Book Review – December 2022 – My Father’s Daughter – Review written by Stephen Kearney

My Father’s Daughter

A story of family and belonging

by Hannah Pool –review by Stephen Kearney

“They’re all going to Bangladeshi families”, asserted my Dublin born neighbour as we gazed down on the mini-estate of social housing under construction from the vantage point of my London balcony sometime back around 1990.  “Really”, I asked “how do you know that?”.  The reply was predictable; she knew someone who knew someone who knew someone (to the power of 10) who “works for the council”.   “Maybe Bangladeshi families need homes too”, I countered.  “Yes” came back the instant response, “but they’re still in Bangladesh!”.

And then the first residents moved in – you know, from that exciting, faraway land beside India.   I’d never realised that so many English people were living out there – and needed homes too.

Now, one of the joys of living in London is watching and listening to the ebb and flow of different ethnicities, cultures and languages lapping at various ports throughout the great capital, like a sample of the whole human experience swirling around your own existence – with 150 languages spoken in my borough alone.  And so it was with the mini-estate; the first settlers moved out in dribs and drabs to be replaced by other people moving in in dribs and drabs, each with their own lives, wives and children in tow.  And so continues this particular version of the human experience.  Keeping a garage directly opposite the little terrace, I encountered a lot of that human experience over the years, getting to know many – Jamaican, Sierra Leonean, Ghanain, Dominican, Portuguese, British with many repeats, even English and not necessarily from Bangladesh.  Indeed, the first occupant of the house directly opposite once explained that in order to get a garage, “your skin has to be the right colour”; this he told me in my own garage!   For once, I was speechless.  For all the joy, there’s an occasional fly in the ointment.

There’s something funny about work of any sort: do it on a regular basis in the same public space and people will stop and talk.  It doesn’t matter what the work is, you just have to be doing something.  For some people it’s doing the gardening, for me it was motorcycle maintenance with occasional DIY improvisations.  I spoke to one and all, usually those from the terrace opposite, but there were others, like Mr. Natural, who were ‘just passing through’.   But for obvious reasons, the strongest bonds were with the immediate neighbours, those not passing through.   Like most adopters of the great metropolis,  they drifted in and then they stayed.  One such came from the north east African country of Eritrea,  and stayed.

Over the years, the man and his wife treated me with great friendliness, feeding me many times.  I kid you not.  I’d be working away at something and suddenly he or she’d be there with a large plate of hot food and a cold drink; it would be either genuine Eritrean cuisine – the real thing – or Eritrean food via colonial influence; Italian, in other words.   Just to explain here,  Italy colonised Eritrea from 1890 to 1941, desperate for European status in the wake of its own recent unification, arriving late in ‘The Scramble for Africa’.  By the time Italy arrived on the scene, all the good stuff had been already taken; there were only the leftovers but if a country had colonies, any colonies at all, even leftover ones, it could feel important.  Under Mussolini it wanted to feel even more important and proceeded to colonise adjacent Ethiopia, an island of independence in an ocean of African colonisation, in 1935, staying there until booted out by the British in 1941.  It goes on to get more complicated. Post war Ethiopia and Eritrea on its Red Sea coast, were united as a single sovereign entity called, yes, Ethiopia.  And there it stayed for some decades with an ever unsatisfactory government, plagued by the usual combination of corruption, coups, attempted coups and secessionist movements, exacerbated by different regional languages.   By the 1980s, the linguistically separated Eritrea had had enough and started agitating for independence escalating to military action.  After a few years of bitter fighting with many casualties, including my neighbour’s two brothers,  Eritrea gained its independence in 1991.  But there’s still no peace: at the time of writing it seems, other areas want to go their own way too.  So there’s your long and complicated history from the horn of Africa compressed into a few short and probably highly inaccurate lines.

Now, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with a book review about father and daughter.  Well, hang on, I’m getting there.   When men and women move in together, usually under the influence of marriage, they often start having children.   The Eritrean man and wife were no exception; they had two.  There’s something else about children; after a while they grow up and then somewhere along the way, they turn into adults.   Sometimes they can even turn into interesting adults and that’s what happened to the two children.  They too continued the practice of talking to people actually physically doing something.  And this is how I got to know the son.  During our yaps, I wondered about bridging the huge cultural gap between his parents lives and his own, especially as he was totally British from day one – he was simply a young British guy growing up in London, culturally and intellectually integrated.  It ain’t necessarily so: the son of an Indian colleague never integrated.  Brought to the UK at one year old, you’d imagine the transfer to adulthood would have been seamless.  At a glance he looked transferred: completely fluent in London accented English, in addition to Gujerati, educationally qualified and living as a fully paid up citizen.  Superficially.  In conversation, cracks would soon begin to appear: the veneer of integration was just that; he never escaped his parents’ culture which was rooted in the India of 40 years earlier, starkly illustrated by his newly imported wife from modern India.  In contrast with the wife, conversations were strained because we just didn’t share the same reference points, just as I had found 50 years earlier during  my road-digging career and that was with a 100% Irish company in the middle of London.   Conversation was impossible – so you didn’t bother – but you bothered with the son of Eritrea.

This was how the man put me on to a book called My Father’s Daughter, by Hannah Pool, Eritrean in name only (EINO?).   This well written, thoughtful and reflective work is worthy of anyone’s attention.  The back of the paperback, bought used from Adobe Books, a great source of used books, explains her situation.

For the first twenty years of my life this is what I knew about my background: I was born in Eritrea, a tiny country on the north-east coast of Africa.  My mother died in childbirth, my father soon afterwards.  I was placed in an orphanage in Asmara, the capital, by a distant relative or perhaps a neighbour.  That’s it.  The sum total of my family knowledge.

Six months later, I was adopted by a British academic and that’s how I ended up growing up in a white family in Manchester.  And then one day when I was a student in Liverpool, I received a letter with an Eritrean postmark.  It was from my brother in Asmara, the one I never knew I had.

And that’s where the action starts.  But don’t fall into any traps, driven by current fashion or new awarenesses.  This is not a story of a woman finding her “lost spirit”, her “true identity” or her “real family”.  This ultimately, is a story, yes, of personal exploration but also of confusion and conflict.

Consider Hannah Pool’s start in life, even before the beginning of her awareness.  At six months, she is adopted by a white British couple and taken to Norway.  Her first language is Norwegian.  At the age of four, her family moves to England where the Norwegian is replaced by whatever it is they speak in her new country.  She grows up with her (white) brother in a happy and loving family and leads a very comfortable, middle-class life.  Going through all the middle-class rites of passage, she emerges from university and continues on the pre-programmed middle-class trajectory  …… and they all lived happily ever after.

Of course she knew she had been adopted but, well, so what?  Her parents, her mum and dad, the people who brought her up because that’s what mums and dads do, loved and supported her and she was happy with her lot.  Why would some irrelevance of which she had no memory, no awareness and no contact, bother her, this quintessentially British, or dare I say it, English woman in her  twenties?  I could very much tune into her thinking.  When I was her age and, indeed, a lot older, I used to think that if I found out that I had been adopted, I wouldn’t have given a damn.   Then, maybe in my mid forties, I began thinking that if I discovered I had been adopted, I’d be very curious about about my “real” parents.   Who were they?  Where did they come from?  Why did they ditch me?  (OK, no wisecracks).   I used to work with a guy who was a foundling, dumped outside a London police station in pre-war 1939.  He never once wondered about the people or chain of events that had led to this situation.  Once upon a time I would have lauded such an approach for “not getting bogged down” in irrelevancies and “time wasting”.  Now I think there was something missing in the man.  Yes he was a pleasant fellow with technical capabilities, but at his core there was an emptiness and, I have to say, a moral cowardice.  Whether these personal failings can be attributed to lack of curiosity about his origins, I cannot say, but I always wonder.

Hannah starts probing.  Yes, her birth mother had died but her birth father hadn’t; he was alive and well and still living in Eritrea as were a string of other relatives, including siblings she had known nothing about.  So why had she been placed in an orphanage?  Simply because her father couldn’t afford to keep her – an agonising choice that must have hurt like hell, as many Afghan parents have been discovering over the last few years.  Whom do you throw out of the lifeboat so that others may live?  I hope I will never be faced with such a choice.

Hannah is shocked – and torn.  She suddenly discovers she has a second family in addition to her real one – the real one that cared for her, brought her up, educated her and gave her a very good life.  Now she has another family but it seems rather abstract.  She wrestles with the conflict, hesitating to make contact with her new dad for fear of upsetting her ‘old’ one, a needless fear, as it turns out.  But her curiosity grows, as I feel sure mine would too.  Eventually, after a lot of soul searching she decides to go, but agonising all the way, wondering if she should turn back, even when reaching the hotel in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital.

And no, this was no conversion on the road to Damascus – or Asmara. For the whole time of her stay, including meeting her biological father and a whole army of multi-layered relatives dotted around the country, she is still not fully connected.  For a start, she doesn’t speak a word of the language though a surprising amount of people appear to be able to speak English there.  However she is feted as the long lost daughter wherever she goes on her whirlwind tour organised by her biological siblings and is made feel very welcome, noting some family resemblances: so, while she mightn’t feel the part, she does, at least, look it.

Along with her personal whirlwind tour going around Eritrea is another one going around in her head.  What is she to make of it all?  Everyone has been kind and generous and anxious to meet her and she enjoys meeting them.  She is the centre of attention, the main attraction, at large feasts, a recipient of great generosity, all from people whom, she is constantly aware, are far less well off than she is.  Yet, ultimately, she is a stranger.  Yes, she does develop some ties, contacts and friendships but there is no way a few weeks can replace twenty-five years.  No blood can be that thick.  But she wonders and keeps on wondering.

Does she regret going?  No.  The trip is almost something she had to do once she ‘discovered’ her past. Back in England she keeps on wondering what to make of it all.  The book contains no denouement, no definite point of conclusion.  It is almost as though the kernel of an idea has been planted but no-one knows, least of all Hannah,  what it will grow into.  This is a work in progress.

My Father’s Daughter by Hannah Pool  review © Stephen Kearney December 2022