Jungle Fever

When I was a young girl there was a couple that I was fascinated with, Aunty Perpetua and Uncle Peter. They were friends of my dad's originally and then became family friends and so they were not blood relatives. Once we moved to Ghana when I was four, as far as I know we lost touch with them but I always remember looking time and time again at a few pictures we had of them on their wedding day which we had in a family album. I don't recall if I asked my parents questions about Aunty Perpetua and Uncle Peter but I do remember wondering if anyone was ever going to mention the fact that Aunty Perpetua had married ... wait for it ... a white man! Did she realise I asked myself quietly? I just wasn't sure what the rules were about that kind of thing or how it even happened. I knew that my parents had met at a hospital where they were both working, nurse alongside doctor amidst romance. I also knew that my parents stood out at times and that lots of people had to get used to the idea of them being a couple but they were my parents so these things still felt normal. In Ghana my parents knew three other couples who were mixed couples where the man was black and the woman white. This certainly wasn't common place but more common place than the Aunty Perpetua/Uncle Peter combination, in my eyes at least.     

For many years I would unconsciously pull out that family photo album and look at the pictures of Aunty Perpetua and Uncle Peter, still with this curiosity and fascination much like the one I had when I discovered a black woman smoking in a public place. I had overheard some grown ups nearby talking about 'those kind of women' and had wondered what that had meant. Again I remember thinking, so what are the rules about black women smoking? If they could smoke, could 'those women' also marry white men? It was very confusing, especially because my own mother was white and had married a black man and she also smoked cigarettes and even though her smoking made my dad cross, she still did it as often as she could! 

At age 20 and 21 my boyfriend and I decided to get married after a year together but geographically apart much of the time. I didn't know anyone from my peer group that had been married or was even planning marriage and so making decisions about the ceremony, the dress, the vows and all those weddingy details was neither familiar or of particular interest. But there was one familiar image that kept coming to mind in those eight weeks leading up to getting married, the image of Aunty Perpetua and Uncle Peter on their wedding day. A number of people asked me then and still ask me now, how I decided on what to wear on my wedding day. Well, it was easy! I owned one dress and I asked a friend from church with sewing skills to replicate it in cream and then I dug out that familiar family album and found the picture of my black aunty with her white husband and told my mother that I wanted to look 'kind of like Aunty Perpetua' which is how I decided on a plain head wrap. My hubby and I still often talk about this couple, this picture of them on their special day, these role models of ours who we do not know or socialise with or even see and yet who have had such an impact on my life and now our life together. I was reminded of Aunty Perpetua and Uncle Peter once more recently when hubby and I watched 'A Bronx Tale' for the first time. Regardless of the fact that I am a huge fan of gangster movies, a huge fan of biopic movies, a huge fan of Robert De Niro, what blew me away most was the depiction of a young black woman and a young italian man, a 'mixed' couple, falling in love amidst all the stuff good and bad, simple and complex that runs alongside mixed relationships. Just the other day my littlest one pointed at the tv and said 'she's like you and he's like daddy' referring to a couple on screen, he looked slightly bemused for a second and I wondered ... am I his Aunty Perpetua or someone else's?    

Mixed Race: A mixed matter

Me with my big sisters

Last week I read a great blog post, see it here! It was one of those experiences where your heart races a little faster with both the comprehension of the subject and excitement with it! My great friend Mama-andmore wrote about a subject that we have spoken about in many contexts before, a subject which drew us to one another when we first met at college many years ago and one that intrigues us further since having our own offspring. It is the subject of identifying as mixed-race.

I always have so much to say on this subject that it is very easy for me to get carried away thinking I'm writing my dissertation all over again! In fact, I'm very late in publishing this post because I've re-written it a number of times realizing that I may be going off track somewhat. So, anyway Mama-andmore asked me for a response to her post and without giving it too much thought (so as not to get into dissertation mode) this is what I wrote:

'This is a great post Zaz, really effortless and natural! I am mixed-race with a Ghanaian(West African) father and a white British mother. I spent my early years in Ghana and moved to Britain when I was ten and on occasion I was both celebrated and insulted in equal measure from both 'sides'. There were cultural issues to face as the question of race and identity were very different for each 'side'. I learned very quickly to be adaptable and accepting of each 'sides' prejudices and misunderstandings and saw my role as an advocate for both camps! I would love to say with confidence that the colour of a persons skin bares little meaning but I don't believe it to be true. I definitely choose for my 7 year old and four year old boys to keep their hair long because it is their hair and not their skin colour that identifies them as 'mixed' and it is very important to us as a family that they have a sense of both pride and clarity in their ethnic and family background. I feel equally passionate about sharing with them stories about their white great-grandmother who was a single parent back in the 1940's, all of these histories are fundamental in shaping who we are and where we came from. However, skin colour visibly 'outs you' whichever side of the fence you sit on and when being in the minority means always standing out in a crowd, that can be a burden whether it's a mixed-race girl in a predominantly white school or a white woman in rural west africa in the 1960's like my mother experienced. I could go on and on ... but I won't! I'll definitely be linking this great post on my blog for others to see Zaz, it's such a great topic for debate and shared experiences!'

On reflection, my comment seemed rather negative and I came away thinking that I may have done 'both sides' a disservice but actually I think that's because where I live right now I don't really have to think about the colour of my skin. In my average day to day experiences it's all pretty cosy and middle class and safe but this has not been the case all of my life. Even seventeen odd years ago when that hubby of mine and I first started dating there were definitely places where we knew not to hold hands because it wasn't worth the hassle of something kicking off. I've never mentioned this to my eldest son - a boy with a real sense of justice he would find it shocking because thankfully he hasn't had any negative experiences so far of that type. He thinks it's normal to get stopped repeatedly wherever we go and told how 'AMAZING' his hair is! There are definitely advantages to living in a country where 'Mixed-Race' is one of the fastest growing ethnic groups! My cousins and siblings were right all those years ago in Ghana when we said 'one day there will be a third race, the 'mixed-race!'

Mama-andmore and I would love to hear about your experiences too, so do get in touch and leave comments. Lastly, here's a short but interesting article that appeared in a paper today.