Anybody who knows me knows that I am a complete sap. I have been known to well up watching advertisements on television (This one gets me every time). So naturally I was crying as I watched Obama’s victory speech when he won the elections last month. After the initial elation however, I felt strangely deflated. Why were the media obsessed with declaring that America had elected the nation's first black president? Being half Korean and half English, I felt robbed of what I considered a triumph for all of those with a mixed race heritage background.
The politics of identity are never straightforward. I know this from being asked a million times by strangers to define myself. Am I Korean or English or American (it’s the accent, apparently), they want to know (though invariably no matter what answer I give, to Koreans I am English and to the English I am Korean), for in their eyes, I can never be both. People like simple answers.
But life isn’t that simple. The Map of Me is a testament to this. On the one hand, people describe being mixed race as having the best of both worlds. On the other, it may mean feeling lost in between them, never feeling fully part of either. Not everyone is happy with being a mutt, though there is often a significant amount of comedy in sitting on the fence between two cultures (i.e embarrassing your stiff upper lipped relatives with emotional outbursts and annoying your very genuine Korean family with sarky and ironic comments). Reading the accounts given by those from the Map of Me (with a box of tissues to hand), which are both moving and often funny, it occurred to me that it is not only the privilege but also the responsibility of literature to explore complexities that arise in growing up between cultures, between colours even, as Zadie Smith (half English, half Jamaican) does, for example, in White Teeth, or more recently, in On Beauty. This is because I believe that literature is able to express ambivalence in such a way that other mediums are unable to.
In his latest book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell (half English, half Jamaican) emphasises that it is culture and environment, rather than the personality of individuals that is the crucial element to success. So what happens when you throw more than one culture into the mix? My hunch is that the contradictions, ambivalence and rewards reaped from growing up between cultures is beneficial to creativity. My hope is that Obama's recent success will encourage those who have previously felt marginalised to speak up and push the boundaries of literature as well.
Hannah Michell
Online Marketing Executive
.............................................................................
..............................................................................
I was at this reading tonight (http://tinyurl.com/6d4d7c) and the author was asked why she had chosen to flip the slavery situation from black to white to make her point - why not change it to mixed-race? Her response was that if you flip mixed-race, you just end up with the same situation - like you say, the In-Betweeners. Perhaps some writers need to be less afraid of ambiguities, and step up to treating these issues. Life isn't black and white.
Posted by: Kevin | December 03, 2008 at 11:58 PM
I too am a mutt. Described in my blog http://sicklecell-ourvoice.blogspot.com/
I'm a mix of this and that, while living with a life threatening disease. I'm loving it anyway cause I feel 100% me.
I wrote about my experience of being in the middle of America's racial divide in my book "I Only Cry at Night".(publishing desired if you're looking for material)(shameless...I know)
Posted by: P.Allen Jones | December 07, 2008 at 05:40 AM
Why cant I find a hardback copy of Gypsy by Lesley Pearse? I've tried every supermarket and bookshop to no avail,I had hoped to obtain a copy as a Christmas present to my sister who is a great fan of Lesley's writing.Was the print run long enough or what?
Posted by: Mr G.M.Erasmuson | December 09, 2008 at 01:53 PM