Mixed Race Studies

My fear killer will get pension, by daughter of train IRA bomb victim

The Belfast Telegraph
2016-12-17

David Young

Jayne Olorunda

The daughter of a man killed in an IRA blast on a train has claimed her elderly mother would be excluded from a proposed victims’ pension scheme while the IRA terrorist whose bomb killed her father would be eligible – because he was injured but survived.

Read the entire article here.

How a mixed-race love affair between an African prince and an Englishwoman caused an international furore

The Daily Telegraph
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
2016-12-16

Marea Donnelly, History writer

Ruth Williams and her husband Prince Seretse Khama in London in 1949.

ONE can only surmise as to whether bank clerk Ruth Williams and her Bechuanaland prince Seretse Khama ever shuffled around the dance floor to The Ink Spots’ hit Prisoner Of Love. United in their affection for the harmonising American doo-wop band, within a year of their meeting at a post-war London dance hall the Ink Spots’ 1946 hit could have been their anthem.

Their black-white romance offended not only their families, but the British and South African governments and the Church of England, which all aggressively opposed their 1948 marriage. Already the subject of a book A Marriage Of Inconvenience, and a film of the same name released in 1990, a new British film about the Khama marriage, A United Kingdom, opens in Sydney on Boxing Day…

Read the entire article here.

I couldn’t cope with seeing Sinn Fein’s new MLA on TV or radio… I’d be thinking all the time: your father killed my father

The Belfast Telegraph
2016-12-16

Stephanie Bell

Harrowing life: Jayne Olorunda whose father Max Olorunda was killed in an IRA train bomb during the Troubles

Jayne Olorunda’s dad was killed by an IRA bomber whose daughter has been made a Sinn Fein MLA. Jayne tells Stephanie Bell this is the last straw and her family is now set to quit Northern Ireland

News that the daughter of the IRA man who killed her father is to take a seat for Sinn Fein in Stormont has left Belfast author and community worker Jayne Olorunda and her family determined to leave Northern Ireland. The distraught 38-year-old says she couldn’t bear to see new MLA Orlaithi Flynn in the news now that she had been appointed by Sinn Fein to replace Jennifer McCann in the Colin area of west Belfast.

Jayne was only two when her Nigerian-born father Max Olorunda was killed by an IRA incendiary bomb which detonated prematurely in Dunmurry on a train travelling from Ballymena to Belfast in January 1980.

She says her mother Gabrielle (66) has never got over it and to this day suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome.

Orlaithi Flynn

Orlaithi Flynn’s father Patrick Flynn was convicted of double manslaughter and possession of explosives for the attack.

In a heartbreaking interview, Jayne revealed how her family has also suffered years of racial hatred and had planned to leave Northern Ireland last month to try and escape the abuse…

…She has spent most of her life working in the community and has also written a powerful book called Legacy which tells the story of how her family were plagued by racism, poverty and grief after the death of her father.

Her father Max (35), an accountant, had been visiting a client in Ballymena and was on the train when the IRA prematurely detonated a device on January 17, 1980.

The blast engulfed a carriage of the train killing her father, as well as 17-year-old Protestant student Mark Cochrane and one of the bombers, Kevin Delaney (26)…

Gabrielle and Max Olorunda

Read the entire article here.

Event Review: Salena Godden’s #LIVEwire Album Launch

Welcome to the MA in Black British Writing
The world-first Masters programme in Black British literature at Goldsmiths, University of London
2016-12-09

Heather Marks

Soho holds many secrets, and last night revealed one of them to be Salena Godden’s spoken word album launch at Carnesky’s Finishing School. Descending the steps into the basement of the old Foyles, I was met by the gaze of pop art portraits at every turn, until I entered the intimate setting for the evening’s entertainment. Against the brightly lit stage, I slunk into the oh-so-Soho dimly lit claret background to watch the evening unfold…

…Salena Godden took to the stage to perform some of her poems to an eagerly awaiting audience. Godden delved into The Good Immigrant to read her excerpt ‘SHADE’. Lines such as “Some days I look like Beyoncé, some days I look like Rihanna” touched on colourism and its exotification of light skinned black women. Other lines like “It all depends on the filter and the time of year…it depends on what point people are trying to make” spoke to the oft-touted lie of ‘not seeing people’s colour’ as Godden listed the world events which do and do not make the news – “oh, Boko Haram black? No, not today”. Godden spoke to the world around her and kept her work current, making reference to the refugee crisis in Calais in her readings from ‘SHADE’, and Can’t Be Bovvered from her album LIVEwire. Godden threw punches at colourism and political inaction,  and the frustration one could sense in her words landed well with the audience…

Read the entire article here.

Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is a dance to the rhythms of womanhood

iNews
2016-11-02

Salena Godden

Zadie Smith, Swing Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016)

Swing Time is a quiet and rhythmic book. Just as the title suggests, this book swings, oscillating from past to present, like the steady rhythm of a pendulum.

This is the story of two brown girls who dream of dancing. Tracey is the skint but talented one; our unnamed first person narrator… not so much. Where Tracey’s mother serves Angel Delight in a kitchen with a cork board heaving with gold medals, our narrator’s mother wears a cocked beret and keeps her head buried in books to better herself.

Living on the same estate, the mothers come from two different worlds, and the girls’ friendship blossoms awkwardly. They compare and compete, outgrow each other to take different paths, then come full circle.

This is a book about living in the spotlight and living in the wings. It time-travels using music and dance, from north London to west Africa, from the ghosts of Chicago swing to Hollywood musicals, jazz and ragtime, to reggae and the golden era of hip-hop. It is also, centrally, about female friendships: the strange envy one might feel when a friend seems to be moving on, moving away, moving faster, almost betraying us with their successful career or by having a baby or getting married. We all have had that friend or maybe we are that friend to someone else…

Read the entire review here.

What Being of Mixed Heritage Has Taught Me About Identity

VICE
2016-12-10

Salma Haidrani

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

“What are you?” When you think about it, it’s a pretty stupid question to ask another person, especially when you already know the answer: a human, just like you mate. But that doesn’t stop people directing it at people like me, who are of dual ethnic heritage or “mixed-race.” If your parents are of distinctly different ethnic groups, you feel like you have to “pick a side”—and the inevitable questions vary from ones shouted in a crowded pub to those staring up in black-and-white next to a checkbox on a form.

We’re so far down the road of thinking about race as a biological reality that we’ve forgotten it’s a construct. There are no links between how much melanin someone has in their skin and their culture. There are no links between melanin and intellect, physical abilities or creative skills. Proximity and language have tended to have more to do with what makes people of the same ethnic group seem similar—the colour of their skin doesn’t determine that.

For that reason, it’s silly to think that the experiences of the 1.2 million people in the UK who identify as “mixed” would be identical. Some are happy to define themselves in that way, while last year the British Sociological Association deemed deemed the term mixed-race as “misleading since it implies that a ‘pure race’ exists”…

Read the entire article here.

From Her Dad To Her ‘Jamish’ Roots, A Poet Pieces Her Story Together

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2014-12-28

Arun Rath, Host

Growing up in 1970s England, Salena Godden stood out. Her mother was Jamaican and her father was an Irish jazz musician who mysteriously disappeared from her life when she was very young.

In her memoir, Springfield Road, the writer, poet and musician tells the story of finding her personal identity, beginning with the word she made up to describe her race: Jamish.

“It’s kind of … a mix of being Jamaican, Irish, English,” she tells NPR’s Arun Rath. “It’s the name I gave myself.”…

Read the story here. Download the interview (00:06:15) here. Read the transcript here.

Springfield Road

Penguin Books UK
2014-09-30
272 Pages
129mm x 198mm x 18mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781783520558
eBook ISBN: 9781783520565

Salena Godden

Springfield Road is a journey into childhood in the late 1970s, a time of halfpenny sweets, fish and chips in newspaper, scrumping apples and foraging for conkers. Set in the dawn of Thatcher’s Britain, it’s a salute to every curly-top, scabby knee’d, mixed-up, half-crazy kid with NHS glasses, free school dinners and hand-me- downs, as told by the daughter of an Irish jazz musician and a Jamaican go-go dancer.

It’s about discovering that life is unfair, that there are bullies out there, and that parents die; yet it is the very antithesis of a misery memoir. It’s a vivid, uplifting tale that seeks out the humour, colour and tenderness in the world, and when you read it you will say Hey! I remember, we did that too!

You might say: I remember being closer to the ground; I remember summers were longer and how oranges were bigger; I remember struggling to comprehend sex and war, life and death, heaven and hell, and perhaps you’ll say, I remember I missed my dad too…

We are not “belligerent,” “dark” or “bitter”

Media Diversified
2016-11-29

Tele Ogunyemi, Co-founder
Diaspora Philes

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s recent article ‘Blend it like Britain’ is a masterpiece in how to simultaneously erase and fetishize people of colour. Published on 6th November 2016 in the Sunday Times Magazine to promote Amma Asante’s new film ‘A United Kingdom’, the article is littered with racist or otherwise problematic assertions about people of colour, and their role in creating a modern multicultural Britain. Alibhai-Brown’s article seeks to explore the role of white women in building a ‘multicultural’ Britain, but is laced with rhetoric that casually dehumanizes people of colour. [Chief amongst these lazy tropes are toxic portrayals of an exotic and dangerous black masculinity in contrast to a pristine, “middle class” white womanhood.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes that ‘miscegenation goes way back and deep down in Great Britain. Much of this integration is thanks to an unsung history of white British women who defied social norms to follow their hearts.’

We do not doubt that white women in relationships with men of colour played a part in this demographic change in society. However, by placing white British women at the centre of a narrative about multicultural nationhood, Alibhai-Brown erases the contributions of millions of immigrants who have come to the UK and done the difficult work of integrating into a new society whilst enriching Britain with the best elements of their cultures…

Read the entire article here.

Blend it like Britain

The Sunday Times
The Times of London
2016-11-06

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

United colours: one in 10 people in this country are in a mixed relationship MORDECHAI MEIRI

An acclaimed new movie, A United Kingdom, is set to shine a spotlight on mixed-race relationships — and how British women changed society’s attitude towards them. The time to celebrate these unsung pioneers is long overdue

Brits have long been typecast as a nation of snobs and Little Englanders. Dull, cold, twitchy folk, as culturally unadventurous as they are sexually repressed. These “small islander” traits are a key part of the national story, but only a part. Dig beneath the surface of British history and society, and you find a culture that is curious and expansive. One in 10 people in this country are in a mixed relationship. Millions of us are bolder than the supposedly romantic and hot-blooded Italians or French, most of whom are conformist and tend not to break out of their cultural and ethnic boundaries.

Europeans are (very slowly) becoming more ethnically mixed, but they will never catch up with the UK’s demographic melange. Between 2001 and 2011, there has been a rise of more than 50% in British black/white partnerships. Today, around half of black and 20% of British-Asian men have wedded or cohabit with white women. This is no new trend. Miscegenation goes way back and deep down in Great Britain. Much of this integration is thanks to an unsung history of white British women who defied social norms to follow their hearts.

In the 16th century, the first black people arrived on these shores. The majority were men: slaves, freed slaves and servants. Poor, working-class women in London and the port cities paired up with them, had children too. They were the first to set the trend that grew during the days of empire and the two world wars. A report written in Liverpool in the early 1930s depicted these women as feckless and promiscuous. In the late 1940s, ships arrived carrying Caribbeans, again mostly men. They, too, found Englishwomen who were enraptured by darker-skinned partners. The women were often reviled, but many of them refused to bow to prejudice. These women began the social revolution that changed Britain for ever…

Read the entire article here.