic. Not a suburban town a few miles outside Coventry.
It’s only as I’ve grown older that I realise what a rich history of magic my country has. Now that I live on the coast, it’s a little easier to imagine giants striding amongst the cliffs and spirits dancing in the waves. Yet for my ancestors, the trees deep in the woodland, the flowers in the fields and the rocks underground all held the potential for magic.
Britain has the climate to inspire the uncanny. Prone to mists and fog, to wind and rain, to cold with unpredictable bursts of sunshine, it’s the kind of starkly beautiful and unforgiving landscape that inclines you to suspect it might be up to something.
So why have we forgotten all our stories?
I asked around amongst friends whether they knew any British myths, and most said no. A couple made stuttering references to King Arthur or Beowulf, but couldn’t tell me much beyond the names. The sword in the stone… something about a monster named Grendel… They all petered out with a shrug. I’ll admist for myself that I’ve never read Beowulf and I couldn’t tell you much about Arthur and his knights. But, as Amy Jeff’s book showed me, there are so, so many stories we could tell if we wanted to.
It’s not just the English people that I’m related to, then, that don’t like to tell their own stories. As a country, we’ve collectively resigned them to being best forgotten.
National identity
I never thought too much about what it meant to be British, or English, until 2016. I always saw myself as a bit of a mongrel anyway, and my neurodivergent brain didn’t notice the raised eyebrows when people asked, “Where are you from?” when they saw my foreign name. I took the questions literally, and I answered them straightforwardedly. I always thought that England was a fairly good-natured country. Brexit ripped off a surface covering I hadn’t seen before, and a lot was revealed beneath that made me feel suddenly uncomfortable in the place I thought I, broadly, belonged.
Once you’ve seen, you can’t unsee. From there I had no choice but to learn about things my education had neatly skirted around. Britain’s slave trade. The impact of colonialism. Police brutality and systemic injustice. The violence and betrayal hidden behind a veneer of polite restraint. The Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 pushed me into a deeper level of understanding that had been evolving over the preceding four years. It felt as though everything had come together to show me where and how I was really living. I didn’t like the view.
The vitriol stirred up during the Brexit campaign, and the animosity that’s been simmering since, centred around this idea that we couldn’t allow our national identity to be eroded. That too many people were coming here and diluting our culture. That immigrants were undermining British values. Although no one ever seems to be able to articulate exactly what British values are, and how exactly they differ from values from elsewhere.
The thing is, our culture is all about immigration. We are a tiny island that has been invaded time and again, by Romans, Gauls, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans. Early inhabitants of the country we now call England were an ethnically diverse mix of different Celtic groups, Picts, and settlers from northern Europe. It shows in our language, which has roots in German, French, Latin and more besides. Adrift as we are, in this inhospitable sea, we had no choice but to adapt to what swept in with the tide.
Somewhere along the line, we forgot this. At some point, we decided that we were the sophisticated keepers of civilisation, and we set out to lay claim to other lands. To do this, we had to draw clear lines around ourselves, to create an “us” and a “them”. We had to make others less than to make ourselves feel like more. And we had to put away our stories. How could we be the conquering heroes if we told tales of monsters and sorcerers with more power than we could ever display? How could we be the enforcers of higher reason if we believed in fairies and witches? Our myths and folklore were put away, into a box that lies, dust covered with rusting hinges, in a dark corner of the attic.
I can’t help but feel that the events of recent years, this furious, almost panicked desire to “protect” some indefinable sense of Britishness, comes from this loss of our national identity. If we felt more confident in who we were, we wouldn’t feel so threatened by outsiders.
Wandering accents
My accent never really solidified. I was born in Oxford, and, as a general rule, I normally speak in a vaguely generic English accent. The kind American actors will imitate when they’re trying to sound like a British person. But the problem is that my accent isn’t entirely stable. It wanders.
I’m not sure what’s to blame here. It could be neurodivergence, which comes with a tendency to mimic as part of the “masking” process - the self-preservation urge to fit in and pretend to be like “normal” people. It could be that we moved around a lot when I was young. It could also have something to do with the fact that I’m partially deaf, which can affect the way your accent forms. Whatever the cause, I catch myself often speaking differently when I’m around different people, my accent sliding towards theirs. I’m not sure if other people notice; no one’s ever mentioned it. Apart from one friend, when I was living in Manchester, who came to an event I was hosting. I got down from the stage after giving my introduction, and he was killing himself laughing. “What the hell was that?” he asked, and began imitating the Mancunian accent I had apparently been speaking with. I hadn’t even realised.
It feels symbolic of this lack of belonging. I don’t know where I fit in, I don’t have any roots. So my accent blurs and shifts as I move around. When you don’t have a defined self, your edges are porous, and other people’s realities can bleed in.
This is the problem, I think, that England is facing. It’s an issue unique to England - other countries of the United Kingdom have retained more of an identity, more of their own stories. England has lost definition, and so it worries about losing itself altogether. It worries that more actualised countries will consume or overpower it.
Maybe if we were able to reconnect to our own stories, to understand our history, our landscape, the rich layers of our ancestory, we would feel more comfortable in our own skins. Maybe we would feel less afraid of outsiders, because we would know where we end and they begin. We would feel able to show our customs, our rituals, tell them our stories, and then sit back, confident in our continued existence, willing to listen to their stories in return.
Losing our stories has led to us feeling like we’re losing ourselves. We’re desperately trying to cling on, but we don’t know what to. We’re scared that other people have something that we don’t, and in our jealousy we’ve tried to destroyed what they have instead of realising that we had it all along. We have held on tightly to whatever fragments of ourselves we could grasp at, terrified to share anything in case it left us with nothing. We need to learn to feel whole again so that we can recognise what abundance there is for everyone.
And where does that leave me? If my family stories are truly gone, if there’s nothing to rediscover or reconnect with, what then? I can write a new story, of course, with my children, with what family I have. I can draw my own edges and define the identity that I want to have. But the issue of roots still remains. So perhaps for me, if the immediate generations before me are lost, I will have to look further back. Perhaps I need to learn some of these ancient stories myself. Maybe I need to learn what my landscape has to tell me. Maybe I need to dig down into my native soil and see what’s beneath it all, deeper under all the recent years of turmoil, right down into the rock. There are lessons there, and a place to plant new roots.
Not every plant grows close to its parent. Some seeds are dispersed by the wind, flying for long distances until they land in faraway ground. Some of us have to float adrift for a while, before making new beginnings.
Creative spark
Creativity is a vital part of self-expression, and since this edition is all about finding a sense of self I urge you to try a few different types of creative outlet with this same prompt to find one that works for you. Use them to answer this question:
Who are you?
Another wonderful piece Allegra! Thank you for introducing me to the work of Amy Jeffs, I have just ordered her book. I am Australian, though my genetic history is all Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Norwegian, and so the tales of those lands have always held so much meaning for me. I think you would like the writing of Sharon Blackie, if you don't already know her. Particularly her latest book, Hagitude, which talks a lot of the archetypal elder-women of northern Europe in particular. I am not at all biased because I illustrated the book (!), I have been a huge fan of her work for many years now (and her Mythic Imagination offerings).
You wrote a truly beautiful poem Allegra, thank you so much❤
This article steeped in questions, ancestry and story was fascinating as I am Canadian with British roots and my husband's parents immigrated to Canada from Britain when he was in his Mom's womb. Canada is such a new country with very different stories!
The thing that came up for me while reading this was that perhaps you are meant to look forward and not back. I have been thinking about this a great deal recently as I got rid of a lifetime of journals and one of the many reasons was my realization that I don't seem to look backward so they are no longer serving me. I recognize this may be a personality thing though because to some folks it is very important for them to know and feel their roots. For me, I believe I can access my roots and my ancestors who are no longer with us any time I want because those stories are woven into me. Even the ones I don't know live inside my bones. If I choose to honor that then they are there and being acknowledged. From there I move forward.
I loved the end of this piece where we may float adrift, or maybe just float!