And - A Memoir of My Mother

And – A Memoir of My Mother is a story of dislocation and liminality, of incomplete identities, of never being one or the other; this is the childhood that Isabel Adonis describes, inspired by her black Guyanese father and white Welsh mother and their own struggles with their cultural and racial identities. In this memoir, the author contemplates the multitudinous nature of her ‘ands’, along with her interracial roots and multicultural upbringing, in which Adonis’s mother seems to be the only constant. Adonis paints a very vivid picture of her mother, her only accessible parent and source of cultural heritage throughout her childhood. Catherine Alice Hughes (her mother’s full name is repeated several times in the book) is often attached to descriptions of fascination, as possessing ‘layers and layers of history, just like a slate mountain’, but she was simultaneously a mother who hated her daughter’s ‘frizzy hair’ and facial features inherited from her father. Although her mother was white, it was her father, the famous artist and writer Denis Williams, who Adonis depicts as being full of ‘whiteness’ – as a black man from British Guiana, he often seems troubled by his inability to capture and embrace his racial background, a potential reason for him being a distant father to his five daughters. Thus, Adonis feels somewhat removed from both her parents at times, and from her own sense of self too, as a ‘mixed’ young girl traversing different communities (from Kilburn to Sudan to Wales) in which she is often marginalised. Now an adult and mother herself, the author examines her parents’ introspective racial lives and considers her mother’s Welshness in the face of prejudice and displacement. Catherine’s connection to her heritage starkly contrasts with the ‘whiteness’ that arrests her husband Denis, a consequence of the British colony of Guiana being the place he once called home. Recollecting this and the memories she has of her father, Adonis confesses that ‘everything my father did was for the white man’ and ‘according to white culture’, and hence she learnt to ‘not complain about oppression’, to ‘not complain about history, even when it is alive in your heart.’ And so, the author’s father’s black identity was obscured, as was his children’s. This, along with being raised by a mother who did not look like her, for Adonis meant that isolation was inevitable. Although racism is still very prevalent in global society, the culture of today contrastingly encourages non-white people to ‘complain’ about the oppression they experience, and not repress what is ‘alive’ in their hearts but to express it openly, as brutal and uncomfortable as it might be. The distinction between Adonis’s experience with race growing up, paralleled with how many young people are being taught to celebrate their multifaceted racial identities today, is more than eye-opening. You cannot help but feel such gratitude for the contemporary organisations and rich cultural communities that encourage people to consider and cherish their differences, compared with Adonis’s upbringing, in which she was not offered this. And is an illuminating yet heart-breaking narrative of a child who has never felt a sense of belonging, and thus admires a mother who does. Her mother’s tenacious relationship with Wales was a part of her heritable culture that Adonis could connect with, and she seems thankful to her mother for this. But what she craves is her ‘and’, the other parts of her identity that were occluded from her during her formative years, because by knowing each of our parts we can become whole – we should all hold on to our ‘and’. ~Holly Porter @ www.gwales.com