During the past couple of weeks, I made a conscious effort not to follow up with the Georgian-Russian war. In truth, my following up with it would have given birth to numerous lugubrious posts and much personal sorrow. I do not know the details of the war except for this: Russia is a world power, and Georgia is a marginal country in the Caucasus.

Georgia’s proximity to where my ancestors came from, and indeed the similarities between the situation it finds itself in these days and what they faced, and their being united by the same aggressor, Russia, make me uncomfortable.

This is the same Russia which waged wars against Circassians and forced most of them out of their homeland and on to wander south with their cow- and ox-driven wooden carriages, men, women, and children, who were unable to speak the language of their hosts and who faced difficult times adapting to their new cultures and warding off native hostility. Russia then was Czarist, and now it is a Republic, but little else has changed in its logic of power.

It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have settled there over the past 2,000 years.

Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of which a handful are established literary languages and several others have only a precarious recent literary status, are spoken. Worse for anyone trying to present a coherent narrative, these disparate peoples have very different histories, and only two, the Georgians and Armenians (some would add the Azeris), have a history of statehood consistent enough to be retold as one would retell the history of a West European country.

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On why I always bring up my Circassian roots, it is because people always marginalize maternal ancestry in favor of paternal lineage. I find that not only profoundly ignorant, but also an act of grave ingratitude. I may not carry my mother’s name for now, but I carry her genes and her history, and even if Circassians on this side and Arabs on the other don’t like my saying so: I am as much of her as I am of my father. Nay, even more.