When
I was a little girl, I would try and minimize my black identity.
My blackness was seen as a curse. Instead of a blessing.
At times, I felt like a spot of black ink on a white wall,
a stain
on an otherwise clean wall. I yearned to,
to blend in,
to smudge my blackness out so I could meld a lot more
easily and seamlessly into my white surroundings.
I've always been aware that I was black.
I don't really know how my parents instilled it in me, but I always knew.
Um one thing that's really vivid in my mind is when my cousin bought her daughter,
a baby born doll, my cousin is black and the baby born she bought was white
when I was little. I
used a whole range of strategies to lighten my skin.
I
would always go outdoors in
layers to protect my skin from the sun.
I knew that there was some
somewhat of a price that I would have to pay for having fun outdoors.
And that would be for however many weeks I would
be a couple of tones darker and that was bad.
I've seen pictures on Facebook mothers bleaching their child,
especially the females want to look like a white doll
growing up in Sudan. I've seen a lot of women
um, using skin
lighting products to
lighten up or turn the skin
that's been seen as it's something normal. It's an active beauty.
It's probably one of the
number one selling products in most of the African um shops that I know
what he's going to say to your young girls.
Like my niece,
she's absolutely beautiful with her black skin and their natural hair.
I
don't want her to look at the mirror and say,
oh my God, do you think I have to,
to wipe my skin just for the world to accept me
in Sierra Leone? Most of the time I was called Yala
Pickin
means fair skin.
And I was always given gift by
people that I knew
and strangers
as a token to express the appreciation for,
for being blessed with such a beautiful scheme.
The effects of colorism come down to colonization um
kind of the white man favoring the
lighter our lighter counterparts, our lighter ancestors.
And I think that's really been
rooted into our culture.
If you had
and light is keen,
you'd be favorite, you'd be better for you
for some reason how some of us see lighter
as being better when that's not necessarily the case.
Even though my parents used to tell me
you're beautiful, you are intelligent,
you can do it
going to school was a big shock for me because
she used to follow me and calling me monkey.
And how could I like myself if the others thought I was ugly.
I remember
I'd also try to change the shape of my nose by
breathing in a lot slower
in the hopes that if I did it long enough then my nose would adapt, would change and
become beautiful and nice and pointed. And
that's the kind of nose Barbie has.
That's
the nose that Cinderella has. And
if I'm a princess, shouldn't I have a nose like that too.
I hated having big lips,
so I'd always fold them in to kind of make them look more kind of like,
but it kind of, I, I
don't even know why I did that.
Um
But
when I discovered makeup,
I used to put lipstick right in the middle of my lips
and foolishly think the rest would just blend straight into my face.
Obviously,
I kind of did look ridiculous and my friends told me so I just had to let go of it
when I had my natural hair
as a child,
Children used to come around and co co compare my
hair as a sponge that used to clean pots.
I used to like
the
nice silky smooth long hair that you can struck back like in the shampoo commercial.
I change hairstyles all the time and a lot of us Africans
like to change our hair,
not that because I'm not proud of wearing my natural hair. It's just
sometimes I just like to wear
something different.
I love having braids, but
that's actually because I'm quite lazy with doing my hair.
But I really appreciate that. This is
part of my culture. Like this is something that
we've been doing for generations and I can tap into it and do it.
It's just a part of me like I just don't see it as any other thing.
It took me years to realize that my hair is part of my identity is who I am
is my culture
and I
should be proud of it.
I'm celebrating my natural hair every day.
When I first came to Australia with my parents,
I made a concerted effort to change my accent because I could tell that the way
that my parents and me and my siblings spoke was very different and that wasn't cool.
And I remember thinking that
I was doing the right thing so then we could be happy because
we would be
true. Aussies.
Um When I was younger, I hated wearing my native attire.
There was this one time we went to a festival,
cultural festival and my parents were speaking so loud in our native tongue.
There was just this point where I just wanted them to stop. Like
I, I just felt so embarrassed.
And I remember
realizing at a point,
I'd forgotten my mother tongue.
I wasn't able to communicate to my grandmother when she called,
I wasn't, I didn't have something
of my culture, something of my heritage that
perhaps in the future I would be able to share
something that I would be able to write in stories,
something that
I would be able to
give to the next generation. That part of my identity
was gone.
Growing up, I found it hard to balance um the idea of being Australian and Ghanaian.
My parents always used to say, oh, you're Aussie, you were born in Australia.
Um But when I'd go to school,
I'd realize that there's something different.
Like, you know, if you talk about what you had for dinner last night,
you know, someone had pasta or
um bangers and mash or something like that.
And I had Fufu or I had like Ken care like something totally different.
I realized there was a disconnect.
I probably got to about 19 and I realized that I'm a hybrid. I'm both.
Um Yeah, some days I could be more than the other. But
at the end of it, I'm a combination of Australian and Ghanaian
for me every day.
I bathe in my chocolate creamy indulgence.
Black is beautiful.
My black beauty is secret and divine.
I am undefined black beauty.