On our very first day in Morocco, it became clear that some
of the locals thought that I was from some part of Morocco.
One friendly souq vendor in Marrakesh finally came out and said it in clear
English that I must have "Berbere" blood in me because I looked like them. Making me feel so welcome made my day, so I continued exploiting my newly found blood relationship for as long as I could keep it going saying a word in Arabic. It became the joke of the month
with our fellow travelers that deep inside I was truly a "Berbere".
I envy those that have a clear knowledge of where they
came from. Come to think of it, usually people
with clear genealogies are those with wealth and the royalty. Even in the Hebrew bible, it is easy to
follow the genealogies of important people but there is no record of the
peasants, the migrants or the worker bees.
Since they were not important, why bother knowing anything about
them. As populations migrated, it became
even more difficult to keep track of your roots. True, there are some strong
races that still maintain their visible characteristics but as the world
becomes smaller and intermarriage blurs the lines between one race and
another, they will become harder to find. Migration has been a big
contributing factor in loosing one’s identity.
If your family has stayed put for several generations you are more
likely to know your roots. Old
civilizations in Europe, Asia and Africa have a better chance of keeping track
of your background, but in America, everything is relatively new.
From my father’s side I know that his parents were Cuban descendants
of Spanish immigrants. I know that my
grandfather fought in the Spanish War in the early 1900s but I don’t know if
his own parents were also Cuban or whether they had been born in the old
continent prior to migrating. Those
records have been lost or at least never reached me. From my mother’s side, her parents were
Dominicans and I have to assume that their parents were also Dominican although
I have heard that some of them (from my mother’s mother side) were Jewish that
had traveled through the Canary Islands prior to settling in the Dominican
Republic. But all of them were migrants,
poor and unknown. Why else would they
had left their families, their own roots, if it wasn’t to find new
opportunities in the New World.
Could some of my ancestors come from the Northern part of
Africa? Or could it be that the Berbers
in my background had migrated to Spain running away from the Arabs that were
dominating their Morocco? I have no
idea. My lineage was not preserved. There was nothing to pass on to the next
generation so no one cared.
So those few days as a Berbere were special to me. Someone saw a connection. Someone saw a glimpse of familiarity. The Berbers that I met were all friendly and
happy people. It would be easy for me to
accept the connection and who knows, maybe one day I would try to learn Arabic
or better yet the now official “Berber” language and head back to my roots in
Africa.
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