#83 

Sally Jackson from FiLiA in conversation with Esua Goldsmith 

Author of The Space Between Black and White

Sally: I'm really pleased to be joined this morning by Esua Jane Goldsmith, the author of The Space Between Black and White, a mixed race memoir, and also an awesome feminist that has been working her entire life to make the world a better place. Hi, Esua it's lovely to chat to you. 

Esua: Hi, you too, Sally. Fantastic to be here. 

Sally: So, the reason that we first got together to chat is that I was delighted to be able to attend the online launch of your recent book, The Space Between Black and White perhaps we can start by just asking, can you tell us a little bit about what that book is about? 

Esua: Yeah, sure. it's my first book and it's a memoir on mixed race identity. And I called it The Space Between Black and White because it's literally the space I've inhabited all my life. But at the same time, I think it's a space in which lots of people can find themselves, you know, that ambiguous space where you don't feel you quite fit and you don't feel you quite belong.

You're wondering how it's going to play out, but I think for most people that's something that happens maybe occasionally. And for me it's the whole story of my life. And I suppose I could describe it as saying I was an only one. 

I grew up in 1950s Britain as the mixed race daughter of a single white mum who is disabled. And I spent the first six week weeks of my life in an unmarried mother's home. And then eventually I was taken back to my grandparents' home on a working class estate in Battersea. And you can just imagine it caused a complete stir to have this brown kid, the only brown kid on the block in the community.

And in those days, this is the 1950s I'm talking about. So early fifties, people didn't move around so much. They didn't shop in different places. They didn't travel, they didn't travel for work, and they did everything in the community. So even though there was quite a lot of black people coming to Brixton, which is only a few miles down the road. I hardly saw any black people while I was growing up. So I really felt like I was an alien, dropped out of space really. I just like stood out like a sore thumb. I got racist taunts in the street and in the playground, you know, and I just couldn't fathom out who I was and where I belonged.

And I think that was compounded because I never saw a photograph of my African father. He left England about a few weeks after I was born. Never saw me. And there were just no books or stories that reflected my experience or the way I looked. And you can imagine this had a profound sort of effect on my sense of self.

So I moved to different parts of the country, different parts of the world, rural Norfolk I was in when I was 15. So people have just never seen anything like me when I was in the countryside. I travelled all over the world for my job. Scandinavia, Italy, Africa, India. And I experienced this only-ness wherever I went.

As a child, I had a chance meeting on Clapham Common, which stayed with me all my life. And I was wondering if I could read a little piece from the book, Sally, just to describe that moment because I think it might bring it home to people.

Sally: I think that would be lovely. I think also it will give people a sense of the style in which the book is written, which would be lovely. So thank you. Yes, that would be great. 

Esua: Yeah. Great. I'll talk about the style a bit later. It's all written in the present tense so in my child voice and my adult voice, so you can really kind of be with me in the moment.

So, Okay. I'm on Clapham Common and its mid-November 1957. And I've just finished playing on the swings and of course it was getting dark and we were walking back across the Common back home. And this is the chance meeting that I had in the twilight.

 I was four years old in the foggy half-light. I can just about make out a family group moving slowly across the grass ahead of us. As we get nearer, I can see they're wearing the strangest clothes, long robes and trousers. Glimpses of red, gold and blue with short jackets, scarves, and hats to keep out the late autumn chill. The woman is wearing a green and gold scarf around her head like a turban.

They stand out in the fast fading light like a flock of brightly coloured birds. The smallest bird breaks away from the group and runs towards me. A little girl, about four years old, the same age as me. She has dark skin and black fuzzy hair like mine. We stop and stare at each other. Spellbound rooted to the spot.

A sudden shock of recognition of connection. I know you - Kumba, Kumba - I think it was Kumba they called her, something like that. Kumba ran off to join her family and they moved off across the common and out of sight. It all happened so quickly. I can't quite believe what I've just seen. I try to run after her, but Auntie Belinda holds me back.

We have to go home now, she coaxes. Your mum will be back from work soon. It's getting dark and Nan will have tea ready. Tea time. It always interrupts something really important just at the wrong moment. I have stumbled on a secret. I'm not the only one. I'm not alone in the world. There are other others and more than that, coloured people sometimes come in whole families, mum, dad, and two children, not just one-offs like me. I feel strange, excited, scared, shocked, all at the same time, but also comforted. 

Sally: Wow, that must have been such a range of emotions for you when you first saw Kumba.

Esua: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's an image that stayed with me all my life, and sometimes I told people my name was Kumba if they ask me, my name and say, ‘Where are you from and what's your name?’ Because I just felt there was a part of my identity missing and she represented it. Definitely. 

Sally: Absolutely. And, and that kind of brings us on I think perhaps to my next question. Clearly that experience of growing up within a white family and not just within a white family, but within a white family where there weren't other black or brown people around in any sense in family and community and et cetera. And as you say, until the first time that you encountered, that was when you met Kumba.

The theme of mixed race because we've seen by no means enough, but we are seeing more books now around race and around black experience and from people of colour. But the theme of mixed race is something quite new.

Why did you feel now was the time for a book that looked at those issues for somebody growing up as mixed race? 

Esua: Well, I think partly for our mixed race community, it's now the fastest growing ethnic minority community in the UK. Probably, I don't know, 2 or 3 million of us according to the official figures.

But I think there's more because not everybody who is mixed race identifies as mixed race. So there's lots of us out there and I think there's a lot of public discussion about it.

 Before Covid, I think you may remember, Sally, that mixed race was a hot topic with all the Megan- Gate and all of that stuff.

But I often think it was a very sort superficial type of discussion, you know, is mixed race the acceptable face of black? And are we really black or are we just good looking and then you put us on an advert and say, you've got it covered, or whatever it is. 

Sometimes it was quite hostile. Like, you're not really authentic. You're not real, you know, and I wanted to shed new light and depth on the issue of mixed race and chart it through, like, it's not a new thing. My experience is over several, decades and generations. And I wanted to do this sort of experientially, not as a theoretical book.

There's lots of theoretical books on race at the moment, but I wanted this to be almost written like a novel. Like a story, you know, there's love, sex, drugs, experience in it, everything. It's not a kids book by the way, It covers some really, in spite of that little passage I've just read you, it covers some really quite deep issues. And I wanted to get across the idea that being mixed race doesn't depoliticize race. That's the charge we get. You know, it's a luxury. It's not relevant, you know, we've got to stick to the real struggle. 

Mixed race is about challenge, inclusion, social and political justice, equality, diversity and kind of finding those commonalities between us as well as delighting in difference. And there's no more relevant narrative than that today really because of what's happening in America. 

Yesterday I was in Tooting joining the Black Lives Matter protest, so I feel very much that I've always been part of that struggle. I always will be, but I always felt like I was an only one. And now I feel part of a community. 

And I'll never forget the first time I walked into a room full of mixed race people, most of them younger than me, because there's still very few mixed race people of my age, so a lot of them younger than me, but I walked into that room, there was 30 or 40 mixed race people in there at a meeting. I cried. I did. I just felt part of a community for the first time in my life that I wasn't alone in my struggle. So I felt it's really important that this book is a contribution to chronicling our history and the history of the movement for social justice over generations. 

Sally: And I think that's one of the things that makes it really interesting to read because obviously as a retrospective, it looks at the issues of being mixed race for you as a child and for you as a teenager, for you as a young adult and as you say, going through various aspects of your life, but also in various environments as well because of the different places that you've travelled to across your life. So it really does give a very wide perspective.

Even though it's a single story it touches on so many different things that I think there's so much food for thought going through it.

 As a white person, for me, there was an awful lot of learning in the book, which I really appreciated. 

Esua: Great. Fantastic and I think you are right that it covers so many different sort of generations and understanding of the theme of race and mixed race and people are still very reluctant to talk about it.

But I think, in a way some of the same issues are facing mixed race children today as I faced.  Still not enough books, not enough images, not enough understanding of the mixed race experience. 

So, I think mixed race parents of today, I hope that they will increase their sense of kind of racial literacy around all these things and do that learning through reading and talking to other parents.

I think, parents of mixed race children need to realise that very often, unless they're mixed race themselves, they won't have an understanding of what it's like to be mixed race. You might have one black parent or one parent of colour and one white parent, or they might be different mixes, Asian and black for example.

But the fact is that you don't know how your child is feeling, and you may well find that that child is struggling with things you can't see as a mono-racial person, whether black or white. So you need to be listening to the children and hearing what it is that they're dealing with and make sure that they have lots of multiracial and lots of multi-ethnic friendship groups, and I know is all very well for me to say that living in Tooting but in other parts of the country that might not be possible.

But at least you can introduce your children to the different images in books. There are books being published now by writers of colour or featuring black or mixed race characters.

 But you know, Sally, only 8% of books published in the UK today are by writers of colour or feature any black stories or characters or anything.

So really compared to this generation of children who are the most diverse generation of children that there's ever been. We still are not serving either that community, our community, or the millions of white children who need to understand their generation because it's their generation as well. It's a multiracial, multicultural generation. So these books are for everybody. 

But I'd also say that we need to be challenging racist bullying, and not be told to ignore it like I was. I'd come home and cry to my mum and say, people called me a woggy and a darkie and a nigger and told me I'd been rolling in dog shit, and she'd say, oh, just ignore them. Well that is really damaging for a kid. Everyone told me it's not just my mum, the teachers and everybody. So I think we need to challenge that. 

But one thing I would say to white parents bringing up mixed raise kids is: remember that white is also a colour. And that how you show up as a white parent is really important. And know that this gives you privileges that your child doesn't have and that you are not going to be noticing things that your child is noticing. 

So, there's loads of things that we can do to bring our community together, but also to raise awareness including, I hope people will read the book now you've given it such a good press, Sally. 

Sally: Well, I've been recommending it all over the place 

Esua:  Oh, I'm really pleased. But actually, can I read you another little bit, which obviously you'll remember it's a bit right towards the end of the book and it's where I went to a meeting just after Obama's election. So this would've been 2008, 2009 and there was this big meeting up in the Barbican somewhere, run by some big sort of lawyer’s association, you know, and it was called something like - will we ever have a British Obama? Could we have a black person in as prime minister here? And the thing is there was a panel of speakers there. There's about 200 people in the room, me and all in the audience with these 200 people. And there's a panel of black and Asian speakers. So they're all speaking. And actually one of the speakers was mixed race, actually, friend of mine. But anyway, the whole discourse, we got to the end of it and everybody was discussing it and on the panel, and then I suddenly had this urge to come out as mixed race because I feel like I've always been very much like I was born in the era of the, well, it certainly in my young adulthood as an activist, in the era of black consciousness, you know, we're all black, you know, even Asian people identified as black, because black was a political statement. Right. So I thought actually now we've had a guy in elected to the White House, who's my colour, who's mixed race, who's the only person I know who went all the way to Africa to find his heritage, and now he is been elected president of the US. I thought, if I can't come out as a mixed race now, when can I? 

So I get up and I make this impassioned speech about how he's given us all, you know, us mixed race people a validity that we never had before, blah, blah. Anyway, of course I was attacked on all sides for this in the meeting. Oh, shut up about your mixed race.

They called Obama a black man while he was running for president, and then when, as soon as he gets elected, they called him a mixed race person because they don't want a black person in the White House, you know? So all of this and I felt really like I had been silenced, and this often happens to mixed race people even today, you know, never mind about bringing up your mixed race kid, you know.  So this was 10 years ago, which is relatively recent for me. So anyway, I'm going to read you this little bit about what happened after the meeting and I'd made this stand. Okay.

Reading from the book:

Sally, a tall white woman, one of the organisers of the meeting could not understand my disappointment that the space for exploration of mixed race identity had been closed down.

My intervention evidently caused tensions all around.

 Tensions? Well, you created them yourself just now, didn't you? She countered crossly on her way out of the meeting room. I didn't mean to. I'd gone and mix it up all again for the black and white people. When they wanted to celebrate, I'd let them all down.

I felt guilty, stupid, ashamed, a traitor, stranded in the space between.

 This was personal as well as political. I'd been an activist in this equality and diversity movement all my life. The only other mixed race person I'd come across who embraced his mixed-ness and had crossed the miles to find his father in Africa like me, had now become president of the United States.

If I couldn't find the space to talk about my mixed-ness now, then when? Where was the space for what I had experienced? To have a voice and know that it is valid, strong, collective, part of the movement for change. What must that be like? At the reception, things started looking up, said one of the speakers confided that having been adopted by an all-white family, he found it very difficult to speak out about his mixed background in the black movement here.

A couple of white women from the audience joined us to say they were grateful for what I'd said. They both had mixed race children and found it hard to create space for their kids to explore their dual identities and to hear from older role models about what the mixed race experience might mean for them.

Sally: A really poignant moment because as you say, if at that moment you couldn't celebrate your mixed race-ness, if that's a word, when could you? But at same, I really felt that that feeling of kind of confusion in some ways, where am I supposed to fit into all of this? 

Esua: Yes, and that was like with a lifetime in the struggle, you know? Haven't I earned my stripes yet? What more do I have to do? 

But anyway, yeah, I think it might give people who are in blended families or families with lots of different heritages, an idea that they are not having a similar experience and that it's a very exciting place, but they're going to grow alongside each other and with each other, hopefully. 

Sally: And as you say, it's about finding that place that recognizes the difference but also celebrates that difference.

Esua: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. 

Sally: So, I mean, moving on to the book itself, you mentioned right at the beginning that this is the first book that you've written. Could you tell us a little bit about how you went about that? What process you used as an autobiography? What always seems to me must be the bit of a nightmare in the a what do I include, what do I not include? And also just thinking about not just what you remember, but what memories trigger. 

Esua: Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. I'm sitting in my little shed, which is like a purpose built office at the bottom of my garden where I actually wrote the book. And if I thought maybe two or three years ago that I'd be sitting here talking to you with a real book in my hand, I'd have thought, Oh my God. Amazing. That's amazing. it finally happened because I think when you are going through it, you just never think that you are ever going to resolve the issues that you mentioned there. 

I mean, one of the issues, the difficulties, I think being a first time writer is what they call finding your voice. And I was writing things down and they just didn't sound like me. I thought, ‘How come?’ I sound like this. How come is it that when I write it down, it sounds completely different and a bit flat and not the vibrant writing that I wanted. And someone said, Well, I think it was probably one of my kids saying, well I don’t know why you can't find your voice you never stop talking at home. 

I thought, actually, yeah, I have got a voice. So I turned on the auto-typing and I spoke the book like I'm speaking to you. So that's why people, when they read the book, they say, I can just hear your voice, I think too right because it is. That's exactly what it is.  Somebody said to me, have you tried this dragon dictate thing? And there you go off I went.

 But I think it's still pretty tough because lots of people like me think, oh, I've got lots of interesting stories. I could write a book. You know, and you write down your interesting stories and realize you've got too many of them and they don't hang together. So you've got to find some kind of a golden thread and stick to it. And as you say, that golden thread was mixed race. That's what I wanted to write about. So I got a mentor who went through it line by line, and she said, Okay, I'm going to take you at your word. Anything that isn't about mixed race is not going to be part of this. So I had to take out a lot of stories like whole chapters sometimes.

Oh, Sally, I'll tell you. I was so bereft. I got all this stuff in there like a file and my mentor said to me, Well, don't throw it away or delete it because you know why a lot of first time authors always do a book of short stories straight afterwards because they got all this beautiful material that didn't go in the first draft.

I learnt a lot just about how you write. But I also wanted to push the boat out and sort of make it a story with everything in it. And so I had to kind of make it a memoir rather than an autobiography. I didn't know the difference before. I don't know if you know the difference so let me enlighten you because this is what I learned: that an autobiography has to be totally researched, like a biography, and you have to go through dates, blah, blah, blah, and who said what and when and all this. Whereas with a memoir, my mentor said to me, you got too many aunties, too many boyfriends too, too many therapists. So I sort of had to meld them into two or three examples. So some of them composite characters and I changed all their names so that if they said I didn't actually say that. I can say, Oh, well, yeah, but it is a character based on you know what I mean?

So it is all kind of true because I wrote loads of journals ever since I was a child, So I had so much contemporary source material. And some of it, like, you know, my 1986 diary is actually in the book, literally as a chapter, literally raw, almost unedited. 

So I didn't have to scrape too far to find the memories, but I also covered myself by doing interviews with about 50 of my friends, family, from my Ghanaian family as well, to get their memories, just to sort of get a landscape and that, as you say, would trigger all sorts of things. Honestly, Sally, I was lying there in bed dreaming about people I'd literally forgotten existed. 

Memories like a muscle, you turn it on and Wow it's like water. It just pours out of you. So it was very exciting. Plus, I have to say I'm a hoarder. I've got files and files and stuff. I did original letters from the 1970s. I reproduced them slightly edited. I got diaries, anecdotes, letters. I keep a dream diary, so a lot of my dreams are in there. So I think it's got, definitely got texture, this book.

 It sort of borrows from everywhere to tell the story. So it took me a long time to write some of the characters in it didn't want to be in it. Some of the characters that got left out of it really wanted to be in it. 

Other times I thought I'd want to avoid being sued here, so I had to change the names and everything. So it is, it's like a minefield, doing a memoir. But so far so good, Sally, I haven't had anybody write into me to tell me that they deny it all. 

Sally: It's a real advert as well for keeping a journal and being a hoarder because they are really rich parts of the book where you say, this is a letter form, or as you say, this is from my, my journal. It really adds to it. And I must just say very guiltily that the number of times I've started keeping a journal and then fallen by the wayside, it makes me think, what, if I had, what would I be reading about my thoughts and feelings, you know, 20, 30 years ago, whatever.

Esua: It's quite an eye opener you know Sally, because some of the time I've got material that I wrote when I was 8 and 14, and I'm thinking it's recognisably me. Absolutely. You know, I got the same sort of sense of burning justice then that I've got now. So you can surprise yourself really. It's an amazing experience. 

Sally: Absolutely. And as you say, there's various stages through your life where recording what was happening to you. There was so many influences happening in your life and one of the, the chapters that really resonated with me and as a feminist for me, really showed the aspects of the personal being political was talking about when you were in hospital and in a small ward just with some other women and some of the discussions that you had with those women and the feeling of sisterhood that comes out of that chapter is really palpable.

Esua: Oh, thank you, Sally. Some of it was very emotional to write and I found, I was writing some of it in tears. You kind of have to let your story go out into the world and sort of it's me, but it's an entity in its own right. The book.  But while I was actually in the process of giving birth to it, it was at times incredibly painful.

What I wanted to show in that chapter was how, as you say, sisterhood is powerful but it doesn't only happen in feminist consciousness raising groups or when you're planning a campaign or whatever. Women actually come together all over the place when things are really tough and you find that kind of sisterhood in those situations, and we can help each other to heal.

You're right, some of those conversations that I had, it's funny, you know, I wrote it down first and then I realised that the characters that I had, they suddenly came back to me. You know, I just thought, oh my gosh, there they all are, very, very distinct. And I realised when I wrote the stories down, there's one woman who was Greek, she'd been raped and had a miscarriage. She's a student activist like me, so she'd ended up in a riot in, Greek, on the campus in her university, been arrested, and then ended up fleeing for her life and coming to the UK and ended up in the same hospital ward as me, with a pregnancy, which was due to her being raped by soldiers.

 The whole conversations we had sort of went across race, class, gender. There was a very posh woman next to me who had loads of horses and another woman who was very working class, who had four kids, you know, from Leicester where I was a student at the time. Someone else having a hysterectomy, someone having a sterilisation, someone had an ectopic pregnancy and we were all women in all those different walks of life. Some students, some housewives, whatever. And we were all telling our stories. It was a bit like the Feminist Canterbury Tales. 

And my story was that I had had my second abortion and I had ended up in hospital because that abortion led to a fallopian tube infection, which was, you know, very serious and endangered my fertility. And I was treated with absolute contempt by the staff, particularly the consultant, very male patriarchal, and you people, this is what you get yourselves into and, and all of this so this is your punishment to be having premarital sex and all that. So it's very traditional. 

But luckily we told our stories to each other, us women, and we supported each other. And I realised by talking to the other women that actually part of my problem was that I was acting out what had happened to my mother that at 19 she'd had this Brown baby and ended up in an unmarried mother's home. And somehow I was kind of re-enacting it and not then being able to go through with it. So, I just want to read you a bit towards the end of the chapter where I'm sort of suddenly realising what is happening to me. 

Reading from the book:

At only 20 years old, a disabled single mother with a brown child, my mum, had been ready to go it alone. In the end, my granddad visited the the unmarried mother's home looked into the cot where I was sleeping and said, ‘Let's have her home’ in spite of my grandmother's reluctance. And now I understand that mum may well have been sad to leave the unmarried mother's home.

 When you're surrounded by loving, understanding women with a shared experience, who accept you and support you and hear your story without judgment or censure, you can help each other to heal. On day five, they tell me, I'm to be discharged. I knew this day would come, but now it's arrived. I don't want to leave.

I don't want to be discharged from these wonderful women on the ward. I feel safe in here. We're all in the same boat. I don't trust people on the outside. I don't know what box they're going to put me in next, how I will be seen from moment to moment, negated, stripped of validity and authenticity, I hug them all in turn, Ari Adney, Samantha, Martha, promising to keep in touch with them. Samantha is going home too. She's waiting for Quentin to collect her. Good luck. Keep fighting. It won't be the same without you. I say goodbye to Wiggy last. She's a philosopher, a wise woman. We all look to her. Listen, yo, she says earnestly gripping my hand tightly, drawing me close to her, every time.

I didn't know what to do with me life. I had another baby take my mind off it, you know, but you, you got choices I never had. You got the chance of an education and a career. Go on. You go out and grab it with both ends and don't sabotage yourself, girl, because that's what you're doing. No excuses. Promise me.  

Sally: I must admit I fell a little bit in love with Wiggy, everyone needs a Wiggy in their life.

Esua: Yeah. absolutely. She was lovely. 

Sally: You touched earlier on the attitude of the doctors. And in some ways I wasn't surprised in that those attitudes exist, but I suppose I was taken aback to be reminded of the blatancy of them displaying the attitudes to you clearly in hospital, quite poorly, in a vulnerable situation and ruthless in the way that they spoke to you and treated you.

And I kind of recognise that these were only a few years after abortion was made legal, but although legal that certainly you weren't in a place where you were supported around that decision.

Esua: Yeah, I mean there was a lot of resistance to it among the medical profession in some quarters. I did find that those kind of patriarchal values, which to some extent are still pervading our health service and particularly racist values, there is still some of that going around institutionally, which comes to the fore in places in times of covid and so on.

So, yeah, I think I wanted to chronicle that, but also to see that in spite of that, women actually can be solid together and not necessarily people who would call themselves feminists. There was a spirit in there of a kind of shared experience, which got us through it.

Sally: For me as well, it kind of emphasised that the resilience and strength of women, and certainly when women come together, it's a power to be reckoned with. So no matter how hard they tried to put you down, the women around you, not just for yourself, but with each other, kept all of them emotionally well and started that emotional healing.

Esua: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Sally: So, moving on sort of through the book, as you get older, you talk about as you started your work, working in in women's rights and also in development, how do you think that those experiences have shaped your work?

Esua: Well I think I always felt myself to be a citizen of the world, I think Theresa May was very disparaging of that. You know, citizens of everywhere are citizens of nowhere or whatever it is. I mean, that was obviously a put down to people who are internationalists politically.

I always felt that I didn't belong in the UK. Everybody thought of me as a stranger. Wherever I went, people said, Where'd you come from? And if I said, Battersea, they said, No, Really, where do you actually come from, originally and all this.

So I always felt okay, I belong in the world and not necessarily to where I am at the moment. And that led me to have a real commitment and understanding rights and international rights and human rights around the world. 

I was one of the first black people, I think, to be sent on VSO voluntary service overseas in the seventies. I was sent to Tanzania and people just didn't know what to make of me. The volunteers, the white volunteers didn't know what to make of me, and neither did the Tanzanians, so as a mixed race person, I felt, again, that huge sense of only-ness. My first time in Africa in 1977, more even than the UK or as equally.

And I had kind of thought, Oh, if I go to Africa, maybe I'll feel like I'm coming home. But actually, my father is actually from Ghana, so being in Tanzania, it just brought up a whole load more issues around identity. I found it a really interesting chapter to write because it enabled me to make sense of my experiences there.

I want to now read you a bit from a chapter called Debatable, and it's sort of in the middle of the book really, where I'm in Tanzania, I'm a volunteer and I have another chance encounter, which again changed the whole direction of my life I think. And I'm on the way to the Shamba, which is Swahili for the school farm.

 And the farm is where we used to go during the growing season. Every week I used to take my students there because I was a volunteer teacher. And we used to grow the school dinners on the school Farm, maize and beans. That's what we should be doing here. Teaching children, how to grow things.

Never mind that's another story.

But anyway, I’m on my way to the Shamba, I've got my hoe on my shoulder. It's really heavy. All my bright young students are streaking off ahead of me because they're much fitter than I am. And I'm kind of struggling along on the forest path. And then I have this encounter, which really made an enormous impression on me. 

Reading from the book:

In a clearing, I notice a woman struggling with a huge log that she has just felled with her axe. Her tiny baby is bundled up in a wrapper on her back, securely tied with a knot at the front. Two big bags of brushwood lie on the ground at her feet. I call out a greeting and ask if she needs help. She nods.

Asante Mama - Yes, Thank you. The two of us grapple with the giant log, struggling to hoist it onto her head. It must be nearly 10 inches in diameter and as tall as me. She has a length of cloth twisted into a circle around her head to prevent the load from slipping. Her knees buckle slightly and her face screws up with the effort and pain under the weight of it.

She steadies herself then sets off down the path at a trot tree on her head, axe at her waist, baby on her back. Two bags of brushwood in either hand. The muscles of her carves straining as her tiny frame almost disappears under her impossible load. A Tanzanian man calls out ‘Jambo Mama’ pleasantly and greeting as he cycles slowly past her.

I sit on a tree stump head in my hands, not quite believing what I have just seen. One of my students, Juma, always late, comes up to console me. Very sorry, Mau, are you tired? Yes, I am tired of seeing injustice and inequality and unfairness, sheer grinding poverty. Women treated like pack horses and second class citizens, and being powerless to change it. And even finding myself unwittingly, aiding and abetting it by trying to help. Nobody talks about this here or at home. It's just seen as women's unpaid role to fetch the firewood and the water and have the babies. It's not even counted as work. Women are strong, they say, they're used to it, but these women are lifting the kind of loads, no human being, or even animals smaller than an elephant should be required to lift. Putting such strain on the spine, the limbs, the skull. And so recently, after having given birth, When I get home, I'm going to launch an international campaign, going about this. We have to do something. It's a scandal. As she disappears along the path, I realise I've forgotten to ask her name.

Sally: It's such a powerful segment. I think it's one of those segments where a whole series of lectures that could come out of that on women's place in the world, the impact of struggle on women, the loads that we carry, how some women have many more loads to carry than perhaps we see it first sight.

It's just so much in that short segment that sums up the varying struggles that we often just take for granted that, as you say, just women's work. 

Esua: Yeah, the thing is, it's kind of archetypal and it is sort of like aid porn really, isn't it? You see women with a baby on their back and a pot of in their hand, and it's almost like a glamorous image to get people giving money.

And, you know, I didn't want to give money, I would just put a stop to it. It's not about making their lives better by helping them put the log on their head. It's actually about stopping that from happening. I felt totally enraged and still do now, and I think I've spent the whole of my career working in Aid and development sector and also in the feminist movement. And I know that I worked in a sector which was riddled with patriarchal, colonial, racist, sexist assumptions.

 But I found a lot of, certainly in the 80s and 90s, really good radical people working in the sector, who I could really join hands with and solidarity with across the world. So I think it taught me a lot.

But I really feel, I've come to the point now where I think it was always flawed and now it's in total crisis and it's been hit, the sector, like many other sort of voluntary and non-government sectors, have been hit by the 2008 financial crash. Then we have the sex abuse scandal in the aid agencies, if you remember a couple of years ago. It's been going on for years, I point that out in my book that there's always been that going on. 

And then we had the global environmental crisis, which meant it was really hard to do any development so-called anyway, because the environment, you'd get 30 years of development projects wiped out by climate crisis and then we got Covid where the whole world has shut down. 

So it seems to me we've been hit by crisis after crisis without changing the institution. It's always been, okay, let's get ourselves together and carry on, do another fundraising and see where we are at the end of it. And it just seems to me now we've got to think, you know, I'm a revolutionary and I think this is a great opportunity to push the whole thing over the edge and reformulate it as an international solidarity and human rights and women's rights movement, which is about reparations and about equality and about a struggle for world justice instead of let's go help out the brown people. It's just got to stop. 

 I got a dream of a future in which you got a southern led women led feminist led movement, which is about transformation. And about de-growth and about not thinking of development as let's get all countries as developed as the Western world. Because the western world development model is the problem. We've all got a junk it and we've all got to find a way to the future. I think the answer to that is very often in the way communities survive and thrive in the poorest places.

And also the work I'm doing with feminist movements in the UK, particularly the diaspora movements. Feminist diaspora movements have connections here and at home. And so we don't have that awful, over here and over there, type of mentality, which is holding us back from true solidarity.

So I see a movement in which those women like us, who support our villages back home, support our movements back home and also live in the West, can contribute our wisdom in a leadership role in the sector. So I really feel that it's time for a big, big change. And although Covid has been an awful situation, we're going through hell and now we have the sort of Black Lives Matter as well. Somehow I feel really optimistic and positive that the future is ours. We can shape it, and we've proved that communities are not dead, they're alive and thriving, and we can have women centered feminist values, which will be leading the world and leading people's thinking. I think it will come. I've been in this movement all my life and I'm still an optimist. 

Sally: And that's positive to hear. You're so right in that as dreadful as it's been and for all the heartache that it's brought with Covid, there's also some really strong lessons there to be learned about what we do value and what is helpful both for us as communities, but also for the planet that we hopefully may learn, and act differently in the future as a result of covid impacting our lives in the way it has as in a global way. 

Esua: Yeah. I think there's been a lot of understanding, sharing, reaching out that was always there in communities and I'm interested in the way people talk about, we got to have a new way of working.

Actually sometimes it's the old way and it's a way women have often been working anyway, in spite of the patriarchal system, so that we have got lots of experience in there and it's the way that women often come together, particularly around feminism, to kind of keep families going and keep communities going and I think it's extraordinarily political and we need to be leading the world in what we already know. It's not that it hasn't been tried and they will never change. And it will never change. I think the biggest enemy is it- will-never-change-ism because it can and is changing.

I mean, three months ago we could go out in the world and kiss and hug each other and it changed and people somehow managed to get together because of and in spite of that.

Sally: Yeah. And the fact that people do learn and people do adapt is powerful. Absolutely.

You talk about the ability to learn and we know, again, we're at a very crucial time at the moment with the dreadful murderer of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And the impact that clearly, each of those deaths is an absolute tragedy. But the fact that it's highlighted that just scratch the surface and the levels of institutional racism that occur not just in America, but you look at the number of people, or rather the balance of people that have had tickets around social distancing for Covid and BME people very much overrepresented. So we're seeing such clear evidence of racism and clearly we need to be doing so much better. I just wonder what your thoughts are at the moment. You mentioned you were at the protest yesterday in Tooting and able to be part of that resistance.

Esua: Well, I can see the movements that I've been part of blossoming in a new generation. My children were there. It's funny how we haven't got a word for grown up children. I mean, they're 27 and 32, but anyway, they're my adults and we were there together and I was thinking, gosh, you know, this is where I started and they are engaging in that whole thing. And so I feel very positive about it. 

I know that feminism is alive and well in its fourth wave, and it is as vibrant as ever it was in the seventies. And it's just a delight to see some of the young women coming forward. And I think the thing is that racism and sexism were always there and so it's not that they've suddenly reared their head, it's that now it's top of the political agenda and top of people's consciousness.

But I've been aware of it and conscious of it every day of my existence, and I'm working with a black women's philosophy group, just a small group of us, envisioning a future and what that future might look like rather than just sort of thinking, Oh, we got to fight what's going on now. We have, and we do.

But at the same time, I think the right wing has sort of colonised and monopolised the future. And it looks very like the past only worse. Whereas I think we can construct a new future and we should bring back utopianism and say, this is the kind of world we want to live in and how we would like it to be. And really sort of say, how would it work? How would we engage with each other in a way that's kind to the planet and all of these things? 

And it seems to me you've got examples all around you because people are actually doing it and they're doing it spontaneously. So nobody can tell me it doesn't work because I can see it, I can see it in my village in Tooting, shall we say. And I can see it in my village in Ghana, that these things are possible. 

So I think, let's think about the Art of the possible really, and not just get stuck in, you know, this is all terrible and I think I'll come out of this. I mean, some people are going through hell, make no mistake about it, and we are campaigning on their behalf.

But in my Black Women's philosophy group, one of the things we were saying was we aren't calling it the, the lockdown, we're calling it the Great Pause because as black women, we are all professionals and one is a museum curator and the one of them is running a project on literacy at a university. So we're all professional women and we were saying that we are having a great pause from the racism and sexism we usually get in institutions when we go to work. And I think it's actually a respite, in some ways, for people who get that every day. And, it's like, there's not just one narrative and some people are experiencing this period in very different ways from others.

And we need to tell all of those stories and yeah, there are lots black women on the front line and there are also black women who are on the front line quite high up in their career, in our careers, who feel this weight of oppression and that this is a genuine period of reflection when we can free ourselves up from having to deal with it on a daily basis, you know, everyday racism and sexism.

So that's a story that I haven't heard told. Everybody's got to tell their terrible story, but there are other stories and we are all different and we all have equally valid stories to tell. 

Sally: Absolutely, just to finish up, we started off by talking about your story, your book, The Space between Black and White.

What are your hopes for the impact of that book? What would you like to come from people reading it?

Esua:  Well, as I say, I think, I meant the space between black and white as actual, like the space I inhabit and metaphorical. So I'd first like people to understand more about the actual space that people struggle with who are mixed race like myself.

But it's not just a story which is negative. It's actually that I'm saying that mixed race people have an entry to places and spaces that other people don't have and that it's a fantastic delight and I just wouldn't have it any other way. I'm discovering more and more about its joys by talking to other mixed race people like myself.

My book is a joyful story, but it's a story for everybody, not just one of understanding our particular situation, but understanding that the human situation is full of ambiguity and that all of us are multifaceted, multi-levelled people with lots of different experiences. We don't just have one story.

There are many and there are many inside ourselves. And understand your different stories and engage with your own identity. And obviously, as you say, we have an opportunity and time at the moment to come together over the death of George Floyd and the rising up of the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement where white and people of colour can come together and challenge that scourge of racism and white supremacy that really does a disservice to all of us, all of us, apart from a very, very small minority of the population who have taught us that change isn't possible. It's a lie. It is possible. 

So it's time for everyone to stand up and be counted. And I hope my book will kind of resonate with people and inspire people. To make that journey because I ain't giving up anytime soon.  

Sally: It's been an absolute delight to chat to Esua and your optimism is infectious both in talking to you and reading through the book. So I'm sure you are absolutely right. This actually gives us a huge opportunity at the moment. 

Your book's available via your website, so we'll make sure we put those details up with the podcast so that people can see where they can get hold of it from.

And as I say, I'd heartily recommend it to everyone, but I also hope that this is the beginning of our conversations and we'll come back and have another chat with you soon. 

Esua: It's mutual, Sally. It's been an absolute delight and fantastic to be engaged with the work of FiLiA and I'm really, really honoured to be invited to talk to you and also to be part of an on ongoing conversation.

So I hope it's the beginning of a very beautiful relationship. And I just wanted to say that, um, during the time of covid, the independent publishers are really struggling to survive, and I am part of a collective of all female black led publishers. Well not black led, they're all black female women who are running this publishing house. It's called Jacaranda. And I really would urge you to buy from your local book sellers and choose indie publishers over the big boys and make sure that we keep that publishing alive because we've got to get more black books out there. And my book is one of the 20 of 2020 and that Jacaranda was fed up with the very few books that were written by writers of colour. So they did a competition and national competition to find 20 black writers to publish in 2020. And so I'm one of the 20. So I'm very delighted to be part of a radical collective, which is changing the face of publishing too. Lucky old me. 

Sally: Absolutely. And as you say, it's so important. We need to get more out there. So yeah, for sure. We'll put those details on the website as well and really encourage women to obviously have a look at your book, but also have a look at the other titles that Jacaranda are promoting as well at the moment.

Esua: Great. Thank you so much, Sally. Really take care of yourself.