Nisha Obano

NO: It was at school, really, that we knew we were from a different background to a lot of our friends. And that's on several levels, that was not just on culture, on our ethnic background, but it was also class as well. But it was only really at school that we were shown a map of the world. And I remember we had some kind of day where we had to talk about backgrounds in different parts of the world. And there was a map, and we were all asked to say, oh, you know, where do your families originate from? And so I said, 'Oh, Tanzania'. But I’d never actually looked at the map and seen, oh, that's where it is, it never...and this was...this must have been...I don't know, I must have been 6 or 7 or something like that. And I'd never really...never looked at the map, or we'd never talked about it at home. And then I thought, oh, it's actually in Africa. Because I've always thought, well, Mum's Indian, because she came to school and she made samosas once with younger kids, you know, when we were in Year 1 or something like that. And so it has always been saris and samosas and some Indian food, and things like that. That's okay, so you must be Indian, because these are the things that I know about. But then I saw that Tanzania was in Africa, and I thought, oh, I don't quite under...that's odd, I don't really understand that. I didn't ask anything about it. I don't remember asking anything about it. But it was only at school that that realization happened. It didn't happen at home. And the other thing that happened at school was my...I remember my year, so she would have been Year 6 now, it wasn't Year 6 then, but now we would call it Year 6, and she was...we were doing a project all of talking about South Africa, we were talking about apartheid. And she said to me, 'You would be this group.' And I thought, oh, I didn't ever think of myself in that way, but because you've identified the colour of my skin, then you told me this. I'd never...we’d never...I’d never really thought about it. To say I'd never thought about it, consciously never thought about it, but I knew I never felt part of everybody else. So there was always an underlying feeling that I had that I wasn't the same. Not that everybody is the same, but there was always something kind of...I felt quite strongly. I don't live in the same area, I don't play on the streets with all my friends, I live further away. We don't play...we don't go to football matches, football’s not part of our lives, where it was part of a lot of my friends’ lives. The music they were all listening to was not the same music that I listened to. So, there were lots and lots of differences that I knew about around myself, but the colour of my skin was not something that came to the surface of my mind until really that point. In my memory anyway, that's how I look at it.

NO: One day I was feeling really, really awful and I had...I was really finding the first year of university really difficult. I was homesick. I was on the phone to my mum every single day, and it was before mobile phones, so I was downstairs in our halls of residence at the one phone every single evening on the phone to my mum crying, because I didn't want to be there. And I was considering going to Goldsmiths to do...where I could live at home, and I could do sociology and literature. And sociology was a subject that I'd found at A-level that I'd loved. So, I was really struggling. It was a very dark time. And then I was in the arts centre at Aberystwyth. And the arts centre’s attached to the university, and it has a bookshop. And so I'd often be in the bookshop. And then on one occasion, I was there, and one of the English professors was just walking around in the bookshop, and she said to me, 'Have you read The Gunny Sack by M. G. Vassanji?' And I hadn't read it before, I knew nothing about it. And she said, 'Oh, it's the...he's from Tanzania.' And so I got that book and I read it, and I was just completely...like my life changed at that point, because it was like, wow, I never ever thought that there was anything...well, my mum had read all of these books in Gujarati, but not...they weren't mine, I couldn't read them. And yeah, so, it was like there's a book that is...says...tells me something about where my family comes from. And then, yeah, I just was on a completely new level with my studies there, and just took all the courses that I could, all the modules that I could that allowed me to go deeper into that. So, though...they offered this course which was...I think it was called Postcolonial African Writing in English. I did that, that was just brilliant. And then chose to do my dissertation on, well, a selection of different African novelists from different parts of Africa, and different backgrounds. And theory, because theory allowed me to interrogate the texts, which is what I also really wanted to do. And yeah, just completely transformed everything, and I just shot forward and did well, and, yeah, came out with a really good degree. And then, yeah, felt like I...still didn't feel like I belonged to a particular place, but I could find something that, I don't know, had...could allow me to explore it further. But I think the thing that continued always, and it continued probably until I got married, maybe, was that I was trying to find ways of being properly Indian so that you could live as an...as somebody who...so, for example, after university, I signed up to do Bharatanatyam dance classes at the Bhavan Centre in London. And there I met lots of girls who...you know, all of them were Indian, some of them were Gujarati, but they were going home to...you know, they would go to temple, they would speak Gujarati at home, or they would speak Hindu...Hindi at home, they would be practising religiously, you know, not religiously practise, but they understood all the traditions within Hinduism. They might pray regularly every morning. They had...you know, they knew what clothes to wear for the different occasions. They knew what all the different important points of the year were. And I still didn't know that. So, I think that going to the Bhavan Centre and doing Bharatanatyam was really eye-opening, because it made me realize there is a limit, this is the limit to what...how far I can go into that heritage. Because I'll never ever be somebody who lives that life. I'll always be just on...I’ll just always have a very peripheral relationship to it. So, yeah, I think that was something I wanted to have, but I've come to terms with the fact that I can't have it.

RA: So, he...his background is Nigerian. Does that...how much does that shape you...shape his life and your family life?

NO: So, I think in terms of how it shapes our lives, I think because both of us have grown up during times when our...those cultures were marginalized, and we've both experienced feelings of, I suppose, anxiety and doubt and internal conflict, I guess, as a result of that. So, I think the most immediate influence that it has on our life now is that with our daughter, we are very open about acknowledging your cultural heritage, or, you know, the diversity of cultures that we live amongst, and for her to know where her roots are, or what her roots are, and for her to feel that she...you know, it doesn't matter if...I don't know, you know, to...I suppose just to value her background rather than to understand it, to value it, to draw from it, to feel comfortable within it, and that it has as much a place in her life as any other culture. So, I don't know, it's difficult to know where to start with it. I think...is...I suppose the difficulty is that for us, it is at the forefront of our minds, but for her, I don't think it is. And I think we spent quite a lot of time maybe trying to lay some groundwork when she was very young, expecting, possibly, that she would feel a sense of...feel nervous about being different or feel anxiety about difference. But I don't think she does, or she doesn't talk about feeling it. And in fact, she's very, or seems to be, very proud of what she looks like. And I remember a conversation I was having to...with her about her identity, about being a girl, and about being Black. And she said that she is...I can't remember the exact word she used, but that she is doubly privileged or doubly advantaged, because she's a female, and she feels very strongly a sense that...she goes to an all-girls secondary school who are very, very...you know, everything they do is about promoting the power of women. So, I think she feels that very strongly. So, she felt...she said, 'I'm advantaged because I'm a girl.' And she feels that sense of advantage because she's a female today in society, but also because of her skin tone, she found that to be an advantage. So, I... that was a sense of relief really, that she said she feels this way. I hope that that can continue.

RA: Have you travelled to India...

NO: Yeah.

RA: Or to Tanzania?

N: Yeah. So, I went to Tanzania after the first year of university. So, at the end of that very difficult year, I asked...I said to my mum, 'I really want to go.' And I said, 'We should go, can you come with me?' And she agreed, and we did go. And luckily we did, because a lot of my family left not that long after that. But the house was still...the house my mum lived in for some time was still there. Her brother, some of my cousins were still there. A lot of the old buildings were still there, because a lot of them have gone now, they're not there anymore. So yes, that was in ’97. And so we spent the whole of the summer there. And that was fantastic. And actually, I don't know how this sounds but I...when I landed...when we landed in Dar es Salaam, I felt like I'd come home. And that's a really weird thing. So, obviously it's not home, but I felt a sense of ease that I've not felt anywhere else. And I don't know, I've never been back though, so I've only been there for that one time. But it was amazing to be able to go round and go to the places my mum remembered. We visited her school. We travelled outside of Dar es Salaam as well, so we did a few tours around like the coastline, and further into land. And my mum's...well, the shop that [my] brother was running then was a shop that she remembered being part...I don't know who must have run it then, but when she was growing up, there was the shop there as well. And she took us, some of the neighbours were still there. But what was lovely was my mum there as well, because she was a bit different there. So, I used to love hearing her speak Gujarati all the time. And she could there, because she was speaking to [my] sister-in-law and her brother, and all the neighbours who still lived in this compound that they all lived in. And every evening after dinner, all the women would just come and sit on the steps and talk. And it was...yeah, it was just really nice hearing them all speaking together. We all went on like...we...some...a couple of outings where all of the neighbours went together. And we went...when we were going to the beach with all of these women, and they all just got into the sea fully clothed. And I just remember that feeling of going into the water, and it was warm, and just being so...just being so fun. Because all these women, you know, they're all mums, they all...you know, and they just loved just being in the sea fully clothed in like salwar kameez wearing, some of them. Like, not all of the women went in, but most...a lot of them did. And just...you know, it was just an unusual experience. But that's...you have an impression of women being kind of a bit subjugated, but I didn't get that sense here. They were just doing...going into the water freely, and laughing together, and just...it was just nice.

Image credit

Rex Obano

Entry credit

Zareena Pundole