Mixed Race Studies

Black Shamrocks: Accommodation Available – No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
2016-03-24
482 pages
15.2 x 2.8 x 22.9 cm
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1523490912

Gus Michael Nwanokwu

While many academics and social scientists have examined the psychological and societal implications of growing up as a mixed-race person, few works exist that chronicle the actual lived experience of navigating life while juggling two cultures and racial identities.

Gus Nwanokwu seeks to fill this literary void with Black Shamrocks, a powerful memoir of life as a half-Nigerian and half-Irish boy in London and the in the 1960s and 70s.

The son of a Biafran-Nigerian father and an Irish mother, Nwanokwu experiences from a tender age the harsh realities of racism, classism, and anti-immigration sentiments and bigotry in post-colonial England.

Despite the high hurdles and the abject poverty into which he and his siblings were born, Nwanokwu rises above the challenges, pursues an education, and spends his life giving back as a teacher and contributing to the betterment of society.

With keen insights about the nature of the challenges he faced, Nwanokwu’s coming-of-age memoir deftly explores his attempts to balance black and white, poverty and pride, love and violence, irreverence and respect, joy and pain, justice and injustice, and misery and satisfaction against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world.

I’m mixed race. That doesn’t mean you can ask me, “What are you?”

The Tempest
2016-05-21

Maya Williams

I’m not your exotic half-breed toy, so don’t treat me, or anyone else, like one.

“Which parent is white?” many have asked me.

That question tends to bother me as much as the “What are you?” question, if not more on some days. Especially when people attempt to soften the blow with the statement “You’re so good looking” right before it.

My mother has a father of white descent and a mother of black/Cherokee descent. My father has a father of black descent and a mother of black, white, and Chickahominy descent. My mother identifies as biracial in most situations, and my father identifies as black in most situations. All three of my siblings and I identify as multiracial in most situations. Therefore, I find it unsettling that multiracial identity is “cool” when whiteness is in the mix, and especially when there are those so desensitized from mixed race people to the point of immediately asking, “Which parent is white?” They don’t understand that multiraciality is a thing – that there doesn’t have to be a sole white parent to look the way I do.

As exciting as it is to meet other mixed race people, I always get the most excited when I meet second generation mixed race people, especially if we have similar heritage breakdowns. When I was in middle school, I met this one girl who made me laugh when she said, “Yay, we’re mixed-ded-ded!”

However, my story and my experiences as a mixed race person are not important unless my identity is placed in a binary. My interactions with black, white, biracial, and multiracial people in my family are not as newsworthy or intriguing. Second generation mixed people are an afterthought…

Read the entire article here.

Tim Brannigan, a real black Irish republican

The Irish Times
Dublin, Ireland
2016-05-28

Fionola Meredith

When Tim Brannigan was born his mother persuaded a doctor to declare him a stillbirth. Then she gave him to an orphanage – coming back a year later to ‘adopt’ the son she couldn’t admit she’d had. After that he had a normal IRA–safe-house childhood

When Tim Brannigan was 19 he found out who he really was. Growing up as a black kid in 1970s west Belfast, he already knew he was different. He had been adopted as a baby, he believed. But it turned out the person who “adopted” him was his own mother, Peggy. As he tells it in his memoir, Where Are You Really From?, it is an extraordinary narrative of secrecy, desperation and deep, unbreakable devotion, played out against the flaming backdrop of the Troubles. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that Hollywood can see its cinematic potential. Brannigan recently sold the film rights to his life story to the Oscar-winning producer John Lesher, and scripting will soon be under way.

“Mum told me everything on July 13th, 1985,” Brannigan says. He remembers the date clearly because it was the day of Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s televised music fundraiser for famine relief in Ethiopia. The family had decamped to an uncle’s holiday house in Cushendall, Co Antrim, to escape the Twelfth parades in Belfast. “The drink was flowing, and my mum was sitting there with a glass in her hand,” says Brannigan. “She started asking me what I wanted to do when I got my A levels. Suddenly she said, ‘Your father was a doctor.’”

That didn’t make sense. As far as Tim knew his adoptive father was Tom Brannigan, a delivery man and sometime showband singer, whom he describes as a chancer. “He had plenty of opportunities to fly his kite, and he did.”

“Get ready,” Peggy said. “First of all, you’re not adopted.” Shocked, Tim began to weep. “Don’t cry,” his mother whispered. “People will think I’m shouting at you. And don’t tell them, or I’ll bust your face!”…

Read the entire article here.

Where Are You Really From?

Culture Northern Ireland
2010-04-10

Joanne Savage

Race, republicanism and a mothers love in Tim Brannigan’s memoir

Peggy Brannigan met Michael Ekue at a dance in Belfast in 1965. She was from Beechmount; he was a medic from Ghana. Their eyes met, they danced and sparks flew. She was gorgeous and vivacious and republican. He was well groomed, educated and, exotically for Belfast in the 1960s, black. Both were married but swept away by each other. It was a passionate affair and the result was Tim.

His skin colour meant Peggy Brannigan had to go to extraordinary lengths to placate her husband and stave off the judgement of her devoutly Catholic neighbourhood. A black baby would have sent the busybodies fingering their rosary beads behind the net curtains into overdrive.

The little boy was smuggled from the hospital to St Joseph’s Baby Home. Peggy told everyone it had been a stillbirth. When the dust settled she began to visit her son in St Joseph’s, soon bringing him home on weekends. Eventually she would adopt him.

Meanwhile, Doctor Ekue did what so many philandering married men do. He stuck his head in the sand and carried on as usual, never contributing to his son’s education or upkeep. He returned to Ghana and left Peggy to do the rest.

Being black in the almost totally white working class area of Beechmount in the heart of west Belfast (an area this writer knows all too well), Tim obviously stood out. Narrow-minded people made stupid remarks, including the British soldiers lining the streets. Some classmates were unkind and Tim was increasingly aware that he was different from his four brothers. As he grew up he became embroiled in the republican struggle, despite backward men in bars insisting that it wasn’t his struggle or that, being black, he somehow couldn’t count as republican…

Read the entire review here.

Where Are You Really From? Kola Kubes and Gelignite, Secrets and Lies – The True Story of an Extraordinary Family

Blackstaff Press
2010-12-06
208 pages
5.4 x 0.5 x 8.4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0856408533

Tim Brannigan

Tim Brannigan was born in Belfast in 1966, and spent the first year of his life in St Joseph’s Baby Home, before being adopted by his birth mother. Told here for the first time is Tim’s extraordinary story, describing in vivid detail what it was like growing up black in Belfast during the turbulent 1970s and 80s, his five-year stint as a republican prisoner, his coming to terms with the true circumstances surrounding his birth, and his desperate attempts to trace the father who abandoned him.

poem: Casey Rocheteau

Union Station
January 2014

Casey Rocheteau

The first time I was black

I was staring out the sliding glass door
at the mourning doves in the back yard.
My white mother came up
behind me and said that if anyone
didn’t want to be my friend at school
it was their loss. I asked,
Why would anyone not want to be my friend?
well, because you’re black.
I looked at my hands
uncomprehending…

Read the entire poem here.

How street kids in the Bronx taught me it’s OK to be biracial and gay

Fusion
2016-05-18

Terry Blas

As a “nerdy, Mexican, gay, Mormon child of the ’80s and ’90s,” cartoonist Terry Blas had trouble figuring out his identity… until an experience in New York taught him a valuable lesson.

…

Read the entire comic strip here.

Stranger In The Village – A Visual Essay

Phoebe Boswell, Visual Artist
2015-12-15

Artist’s Talk at Bla Stallet Konsthallen,
Angered, Gothenburg, Sweden
September 2015

The term ‘residency’ is an interesting one to me – it offers a sense of belonging, of being present, resident, which is artificial of course since you are more often than not placed somewhere you have no connection with, no ties to, no friends in, and no reason for being there, except of course to make work. Belonging is something I think a lot about in my work. A tutor at the Slade once said to me that you make work to ‘fill a hole’, and the difficulty lies in determining within us what that hole is. Mine, I realise, is ‘home’, or a lack of it, and I’m fascinated by how, as human beings, we each individually negotiate our personal sense of belonging.

To give a little history, I’m from Kenya. My father’s family settled there from Britain three generations before him, bought land and farmed it, and he grew up bearing the guilt of a colonial system within his home, much to his dismay.

My mother’s family are Kikuyu, and of course it was the Kikuyu who set up the Mau Mau who fought for Kenya’s independence from the British, and won it in 1963…

Read the entire article here.

It’s not all black or white: reporter struggles with mixed-race identity

The Lowell
Lowell High School, San Francisco, California
2015-11-24

Rachael Schmidt

Reporter Rachael Schmidt is half white and half black. Photo by Kiara Gil.

I arrived at my cousin Angela’s fourteenth birthday party and was the first one there. Her mom is from Malaysia and her dad is German. I immediately gravitated towards her and for the rest of the evening, we exchanged gossip, played guitars and harmonized together.

Once my father’s side of the family began to arrive and attempted to interact with us, we retreated to her room. My cousin and I always laugh when we joke and scream, “Run away!” as we make our great escape. But I have always wondered why we feel so inclined to leave when our other relatives, who are mostly white, begin to show up.

I used to figure it was because of our vast age differences in comparison to our other family members’, but the more I thought about it after the party, the more I realized that I had grown uncomfortable with my father’s family when I was nine years old and my parents divorced. After my mother, who is black, became absent from family gatherings, I felt even more out of place. I am half white and half black. When one side of my background is taken away, I do not feel complete…

Read the entire article here.

The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
2016-04-06
222 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1522998952
6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

Dmae Roberts, Writer, Producer, Media and Theatre Artist

The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family traces four decades of what it means to be a mixed-race adult who sometimes called herself “Secret Asian Woman.” With her personal essays written over a ten-year period, Dmae Roberts journeys through biracial identity, Taiwan, sci-fi, and the trials of her interracial Taiwanese and Oklahoman family amid love, loss and letting go of past regrets and pain. Through journeys across America, Japan and Taiwan, this collection of personal stories charts four decades of racial identity. Each essay lends insights into the complexity of cross-cultural family relationships and includes photographs of the author’s family.