English | Guyanese
My Mother is English, my Father is Guyanese. My Mother has always been very open about her culture and this has always felt easy for her to do. My Father has too been open about his culture; however, it is not as ingratiate in our day to day lives. My Grandad served in the war, working on the HMS Belfast and on the Mother’s Day of 2019 my family and I went to visit the ship. This was a very important moment for me as I was able to see the historic implications of my Grandad’s service and felt some connection with the English side of me as he did fight in the war for his country.
I have connected to each of my cultures mostly through communication and listening to stories and events told by my family about their experiences. Ideally, I would want to experience some of these stories first-hand by going to Guyana and that is what I plan to do. Growing up, most of the experience I had with Guyanese culture would come from my Grandma; her cooking, her accent, the phrases she uses and the family she connects us to. Not until my teenage years did, I start to process what being mixed-race meant to me personally, and I started to want to know more about being Guyanese and would begin to ask more questions to my Dad and my Grandparents about their upbringings. I now feel like I have a better understanding of what constitutes making me who I am.
I think it is very possible that people’s culture affects the way they choose their partner. I think we gravitate to people who are similar to us. I certainly find that with my boyfriend, there are some aspects of his Nigerian culture that are similar to my Guyanese culture and that often makes me happy in a sense that we have had common experiences and can relate to one another. However, I think it is important to recognise that culture is only one factor of why you might choose a partner or friends, and in fact the ability to share culture and connect with people could come in a form of teaching or learning from culture, hence why I think interracial couples are so important as this sharing and learning of one another’s culture would happen.
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