An ancestor’s sketchbook [as a detour around my very first post]

Oct 22, 2024

I have been imagining to write so many posts, so many lines, and so many words for this newsletter for quite a while! But now that the time is due to sit down and write my first post, I inevitably feel as if I have nothing to say. At all. So I am taking a detour. My first post is not about sketchnotes, and it is not about anthropology (the two things that The Sketchy Anthropologist is actually all about).
My first post is about a sketchbook.
And an ancestor.

We know very little about Abel, my great-grandfather.

He died young, somewhere between his twenties and thirties. He did make it out of Verdun though, one of the key WWI battles, a battle that was apparently central to French victory (at least that’s what the surviving soldiers were told then, and what school taught us much later on).

That staying alive gave him access for a few months to a bright medal and a cushy desk job. That glory was short lived though, as Abel was to die from the complications of the gas he had inhaled, like so many others, in the trenches. And yet, out of all my ancestors, his name is the most familiar. That’s because as a kid, I heard it every time I would pick a pen to draw while getting a snack at the kitchen table: my grandma would light up and say “You’re an artist!! An artist just like my dad Abel!!”.

Abel didn’t leave much in terms of a life behind him: he died shortly after getting married, was sick the whole time, and only had a few months left when his only child, my grandma, was born. But he did leave his mark in a few drawings. And no matter what I was about to doodle as a kid, it was that crayon-to-paper moment that made my grandma glow: as if through those scribbles, her dad was inviting himself to that snacking-sketching session.

Abel’s very own sketchbook reappeared out of a dusty box a few months ago, as I was paying my parents the annual French visit. I am a bit of a stationary nerd. Actually, obsessed might be the right word. So any sketchbook, doubling as a piece of archive and an understudy of History brings sparkles to my eyes. But this one is different. Not because it’s an antique (although clearly it is, circa 1910’s is something to bow to), but because I remember my grandma carefully taking it out once in a while to show me how, truly, Abel was an artist.

I have some very sensorial and haptic memories of my grandma, and of her with that sketchbook: against her chest and her knitted green cardigan and freshly pressed shirt; held with a caress in her always perfectly manicured hand; attentively refracted in her bright brown eyes (behind the gigantic glasses that is). I remember how this sketchbook was different from any other object, from any other piece of memorabilia in the house. It only made rare, precious appearances, and during those, she would always keep it close.

The sketchbook came back to me somehow randomly, in a time and space when I was reminiscing about my family: scattered like so many others across the worlds of the dead and the living, across continents and years apart. In the pile of the random other things kept in that box, I recognized the sketchbook instantly: the cover, the format, and even some of the drawings: dogs, portraits, dogs, landscapes, and more dogs.

But there is that one sketch that I somehow did not remember at all, the very one which should have imprinted my mind!

Abel’s drawing of the Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza, Egypt (circa 1910’s)

A smooth pastel depiction of the pyramids of Giza, Egypt.

I am now writing those words from Giza, Egypt.

A place I knew nothing about before a job took me to Cairo three years ago. A place I have now called home, in addition to my other home across the world in Cambodia.

One hundred years ago Abel was drawing Giza.
One hundred years later I am trying to get back to drawing in Giza.

How Abel came to this somehow random drawing is a mystery: we are a tiny family with no one on this side left to tell his story. So we don’t know if he ever traveled to Egypt. I doubt he did though: like everyone else in the family, he was merely a train-guy with little resources to travel (and too short of a life to do so). But I also doubt a trip to Egypt happened, because there is only this one travel-inspired drawing in the sketchbook: I imagine he would have filled many pages, and many sketchbooks if he had indeed gone on a journey.

So I guess Abel just drew something that inspired him, a place he dreamed of going to, a place that was not where life had stuck him: at the front of a train, at the front of a trench, at the front of death. At the high of the Egyptology mania of the Belle Époque, Abel took his colors and took to a world he would never picture himself.

I don’t love that Abel is not around to sketch through eternal life and dream travels anymore. But I do love that he is sending the sketch back to me now, at a point when I live in Egypt and when I draw again.

I’ll think of you Abel next time I pick a crayon.

Or the next time I sketch with a snack.

Or the next time I’ll take one of those long breaths that wars took away from you.

I hope you enjoyed this reading. If you have comments or questions please feel free to leave them here, this page will feel less lonely! 👯

The Sketchy Anthropologist

An ancestor’s sketchbook [as a detour around my very first post]

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