Tuesday, 9 April 2013 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Robert Webster Building 231
‘Being alone together’ (Pinney 2006): the ego-histoire of indigenous Black British Writers’ Adoption Aesthetics
Indigenous perspectives in the Australian context are acknowledged generally, as originating authentically from the land of one’s birth (despite legacies of catastrophic historical erasure). For black people born in Britain, the sense of one’s indigenousness is far from accepted in narratives of national identity and belonging where, as playwright Mojisola Adebayo describes, ‘The experience of being black in Britain is a microcosm of homelessness, of being displaced, estranged, a foreigner in your own country.’(2007). When viewed from abroad in an ex-colony, the opposite can be true - as black British writer Lennie James experienced in New Zealand where he was positioned automatically by his Maori colleagues as imperial beneficiary, from a British homeland one where, he is in reality, historically and culturally discounted.
Certain British writers embody a further protean identity in terms of racial and cultural knowledge which has been edited out of the nation’s familial story. ‘Trans-raised’, a term coined by Valerie Mason-John, describes a generation of people who grew up in Britain in the 1960s and 70s, who self-identify as black or mixed race but were reared by white people: as adoptive or foster parents or, in white-run care institutions (in systems distinct from the Stolen Generations’ experiences but with shared destructive power). As a formative but most definitely not summative experience, the representation of growing up in Britain as a trans-raised child, informs a sizeable corpus of creative work. These first-hand recipients render the individual human consequences of being trans-raised, not only in their quests for an authentic sense of a validated social self (as coupled with an artistic identity), but also in developing a distinctive perspective towards acts of ancestral reclamation.
A critical tendency has been to ring-fence analysis of black people’s creative writing with auto/biographical attribution. Given that the voices of trans-raised people in Britain’s adoption and fostering system had little recourse to self-representation or advocacy, these writers’ authentic (but aestheticized), insights into their experience effects a double restitution from a muted marginality, centralising ‘the shadow that is companion to this whiteness’ (Toni Morrison 1993), thus making fresh tracks which transform well-trodden historical routes. This paper considers a range of poetry, fiction and dramas by writers: Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay, Alex Wheatle, Joanna Traynor and Valerie Mason-John, work that articulates trans-raised perspectives as a powerful addition to conceptions of British cultural heritage.