Black.
This week has been soul shattering.
I’ve realised a lot about how I’ve spent my whole life carefully trying to erase my blackness and squeeze back into my little house n* box. All because of those ‘microagressions’, those small deaths by inches that I used to scoff & roll my eyes at when other black people would call them out. I was so far from Ready back then.
In part it is because I have been brought up in an environment where self-victimisation is deplored, and so I have blinded my eyes to the small and unassuming assaults to my character I’ve endured at critical times in its formation. I have shrunk back from any remotely uncomfortable encounter with my own skin, because I am not a victim. I refused to be a victim. I am just fine. I am successful. I am Token Black Poster Girl, rising above racism into a sparkling white realm where everyone is so adamantly colourblind.
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In reality this starts with me being born in Nigeria, growing up to the age of 5 or 6 in that country while my family – as I’ve since been told again and again and again – constantly jested me for being ‘oyinbo’... all because I could for some reason speak English better than most grown Nigerian men, apparently without much trace of my native accent. I was even told I’d marry a white man when I grew up (guess that prophecy came to pass - it’s almost like they were hoping it would) because of the fact that I was apparently more like ‘them’ than I was like ‘us’. Nigeria, I realise, is a country that has not yet wrestled out of many of its colonial cages.
And so I moved to England - my spiritual home if what my family told me was true - aged 5 or 6 and with a solid foundation of confusion, fear and denial about my identity nicely laid out by the generations before me, ready for the gallows of my later years to be built upon. And when I arrived fresh at my new school and they couldn’t pronounce my name, I decided to settle for ‘Shen’. Because young ‘Seun’ had pretty much died her little death back in the motherland.
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Believe it or not I used to have black friends. But they were from the ‘rough crowd’, which my parents and other migrant middle class (either actual or aspiring) black family & friends encouraged me to stay away from. So I dropped those friends out of self preservation. I guess I already had my own ideas about my future and how I was going to ‘make it’ out of being poor & from a relatively rough neighbourhood. Out of being Black.
Our school was incredibly diverse (being in a dodgy part of North West London has that effect) so I wandered between friendship groups that looked very different from one another with ease. At last, between the ages of 16 and 18, I figured the Asian crowd might give me that sense of acceptance and familiarity I was longing for. They weren’t white and our parents liked to cook rice and beat us with slippers so they understood, right? I spent a lot of my teenage years in Filipino households, being invited to participate in Filipino traditions, and feeling like I’d finally found my crew. The people who got wherever it was that I was coming from. And I was heartily accepted by my Filipino fam too. But I also, looking back, experienced the most blatant and scarring forms of racism I’ve ever had to face in my entire life. It’s where I was first introduced to the label, ‘Oreo’, and where I began having to say ‘no, don’t touch my hair’ almost every day I had my Afro out (until I eventually gave in), and where I’d hear things from well-meaning parents like ‘you’re not like other black people’. In essence it was where my singular version blackness, which I tried so hard to bury or at least ignore, was simultaneously upheld and called into question. But it was all okay cos the Filipinos were always the first to joke about of how ‘fresh’ they were and how they too didn’t feel like they belonged. The only difference between me and them was that I was isolated in my experience of blackness, feeling no sense of identity or national connection to the place my parents had brought me from. They had their community to fall back on and I did not, through some fault of my own.
At this point I should mention that my folks never taught me Yoruba, I assume because ‘In the UK we speak English’. Obviously. So while the rest of my family spoke my native tongue to me and half laughed half scoffed when I stared blankly back at them, I receded further into my ‘I’m not one of them’ hole. When the distant cousins I’d been transplanted amongst, who were all more closely related to each other and had literally grown up together since birth, tried to take this awkward and quiet and different little girl into their fold, I shrank back because I did not see myself in them.
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And here I am, almost twenty whole years later still licking the same wounds, but finally finding the words to call them out by. This week has unearthed things I would rather not have spoken to anyone but myself about because they hurt and they embarrass me on a very deep level. But here we are. Embracing the vulnerability and rawness of emotion and letting it hurt us all the same, in the hope that it eventually won’t hurt any more. Or it’ll just hurt a whole lot less than before.
This is my public healing.
I don’t know what, if anything, my blackness means to me yet. But I am damn tired of hearing all about what it means to other people of all other races who will never think to stand in my particular pair of shoes.
