Antiguan/English | English
I can acknowledge that I do feel very cut off from my Caribbean heritage. My Mother didn't inherit much of her Dad's Antiguan culture; most of it was concentrated in the songs and stories she used to tell me at bedtime. These were wonderful but for practical things like managing my hair, neither Mum, nor my Grandmother had ever really got to grips with it. As a result, I have been doing much of the grappling with the challenges of being mixed-race for both myself and my Mum. In a slightly backwards way, it was me who did the research and worked out that we were using entirely the wrong washing regime and products.
I have so much more of a positive outlook on being mixed than when I was a child. My favourite book of all time is 'The Bluest Eye' by Toni Morrison. Obviously, my life experience is not similar to those children, but I distinctly remember, as Pecola does in that novel, wishing for straight hair as a child. It hurts my heart thinking of that little kid desperately wishing it away. Now, I love my hair. I've really come into my own and though challenges still percolate I've lost a lot of my self-hating impulses which came from a childhood of never seeing anyone who looked like me.
During my teens I endured the now almost cliché 'but where are you from?' constantly from potential partners. It has been so refreshing to be with a person who is interested in where I originate from, wants to hear all my stories, but has no interest in nailing down my racial ambiguity before considering a relationship. For my Grandparents, my Grandmother's parents flatly exiled her for being in a relationship with a Black man. They only came around to the idea, grudgingly, after they had children and it was clear he was there to stay. Indeed, for their children, bullying was rife. My Mum moved from North London to Milton Keynes then to the Solomons chiefly because she was mercilessly taunted whenever she went to school, an island in the middle of the ocean with a completely different racial order was their only refuge in the 70s.
Studying History at University of Cambridge
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