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Volume No. 1 Issue No. 47 - Friday August 29, 2003
My Mother's Race My Identity
by Aicha N'diaye


I first heard of David Mura in my fourth year in the United States when I was assigned to read his book, Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity. I was fascinated by his ability to express so clearly what I had felt for so long.

In his book, he is an American man stuck in the body of a Japanese man, and his entire purpose is to fully become that American man, a White man. Tonight, after four years of not thinking or hearing of his work, I was faced with the issue of walking home and re-running my entire life, after his two hour long presentation.

David had my interest peaked with recognition and then hostility because he was forcing me to recognize the identity crisis that surrounds my own life. Earlier this semester, in my reaction to Lisa Norling�s presentation I proudly declared that before identifying with being all that I am � Black, Arab, Woman, Third World Citizen, I first identify with being a Dominican.

Allowing myself to be anything other than Dominican would force me to deal with the fact that I am bi-racial. Race, identifying with race and freedom within race are issues that going to school in the United States have forced me to deal with. Nationality came after.

David made me sorry that he wished himself �White� claiming that in the movies white men were the heroes and every other race remained the servant or the messenger. He made me think about the first book I read for American Cultural Studies, Ann Moody�s Coming of Age in Mississippi.

In that book, I learned about Civil Rights in America and the hardships that Black Americans were faced with. He forced me to remember having nightmares over the horrific incidents in that book. Incidents like lynching, a word that I was not even familiar with until I got to the U.S.

He made me think of all the Black people who died fighting for their rights as American citizens, but mostly he made me guilty for not knowing any of this before I came to the United States.

I walked home after his presentation thinking, �How could we be so ignorant in Dominica? Why is it we are not taught of the tragedies faced by Black Americans? Our knowledge of the Slave Trade is extensive and our history and politics of the other Caribbean islands leaves nothing to assume.

Yet we know nothing of Black America, except that Malcolm X said �by any means necessary�. Are we to believe that we are not of the same identity? Is this another ploy on the White man�s behalf to keep Black people separated like they did during slavery?�

Later I recognized my ignorance when reminded that in Dominica, we are taught no American History, neither Black or White. All the same David had stirred in me all the feelings that I had had four years ago when I first started learning of a people that I thought and still believe that I should be able to identify with racially.

Growing up in Dominica does not leave much space for racism; there is just the reality of existence. Classism existed, but not racism. I was never aware that I was half Arab and half Black.

Ellis Cose says, �Race is a strange and flexible concept.� I understood his analysis in my own capacity after reading Ann Moody, Maxine Hong Kingston and Malcolm X�s life stories, not because they were of mixed races because they were not, but because of their descriptions of racism in America and their individual experiences within the White American existence.

I remember going to Barbados to be with my father�s family on the summer holidays, where my old aunt Dorothy never allowed us to talk to the black boys.

She sang me a song in the summer of 1988 and I laughed but now I regret laughing. I think of all the things that I should have and could have said to her then rather than letting her think that she was funny.

I was talking to this boy and she said that we had to go home immediately because of my behavior. She sang, �God made the nigger, he made him in the night, he made him in a hurry and forgot to paint him white.� I never told my mom because I had not yet grasped the concept of racial consciousness.

Neither my mother nor my father had raised me to believe that I was one or the other. Maybe I was like David all those years and did not even know it. I probably laughed at Auntie Dorothy�s song because I wanted to identify with my Arab self and refute the Black me.

Frantz Fanon has insisted in many of his writings that the Antillean will do anything to have a bit of �whiteness�. Why else would I remember the song but never have told my mother about it. Tonight I realized Auntie Dorothy had made me more aware of race than I wanted to admit.

My ignorance had not enabled me to correct hers. I would have informed her that outside of the Caribbean, she would not have been �White�. I should have told her that I shared a Black existence that she never acknowledged. Tonight David made me angry that I had not defended my mother.

I thought, �she should have known better, after having to flee her country with her parents during the Turkish war. But this one was clearly a case of the oppressed becoming the oppressor.

As it is, my mother did know her place. She knew that she would have never gotten my father�s �whiteness�, no matter how long she was with him. She just played along for twelve years until the inevitable walked in � he left.

He died miserably claiming his dissatisfaction with life without the �negress� who would do anything to keep him happy. I despised David for being luckier than my mother. Not because he married the white culture and supposedly validated his heroism or his manhood or his dignity, but that his white woman was fierce enough to defy American social expectations, no matter what her initial reasoning, to marry the man that she loved and to spend the rest of her life with him.

I am envious of him for being closer to understanding his identity than I am, because as it is, apart from having the nationality of a Dominican, the question still persists, �Who am I?�

Comments about this article? Email:
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Volume No. 1 Issue No. 47
My Mother's Race, My Identity
Remembering Hurricane David
The Paradox of Life
PM Statement on DOMLEC
New Book to be Released




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