Mixed Race Studies

1944 We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset

Lulu
2014-10-06
103 pages
5.83 wide x 8.26 tall
0.57 lbs.
Paperback ISBN: 9781291278170

Louisa Adjoa Parker

1944 We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset explores the stories of the black soldiers who came to Dorset to train for D-Day. Told through the eyes of local people as well as the children of the GIs themselves, this is an important addition to Dorset’s rich and diverse history. Here we discover stories of friendship, love, murder, racism and the segregation that was a fact of life in the US for African Americans at this time.

Blinking in the Light

Cinnamon Press
2016-02-01
28 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1910836057

Louisa Adjoa Parker

A collection of confessional poems which, in starkly telling a story about a fraught pregnancy and the suicide of a man very close to the speaker’s family, evokes with powerful images and unadorned language a raw sense of contemporary life.

‘You don’t see many of them round here’: being black in the white, rural West Country

gal-dem
2016-09-05

Louisa Adjoa Parker

My parents met when my dad came to the UK from Ghana in the 1960s to train as a nurse. He married my mum, and I was born in Doncaster in 1972. I don’t think he had a clue before he came how racist Britain was then, and both my parents were naïve in their own ways. Their turbulent marriage was unsuccessful, not, as my grandparents had feared, as a result of two different cultures colliding, but because of two very different personalities colliding (and my dad’s fists colliding with parts of my mum’s body).

Many people of mixed heritage talk of the difficulties of belonging to two cultures. I didn’t have that problem – my dad rarely offered anything in the way of Ghanaian culture. We didn’t eat Ghanaian food, listen to Ghanaian music, or have contact with any of our Ghanaian relatives. In fact, Ghana has always seemed to me, a far-off, mystical, hot and dusty land, peopled by unknown relatives. My dad wanted to become English; he looked up to them, liked their ways. I’ve not yet visited, although I hope to soon, and am grateful to my brother for flying out there and finding our long-lost family…

Read the entire article here.

Interview with Louisa Adjoa Parker

The writer is a lonely hunter
2012-01-10

Gail Aldwin

Louisa is a writer, poet and Arts Project Co-ordinator who has lived in the West Country since she was 13. Her first poetry collection, Salt-sweat and Tears was published by Cinnamon Press to critical acclaim in 2007. She has also written a book and exhibition about the history of African and Caribbean people in Dorset over the past 400 years, both entitled Dorset’s Hidden Histories. Louisa has recently worked on a project using images and stories to celebrate multi-ethnic Dorset. Funded by Arts Council England and Dorset County Council, the exhibition and book is called All Different, All Dorset was launched in September 2011. Louisa is passionate about equality and the Arts, and hopes to inspire people from a range of backgrounds to become interested in writing.  

Let’s start with your writing journey

I wrote a few adventure stories when I was about six, which my mum said were like Enid Blyton books and I still have a poem written at that time. When I was a teenager I kept a diary for three years and wrote about everything that happened to me. As an adult, I turned to letter writing to try to sort out problems with relationships. In 2002, I went to Exeter University to complete the degree I’d started with the Open University, and I began writing poetry alongside the essays and coursework. I was encouraged by Selima Hill and I had a poem published in a magazine. Getting published was exciting and encouraged me to write more. I realised I had a lot to say about being dual heritage and growing up in white communities. My Dad is Ghanaian and came to England in the late 60s for education and he met and married my mum and had three children with her. We lived in Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, and then when my Dad left we moved to Devon. Growing up knowing only the white side of my family was weird. No one wanted to talk about my background. Writing helped me to explore unresolved issues around my identity. It helped me come to terms with some of the things that had happened, racism and domestic violence…

Read the entire interview here.

Looking back at lives of black GIs in Dorset

Dorset Echo
Weymouth, Dorset, England
2013-06-12

James Tourgout

A NEW exhibition is highlighting the stories of black soldiers in Dorset during World War Two.

It explores the lives of African American servicemen who headed to Dorset to train for D-Day and is showing at Weymouth library until June 14.

It comes in the week following the 69th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France.

The exhibition—entitled 1944 We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset—was successfully launched last May at Walford Mill Crafts in Wimborne. Louisa Adjoa Parker, a Dorchester writer and poet of British and Ghanaian heritage, carried out the research into this part of local history, which has been little explored so far…

Louisa specialises in local black history and has written several books and exhibitions exploring the presence of black and minority ethnic people in Dorset. Louisa said: “This local history has not been explored in great detail until recently, and is arguably an important part of Dorset’s heritage.

“It was important to gather the stories now, as the GIs’ children and the local people who remember the GIs are getting older. “The African Americans’ presence here left behind a lasting legacy—cultural influences, memories and stories that have been passed down in families and become part of local folklore, and a number of their children as a result of relation-ships with local women.”

Read the entire article here…

Salt-sweat & Tears

Cinnamon Press
March 2007
80 pages
21 x 14 x 0.8 cm
Paperback ISBN 10: 1905614187; ISBN-13: 978-1905614189

Louisa Adjoa Parker

Of Ghanaian-British descent Louisa Adjoa Parker explores issues of identity, belonging, family and relationships in raw, honest, but crafted pieces.

Mulatto Girl

See the mulatto girl walking
down country lanes and fields, her
head held high, her skin the colour
of caramel boiling on the stove.  See her smile
in the knowledge she is not the first
to walk this green and pleasant
countryside, she has history stirring within her limbs
she has Africa’s heat and England’s cold rain
pumping through her blood, her
DNA a beautiful mix of gene pools
scattered across continents.  She is strong.
She show Africa in a way the English hide.
She shows an eighteenth century master’s love for slaves.
She shows a slave’s contempt.
She shows twentieth century people brave enough
to cross a line made of different tones of skin,
to love in spite of hate.

See the mulatto girl walking
down country lanes and fields, her head
held high, her quadroon baby girls
held on her hips, her hair thick and frizzed, lips
half full, there are no
white men dressing her in robes and jewels,
but see her smile, see her sway, as she walks
with her head held high.