The Innateness of Kinship Object

Neither here nor there, I (Chris) came into the world through the omnipresent duality of my Japanese mother and my mixed European father who married 20 years after the end of WWII. My mother was born in the internment camps where all Japanese Americans were detained due to racial and political fear. Meanwhile, her father was fighting in the 442nd Infantry Regiment (the most decorated unit of the war) for the very government that had imprisoned his family. My father’s Basque heritage is tied to one of the oldest ethnic groups in Europe. Nestled in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, Basque history is marked by struggles for selfhood while being subjected to the civil wars and control dynamics of its neighboring nations. As a result, the Basques are a people fighting for autonomy with an identity that is French, Spanish, and distinctly Basque. These contradictory and hypocritical cultural outcomes, products of fear and perception, created experiences and a sense of displacement that shaped my worldview. As an only child, I was keenly aware of my biracial identity, feeling half but not whole. I envied the collective busyness of larger families where many “pieces” seemed more unified than my bifurcated, yet singular existence. This sense of disjointedness led me to ponder the nature of reality, which I see as a koan of push/pull and expand/collapse dynamics that eventually invert through paradoxes to reveal an underlying truth. I am reminded of how we ended the last World War in an attempt to unify by splitting a singular thing – an atom. As we navigate perilous times, I hope that the plague of “otherness” may resolve itself through a kinship process of unification and wholeness rather than another catastrophic split.

Genocide lives in my (Lisa’s) DNA. My mother is 100% German Jewish. My father is full-blooded Armenian. Between 1915 and 1923, Turks of the Ottoman Empire undertook a propaganda campaign to convince the public that Armenians presented a dire th