Just Cuz
In which I attempt to explain the meaning of the word cousin, as it was used in my family.
A cousin was any person who was born on or whose parents were born on, the Island of Olib. This rocky speck lies a four hour ferry ride off the coast of modern day Croatia. Among the inhabitable islands in that part of the Adriatic In my childhood this was part of the greater Yugoslavia, a collection of city states glued together post WWII by one time Nazi fighting leader of the Yugoslav guerrilla movement Josip Broz, Marshall Tito, a failed locksmith and thorn in the Soviet Union’s side. Upon his death, the parts again separated, like so much local olive oil and Adriatic water and violence naturally, very sadly, erupted.
So, I was raised a united, Mercedes taxi, nude beaches Yugoslavian and not a my flag is better waving national Croatian, although Croatian still defines my bloodline. Of the 718 Islands in the Adriatic Sea only 47 are inhabited with rugged Olib currently at 33rd on the population list at a stated 140 inhabitants. The islands have been inhabited on and off since very ancient times, there is no source of fresh water there, so it would never have been a first choice. My desperate family arrived to an, at that moment abandoned, Olib in modern times, 1476ce. My ancestors, both sides as my mother and father both hail from Olib, were members of a ragtag exodus of 100 persons, fleeing their mainland home city of Vrlika and persecution by the Ottomans. That for sure and perhaps they were seeking another vowel.
1476, the year that Leonardo da Vinci was acquitted on charges of sodomy and disappeared from the historical record for a couple of years. No twitter, no nothing. While in the Americas, Axayacatl, sixth Tlatoani of Tenochtitlán, was defeated by the Tarascans of Michoacán, a rare defeat for the Aztecs, sullying young and soon to be dead Axayacatl’s reputation, 43 years before the Aztecs faced the smelly, disease ridden, duplicitous if effective Spanish in battle. And in December of 1476, we saw the passing of Vlad the Impaler, the trickiest person to keep buried ever, in fictional history.
As it is absurd to think that they chose Olib because of an advertisement on a travel parchment, I assume that they were driven to the coast. There they hired (or stole) a boat and kept sailing, landing on island to island until finding one on which people did not try to kill them. So in 500 years, Olib picked up 40 citizens, while losing scores to the far more resourceful islands of Manhattan and New Zealand primarily. We Olibians have become adventurous souls that now plan to move every half millennia or so. Worth noting that my genetic profile points to my being a member of the U5 Haplogroup, which is to say that they were among the first to settle in the hood, Europe. After a truly epic journey out of Africa, they took advantage of lands exposed by only just retreated glaciers, quit wandering and just in time. Just in time to escape in to a cave in order to avoid a sabertooth cat and in that cave, to find a very attractive Neanderthal with whom to gather some fermented apples, mine some ochre, share a romantic paint n sip and oh sho naturally, some DNA. I have 37% more Neanderthal DNA than other Europeans. I do not know how much cave action it took to inform my mitochondria so richly, but this trace amount, 1.7% seems to have been enough for me to inherit at least one notable Neanderthal trait, a challenged sense of direction A fault masked today by GPS and which made me a terrible, really criminally terrible, twenty something, newsboy messenger.
Some 35,000 years before the domestication of the dog and forty thousand years before plant cultivation, my genetics were set, ancestral home settled upon and there my folks stayed. We really are a peripatetic lot. Until of course 500 years ago, when they decided after 34,500 years to swap spit with an even more limited sampling of the gene pool by moving to a very difficult to reach rock, afloat in an azure sea.
All this genealogical and historical background not only hints at the roots of my family’s insular attitudes towards others, but it also clearly explains why all of the decendants of Olib call each other cousin. Everyone is a member of that extended and stranded family. On a much bigger and frankly much prettier set of Pacific Ocean rocks, the ancestral Hawaiin residents refer to themselves as kanaka. One can no more decide to become a Hawaiian kanaka, than a Olibian cousin. Strangers, visitors to Hawaii, chiefly European blooded persons, are referred to as Haole, pronounce howl-ee and not hA-ole, although that might often fit.
In Russian, the word for friend is “drug”, pronounced droog and not to be taken orally. Well, perhaps sometimes. That same word droog has the same meaning in the Chakavian Croatian dialect ostensibly spoken by the inhabitants of Olib, but it was used, in my youth, disparagingly and tantamount to stranger or “unwelcome other.” What the hell is a friend after all but one who is not a relative and what is a friend really, if everyone you have ever known was a cousin?