English/Indian | Jamaican
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My Father was Jamaican. My Mother’s Father was from India and her Mother was English. My parents met when my Father came to England to study. The married in England in 1957 and then went to live in the Caribbean. I guess that coming from a mixed-race background herself, my Mother was open to other cultures and ways of living. My parents had four children, we were all born in Guyana and we grew up in Jamaica. So, my first cultural affinity is with the Caribbean. It has shaped who I am and how I think about myself. In particular I grew up in a country which was itself transforming – becoming more nationalistic, challenging the UK as the mother country, embracing its indigenous culture and emerging as a self-determining polity. I came to study in England as a postgraduate. It wasn’t quite as daunting as it sounds because we used to come to visit my Mother’s family in England in the holidays. However on my own, without my family, it was a bit scary and I realised that people looked at me as if I were different, although I did not think I was. I used to get the ‘where are you from’ question regularly – and found it difficult to answer – Jamaica was my initial response, but then that made me feel like a foreigner – and I thought I should not be pretending my Mother was not British – but there was no easy way to explain this, and anyway I did not really want to explain it to most of the people who asked. I am now (many years later) more confident in explaining who I am to my friends. I am comfortable living in the UK and working for Parliament – and indeed I now have a family here. I have friends who moved to the USA and they tend to only mix with other Black people. I prefer getting to know people from all backgrounds and cultures. When I go back to the Caribbean (infrequently now) I do breathe a sigh of relief – I think it’s the comfort of being in a familiar place again and one that I associate with happy memories. Yet I also know I have been here too long to settle back in the Caribbean.
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