Bird of Paradise by Raquel Cepeda

Author:Raquel Cepeda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER TWELVE

Things Come Together

One never knows anything about one’s father. A father . . . is a passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a way out.

—ROBERT BOLAÑO, 2666

THE RESULTS ARE TRICKLING IN.

Dad, Bennett says, is of Semitic descent on his father’s dad’s side: haplogroup J2.

“Doesn’t that mean my father descends from Sephardic Jews on his direct paternal line?”

“There was a chance, because many Arabs and Jews fall into the J2 haplogroup, but ultimately, no,” says Bennett. “That was the very first thing I checked for. We reviewed his entire Y-37 DNA sequence and compared his results with the massive Jewish database we sit on, and there were no matches.”

“It’s interesting how so many Arabs and Jews share ancestral origins, and yet there’s so much beef between them,” I respond.

I pace back and forth in my kitchen, speculating which of many ways this branch of my family may have washed ashore in the Dominican Republic. I can only surmise how this man arrived in Hispaniola. He may have entered the country as a crypto-Muslim or a Moor, after Spain’s reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. There’s really no way to quantify exactly how many crypto-Muslims immigrated to Hispaniola or the rest of the Indies because they weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.

The more Bennett breaks it down, the more questions and scenarios whirl through my mind.

“There’s absolutely no doubt it’s North African. Perhaps at some point his ancestors had Jewish cousins,” Bennett says. “It’s likely that your dad’s direct paternal line descends from either North Africans or maybe Neolithic farmers who migrated west to Northern Africa from Iraq until they reached Spain. It’s looking like he may most likely be of Berber or, rather, Amazigh, descent. Either way, it’s very rare, because nobody in my entire database matches him.”

I had no clue what to expect on either side of Dad’s family, especially his father’s side of the tracks. I still don’t know what my paternal grandfather looks like. Every time I tried to talk Dad into taking the ancestral DNA test, I’d also ask to see photographs. I was curious what his father looked like, but whenever I asked for a photo, he’d respond, “We’ll see,” and change the subject.

I’ve rarely heard Dad talk about his father. What I do know is that he moved his family from the Dominican Republic to Aruba for some time when Dad was a child. Dad also told me they learned how to speak Papiamento, a local language that has more ingredients than a pot of sancocho: different African dialects, Spanish and Portuguese, with indigenous, English, and Dutch words. I know that Dad’s father was a successful importer/exporter for a while until he inexplicably lost everything and moved to New York City sometime in the mid-1950s. And that’s about it.

I’m hoping that once I reveal his direct paternal ancestry to him, Dad will become inspired to start sharing something other than CliffsNotes about his life with me.

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