I had never planned on sharing this story, for many reasons. But I realised I would be doing a big disservice to my debut album and my art if I’m not honest.
This is the real story of my life as an immigrant kid, and it mirrors the reality of many immigrant children and first generation immigrants across the UK.
I saw a post a couple of days ago by Jessica Jocelyn which said “I used to wish I could stay asleep and be with my dreams. Now, being awake is better and I couldn’t be prouder to say that.” It resonated with me so deeply. I started reflecting on the long period of my life, during my childhood and teen years, where I used to live my life in my head to escape my reality.
There’s a term for it now; maladaptive day-dreaming. I ruminated on why maladaptive day-dreaming was my normal state of being at the time, and this led me to start typing and I couldn’t stop. This is a story of overcoming, and one with a very happy ending, or present rather.
Zora Neale Hurston said “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
Let me take you back to my childhood and teen years. My parents migrated to the UK from Nigeria in the 90s when I was a few months old. My dad came here to study for his PHD and at the same time he was a sales assistant at a petrol station. His small salary had to take care of my mum and 5 children. A few years later when I was 6 years old, my dad got a job as a university lecturer and we moved to The Valleys of South Wales, specifically Pontypridd, where I grew up.
Pontypridd was an incredibly difficult place to grow up. We encountered what I call “old-school racism”. While we stood at the bus stop on the way to school, kids from neighbouring schools would spit on us and yell the N-word at us on a near daily basis from their moving buses. Nowhere was safe outside the four walls of our home. Even on our street, I have vivid memories of my mum taking my younger sister and I to walk around the street to show our neighbours that we had the same right to live there, while one of our neighbours, an adult woman, hurled racist abuse at us from her window.
On any given day, on any given street, in any given park where I was simply existing, someone would pass me and yell “N*GGER!” or throw things at me. Sometimes, I’d be with my friends who chose to remain silent. The aloneness that their silence made me feel is indescribable. My mum would walk past a school, and hoards of children who were on break would run to the gates and chant monkey noises at her.
It was constant. It was unrelenting. It wasn’t everyone, but it was everywhere. Every instance of racism felt like a freight train colliding with my very soul. At a vulnerable time when you’re meant to be developing self-esteem, mine was actively being torn down.
I made the heart-breaking discovery of the real meaning behind the nickname my friends had given me in school.
Aside from maladaptive day-dreaming, which I’ll go into more in part 2 of this series, I survived by believing that there were the “bad ones” and there were the “good ones”. There were the racist people, and there were the people who were not. This survival technique quickly fell apart when I made the heart-breaking discovery of the real meaning behind the nickname my friends had given me in school when we were 12 years old; a nickname which many kids beyond my immediate friend group also called me. “Minstrel” was the name.
I was always confused about what it meant and why they called me that, but I embraced it as a term of endearment. Google also wasn’t really a thing at this point (it sounds so crazy to say that now) so I asked a friend for clarification on why they called me Minstrel. She turned around and told me that it’s because I “sing like a Minstrel”. I will never forget that because it left me even more confused. I was an avid performer and I would regularly sing at school events and plays, but what did that have to do with Minstrels, I wondered? The only thing I knew that were called Minstrels were the small bags of chocolates that were sold in our school’s vending machines, and chocolates don’t sing.
I would later learn about “The Minstrel Show”, a show that was televised in America from the 1950s to the 1970s where white people would dress up in blackface to sing and dance, portraying dehumanising stereotypes of black people. Learning that was another freight train to the soul. My friends? Surely they were the good ones. They were supposed to be my friends. Our school didn’t teach this history, so I embarrassingly learnt about this when I had already graduated, after years of proudly telling people my nickname, only to find out it was racial abuse.
Another blow to my “good ones” theory came about when I learnt that the elderly couple in our Church who had been the closest thing I had to grandparents in the UK had actually disowned their son because he married a black woman. Another freight train. I found it hard to be understanding, because, simply put, I do not have the energy to explain my humanity to anyone and I struggle to wrap my head around such levels of ignorance.
Many of our teachers and the adults around us were not exempt from this behaviour. My 4 siblings and I were good at a lot of things growing up. We were strong academically, we were all great at sports and also talented in extra-curricular activities like music. I credit my parents who raised us on the values of faith and excellence and regularly reminded us of how capable we were. However, this made a lot of our teachers very uncomfortable. Maybe they would have been okay with one of us excelling, but certainly not all five.
My oldest brother was an exceptional rugby player, to the point that his classmates’ parents would bring video cameras to his games to record him. Everyone was certain he was going to be a famous rugby player one day. Then awards day rolled around and the man presenting the award for rugby player of the year says ‘while we all know that there is a great rugby player on our team “we have to look after our own”‘ and he proceeded to give the award to another child; a white child. My mum got up and left the room. Only one person, one man, got up and left with her. This is one of many stories of us not getting leadership positions for unexplained reasons and being denied awards that we deserved.
I recently looked back at an immortalised interaction with a teacher on my Facebook Messenger that underscores how many of our teachers felt about us. On A Level results day I received a message from that teacher who had always been pleasant to me and we’d been Facebook friends a long while. She asked how I had done in my A Levels and what my plans were for university. I shared my good news; I’d achieved 3 A’s (the top grades possible at the time) and I was going to study Law at LSE, one of the best institutions in the UK. She did not reply and she immediately unfriended me on Facebook. She had smiled at me my entire school career all the while not wanting me to succeed.
Believe it or not, these are just a select few stories out of a sea of near daily experiences of racism and hatred that we endured.
I’ve always been so grateful for the creative scene in Cardiff. Amidst all of the racial abuse, it provided a haven and an escape for me. I only had positive experiences with the music organisations, choirs, operas, radio stations and record labels that helped me fall in love with music. The people in the Welsh creative scene supported me then and continue to support me to this day. In these spaces I have been welcomed and celebrated and my talent has been nurtured. Every single person I’ve interacted with in those organisations has been amazing, but a standout memory is of the lovely lady who chaperoned me and another young girl when I was a member of the Welsh National Youth Opera at 14 years old. She asked me what I wanted to be when I was older, I said a lawyer. Then she bought me a book by Constance Briscoe, a prominent black female lawyer in the UK and that book inspired me and shaped the trajectory of my career (spoiler alert: I did become a lawyer). She also told me I was pretty at a time when I really, really needed to hear it. I hate that this was so long ago that your name has escaped my memory, but if you happen to read this – thank you, I’ll never forget how you impacted me.
If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it
– Zora Neale Hurston
To close, I watched a documentary by fashion designer, Tan France, on Netflix where he was confronting the racism he had experienced throughout his childhood. His challenge was to go back to Doncaster where he’d experienced things like being beaten up by a group of white teenagers when he was just 5 years old. Spoiler alert: he couldn’t bring himself to go back. His emotional turmoil was visible. Through a river of tears and incoherent attempts at speech, he had to take a break from filming. I got it. I understood.
Many immigrant parents adopt a line of encouraging their children to ‘rise above’ the racism, to be the bigger person or to ignore it. I think one thing they neglect to consider is that they got to grow up in a society where the smart people looked like them, the pretty people looked like them, the rich people looked like them – everybody looked like them. They are experiencing racism as an adult when their self-concept is already formed.
Growing up in an area where you are torn down because of the colour of your skin or your culture is extremely damaging. And while the approach of rising above it helped us to survive at the time, the time also comes when you have to process what you were subjected to and speak out about the reality of living as an immigrant kid. My advice to black and brown parents is please be very selective about where you choose to raise your children. There needs to be a good amount of people who look like them around. You have power over that and those areas exist within the UK. I believe my experiences would have been better if we had lived in Cardiff, just 30 minutes away from where I grew up by car, and bustling with ideas, art, culture and a more diverse population.
Part of me hoped that these kinds of experiences were old, that times have changed and that things are better. But the riots we witnessed this year all over the UK prove otherwise. This summer in the UK, a group of people smashed the windows of a hotel where migrants were staying and started fires. It reminded me of the petrol bomb attacks on Asian-owned stores in South Wales that were being carried out around the time we moved there. Another recent documentary I watched called “Black and Welsh” shared the story of two little girls who described experiences that were almost identical to the ones I had when I grew up there. It made me realise that very little has changed.
The anti-racism protests that took place this summer in the UK in response to the terrorism were incredibly welcomed and encouraging. But please remember my words earlier that while it is not everyone, it is everywhere. Racists will go out of their way to let black and brown people know that they are not welcome, that they are not seen as equal, and that they are barely regarded as human. They will be persistent in the hopes of wearing you down and it will come from everywhere around you. It is, in my opinion, the greatest cancer in our society.
My words to the allies is this; please go out of your way to protect and support the immigrants and people of colour around you. If you see something good or beautiful in someone, tell them. Don’t assume they already know. Trust me when I say that the people who see the bad in them will make it their life’s mission to let them know repeatedly. It is crucial that you use your voice.
Protect The Immigrant Kid.