The tribal instinct never completely dies.
We want to believe in the power of human reason. We have created extraordinary technologies. We live in amazing cities. Our libraries and the Internet are filled with the accumulated glories of centuries. And still, here are the tribes, locked in mindless conflict in Northern Ireland, in the Middle East, in the country that should be renamed Kafkanistan.
Every week, the war between the tribes in Israel and Palestine fills graves with dead children, dead women, dead soldiers, dead fanatics.
The tribal instinct fueled the murder on Saturday of Afghan Vice President Haji Abdul Qadir. He was the heroic Pashtun druglord who sided with the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance that joined with the Americans to sweep the Taliban from power. He was killed gangland-style on Saturday. The almost certain prize: tribal control — Pashtun or Tajik — of the opium trade.
In Northern Ireland, remnants of ancient tribalists are trying hard to destroy the Good Friday accords of 1998 and return to what they perceive as ancient truth: self-righteous hatred, contempt and murder.
The “marching season” has begun. Yesterday in Portadown, the annual parade of the Orange Order insisted once more on marching into the Catholic area near Garvaghy Road. They charged police barricades, lashed out with umbrellas, hurled rocks, bricks and bottles, bashed policemen, provoked plastic bullets.
“This is our road,” one young Orangeman shouted, according to The Associated Press. “You can’t stop us.”
He didn’t live with the Catholic tribe on Garvaghy Road, of course. But he surely believed that the “our” was part of his heritage. The July marches of the Protestant tribe all celebrate the defeat of the Catholic army of James II. That was in 1690. Seriously. Back in 1690, when New York had a population of about 4,000. Tribalism forgets almost nothing, and remembers grievances more deeply than anything else.
Now the marches (made up of a fanatical sliver of the hard-working, decent Protestant population) have another goal: to destroy the peace accords. To provoke and provoke, until the Irish Republican Army once more takes up its guns. Then life will be normal again.
Here I must speak about my own tribe. My parents are from Belfast and came to America in the 1920s to escape anti-Catholic bigotry. They met here. Their marriage was American, as was their family.
They did not live a long regret about leaving Belfast. And yet each carried some piece of their tribe with them until they died.
So, in some ways, do I. On the shelf in my living room is a fragment of a cheap orange brick marked “32 Madrid St.” It comes from the house where my mother was a girl. It once stood in a tiny Catholic enclave called the Short Strand: a plain two-story row house with identical neighbors, and an outside toilet in the back.
Standing there on a few brief pilgrimages while covering the Troubles, I tried imagining my mother’s childhood, with her widowed mother, her younger brother. Back in Brooklyn, we had a photograph of my mother when she was 12, a hint of uncertainty in her posture, her intelligent eyes tinged with wariness. In Belfast, on Madrid St., I would think: How could anyone want to hurt such a girl over the abstractions of religion or class?
About a decade ago, my brother Denis arrived on Madrid St. on the day the house was being torn down. He rescued a single brick and brought it home to New York. There he broke it into pieces for each of the seven children of Anne Devlin and Billy Hamill. My piece is there to remind me of where I came from. I see it every morning of my New York life.
Sacred Objects
But my small brick talisman is not unique. I’ve known Jews who treasured battered old samovars, or frayed prayer shawls, objects carried by grandparents across an ocean from some perilous shtetl now erased from the earth. In spite of Cossacks and Nazis, those objects survived, symbols of memory, symbols of the undefeated tribe.
I knew one Italian family that had a small sealed box of Calabrian earth on the mantelpiece, another with a dented, pitted, coffee pot from Sicily. I’m certain that similar sacred objects exist today among all the new people who have joined us as New Yorkers.
In New York, all of us knew some version of our family origins, but our primary allegiances were to other tribes. The Dodger, Giant or Yankee tribes. The Brooklyn or Bronx tribes. The tribes of neighborhood. We were Americans. Our legends were named Robinson and Reese, not Collins or Emmett. And yet, some of the old tale was driven into us. In my family, we absorbed parts of the story at kitchen tables, in Irish songs, from the plangent sound of pipers.
And so when British soldiers killed 12 Catholics in Derry in 1972, and I gazed at the bloodstains in the streets, I was filled with some primitive rage. Like other members of my tribe, including those in the diaspora, I wanted to hurt somebody back. Two months ago, when Protestant hard cases in Belfast started hurling stones, bottles and finally firebombs into the Short Strand, I felt the same unreasonable and shameful anger again. They were trying to burn out Madrid St. Where my mother was young.
I’m sure that many Israelis and Palestinians feel that same rage, many Pashtuns and Tajiks and members of other tribes. They might be far from the home place. They might be splendid examples of the modern world. But there is always the possibility that the civilized veneer can fall away. At such moments, we are still able to feel the fevered pulse of the tribe. We rise from the campfire and reach for the club.
PETE HAMIL
http://www.nydailynews.com/today/News_and_Views/Beyond_the_City/a-156797.asp