‘Do you know what this is?‘…
‘Well, it's a sack,’ (he) exclaimed…, ‘then get in it!’
In the fairytale ‘The Soldier and Death’, in exchange for an act of kindness, the soldier is given a magic sack. Inviting another to see and get in it traps them indefinitely.
My mother was white. My father was brown. They were born in Europe and North Africa respectively. Ethnicity surveys in the UK, including the 2021 census of England and Wales (UK Government n.d.), tend to give the mixed options of ‘White and Black African’, ‘White and Black Caribbean’, or ‘White and Asian’. I don't fit into any of those categories, so I cannot choose any of those sacks. The container I am invited to get into is labelled ‘Mixed other’, or sometimes ‘Any other mixed or multiple ethnic background’. I have been ticking this box for a long time, but apart from that I have not really needed to think that much about my own mixed heritage because I look like my mother. I have white privilege, and I experience and express white fragility. I am functionally white, and have unconscious, semi-conscious and conscious racist thoughts. Over the years, I have occasionally been asked if I have addressed my mixed ethnicity in my own analysis. Truthfully, I have had to answer ‘not so much’. This in itself I understand to be an expression of white privilege. Other terms also come to mind: disavowal, splitting, confusion. Reflecting on it now, more than fifty years after I immigrated to the UK, in the context of the Zeitgeist as well as in the context of this Sitegeist, I wonder about the role it has played in my analysis all this time, not so much in terms of how I am seen (I pass), but in terms of my identity, how I construe myself, as a subject. My subjectivity is therefore the subject of this paper. The concept of belonging (wondering what sack or container
to call my own) is central to this personal exploration of what it means to be ethnically mixed up.
But I began not with belonging, so much as a definition. UK ethnicity questionnaires are lists of definitory assumptions. On the premise that collecting data in this way is useful and statistically helpful, there is the assertion (in acknowledgement of, but also rooted in, colonialism) that these are the most useful contemporary categories (before 2001, ‘there was no category for “mixed” …. before that the only options were “Black-Other” and “Any other ethnic group”’, Morris 2021: 8). What the census collects, of course, is, on the face of it, individually and freely self-declared identification, but determining the overall categories, and then allowing the individual to make a self-identification from the options given, is in itself effectively an act of colonisation. In her 1997 paper on the ‘“mixed race” identity’ of British women neither classified as Black or White', Ifekwunige (1997: 127) reclaims the term ‘métis(se)’ (its Latin root meaning ‘mixed’) for these subjects. But this term doesn't seem to fit me. In my whiteness it feels like cultural and linguistic appropriation; in my non-whiteness it is a term I do not connect with. In her study, Ifekwunige began by interviewing twenty-five métisse women, but felt in the end that she could only do justice to the richness of the material she had collected by concentrating on the experiences of six. Here, the only other's memories of mixedness I presume to articulate are my own.
If not métisse, what should I be called? Ifekwunige gives nearly twenty-five terms from ‘mixed race’, ‘multiracial’, ‘biracial’ through to ‘half blood’, ‘half breed’, ‘zebra’. My own list: ‘European’; ‘Austrian’; ‘Australian’ (a linguo-geographical confusion); ‘British like us’/ ‘Eastern European’ (patients' projections in sessions); ‘ignorant white cunt’ (in a psychoanalytic discussion); ‘that Austro-Israeli-Arab-Egyptian bird’ (to my partner, at university); ‘Other’/‘Alien’ (at passport control); ‘English’; ‘very welcome here’ (in a workshop on white fragility). The term métisse, initially intended to counter the reification and legitimation of the sociocultural construct of race, and to articulate a non-hierarchical discourse of difference against the ‘silencing’ of ‘colour-blind ideologies’ (1997: 128), was in her later writing discarded by Ifekwunige (2004)
in a return to ‘mixed race’, because using a specifically French-African term risked downplaying the experience of those from other complex backgrounds, but also to mark a conscious differentiation from ‘mixed ethnicity’ or ‘mixed heritage’, which also retreats from a racialised discourse (colour-blind again).
But none of these terms was used in my family as I was growing up, because we did not speak about colour at all.
I am perhaps 4. My father returns from a long business trip to Tehran, where (I learn when I am more grown-up) he has been doing market research on the sort of bras Muslim women there would prefer to wear. Standing in the kitchen, he is affronted by my wriggliness and wilfulness and is strict with me. I am affronted in turn – my mother is not like this. I tell him to ‘get back to Tehran’. He is very offended.
… In a timeframe that feels like later that week, my father returns to our flat from an evening out with male friends. The noise wakes me. They are a little drunk, and very merry, and in showing them the Persian carpet he brought back from his business trip, he somehow rolls us both up in it and has a friend unroll us again. He finds it very funny. I am meant to find it funny too. I think I do. I look at my mother for guidance. Is this funny? I can't tell if she thinks it is.
When I was 4, I didn't consciously think of my father as being a different colour from my mother or me, though I suppose I must have been aware of this.
‘[M]y formation as subject results from the impact of other bodies, of matter that is foreign to me’, writes Irigaray in To Speak Is Never Neutral (2002: 3). ‘Discourse hardens up and closes off’ (2002: 8). She is talking here specifically about the hegemony of the discourse of science over the sexual (female) subject, but the violence (actual physical violence as
well as linguistic) exerted on the subject by a mostly binaried, inherently (inter)corporeal discourse reflecting a complex of power is obviously also highly pertinent to race. There is always rigidity; something (someone, somewhere) always gets damaged, missed out, lost. We know ‘race’ is a sociocultural construct (there is more genetic variability within people of the same ‘race’ than there is between ‘races’: National Human Genome Research Institute 2023), so to couple ‘mixed’ with ‘race’ is inaccurate genetically (genotypically), but accurate socioculturally. In another sense, particularly for some mixed people like me, whose phenotype means they pass as one construct of race or another, it is also inaccurate socioculturally, at least from this ‘outside’ view.
So, if not at 4, when did I start to think consciously about race as something that might have meaning for me internally? The discursive subject, according to Foucault, is constructed in ‘a world of discourse’ not ‘divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies’ (1978: 100).
In the summer before my eleventh birthday, on a road trip to Vienna with only my father (now an Austrian citizen), an argument between him and a man who (for reasons unclear) had been taking photographs of men at the urinals in the public toilet spills loudly out on to the station concourse. Amidst the shouting and gesticulating, a passerby stops and, without any understanding of the circumstances, vociferously takes the white photographer's side. My father would do well to go back to where he comes from and stop causing trouble here. It is my first conscious experience of racism directed towards him, and I am shocked and begin to cry. As we leave the station on the escalator, my father puts his arm around me. ‘Don't let him upset you’, he says. ‘It's just some old Jew.‘
‘[T]he contingency of identity and belonging’ are 'not just spatially and temporally fluid, but also shift as different configurations of bodies move
through public spaces together', suggest Klocker and Tindale (2021: 208), in their study of mixed-heritage families in Australia. Their understanding of intersectionality is that it must always be approached intercorporeally, ‘on the basis that experiences of privilege and marginality are always an extra-individual affair’ (2021: 208). That day, in mid-1970s Vienna, I began to acquire discursive language that I had not had before. In a public space, my attention was drawn and meaning was given to a difference that had meant nothing in private. And it was mostly to do with my father's racial identity rather than my own – my externally and internally perceived whiteness seemed to protect me from that. This was an extra-individual experience certainly, but also an inter- and intra-individual one. The ‘unthought known’ (Bollas 1987) it put me in touch with was less my ethnic mixedness than my mixed-up-ness. The Black/White binary, ‘this crude form of colour coding which came into being in the modern era [that] has divided humanity and ensured white supremacy in the service of domination, colonialism, slavery and capitalism’ (Morgan 2021: 12), is inherently a paranoid-schizoid state. ‘The ego is incapable of splitting the object – internal and external – without a corresponding splitting taking place within the ego’ (Klein 1997: 6). The relevance of the reflexivity (and antithesis) of the inside/outside binary is complicated here. First, in the broader sense, if my experience of the world is split and fragmented, that may be reflected in my internal organisation too. The idea that people of mixed ethnicity must be confused about where they belong, or feel marginalised, is often criticised as an outdated assumption, a cliché of discourse imposed on those who identify in this way. I understand that this is clearly not true and anachronistic for many (Ifekwunige , ; ), but I think it is true of me, though this is more overdetermined than a straightforward internalisation. Second, of course the outside world is more than just about race. Privileging my sense of my own white identity as a matter of course over my non-white ethnicity, can also be interpreted as an internal expression of that external repression and violence. Third, in the subjective experience, where an inside/outside binary is a necessary but fictional construct of an objectively perceivable reality, that construct is even more confusing
I didn't really start to think of my mixedness as something I ‘could’ think about until I was much older, middle-aged, and psychoanalytically trained. Even then I came to it from the perspective of white privilege and intersectionality.
I am a functionally white person talking to a group of functionally white people about ‘diversity in counselling’. I tell them about two adult women I know well: (1) the mixed-heritage daughter of immigrants, born abroad, who came to the UK as a 7-year-old, not speaking English; (2) the daughter of middle-class parents, who was privately educated, went to an Oxbridge university, and is bilingual. I ask them to consider the differences between their lives, and they imagine many.
Both women are me.
The ‘diversity’ talk took place in the mid 2010s. I gave it as a white middle-class person, my ethnicity was not the reason for giving it, and in this completely white, also mostly middle-class, counselling training (from which I myself had previously graduated, prior to training psychoanalytically) we didn't yet have discursive terms for white privilege, white fragility, institutional racism, or intersectionality. Though some of these ideas had long been in circulation, and my two vignette ‘identities’ might be seen to be illustrative of different intersectional axes, they were not part of the vocabulary of our group of home-counties counsellors, predominantly middle-class, predominantly women. Much could and has been said about the lack of diversity and the lack of awareness of diversity in the psychotherapeutic professions. Now the language is available to me, I look back with some shame and embarrassment at myself as a white person who didn't know they didn't know what they were talking about.
This question of bearing the shame of my own racism is not just deeply uncomfortable, it is also problematic – on both the questions of whiteness and of memory. It is probably true to say that even if we had had the vocabulary in the diversity evening c. 2015, we most likely would not have found it easy to use it in relation to ourselves. Robin DiAngelo explains very clearly how ‘individualism’ has allowed ‘white people to exempt themselves from the forces of [racist] socialization’ (DiAngelo 2019: 2). Writing an account of my individual experiences of mixedness is a prime example of that. I began this paper by citing my white privilege and fragility – hiding them in plain sight – but the first instance of prejudice I actually cited was my father's, not my own. Apparently (also truthfully as far as I remember), I don't recall having a concept of race before that. If one is functionally white, can it ever be anything but an appropriation of mixed ethnicity, even though my ethnicity is actually mixed, to write as if one is anything else? And in denying my identification with whiteness, am I looking to a different kind of passing – a pass to be white, with all the privileges and entitlement that affords, but exempt from racism? In this, as many have pointed out (including Eddo-Lodge 2018, DiAngelo 2019, Morgan 2021), I am hardly unique, but perhaps I want a specific pass that tells me I am a white liberal aware of and implicated in racism, but with a tiny get-out clause that also makes me a little bit exotic and not so white anyway after all. I have thought (and said) some stupid things in my life: among them actually articulating out loud (and not as long ago as I would like) that I couldn't be racist because my father was brown and had afro hair. I make racist assumptions: after 9/11 for example, even more scared of flying than I usually am, I would try to calm myself by scanning the other passengers as likely terrorists by racially and socioculturally stereotyping them. I realise I am giving uncomfortable examples of my racism set comfortably in decades of my past.
But in this paranoid-schizoid context of a Black/White split, I am also conscious that ‘mixedness’ (even my whitewashed mixedness) is awkward. 'I will not be able to do justice to the complexity of multiracial
identity', says DiAngelo, though she offers a possible thought-path through intersectionality:
for the purposes of grappling with white fragility, I offer multiracial people the concept of saliency. We all occupy multiple and intersecting social positionalities. I am white, but I am also a cisgender woman, able-bodied and middle-aged. These identities don't cancel out one another; each is more or less salient in different contexts.
In a group of older white men in which I am the only white woman, my gender may be far more salient to me than my whiteness. But in a group of white people coming together to discuss white fragility, my mixed identity is likely to have greater saliency. It's a frame that opens up and allows for complexity: for example, my white privilege may be shored up by education and class; internally, I may feel I am compensating for my white ignorance by knowing a bit about Foucault or Fanon; those threads and others will be interwoven in any discussion in which I engage. The way in which the term ‘intersectionality’ is now more frequently used is in itself an expression of tension between broader categorisations and the specific. Coined initially by Kimberlé Crenshaw to draw attention to power dynamics specific to the position of Black women because they are both women and Black, it has evolved into a term that also describes ‘a general approach to thinking categories of experience, identity and oppression that could be taken to any site – including, for example, straight, white cisgender men’ (Bohrer 2019: 89). Saliency allows individuals to make sense of some of these intersections, but it is interesting to wonder, if we know via palaeo-anthropology as well as genetics that homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and are therefore all mixed, why this concept of multi-ethnicity still feels so difficult. In the context of studies on whiteness or blackness it is exceptionalised, potentially a field of study or book (Ifekwunige 2004; Morris 2021) in itself. Perhaps, this is a point of antithesis, an aporia, where the tension between the
necessity for general categories and specific experiences really does harden and close off (Irigaray). ‘Setting aside your sense of uniqueness is a critical skill that will allow you to see the big picture of the society in which we live; individualism will not’ says DiAngelo (2019: 13), but through its very nature there is no big-picture mixed-race experience, and if the mixed-race experience is also everyone's, any big picture does a small-picture violence to everyone's experience (and in reverse).
For Ricoeur, the narration of the subject can be ‘characterized as the invention of a third-time constructed over the very fracture whose trace our aporetics has brought to sight’ (Ricoeur 2014: 420), so the ‘subject then appears both as a reader and the writer of its own life’ (Ricoeur 2014: 422). In describing memories (and there is time travel in the act of this, as I actively write them now, aware that if you are reading them, this inscription of my present past will have happened some time ago, and probably not in this order), they are expressive of my present, a re-visioning of a previous experiencing I cannot dig up or restore as a museum piece. I cannot help experiencing my ‘memory as practice, not as pregiven object of [my] gaze, but as the act of gazing and the objects it generates. Memories are produced out of experience, and in turn, reshape it’ (Lambek and Antze 1996: xii). In the very specific process of archaeological self-excavation that is my personal psychoanalysis, it is true that I have not used the terms ‘mixed ethnicity’ or ‘mixed race’ very much, but my ethnic mixed(up) ness (internally to me, inter-generationally, inter-familially) has been completely interwoven with it. I am anxious to reiterate that in these explorations of my past, I am talking only of my subjective experience of my family history, and the stories, narratives and repetitions that interpellate me. I could not have written this while my parents were alive to argue with or be hurt by it. There is inevitable violence in the subjectivity and selectivity of that.
My parents met in Vienna, at the university, in the 1950s and were married there in 1959. One generation before, this kind of marriage would not have been permitted. From 1933, an Aryan certificate, giving
genealogical evidence of two generations of Aryan parentage was required to work in the public sector, education, and later also to marry. On the pretext of protecting further German generations from the miscegenation of its ‘Rhineland bastards’, 385 Afro-German children, their heritage mostly interlinked with the diaspora of Black Africans related to German colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Budman 2022), were forcibly sterilised by the Nazi regime. In a way, both my parents were driven by diasporas of their own.
History: My father was advised to leave Egypt because of newspaper articles he had written in opposition to the Nasser regime (the Suez Crisis itself a consequence of colonial occupation), and chose to come to Austria, a country he couldn't identify on a world map, primarily because the immigration laws were favourable. Having learnt German, enrolled to study philosophy and journalism, and (eventually) divorced his Egyptian wife, who could not bear the loneliness of living in Austria (though he secretly conspired to steal her cookbook in order to recreate the flavour of home), he met my mother. One day, close to graduation, sitting in the park, she declared quite unprovoked that she would never marry him. In indigation, he asked her to, and she accepted.
Herstory: After my grandfather was killed in the Second World War, having been conscripted into the Reich's army despite being too old, because of his refusal to join the Nazi party, my grandmother was left to run their small-holding and look after two children on her own. For a while the village was on the front line – they took refuge from the bombing in the church basement, had a Russian soldier billeted with them, and once encountered a cartload of dead bodies on the road as they walked to the next village. Her mother said, ‘Don't look up!‘, but she did. She was exceptional at school and her maths teacher came to the house, declaring her to be a mathematical genius (though actually she was always completely rubbish at maths) who must go to university, something no-one from the village, of either sex, had done before. She knew if she told my father that she wouldn't marry him, he would think
Page 85about it. Her fantasy was not to be poor or go back to the village to live there permanently again (though she had a fantasy of coming back as mayor), and she didn't. She helped write my father's thesis, as well as her own, and lived abroad and worked as a creative in advertising for all of her life, except for the first five years of mine. I was her only child.
My mother's profession brought the family to the UK in 1972. I have lived here ever since.
I have said that as a family we didn't speak about our multi-ethnicity and this is true. It came up occasionally as stories. (Someone wrote hate mail to my grandmother asking if she knew her daughter was seen out and about ‘mit einen Schwarzen’, but she didn't take much notice; at the bank, where he had friends, my father was affectionately known as ‘jungle bunny’; he laughed at the idea of ‘wog’ meaning ‘worldly oriental gentleman’; when we moved into a new area it later transpired he had been investigated as a ‘person of concern’; my friends' white middle-class mothers described him as a ‘dashing Omar Sharif’; he was known to ‘have rhythm; he can really dance’.) It surprises me when I show people photographs of my childhood self with my father and they remark on our visible ethnic difference. Our personal closenesses and later our very personal differences (we had been estranged for years when he died) were both much more ordinary and seemed to loom much more largely in our lives. What always made it more difficult to speak not just about race but about everything, was that each of us had a different first language: German, Arabic, English. My mother's tongue was my first language but not my mother tongue. Neither of us spoke my father's first language. The Oxford English Dictionary has the oldest example of the English term ‘mixed-race’ dating back to 1860, ‘half-caste’ a century earlier, but much as the unsatisfactory and crude monikers others gave my father are reflective of a grasping around for suitable language, we were limited in the availability of words. This was not just a paucity of conceptual language (no concepts of ‘intersectionality’, ‘white privilege’, etc.), but also a paucity in terms of communication between us and a paucity of
containment. My anxieties projected into my maternal and paternal containers were sometimes returned to me filtered through layers of possible (mis)translation. I am thinking here of containment not just in the sense of the infant or the analysand projecting feelings into the good breast, so that when they are reintrojected ‘they are felt to have been modified in such a way that the object that is re-introjected has become tolerable … to … the psyche’ (Bion 1991: 90), but in broader terms as a relational alpha-functional way of communicating between family members. ‘In terms of a model the mother derives benefit and achieves mental growth from the experience: the infant likewise abstracts benefit and achieves growth’ (Bion 1991: 91). The relationships in my family were often difficult for complex reasons; one of them was that our linguistic capacities for containment were at odds with one another.
I wonder if something was unconsciously enacted in my parents' diasporas that I was partly expected to contain. Individuals' narratives of mixed race often talk about the complexities of feeling both at home and estranged in the different families and sociocultures of their parents, but our move took us away away from relatives on both sides. I have had no real relationships with my grandparents; my Austrian grandmother died when I was barely 5 and my father had cut off most ties with his Egyptian family before I was born. In this sense, immigration to the UK was an effective wiping away of much familial and intergenerational past (the trauma of war and parental death on one side; and the demands of a Muslim culture, and parental control on the other). My father was also of mixed, Egyptian/Turkish, ethnicity. On the rare occasions he talked about this, he suggested his position as his mother's only child (but not his father's, for whom this was a subsequent marriage) in a culture foreign to her was intensely s(mother)ing. There were visits to Austria and Germany but I think my identity was meant to be a blank slate on to which (not unusually for parents of any ethnicity) hopes of independence, differentness and originality were supposed to be inscribed.
I am 17 and we are invited to Christmas drinks with a couple local to us, non-white friends new to the family. The host starts a
Page 87psychological parlour game in which we are invited to write down adjectives describing ourselves and compare them with the ones our family members choose about us. For me, my mother chooses ‘realistic’; my father ‘fair’. I choose ‘romantic’.
My father meant ‘fair’ in the sense of unprejudiced, not in the sense of white or pretty, though of course those are all meanings that could have racial connotations. I think he might also have meant fair in that he didn't want me to be swayed by the terrible and tempestuous arguments my parents had with each other, which had now been going on for much of the ten years we had been living in the UK (I was in fact swayed, and compelled to take a side, at the time usually his). For my mother (as for both my parents) ‘realistic’ often meant denying difficult emotions, though the terrible struggle and unhappiness of this was expressed by her in other painful and troubled ways. Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, warns against imposing racialised interpretations on ‘ordinary’ neurosis in a detailed analysis of the main character of René Maran's novel Un Homme pareil aux autres, where a relationship between a ‘man of color and a white woman’ might be seen reductively as an expression of an inferiority complex and fantasy of becoming white: ‘Jean Veneuse is a neurotic and his color is only an attempt to explain his psychic structure. If this objective difference had not existed, he would have manufactured it out of nothing’ (Fanon 2008: 57). I am conscious that viewing my family history through the single lens of race is reductive and distorting. In one sense it opens up some capacity for thinking: for example, I wonder now what it might have been like for a brown Egyptian man, standing in his kitchen in Munich in Germany, with his white Austrian wife, to hear his indignant white daughter telling him, in German, to go back where he has just come from. But though there is a strand of mixed-racial tension in this, it would be just as incomplete (and conversely no less relevant) to attempt to interpret it through an Oedipal lens; in tems of the function of the father in the symbolic; as my attempt through narrative to reduce my father to the imaginary; or in terms of attachment, child development, class theory, or the sociocultural history of 1960s gender roles.
I don't want to give more meaning than is appropriate to my mixed ethnicity. In Morris's (2021) interviews with UK citizens who, like she does, identify as Mixed/other, as in Ifekwunige's earlier study, many of the interviewees talk of the tension between feeling somehow aligned and not aligned with each parent's culture because of the way they look (or more accurately the way they are seen). For many this is a part of their everyday, where not looking quite white enough can mean routinely contending with race-based assumptions, questions, impositions (‘where are you from from?’, Morris 2021: 7), verbal, and sometimes physical, violence. The locus of being mixed problematises the culturally binary and paranoid-schizoid, and this ambivalence is often unwelcome. Looking white means I am exempt from this. One could also say that I am living in disavowal of my brown-ness, as a kind of reverse coconut, and clearly there is truth in that, but this is problematic. My mother's ambivalence towards her background and my father's disavowal of his family and state are repeated transgenerationally in a sense of not belonging, a sense of mixedness and a sense of otherness in me. I am culturally more British than anything else, my status is ‘settled’, I am married to a white British man and have white British children, but my nationality is Austrian. I have never been to Egypt; the only Arabic I speak are swear words I picked up as I was growing up, and some I began to learn in 2022 on Duolingo. What is the transgenerational transmission? What is being disavowed?
It is 2017 and my father, now in his mid-eighties, is in hospital long term. My parents separated in 1984, but they have continued to be in regular contact, as if they are still spouses but somehow geographically separated by coincidence. They now live in different countries and my father has been together with his current wife much longer than my parents were married to each other. I am pulled into making sure, remotely (and in my father's case indirectly), that they each have each other's phone numbers. But they never make contact.
Page 89Every time my mother calls she wants to discuss quite insistently why I don't want to speak to my father.
It would be difficult not to see this as an example of a projection into me of their relational ambivalence, with the overtly stated demand that I somehow contain and process it. The many emigrations and immigrations of my family contain in them strands of disavowal and denial. The meaning of this transmission of disconnection and forgetting, of moving on, of starting anew, creating a family with almost no history, acting in fact as if there is no history, no change to the relational status quo, is elusive. Speaking of ‘knowing and not knowing’ trauma, Laub and Auerhahn (1993) suggest that the children of those who have experienced trauma ‘may serve as an easier medium for knowledge to evolve and memories to emerge, with associations and imagery’. To present a history in the fragmentary way in which I have presented it in this paper could be construed as an example of that. Perhaps in restricting my knowledge of their history and securing a place for me in a separate time and place from either heritage, my parents were unconsciously communicating a defence they themselves had used to good effect – by splitting, these fragmented narrative memories and forgettings were to be shored against our ruins. But in Kleinian terms, splitting also has a healthy function. As well as being characteristic of abnormal object relations, ‘The processes of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them into objects are … of vital importance for normal development’ (1997: 9). Through recognition of ambivalence (of mixedness), it's possible to come into a relationship with the objects and realities outside the self. The act of immigrating, of separating, might be seen as an attempt to process trauma or loss by introjecting it into a new location or generation in the hope of containment. In this sense, the process of remembering, of imagining the past from a different perspective, and in a different language (socioculturally and historically, as well as analytically), might be seen as a transgenerational Nachträglichkeit, a transgenerational working through.
‘Passing’, says Pelham in her book on the phenomenon (2021), ‘is the act of living or imitating a life belonging to an identity other than the one you have been assigned by society, and the “passer” is someone who actively emulates this new identity's traits, hiding or omitting their own’ (2021: 1). To pass, then, implies the denial of an internal truth of some kind, and Pelham's book explores this extensively in terms of the complexity of many kinds of sociocultural and intersectional passing, not just ‘racial’. But in a more basic sense, to pass as one or more things you are not implies that there is another thing that you could or should be. In the workshop on white fragility in which I was (in genuine and kind intention) ‘welcomed’ as someone of declared mixed heritage I felt internally indignant that I was suddenly seen in need of an invitation to inclusion. As well as illustrating very clearly what it means to have white privilege and the sort of fragility that is associated with having that privilege even momentarily withdrawn, I think it also draws further attention to the fulcrum of contradiction at which mixedness is located. If race is a sociocultural construct, the concept of needing to make sense of being of mixed race (in denying it, passing, embracing it, or taking it to analysis) is meaningless. It is more meaningless the closer one is to looking and feeling white, but whiteness, as in my own case, can also blank out, cover over, whitewash meaning. Something that is imposed upon the subject, a language of binaries (Black/White, phenotype/genotype, inside/outside, sociocultural/psychological), inflicts a kind of discursive violence upon it. It forces a need to give an account of oneself, as if there is a non-subjective place (contradicting Ricoeur) where one can stand. ‘The way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives … our “incoherence” establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond and before us’ (Butler 2005: 65). The social world asks mixedness to give an account of itself (‘where are you from from?‘) in binary language that mixedness makes meaningless. Precisely because there are no definitory answers to this question it keeps being asked.
In this sense, the Mixed/other box on the ethnicity questionnaire is an acknowledgement of a paradox. The presence of the tickbox acknowledges the desire to fix and categorise; but how it is labelled acknowledges the impossibility.
A sociocultural construction of race based on the way people look at and to one another is rooted in an essentially intercorporeal relating. Emotions ‘circulate between bodies, examining how they “stick” as well as move’ (Ahmed 2004: 4). In covering over my ethnicity, whiteness makes my body less easy for others to read. My other intersectionalities (class, education, speaking without noticeable accent) contribute to that. A sticking point is generally regarded as a point of tension, but my intersectionalities also allow me to find a resting place in more social milieux than would be possible if, for example, I looked like my father and spoke with an accent like my mother. The flip of that is that I don't feel I belong anywhere very much. In a stereotype of mixed-race identity, I take to my analysis my marginalisation, my sense of being an outsider, my uncertainty about belonging to any group that would have me as a member, my fears of abandonment. ‘What is relegated to the margin is often, as we know from deconstruction, right at the centre of thought’ says Ahmed (Ahmed 2004: 4). Perhaps this is so, and there is certainly some mileage in the construct that someone who experiences themselves constantly as being on the edge of things, problematised on the contact barriers (so to speak) between acceptance, rejection and difference, might end up working psychoanalytically. But any analytically minded person reading this paper will be able to follow threads other than the ones I have followed, tracing out different lines of significance, contradictions, omissions, aggressions, self-deceptions, displacements, negations and denials. Whatever mixed paradigms of race, class, sociocultural, psychoanalytical or other thinking are applied to it, I have written subjectively, selecting narratives idiosyncratically, accurate, if that is a term that can be used at all, only to a vaguely free association to fragments of my own reconstructed memories. In another timeframe, another space, in other circumstances, from another conceptual starting point than race, it could be written along a multiplicity of axes or assemblages of intersectionality (including
emotional, relational and intercorporeal ones). What is viewed from one drawing of a margin may be viewed just as richly but differently when the margin is redrawn. In this sense my ‘mixed race’, as an expression of betweenness and of fluidity is not so much a state to be analysed, but a process of being analysing (or analysing being) and continuing to try to do so.
In the ancestry of the argument of this paper, I said I began with a definition. But actually I began with a fairy story about a magic container (a sack, or an ethnicity tickbox) that is also a trap. The story is from Anthony Minghella's collection The Storyteller, itself a retelling of a Russian folktale and one collected by the Brothers Grimm, in a book that was a companion piece to a TV series of storytellings. In the many iterations of stories of magic bags, which continue to spill beyond them in many different versions, there is a 2007 telling in the short story, ‘The Faery Handbag’, in a collection by Kelly Link. This bag – the property of a village matriarch, brought by her to the US when she immigrates there, saved as an heirloom for her granddaughter, who tells the story – is not just a trap, it is a refuge and a portal. When the people of the village are at risk from genocide, they pack up their belongings and move into it.
The clasp was made out of bone. If you opened it one way, then it was just a purse big enough to hold a chicken and an egg and a clay cooking pot, or else a pair of reading glasses and a library book and a pillbox. If you opened the clasp another way, then you found yourself in a little boat floating at the mouth of a river. On either side of you was forest …
… If you opened the handbag the wrong way, though, you found yourself in a dark land that smelled like blood.
The fates of those who get in it are diverse.
when all the available ‘internal’ and ‘external’ racial models for perceiving oneself and being perceived are so at odds with one another.