Page 175 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
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Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION
apt description of Sophie herself, as she pokes at the past with her stick, looking for
memories of her ancestors.
“I am descended from a hard working, hard drinking people. And hard hearted too,
suspicious and battle weary.” Her people are Ulster Scots forced by the English land
clearances to Ireland, and from Ireland to America by the potato blight. But that is only
one stream in her blood. There is another: the “indigenous peoples who wore skins...for
whom the land and the red deer were sacred.” Sophie contemplates her mixed blood
ancestry: “Two warring bloods living side by side, keeping this life running now for some
eighty years. I lost many, not so much to history as to hope. The kind of hope that
carries us across seas, over borders, that issues from a hunger so desperate it drives
murder. Of a people, of a land. Hope can be terminal. It blinds grief, the portal to the
soul of a person.”
Sophie declares herself to be deranged, like the polar bear she saw in the zoo as a
child, hopelessly pacing its small enclosure. “What is wrong with that bear?” she had
asked, and her mother replied with a memorable word: “Deranged.” Like the bear,
Sophie paces “the cages of history’s making.” From a lifetime of living, Sophie has
gleaned her blood stories: her grandmother, Rayna, a mixed blood Abenaki-Scot who
quietly taught her native ways; her grandfather, Joe, an Ulster Scot who emigrated to the
States looking for work as a weaver; her parents, Angus and Fiona; her husband,
Samuel, fresh off the boat from County Armagh and with whom she had two stillborn
children, their marriage faltering under the weight of childless sorrow.
Sophie tells her unknown reader, who has now become us, what compels her to write
everything down. “Like the bear, I am trying to walk home and it is hopeless. I do not
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