Mixed Race Studies

On Being Mixed Race: I am Not a Percentage or a Fraction

The Radical Notion
2016-01-12

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

I’ve noticed frequently when I’m having a conversation with someone about my racial identity, I start to feel frustrated by some of the language that comes up. To clarify my father is black Jamaican, Nigerian and white British, and my mother is white British.

My earliest memories are of being described racially as ‘half-caste’. This was an acceptable term back in the 80’s, in the UK, to describe someone whose parents are of different races. People don’t tend to use this word anymore unless they are from older generations and unaware that it is not politically correct. The word ‘caste’ originates from the Spanish/Portuguese word ‘casta’ which means ‘pure’. Describing someone as half-caste is to imply they are only half pure which has obvious racist implications. This term was my first introduction to the idea that I had an identity that could be broken down into numerical fractions…

Read the entire article here.

TS Eliot prize: poet Sarah Howe wins with ‘amazing’ debut

The Guardian
2016-01-11

Mark Brown, Arts correspondent

Sarah Howe, a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, could ‘change British poetry’. Photograph: Hayley Madden/FMcM/PA

Judges hail daring use of form in a collection that examines poet’s joint British and Chinese heritage

A new voice, who judges say “will change British poetry”, has won the TS Eliot poetry prize. Sarah Howe, a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, was awarded the £20,000 prize for Loop of Jade, which explores her dual British and Chinese heritage.

Howe’s work – the first debut poetry collection to win the British prize since it was inaugurated in 1993 – triumphed over a particularly strong shortlist, which featured some of poetry’s biggest names, including Don Paterson, Claudia Rankine, Sean O’Brien and Les Murray…

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Book review: Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe

The Scotsman: Scotland’s National Newspaper
2015-05-03

Roger Cox, Arts Editor

Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015)

DOUBLE takes haunt poet Sarah Howe on her return to memory’s fragrant harbour, writes Roger Cox

In her poem Sirens, Sarah Howe writes “I had one of those blurrings – glitch, then focus – / like a put-off optician’s trip, when you realise / how long you’ve been seeing things wrongly.” This sinuous, shimmering, mirage-like debut collection is littered with such moments of sudden realisation, and also haunted by the suspicion that there must be more to everything than meets the eye.

In Sirens, the blurring occurs when, reflecting on a line in a poem by Theodore Roethke, Howe suddenly twigs that a description of a girl’s “sidelong pickerel smile” is not a reference to juvenile pike, as she had always supposed, but to a small wading bird.

She knows she must now update her mental image of the girl from fish to fowl, yet try as she might she can’t shake the original image of the girl’s fishy grin. Could both images be right? Did the poet intend the double meaning?…

…Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and a Chinese mother, and moved to England as a child. She still has vivid memories of her time as a schoolgirl in Hong Kong – as demonstrated by the wonderfully evocative poem Islands, in which she recalls the girls at her boarding school sleeping three to a bed shelf, “like dumplings stacked in steamers” – but this collection is billed as a voyage of discovery, a journey in search of her roots…

Read the entire review here.

Loop of Jade

Chatto & Windus, part of Vintage Publishing
2015-05-07
80 pages
Paperback EAN: 9780701188696
eBook EAN: 9781448190683

Sarah Howe

• WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2015
• WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PETERS FRASER + DUNLOP YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015
• SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2015

There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots.

With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.

Both native and foreign: How being of mixed race affects Japanese students

The Cavalier Daily
Charlottesville, Virginia
2014-07-01

Emily Gorham

I have now entered week five of my three month stay in Japan as an intern for the Ibaraki Christian University’s English department. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I’ve termed the gaijin stare — a phenomenon in which, as one of very few foreigners living in the Japanese countryside, I get stares from just about everyone, wherever I go.

This concept got me thinking: what happens when the gaijin stare is misplaced? Japan used to think of itself as a homogenous nation. Some people still think of it this way — though times are certainly changing and interracial marriage is growing increasingly common.

By one statistic, one in every 49 babies born in Japan today is considered “mixed race” — or “haafu,” which natives presumably take to mean half-Japanese and half-foreign. While this number may not sound staggering, it means Japan’s mixed raced demographic cannot be ignored.

After experiencing the gaijin stare myself, I spoke to a few students at the university who are considered “haafu” for their take on racial perception in Japan…

Read the entire article here.