(be)longing Workshop: Dr Ngozi Oparah

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.

The final creative workshop for my (be)longing Bethlem Gallery programme of events that I am curating was run by Dr Ngozi Oparah. Ngozi ran a fantastic storytelling workshop focusing on prompts related to our sense of belonging.

Ngozi’s prompts elicited such a range of responses from participants with each bringing a different perspective to a sense of belonging. Some of the things that really touched me, and have stayed with me and may inform the work I make for the exhibition were:

• The concept of feeling that we can both belong and not belong at the same time, it isn’t a binary;

• How a death can rock our identity and uproot our sense of belonging;

• How being / living somewhere else can provide a sense of freedom but simultaneously may not feel real - it is just a temporary escape;

• The sense of belonging to others (family, friends, lovers);

• The fear of difference and being different - how does that alter our sense of belonging?

The workshop - excellently facilitated - made me think deeply about my connection to writing and my current relationship to it. As a child my first love was words, but my fear of sharing or even tangibly describing my mental health struggles heightened a sense of vulnerability in me and I moved into image making. Now that I’m in a fairly stable phase of my life I have been returning to words and discovering how much I love to feel them tumbling from my mind into sentences on screen. I’m really excited to bring words and text into the exhibition - I’m just not sure how now.

One of the prompts that Ngozi posed to us was “what/where/who is home?” and I wrote the following piece, albeit very quickly. I was shocked how quickly I went to home as people as opposed to place, and most notably thinking about the past (my mother) and the present (my husband).

Home is you.
Home is you stroking my hair as a child.
Home is your voice, now only heard in my dreams.
Home is your curried goat.
Home is you patching up my wounds.
Home is a hospital visit.
Home is the smell of your Chanel no. 5.
Home is us peeling potatoes at the kitchen table.
Home is a goodbye.

Home is us: you and our cat.
Home is a silent hug.
Home is travel.
Home is trust.
Home is your awful cooking.
Home is your patience.
Home is red and yellow, rhubarb and custard.
Home is our skin touching.
Home is anywhere with you.

I sometimes find myself drifting off into daydreams with words so it can be hard to focus. A word connects to another word and then to a memory and that opens up a box of thoughts in my head. It’s not unpleasant - rather the opposite - I begin to daydream. It just means that I write slowly because each sentence is like unwrapping an unexpected thought connected to a hundred others.

I found my staring at this beautiful patch of undulating light in the workshop studio before coming back to myself and the others attending.