“Remember You Are English”
Fellow Seekers-
I’ve been sitting with questions about ancestry, whiteness, and the stories we inherit—the ones spoken aloud and the ones kept carefully hidden. What follows is a personal excavation of my grandmother’s life and the colonial legacy woven through our family history. It’s about loving someone deeply while also reckoning with the harm embedded in the world that shaped them. This piece explores the contradictions I carry: pride and shame, affection and accountability, the desire to honor memory while refusing to look away from truth. If you’re also grappling with what it means to inherit both love and violence, to untangle supremacy from belonging, I hope this resonates.
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I watch my Grandma weave another blanket and the click click click of her knitting needles as she tells me the story of her home being burnt to the ground as a child. The yarn pools in her lap, soft and warm- a gift to honor the birth of a cousin. As a 10-year-old, I beg to hear her stories, and she only shares them with me.
"What does she tell you?" my mom asks.
"Stories of England during the war… of her time in Africa…"
"Oh?" My mom's voice carries something I can't name yet. "She would never tell us of her life when we were kids."
"Yeah—did you know we are Jewish?"
"Emily, be quiet. We are not. Your Grandma is confused. Do not ever repeat that."
I am a good girl, so I am quiet. But there is a feeling in my body that there is something here I want to understand and not know all in one moment.
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Years later, her mind wracked with dementia, she calls out for them to release her. She calls the nurses Nazis and rallies the other "inmates"—the other memory care seniors with scooters—to break free and get to Dairy Queen.
She tells me in her more lucid moments of her cousin Jack being shot down over France, how a family tended to him while he was injured and buried him in a nearby meadow when he died. She tells me of her family interned in Krakow, murdered. She tells me of that cottage in Africa, the one that burned down.
Her dad, my great-grandfather, was Military Police stationed in Kenya in the early 1950s. They were settlers and he was an angry, mean man that was not well liked by anyone. The story is unclear and tangled, (vague). They were woken in the middle of the night by their housekeeper. Local people had started the house on fire.
Later, I would learn what my grandmother could not speak: The British occupied Kenya for decades before formally establishing a colony in the 1920s. Their rule lasted until 1963, marked by unfair labor practices, rampant discrimination, and displacement of Indigenous people from their lands. A major resistance movement—the Mau Mau Rebellion—took place during the years my grandmother's family lived there, 1952-1957. Mau Mau is a Swahili abbreviation that translates to “The white people should go back where they came from, that is Europe, for freedom to return to Africans.”
Much of the British aggression was covered up, files destroyed, propaganda printed. Very few British were killed during this time; most of the violence and destruction done on them was to their property.
Many Indigenous peoples lost their lives. The UK ran concentration camps and "enclosed villages" in Kenya during the 1950s, where nearly the entire Kikuyu population was confined. Many thousands were tortured, murdered, or died from hunger and disease. Today the Kikuyu people are the largest ethnic group in Kenya.
That house fire was not random violence. It was resistance.
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My Grandma Hazel was my hero and idol. Up until her death I called her twice a week, visiting every time I was home, bringing my partner and kids. When I was 14, I had the opportunity to visit England with her and see my family. She was disabled and used a wheelchair. I helped transfer her from chair to bed, bathed her, gave her insulin and tested her blood. I loved her with my whole heart and thought the world of her.
I was told the greatest thing to be on earth was English. When another kid might be mean, my Grandma Hazel would say, "They are jealous of you. Remember you are English and there is nothing better than that."
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I am 14 and it is May 2002, eight months after 9/11. I am flying for the first time and it is international. Since my Grandma has a wheelchair, we bypass most of the indignities of security. We get an escort to help us with our bags and to get us to our gate.
"Jambo!" My Grandma warmly greets the man who will be our escort like he is an old friend. Without missing a beat he responds—
"Jambo!"
They talk the whole way as this wide-eyed teenager walks behind with our carry-ons.
When we arrive at the gate, he hugs my Grandma like family and beaming she gives him a $10 bill.
Her smile, of love and care, connection. I will always remember it. And I will always remember when she called my cousin-in-law a racial slur, when she would deny care from some nurse aides at the home because she thought they were dirty, and how some of the aides would find that same connection with her that the airport escort did.
How could she be racist and kind so inconsistently?
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Ancestry.com and my a DNA kit unravel the stories tightly bound and wound up, the ones my family tries to hide. I imagine pulling apart the yarn from my beloved knitted blanket, searching for the why of it all in the tiny fibers of wool.
I desire to shred my Grandma’s knitting down until the fibers become nothing more than fragments, each piece examined yielding the truths and origins.
I learn I am more Irish than English—my Grandma hated the Irish. More Russian than German. Not a drop of Norwegian—it's actually Dutch. Political lines drawn in an attempt to map out people and fluid cultures…migrations extending beyond the boarders
What is the story that wants to come out?
My Grandma loved being in the US. She loved this country but never became a citizen. She received benefits from the government who paid for her care when she aged. She worked here for decades, sometimes with a visa, sometimes without.
How could she hold both kindness and hate? She was scared. She didn't want to lose what she had. She was taught to fear others and to keep quiet about her heritage. She lived as an English subject. This is what she learned as a child. The anxiety there reverberates still in my mom—the fuel of misinformation thrown on the flames.
And in me. I carry this too. The legacy of violence disguised as superiority, love tangled up with supremacy, the weight of what was done and what was hidden. I cannot unknow what I know now. The cottage that burned was built on stolen land. The woman I loved was shaped by empire. Both things are true. All of it is mine to hold and to accept.
Stay Wild and True-
Emily
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