THE IN-BETWEENERS: WHAT ARE YOU?

I grew up like many Western Australian kids in the 1980s. I ran around the streets of bushy suburban Yangebup with my friends until nightfall, riding bikes, having sand boondie fights on the piles of yellow sand in freshly poured cement and climbing giant willow trees to hide from our parents. My mother an administrator at a local university, my father a musician taught guitar at a local music store and played gigs every other night. In the summer he would tour up north in a 1950s blue and white Bedford bus called JOK after Australian rock’n’roll pioneer Johnny O'Keefe. I would spend school holidays playing hide-and-seek on the tour bus in a with a local Jack Russel, aptly named Jack. The roles in our house were flipped. The neighbours called my dad Mr Mum, and my mum missed all stereotypical-mum events like sports carnivals and school assemblies. Our family was labelled unusual by many, and at the time, I thought it was the gender reversal that drew such commentary.

In the late 1980s we moved to a more affluent area of Western Australia, the suburb of Kardinya - it was closer to mum's work. I didn't want to leave my friends, but I was excited to see that there were new piles of yellow sand for me to have boondie battles with my brother. This new school was different, everything was newer and cleaner. The teachers wore smiley faces and let me bake cookies at Christmas, but I struggled to make friends. It was late in the summer, and I was sitting on a bench outside of my classroom, when one child came up to me and said, 'what are you boong?' I cocked my head confused by all elements of the question; the look on a teacher's face nearby signalled to me that indeed was not a kind one. The teacher said nothing and looked away. I asked one of the other kids in my class what it meant, and they said, “it's a mean word for Aboriginal”. I walked to the name-caller and mustered all the bravery inside my little body and said, “it's not nice to call people names.” The kid laughed at me and said, “you're brown, so you must be.” I was seven. Seven, when I discovered that my variegated skin that cycles through the spectrum of light olive to tan was the topic of speculation, commentary and (un)safety. Seven, when I realised that I was not, nor did I want to be, white.

My mother was from Anglo-Saxon heritage, her parents emigrated from Britain as children, and she was raised Sydney. My dad was born in Durban South Africa, to my Mauritian grandmother and South African Grandfather. Dad’s family suffered the stings of apartheid in the early 1960s. His family of twelve siblings, were split in half when six were declared white and the other labelled "coloured"- my dad was one. In attempt to protect my father from the abhorrence of colour classification, my short grandmother matriarch of twelve children, burnt the South African flag on the front lawn, and placed her youngest son at 12 years old, on a train to the British-ruled province of Swaziland for a "visit" his sister. This visit lasted 8 years with his sister and her husband took adopting him. My dad, while away from apartheid wouldn't see his mother again until they immigrated to Australia when he was twenty.

Epigenetic literature shows that trauma lives on in genes; passed from one generation to another. Some days it is if I can literally feel the genes of my grandmother, and father, and the blood that flows through me, as I look at my own skin and ask: what are you? Not who, but what? It is a question that from seven was asked of me with regularity. I could tell when the sun began waking at 6.00 and the daisies bloomed that the questions would be coming soon. Sometimes they asked with wide eye curiosity, sometimes with furrowed brow. The pendulum swung between being something dangerous to follow around stores, to being exoticised and fawned over. When I was 9 there was the baker who gifted me free bread and then became angry when my mother told him that I wasn't Spanish. At 15 my friends would share their jealousy and contempt for my all-year tan. The lecherous literature lecturers at 19 would describe in keen detail my almond eyes and skin colour likening it to consumable beverages like milky mocha. At 23 my then husband would jokingly ask in how high I could jump with “Kalahari” feet. As I recently entered my forties a close friend asked what percentage of my blood had given me my colour. I have not gone more than a few months since I was seven without being asked: what are you?

My answers changed over the years. For a while I referred to myself as a "bitsa". Like a mixed breed of dog that was interesting but unidentifiable. For years I said "English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German-Jew, Corsican, Mauritian". Like the trauma hidden in genes but unspoken from my kin's tongues, South African was excluded from that list. My dad would censure conversations on colour; he holds a utopic vision for people to not see race and skin colour. He lives this truth and therefore it is beginning and end of our discussions. A beautiful conception, however, those existing outside walls of our brick and tile home remained binarily opposed, creating incongruence to my lived experience. To avoid re-traumatising my father I stopped talking about colour. As I grew older and the question came, I shifted my answer as a way of moving through the dissonance. I am an" indi-kid, goth, grunger, uni student, postgraduate, mother, academic, rockabilly, artist, pin-up and writer. I adorned my undefinable melanin with wearable identities. Those with histories, cultural signifiers such as clothes, tattoos and accessories. Dressing my body in thick semiotic layers of cloth, leather and hair dye to mask my bloodline with something people could define. Fashion hacks that distracted people from asking the question: What are you? A question to I now answer with I am Ange.

Hurtling forward from my first interactions with racial profiling in school 1988 to 2024, I now exist time where discussions of race, gender, and identity politics pepper everyday conversations. Yet the ground remains uneven, people are afraid of the word privilege, and no one is sure if wokeness is a positive trait or a political slur. Conversations are not conversations, but ideologically infused edicts of truth. Truths that cannot be questioned and many are scared that they will be cancelled if their lexicon is out of date. On one hand the world has moved forward; Gen Z leads the charge of embracing diversity, challenging historical privilege and decolonising structures. But at the world has also gone backwards with an inability for people to be converse, debate, learn and grow without being offended or scared that if one causes offense, they could lose their livelihood. So, we stagnate, and as the world turns on its axis discussions of “colour” remain jarring. I still get asked: what are you? Am I offended? Sometimes when I feel the length of this question’s arc. More often I remain baffled that the question is still being asked. Sometimes this is preceded with an “I’m just curious but…” To some, it might seem like an innocuous question; someone wanting to get to know me perhaps. But it is in the “what” that the sting lies. What, as if not human, an alien perhaps. What, as if an object, a thing to be observed. What, as if something that needs to be categorised. There’s an acknowledgement of physical difference that they have seen and there is some kind of need to to make a categorical decision about me. The reason perplexes me still.

Someone once told me I should be happy because I was “white passing”. Such an assumption that I wanted to be “white passing” angered me. I am acutely aware that my in-between status has allowed me the favours of white privilege but that does not deny or replace my own lived history and experience of racism. When you’re in-between colours, you don’t get the slurs of one race, but you get a global approach “swarthy from the docks, dirty knee’d, half-caste, kaffir, ding, Abo, Wog, hybrid” etc. My son came home from high school in the summer of 2022 and asked me what a light skin was. I was shook. Not only at the question but the fact that the schoolground had not changed. With his olive skin, dark hair and eyes, he still gets asked the same question: what are you? Each week labelled with a different ethnicity. Each week I watch him struggle with the same identification I did, as he was bombarded with questions of heritage. “Can I say I am African mum? Do we have any Mexican in us?” and then the final heart-clutching statement: I wish I was browner so people would stop asking me. Thirty-five years on and one’s variegated skin tone can still change the colour of their day. Maybe it is within the epigenetics of those asking the question; historical notions of identifying difference, friend and foe locked within their genes that perpetuates the need to keep asking it. Or more likely that today conversations around race, while more prevalent, and being “white” is clearly labelled, where historically it had been unmarked, there is global unease about skin shade, blood casting and notions of bla(c)kness, browness and whiteness.

I speak to my friends about how in winter I hate fading. One friend said, “we all fade in winter”. I said “it’s different. I feel like my identity fades with my melanin.” The racial profiling I experienced as a child has resulted in my own internal turmoil with understanding whiteness. Something that those of us who sit ill-defined in racial categories wrestle with on the daily. It stems from not wanting to be “seen” or aligned with the same colour of those who so casually hurt us. Of consequence, maybe part of my “self” secretly rejoices in being asked the question of heritage. Because then, at least, my skin is distinct from those who try to racially define or hurt me. The result is an ongoing search for identity to find a tribe. The question of what are you? is so perplexing because there is no singular ethnicity to link myself and identity too, and yet it seems to hold such grand importance for those who are asking it. I, like the ones who define me, do not sit outside the paradigm of categorisation. More and more I find myself longing for my dad’s utopia, where I am not a what, but a who. A complex being who is, layered with cultural identities – ethnic, family, social and environmental. This is not a longing to be colourless, but a longing for people to see the richness of every human’s makeup, the colour within rather than without. I am, you are, we are not a colour on a Pantone chart; catalogued and selected for wearability on the global wall of life. If we are going to be a metaphor, we are not a thing, but a connection; the call and response of a jazz musician, when someone asks the what…? We reply in incomprehensible scatted canto. For we are each a syncopated history; a verse of ethnical beeps and bops strung together to create our own song. Individually beautiful pieces, played together to create a symphony, where even the dissonant notes have a place in the musical journal, understood for the sound they are; not what they are not.