A Mixed Race Feminist Blog Interview with Isabel AdonisPosted in Articles, Autobiography, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2016-01-16 15:37Z by Steven |
A Mixed Race Feminist Blog Interview with Isabel Adonis
A Mixed Race Feminist Blog
2016-01-15
Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom
About Isabel Adonis
I’m a private tutor, artist and writer and I live in Wales. My mother was a white Welsh woman and my father was a black man from Georgetown in Guyana. He was quite a well-known writer and artist. I was born and brought up in London until I was six when my father began working in Khartoum in the Sudan. I lived and went to school there until I was nine when my parents bought a house in Wales. For the next nine years I lived and went to school in Wales and travelled to Africa in the holidays. After five years in the Sudan my father worked in different universities in Nigeria. My parents split up when I was seventeen and my father returned to the Caribbean. My mother did not remarry. In my twenties I trained as a teacher but because of an incident at the school, which I think was race related I decided I would never teach. I have four grown up children.
Do you remember when you first came to understand that you are mixed race?
Yes, around the time that ethnic monitoring was introduced in the UK in the early nineties. I had no notion of being mixed race prior to that. I was not brought up to call myself anything. However I do not call myself mixed race now. I leave it to others to do that kind of thing. I resist being categorised in this way, since it is problematic. Identification functions by inclusion and therefore exclusion. I’m not happy with that…
Read the entire interview here.