Nature or Nurture

I’ve always wondered about the nature/ nurture debate. Are human activities, tendencies and behaviours more influenced by genetics or by environmental factors?

As an adopted person I got the chance to find out. Here’s what I learned.

Would it be fair to say I was adopted and raised by criminals? They didn’t seem so to me. I just called them normal, my people. Of course I always knew they were anything but either.

The furthest back I could find out about, my great-grandfather took over Brick Lane market market at gunpoint when he first arrived in London from Lithuania.

After him, my grandfather was an international arms dealer and all round heavy who did business with a range of colourful characters from the Chicago mafia to Palestine.

Then my dad; he was hustler; a speedball junkie who hung out with gangsters and villains, as well as jazz musicians. My mum didn’t hang around. My step-mum was an ex-hoister, high end goods to order, an ex-hooker too, turned coke dealer, known and feared in the West End. When I saw the movie ‘The Grifters’ that was her to a tee.

I never liked that side of things. I wanted a clean and natural life, not full of loss, trauma, chaos and corruption. I pleaded for it as soon as I could talk, and never stopped hollering foul. As soon as I was old enough I planned my escape and got the heck of those circles. Tick for nature, I’d say.

I’d say my dad approved of my personal code, even envied it as he himself was so thoroughly corrupted and rotten, having long-since traded any principle or virtue with the devil for a next fix. He had a good heart once, a beautiful soul no doubt, to be so in love with Jazz, but life has a way of beating people up and he took the hits pretty hard. The best parts got smashed one way or another, I guess.

Before he got so lost that he gave up on ever getting back to found, my dad had a bit of soul, like any true Jazz man is entitled to. Bearing in mind the name of our podcast, that is a tick to nurture.

To my mind, he showed it most by making sure I’d always have a bridge back to my African heritage: When I was age 2 or 3 he introduced one of his Jazzy Nigerian friends to me. Mfon, Moosy, Speedy, Ginger, someone else? I’ll never know. And he asked him to suggest a good name for me.

Ironically, it’s one of the greatest things my adopted dad gave me: a bridge to my Ancestral heritage, offering the stability of cultural balance and making it possible for me to feel supported by my Ancestors going forward through life. Having that name kind of allowed certain parts of my nature to emerge, maybe, who knows. But I got the name through nurture. That’s a tick for both.

There was things in that life that did not agree with me: I had my scruples, especially regarding women, with a strict code all my own, cobbled together from scraps I’d picked up along the way from those I respected as ‘big’. Duke Ellington in particular, via his ambassadors Ray Nance and Paul Gonsalves from his band, old friends of my dad. Stories there I won’t be sharing here today, but maybe in the podcast;)

Ray was kind of fiery and funny and Paul was kind of watery and sad, but when they spoke of their boss, the Duke, I got that they were more proud of what Duke stands for than of anything else in the world, including certain things about themselves.

The way everyone went when Duke was mentioned gave me idea that he must be a true giant. They all really loved him, the band sometimes played for him for free! Duke Ellington was a true gentleman was all anyone could say, charming, witty, highly respectful to all and respectable by all.

Duke Ellington was different from most jazz player’s ghettoised mentality of disrespect to themselves and their women with all their abusive hedonism of sex and drugs and jazz music (interiorising the values of their oppressors as Paulo Freire would say, more on him in a sec). Originally spelled ‘Jass music’, ‘Jazz music’ literally means ‘sex-music’ and it comes from the red light district of New Orleans. But Duke gave jazz an element of authentic class and style with the natural nobility of the man and his music. His music broke out of the smoky red-lit slave-room and ran all round the magical palace grounds. For real.

Duke wasn’t the only influence, of course. I’ll introduce you to another in just a minute, but Duke stood out as a beacon of virtue and respect in a jazz world mired in babylon.

By 15, the base of my personal code was pretty well formed. It was simple: No powders, no people. Tick nurture.

I could sell anything else from jewellery to clothing to fire extinguishers. (Haha: At 17, I nearly set Ronnie Scott’s club on fire one day when I was demonstrating some slightly iffy extinguishers to Monty, who ran things there.)

A lot of people seemed to want me to sell all kinds of things, as I recall. But I was more of a blagger really, someone who could talk my way into or out of anything I had to. I put that down to both nature and nurture, again: I may be descended from a line of storytellers or griots, but my adopted dad was also known as one of the top hustlers in the West End in the 70s.

By 21, every male in my world was a pimp, including my flatmate, and every woman was a hooker, including my girlfriend. (Being offered a position as pimp is the most unflattering job offer I’ve ever had.)

I never looked down on others, they were only doing what they could to survive. I was lucky to have great mentors and role models, luckier than them in that way, and I was good enough at blagging to be able to survive by sticking to my own code.

Until I escaped to Brighton, age 23, most of the people I knew was through my adopted family. Even my boss was a killer, bank robber and importer. Family friend. Everyone seemed scared of him. I never felt fear for a second. Sure, he was a rough old diamond, but I think he liked not being feared; he was good to me in lots of ways; always tried to show me wisdom like it was worth it.

So, would it be fair to say I was adopted and raised by criminals? What even IS a criminal? The guy with a ten pound draw or the guy with a fountain pen for a magic wand to turn your world into his mansion, your life into his wealth? I know this: a criminal is best understood as being criminal minded. And criminal minded is thinking that everyone else is a mug.

A ‘mug’ is literally a ‘face’ to be mugged, robbed, and to be mugged-off, told lies to and disrespected. Muggins means a sucker or one who cleans up the mess of others. Neither nature nor nurture set me up to be anyone’s mug. People tended to respect me, probably because my dad was seen as a bit of big shot in his world.

After 7 years of London streetlife in the underworld circles of my adopted dad, something in me broke free and struck out in the direction of meaning, searching for something more meaningful than materialism to base my life on.

I have to give credit to womankind, for my first girlfriend was an educated woman, artist designer. She helped to nurture my interests in culture, value and meaning. When we ended after three years I was in a good starting position.

I began by going back to the roots of modern European mind in Classical civilisation. Started reading Plato for fun, then Homer, then started studying seriously as a student. I was interested in how we’d stumbled into this dadaesque post-truth and post-meaning storyworld we now live in.

Over the years, as I climbed up the academic ladder, I discovered my own mix. Perhaps it was kind of influenced by life-teachers or mentors I was privileged to know, like author, Johan Borgen, drummer, Art Blakey and educationist Paulo Freire.

For most of my teens, Johan Borgen, Boomps as we called him, was my close friend despite our 60+ year age difference. He saw the mess I was in and did what he could to help, along with his family. I’d never met anyone with bullet holes in them before.

The Nazi prison camp guards put them there when his wife led a group of resistance fighters to spring him one night. She had no choice, she said. Having endured the tortuous extraction of every tooth in his head with pliers (and still not cracked!) the Nazis had given up on torture and her man was marked for execution.

She wasted a load of guards that night with her machine gun, for real, and she half-carried her bullet-ridden man away from the prison shoot-out. Proper viking warrior queen, the formidable Annemarta, with her library of 20,000 books.

She and Boomps met me age 11, unfed, filthy and feral but interesting enough to be worth helping. They looked after me for a month every year throughout young my teens. It was the pair of them, but Boomps especially, who got me into writing.

I didn’t spend as much time with Art Blakey, he seldom visited England, and America was far for me. But talks with him made a big impression in my early teens, helping me set goals and get my shit together later in life just like he told me.

The man had soul. He was great with young people. He launched lots of giants through his Jazz Messengers, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, a long list of such giants were nurtured under Art’s wing. When you’re a kid who plays jazz drums and your favourite drummer tells you not to play jazz music for a living it sounds weird. But just about every musician I knew would have advised anyone against being a professional jazz musician. Part of the reason it’s taken me this long to produce a debut album is due to that nurture.

Most of those guys don’t always enjoy being pros and often feel more used than using in relation to music and performance. Believe me. In those days jazz was the sound and spice of real-life vice. A lifestyle that will spin you out and wear you out before it spits you out in pieces.

Thanks to Art, I never married the music, she’s way too fickle to rely on and way too precious to pimp. Instead I have always kept music as a lifelong mistress and sweetheart. Only now, with the release of the debut album ‘Treesongs’, am I making public my relationship with music. Time to make an honest woman of my muse.

Paulo Freire was the third mentor who formed part of my nurture as a younger person.

I met him on my way up, after breaking free of the London family scene and blagging my way into university, where I graduated top of my year in philosophy, and flew through MA to PhD.

Haha. I’m the only PhD teacher, teacher trainer, and trainer of trainers in the land who doesn’t even have O-levels. Hahaha. I skipped that whole stage. I didn’t need it. Once I blagged my way onto A-level courses all my achievements were very real.

Philosophy is blaggery: constructing and conveying coherent and convincing meaning. As an experienced blagger in the real world already, age 23, used to depending on my wits for a living and to stay alive, it was no wonder I graduated top of my year.

Paulo had something to do with that. He was the most inspiring writers I found in my years as a degree student of philosophy, social anthropology and linguistics. His extra-classic book ‘Pedagogy Of The Oppressed’ spoke loud and clear to my own experience as a young person, and his ‘Cultural Action For Freedom’ was a short simple blueprint for how to transform reality. And the man himself was a great soul, a mahatma, who had survived the fascist’s culling of radical priests in Brazil in the 60s and 70s, emerging from prison to become World Council Of Churches’ ambassador to the UN as well as education minister for Brazil’s new more people-friendly and more democratic regime.

Surely, two notable figures who derived profound personal ans well as intellectual influence from Paulo way before me are Henry Giroux and Steve Biko. We all know what happened to Steve, but his words live on. As for Henry, he’s still out there banging the drum for humanising critical pedagogy and against dehumanising fascist tyranny. He really does carry the flame passed on by Paulo Freire.

First I got into Paulo’s writings, then I based my Doctoral work on developing his ideas in different contexts, then we met and spoke a couple of times in London and my life changed. He loved how I was building a related or parallel model, adapting his liberating work to the UK context and expanding his dialogic and codifications elements to include story, with all its life-orienting mythologic, cosmologic and epistemological functions. He said it could be a major breakthrough for understadning and working with the dynamics of social transformation through pedagogic interaction.

Everyone was always very flattering about my work, a breakthrough of some kind, apparently, but it was all easy come easy go to me, I was all about Wittgenstein’s dictum, that ‘ambition is the death of thought’. I’d achieved my goal. To escape from the underdog underworld of whorehouses and drug dens to a PhD and professional status. I had no interest in being an academic beyond that. I wanted to teach, which is why I ended up teaching in high schools for 30 years. But that’s another story.

One big truth I realised, after processing my private conversations with Paulo over the years: it matters not so much what a person does; nor even how one does it. What really counts is who one is and what one signifies, i.e. the vibe you ring with and the light you bring.

That was the thing about Paulo: he was very real. Just like Boomps. Just like Art. They were all real enough long enough to be wise enough. Authentic big men, great souls, Mahatma, like Gandhi, and no doubt all just as flawed. I didn’t realise it at the time, of course, all I felt was humbled, but what they all brought to me was hope, guidance and a sense of self-worth: that such men would want to such spend time on a kid like me. Very humbling.

So, all that was my nurture side: An underworld jazzlife with a single dad awash with heroin, money, women and jazz. Duke Ellington for my role model on women. Freedom-fighter artist-intellects like Boomps, Art and Paulo for mentors.

It is also probably significant that I received no nurturing of any kind from any female past the age of 2 weeks until I met Annemarta, age 11. She took care to feed my mind, spirit and character as well as my stomach.

That point, about no female nurturing, brings us to the nature side. There seems as little female influence there as in the nurture.

Nature: I knew nothing of my natural status as a human until I my first son popped along. Holding him at minutes old was the first human connection I had felt since being left by my birth mother at two weeks. Till then I’d actually half suspected I was not born but created, but seeing my own flesh and blood manifested in another person let me know I was part of a chain just like everyone else.

When I hit my 40s I was traced by my birth parents’ other children – my birth-siblings. There’s way too much to say to open that subject properly here and now, but suffice it say for the time being that it certainly gave me cause to consider the nature/nurture debate and how my own experience might relate to it.

My birth mother looked like an alien to me, couldn’t imagine myself ever coming from her or being related to her physically. She wanted to write poems, but never could get beyond birthday rhyme mode. As a war child, did she lack opportunity to develop more nuanced work?

I think she played pretend a lot, probably a bit of a young fantasist, until it bit her so hard it she broke in two. Giving me up hadn’t broken her, she was broken apart before, but giving up her only son had made it impossible for her to put herself back together again. All I felt for her was sadness and pity. Trainwreck life.

All I know of her family background is they were all dirt poor and died young.

Sad to say, I have never felt any connection to my birth mother. Aside from a week or two after birth, I only ever saw her five times in my life, from my 40s to my 50s. I actually felt more connected to her before meeting her, if that makes any sense, as if I was only ever really connected to the idea of a mother, never to the real thing. She didn’t dig jazz, didn’t turn on, didn’t do any of the stuff I was raised in, but that’s cultural, not nature. Naturewise, she was even more like an alien to me: she had no fight in her against wickedness or downpression personal or social. She never stood for justice or progress, freedom or rights for herself or anyone else. She was a woman totally beat down by a lifetime of poverty, sorrow, sickness, pain and regret. Saddest of all, she was so deranged by the trauma of her abuse that she loved her violent abusers more than she loved her own three children who depended on her for love, saftey and protection. I was lucky to get away from the start, I had two other other siblings stayed and were destroyed.

I know more about my birth father, who was never my dad. Reckon he was just as mad and sad as my birth-mother.

From dirt poor Jamaican hamlet beginnings he too wanted to be a writer, publisher and educated man. His writings were pretty odd though, the voice and mind of of a british colonial sergeant major. As a writer, my interests were fundamentally opposite to my birth fathers: he wanted to pronounce his divisive opinions about races and nationalities; I wanted to understand the dynamics and common denominators of human cultures. And yet, despite these nurture factors there was a core interest in peoples and values and writing or telling stories about them. Tick nature?

The man loved everything western, especially england and america, and he despised anything African. The opposite of me. Tick nurture?

His father was a wandering griot/minstrel of the Westward Maroon region of Saint James.

According to my birth father, my griot/minstrel grandfather was descended from a griot who had arrived in Jamaica as one of a party connected with Ashanti royalty. The time and location suggest that royal might have been Naqqan, father of Cudjoe and founder of the Maroons. Apparently, he was kidnapped and sold by a treacherous ship’s captain instead of being transported to England as an elite to be educated.

Discovering, in my 40s, a line of consecutive generations from the 1700s to the 1900s, all minstrels/griots, made an impact because I had carved out a life like a griot myself too, totally naturally: a teacher, a musician, a storyteller, mythographer and philosopher. Tick nature?

I was so struck by the coincidence that on my return to England from that first trip to Jamaica I immediately quit teaching full time and started building Abracadia; I became a full time griot, like my grandfather and his predecessors. Not in their African-roots or Jamaican-hills styles, but hip and urban, in my own Jazzy style.

My birth father’s values were totally opposite to mine, politically, ethically and personally. I found him just as alien as my birth mother. I was shocked and pretty horrified when he told me he had never loved a woman in his life. As a person who has loved a number of women and who has never stopped loving any of them, I believe love is an eternal meeting of souls, beyond time and rustproof as gold. I never got that from my dad or my birth father, who both showed similar abusive disrespect for women.

I liked strong women, women who could stand and be of some real use in the world. I suppose that’s a tick for nurture: I’d suffered from a birth mother and adopted mum who were so beat down they couldn’t even care for me. It was their lack of strength and principle that made me seek women who had it.

My birth father described himself as having always been a violent man; I know some of the things he has done; he wasn’t lying. It’s impossible to judge another man’s soul. I’m fine with strong defence, but not with cruelty or bullying; I did not like his ways with women and children.

And yet, I wonder how much that part of him comes from nurture: let’s not forget that Jamaica was a slave-breeding island after all, absolute cruelty to women and children was literally branded into so many people and passed along to where those epigenetics of nurture become nature.

I’m not sure how a lack of positive connection to female nurture in formative years can effect a person. Personally, it hasn’t made it difficult for me to have great relationships of all sorts with women. I may I may have broken a few hearts, and mine’s been stomped too, but they’re the exceptions, not the rule. 90% of the balance has always been good and the lifelong warming embers of caring compassion remain when the flame of passions subside, just as they should.

So that’s the nature or nurture test. I’ve tallied them up: 6 points for nature and 11 for nurture. Aptitudes seem natural, social relations and values more nurture based. My conclusion. Yours?

For more on all topics to do with Abracadia and its work, don’t forget to check Abracadia’s weekly spoken word offering at the ‘Bit Of Soul Podcast’. Come and say hi, pass by for a try. Be great to see you there. Just roll up anytime to listen, chill and reason at the lush and refreshing oasis that is Abracadia.

Until such time - In Ubuntu

Remi