Mixed Race Studies

Tangled Roots: Real Life Stories from Mixed Race Britain

Tangled Roots
2015-12-11
205 pages
ISBN: 978-0993482403

Edited by:

Katy Massey

12% of UK households are mixed race. These are our stories.

The Tangled Roots book brings together over 30 writers to answer the question: What is life like for mixed families in Britain today?

Five leading authors—Bernardine Evaristo MBE, Sarfraz Manzoor, Charlotte Williams OBE, Diana Evans and Hannah Lowe—together with 27 members of the public tell the story of their mixed lives with heart-breaking honesty, humour and compassion.

Tangled Roots: Celebrating mixed race people and families

Tangled Roots
2015-03-04

Tangled Roots publishes books, and stages events and performances which explore the mixed race experience in the UK

NOW ACCEPTING STORIES FOR OUR NEXT BOOK!

Submission Guidelines:

• Please send up to 2,000 words cut and pasted into an email to tangledroots@live.co.uk.
• Sorry, attachments will not be considered.
• If you have relevant photographs, please tell us about these too.
• Closing date for BOOK submissions is April 30 2015. However, website submissions are on-going and until further notice.
• If you have a story to tell, we would like to hear from you. Please don’t worry about your spelling, grammar, etc. We have editors who can take care of that. It is great stories we are after!
• YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE MIXED-RACE YOURSELF TO SUBMIT YOUR STORY – Tangled Roots is open to EVERYONE who has experienced of a mixed family or household.
• We are aware that definitions of race and religion can sometimes overlap, therefore we welcome stories where religious tensions has/can form a significant barrier to personal relationships.
• For more information about Tangled Roots and the kind of stories we’re looking for please click on the ‘Stories about mixed lives’ tab above. However, regrettably, there will not be space for poetry in the new collection.

For more information, click here.

Tangled Roots: A Performance of Real-Life Stories Celebrating Mixed Race Families

Trinity Centre
Trinity Road
Bristol, England BS2 0NW
2014-10-19, 14:00-20:00 BST (Local Time)

Free life-writing workshop and performance with Dr Katy Massey – part of our Black History Month programme

On Sunday 19 October, Tangled Roots are staging a live workshop and performance event at The Trinity Centre. The event is in two parts: a free life-writing workshop in the afternoon led by Dr Katy Massey PhD will then be followed by a live performance staged by the Tangled Roots writers and actors.

Workshop attendees will also have the opportunity to hear their own life experiences dramatised on stage as some of the life-writing produced in the workshop will be adapted by the team becoming part of the live performance.

In addition, attendees can browse an exhibition of photographic portraits of mixed race writers, specially commissioned by Tangled Roots.

Bristol-based poet Katie Grant is a high-profile supporter of the Tangled Roots project. She is part of a mixed race family herself and, last year, presented a documentary ‘The Brown Camp’ about mixed families on Radio 4. “I am thrilled to be representing the Tangled Roots Project in the South West. The history and experiences of mixed race families has a direct relevance and resonance in my life – both as a writer and as a mother” says Grant. “The photographs commissioned by Tangled Roots really reflect the nature of this diverse new population.”

“Bristol’s history at the centre of the UK slave trade is well-known, what isn’t so well documented is the huge mixed population who call Bristol ‘home’. 16% of our city’s population^* belongs to a black or minority ethnic group, but among under 15s the figure is 28%^*. Rising numbers of people are forming relationships across different racial and ethnic groups. As a result, more families than ever before comprise of more than one race. These families – families like mine, in fact – never see their stories represented in the mainstream media. It is the experiences of mixed families in Bristol and the South West that the Tangled Roots project wants to highlight” Grant explained.

Workshop & Performance information

The writing workshop (2pm-5pm) is open to adults who wish to learn how to write about their own life experiences or anyone else’s. You do NOT have to be mixed race to attend! The workshop theme will be “Home” and you must book your place in advance.

The evening performance (7pm- 8pm) is open to young people and adults (please note the performance is not suitable for under 12s). It is free and lasts approximately one hour…

For information, click here.

Roots Entwined by Audrey Dewjee

Tangled Roots: Literature and events to celebrate mixed-race people in Yorkshire
2013

Audrey Dewjee

Yorkshire-born Audrey Dewjee has been married for over 40 years to a Zanzibari of Indian ancestry. She has been researching British Black and Asian History since the mid-1970s, and is currently a member of Leeds Diasporian Stories Research Group. In the 1980s she worked with Ziggi Alexander, co-researching the exhibition Roots in Britain: Black and Asian Citizens from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, and co-editing Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, which brought Mary Seacole back into the public consciousness

London abounds with an incredible number of…black men who have clubs to support those who are out of place [i.e. out of work] and in every country town, nay in almost every village, are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkeys, and infinitely more dangerous.

So wrote Phillip Thicknesse in 1788. Thicknesse may have been exaggerating the numbers for effect; nevertheless, surviving records show that inter-racial families existed all around the country. There may be a greater number today, but mixed-marriages have taken place in Britain for hundreds of years.
 
Small numbers of Africans and Asians started arriving in Britain as a result of the trading links which followed upon early voyages of exploration. Africans were the first to arrive in the 1500s as a by-product of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. They were followed by Indians and Chinese, after the setting up of the East India Company in 1601. London and the southern counties provide the earliest evidence of marriages – for example, that of Samuel Mansur or Munsur “a Blackamoure” to Jane Johnson at St. Nicholas, Deptford in 1613. Samuel may have been African, Arab or Asian.

Yorkshire eventually caught up with the trend. One of the earliest marriages here took place on 12 November, 1732, at Thornton by Pocklington in the East Riding, when John Quashee wed Rebecca Crosby. Others followed. Henry Osman, who had been brought to England from India by a member of the Lowther family, married Anne Cook at Swillington in 1753. At the time of his marriage, he was employed as a footman by Sir William Lowther, and he remained at Swillington until his death in 1781. Henry and Anne had a number of children, many of whom married and stayed in the local area.

Respectable English women appear to have had no hesitation in marrying men of colour: for instance, Elizabeth daughter of Rev. George Lawson, vicar of Weaverthorpe, who married Peter Horsfield at Boynton in 1780. The fact that many of the men had skills or were in secure employment and therefore able to support a family, would have added to their attraction. Yorkshire men also married African and Asian women. James Doe and Parcira Derosa, described as “a widow and Chinese”, were united in Ripon Cathedral in 1755, while possibly the earliest portrait of an inter-racial family in Britain was that of Harlequin, her Yorkshire husband and their two children…

Read the entire article here.