I’ve been thinking about Identity for a while, wondering why I class myself as a Gujarati, East African, Indian, British.
There’s one group I enjoy connecting with called East African Asian on Facebook and Instagram. I don’t have many memories of my childhood in Tanzania, but those I do are vivid, the sight and sound of the market with my masi and the feeling I had when my dadima pulled at my cheeks, a safari trip when a European offered me a boiled egg, a breakdown of a bus and a giraffe with his dark tongue at the window. My first day at nursery school, trips to the beach. Mostly it's the smells and sounds that take me there, to the land of my birth. But I was told recently that I wasn't East African, that I was Indian and I was back in India and told that I wasn’t Indian but British and I remember being asked where I came from by someone I worked with and when I explained Coventry, they said no, no I mean WHERE do you come from? And I reluctantly said India, although in my mind I wanted to say but I was born in East Africa and my father left India when it fractured into a country he didn’t recognise. I thought I'd share some photographs of how I class myself.
Daughter.
That’s me at six months old with my mother who’d arrived two years earlier after staying in India while my father and his family came to East Africa. I often wondered what my mother thought when she travelled to a foreign land to her husband, a man she had been apart for ten years. She was left in India with her parents, a daughter returned with a young child, my sister. But she never spoke about it. When I asked her, she would change the subject. In this photograph her identity had changed from Daughter, Mother, Sister, Cousin, to Wife, Mother, Daughter in Law, Sister in Law.
Big Sister, Student, Obedient Daughter
This set of photographs are of me with my brother and sister, one taken just before we left Tanzania. I know I’d already started nursery school and my earliest memories are of telling my mother to get rid of my brother before I came back. Yes, I was that child. The next black, white photograph is our school photo, when my brother started school in England.
On the first day of school, my brother was told to meet me in the playground at lunchtime. I waited and waited for him and after a while I checked if he was in the dining hall. I found him crying in front of a plate of food, meat and two vegetables, covered in gravy. The dinner ladies had ushered him in and unlike me, who had learnt English in my nursery in East Africa, his mother tongue was Gujarati, so he couldn’t tell them he was going home for dinner. Then a year later my younger sister joined, so I took on the responsibilities of walking home and school with two younger siblings who didn’t listen.
Obedient Daughter, Sister, Aunt.
The photo of me carrying a baby changed my identity further. I was now the oldest daughter, as my sister had married, and this is a picture of my niece and I became an aunt. She came to stay with us, while my sister worked and my responsibility increased.
Student, Friend, Niece, Daughter, Girlfriend
These photos are with my friends, when I went to Coundon Court School there weren’t many Indians, my friends were predominantly English girls until the school merged with Barker’s Butts, and became co-ed and full of Indians too. That was the turning point for me, the time when I straddled both cultures, my Britishness and my Indian heritage. Not only did I go to Saturday morning disco at the Locarno, I also went to watch Bollywood films at the Ritz and Palladium regularly.
Going away from home for my degree opened my eyes to exploring my identity further. I joined the Indian Society and met with others who were also of Indian origin. When I say Indian origin, I use a broader identity. Those whose ancestors were originally from the Indian subcontinent but were Singaporean, Malaysian, Indian, East African, Gujarati, Punjabi, Pakistani. It was where I forged my identity as a Gujarati, but also as someone who questioned cultural norms, observed differences and similarities.
Earlier this week I took part in a discussion on Blended Relationship, a conversation on why it’s important to keep our identities, embrace them, talk about them and question them. We don’t need to be put into a box. I’m who I am because of where my ancestors came from. Here’s the blog, the year of the horrible death of George Floyd. A moment that created a movement, but also a time when people questioned colonialism and empire. Watch the interview on South Asian Writers Facebook Page
Identity
A noun - the fact of being who or what a person or thing is, or a close similarity or feeling of understanding.
I call myself Gujarati, East African, Indian, British because that is as near as I sometimes fit, but at other times I don’t fit into any of those nouns, I would much rather be a human, someone who is the same as you, even if my skin colour is different to yours, my name is different to yours and I speak a different language to yours. But our leaders, governments, religions find differences not similarities to help them put you into a predefined box. I don’t have to take that identity on, I’ve created my own.
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Her’s a piece of writing for Headstone Manor Museum about the Safari Cinema, Harrow for My Home Away From Home: Untold Immigration Stories and Mental Health, an online exhibition, scroll down to Stories from the community to read it.