(be)longing - a beginning
My parents, T & B
This entry is about my on-going project (be)longing which looks at themes of race, heritage, transracial adoption and estrangement. Click here to read all of the posts on this topic.
For the last couple of years I have been increasingly curious about unpicking my family history, including tracing my Caribbean heritage, or at least understanding some of my family lineage on both sides.
If I’m honest, my family history is a mess. Growing up I experienced repeated estrangements on both my mother and father’s side. We would often go long periods (years) without speaking to family members for various and complex interpersonal reasons that growing up I only had a vague grasp of. However, one of the biggest parts of my family story is that my father - a Black man - was adopted by white folk in the late 1950s. I always knew this growing up, but the story around my father’s adoption was something that both of my parent’s avoided discussing with me. It was made clear to me to not ask questions because either my father didn’t want to discuss it, or there was no information for us to discuss.
For most of my life I accepted this strange scenario - to be raised by a Black father and a white mother, but with no exposure to our Black biological family. After all, that’s what happens when adoption takes place - it’s just that not all adoptions involve the transracial aspect. I have been navigating 39 years of my life as a racially ambiguous person of mixed heritage.
Whilst I was growing up my white mother did the best to expose us to as much Black culture as possible. Her love for soca and reggae music would see us dancing and whining in the living room, or at Notting Hill Carnival which she took me to for many years in my adolescence. She would cook giant pots of the most delicious curry goat, fried dumplings, escovitch fish, and her ability to handle spice was akin to none. Meanwhile, my Black father appreciated a fry up and a traditional British roast dinner. It was, at times, a comical pairing.
Growing up I tried to not think about race and belonging. Primarily because there was not much I could do about it and I had other pressing issues to focus on - surviving being a queer, mentally ill kid in a hideously racist and homophobic part of Essex in the South East of the UK. As soon as I could I escaped to London to go clubbing underage. I quickly found that even within the queer community I didn’t belong because my brownness was another basis for exclusion.
On my first outing to a gay bar in London with a friend, excited and filled with gut-wrenching nerves, I stopped someone to ask them the time.
“I’m sorry, I don’t do brown meat,” they casually laughed in my face.
I immediately felt unsafe in a community where I had naively felt that I would belong. This is a feeling that I still carry with me every time I step into a queer space - a sense of trepidation that the “white gay male tyranny” (quote from the fantastic and hilarious A Strange Loop musical) would do all it could to stop me belonging there. At best I experienced fetishisation, at worst, ostracisation.
It wasn’t just the queer community that wanted me to sit on the outside. Growing up, both the Black and white communities available to me let me know that my ambiguous brown skin was not welcome. At school, where I was one of a few children of colour, white kids hurled (incorrect) racial slurs at me, from primary school all the way through and beyond. Yet whenever I tried to socialise with people from the Black community, people would give me that look that says you are too white to belong here.
For over 15 years I pushed race to the side because there was nothing I could do about it. I am Daniel, I thought. I’m a mixed person, a queer, a disabled guy and that’s that.
It wasn’t until I started working on Incipiency in 2020-2022, my work with Tavistock & Portman and SLaM that these huge issues started rearing their head and became something that I could no longer avoid. In so many of the conversations I was having - primarily with other people from mixed heritage - we were asking questions such as:
Where do I belong when I belong to two cultures? What is this third space that I exist in?
I’m too Black for white people, but I’m not Black enough for Black people. Where do I fit in?
Who am I when there are gaps in the connection to my Black culture?
I finished that project feeling quite interrupted, jarred, like I’d been shocked over and over with a cattle prod. What had been buried for means of self-preservation came rushing to the surface and I began to question so many things about my identity. This included:
Asking Black friends (including people like me, who are mixed), if I was allowed to apply for grants for Black artists, or attend Black Pride? They said yes, silly, of course you can! You’re skin is brown because your father is Black, that’s why you’re not white.
How do I describe myself? A very close friend asked me “why are you describing yourself as brown instead of Black? Brown is a skin colour, Black is an identity.”
In the last few years I have been (happily) astounded by the confidence that light skinned Black African-American people have in asserting their Blackness. They are unapologetic. Since 2019 I have also been travelling back and forth to work in Australia where I have been learning so much about cultural fragmentation due to systemic policies of white assimilation, including the horrendous rape of Aboriginal women, and what it means to identify as an Indigenous/Black person in the wake of these hideous acts. Blackness means different things to different people, depending on the context of their heritage. I started thinking, I guess that includes me too?
I suppose that I am writing this to say that I’m embarking on a journey to unpick some of these painfully complex topics and how they pertain to my family history. Sometimes we can make assumptions that family histories and archives are easy, present and accessible but in my case, it could not be further from the truth. As an estranged person I have no archives. As the descendant of an adoptee I have no family lineage to access and make sense of.
There are a hundred questions and not a single answer. But it’s a starting point all the same.