FLY, vol. I (2016-2017)

editors’ note

The idea for creating a FLY zine came from an open mic night in early 2016, which celebrated the creative talent of women and non-binary people of colour from all across Cambridge.

This year the zine is themed around Bodies and Voices. Often, our stories are told for us; too often, our stories are not told at all. Because of this, our bodies and voices become sites of resistance, starting points in the process of taking ownership of our own narratives. In putting this zine together, we wanted to create a space to celebrate the work of people like us, people whose experiences of life and of Cambridge in particular are complex, painful and joyful.

To the amazing contributors and editorial team who helped this happen - thank you.

fiction: jun pang & mariam ansar non-fiction: siyang wei & arenike adebajo art: mariam ansar & chloe tayali editors: arenike adebajo & jun pang

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bodies 4 5 6 6 7 8 10 12 13 14

voices 18 20 20 21 22 24 28

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eireann attridge claire takami siljedahl joy okwuonu (body image) arenike adebajo joanna lee (body image) karis onyemenam olivia lam (hair removal) jade cuttle fenja akinde hummel hanna stephens

sienna hewavidana (shaming) amiya nagpal mariam ansar rebecca tan (mention of blood) jun pang interview with lola olufemi & martha krish jay kaur (mention of abusive family)

cover image by melanie issaka illustrations by yukiko kobayashi lui

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eireann attridge I remember you promised to kiss every inch of my body until your lips had covered me like paper mâché.

You said you never knew how good art could taste And when I felt the tip of your tongue colour in my tattoo you made me moan at least a thousand times which put a smile on your face, the subtle kind of artist when things fall into place.

You did a dot to dot of every beauty spot until you knew my body so well you could portray me better than any photograph And when my self portrait Reflected self hate You reminded me that I have an endless supply of paint And art is a movement A picture is a poem without words And yet it paints a thousand You told me my mere presence is a protest And you don’t make art out of good intentions So stop hanging around like an exhibition Stand tall Like a placard And state your right to be Unfinished

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claire takami siljedahl [disconnect] From your window I see it.

Rooftops and chimneys and an endless plume of smoke winding its way into the sky, made watercolour tangerine in the setting sun.

The sound of marbles rolling on wood, on stone, their cool clicking.

Cool, warm, soft, firm.

I never find an extreme, just shades of in-between.

And then you put your arm around me And I stiffen and so do you But not for the same reasons

[daydream and maybes] I dream now of that girl: Facing her, winding my arms around her neck Letting the flat of my palms and the tip of each finger graze her skin like you would touch velvet, precious and deliberate.

I have touched friends like that by accident Let my hand touch a collarbone, lower back, wrist, linger there for two seconds too long before we quickly draw away and pretend it didn’t happen.

But it’s too late Because you feel the electricityd, the warmth.

The smoothness.

The curious interplay between pillowy softness and taut muscles of give and take.

The potential of being Of wanting.

And it is all so blissfully easy now, here, with her.

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joy okwuonu Daughter of Africa Is it my black skin that makes me so detestable?

A face unsightly and incomprehensible with a rotund nose, almost roman-looking from another angle, it is the width of my mouth.

Undefined lips and almond eyes only expose how much this inflamed nose is unrefined, more than hers or even some of my own kind.

Black skin estranged from the homeland, born in this land where other beauties thrive.

I vow to never enact a part in this play in which I am no more a part than that tree or that door, or prop that holds the other up. As if the other’s glass were filled with a sweeter wine than ours - me, myself and my squash filled cup.

arenike adebajo ‘Beautiful’ glimpse of the mirror-girl stranger to myself i roll it over my tongue chew thoughtfully and spit it into my palm glistening with saliva and bile. is it cocooned with me pining in animal stink goose-feathers and sweat? (i come sometimes) on your lips it was a gossamer kiss premonition of undulating skin tangled in cotton a whisper of worship for the shivering thing

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joanna lee “ I thought Asian girls were supposed to be skinny�

I stop eating white rice wary that each grain will become a part of me fortify the stereotypes tattooed across the insides of my eyelids: perpetual.

I have grown fearful of white; empty carbs and bloated voices.

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karis onyemenam A bodycon gown is always a good idea at a Nigerian wedding reception, if you’re willing to forgo nutrition in lieu of stealing all attention from the bride. Clara picked at the jollof rice and chicken on her plate, shifting the food around to make it appear as if she’d eaten. To her left, the gentleman who had been raptured by her beauty and British accent was noisily chewing his food. He had opted for the pounded yam and efo, and as he ate greedily, Clara silently counted the hours until she could rip her red Maison Valentino gown off her body and enjoy her first meal in twenty-four hours. She was thinking about what she would eat when the gentleman on her right tapped her shoulder and said, “So how is Lagos to you after all these years?” She stared at him briefly, and tried to hide her annoyance before giving him a generic answer. She didn’t understand why Jennifer had placed her on a table where the only other lady was a 22 year old graduate from Coventry University who had spent the entire afternoon taking selfies on her iPhone. Well into her thirties, Clara imagined they would have nothing in common and so had avoided eye contact the whole afternoon. Glancing at Jennifer, who was seated at the “high table” in her thrifty wedding dress, Clara wondered if she had done so out of guilt, or because this was what you did when you invited unmarried friends to your wedding. Rising up from her seat, Clara resolved to mingle with people for a maximum of thirty minutes, before saying goodbye to the bride and groom.

“You’ve finished eating? Me too. Let’s dance,” the gentleman seated on her left said, before standing up and leading her to the dance floor. As they danced, she tried to ignore the rancid smell of efo on his breath as he whispered nonsense into her ears. She wondered why men always believed that flattery was the key to capturing one’s affection.

That was perhaps the only good thing she could say about her last experience. She had been given the candid truth. She was beautiful, smart and accomplished, but that was why she would never marry. No man wanted a woman who made him feel inadequate when he would not be able to buy her fancy things from Harrods, or take her on the exotic trips she had grown accustomed to. Women like Jennifer would never need to look far for a husband because they were beautiful, smart and accomplished enough, but would never threaten their husbands.

It didn’t matter that although she like nice things, she was not looking to marry a man who could provide her things she already could for herself.

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Maison Valentino The music had started slowing down; the DJ no longer played afrobeats music, and the soothing voice of John Legend now filled the wedding hall. It would soon be time for Jennifer to throw her bouquet, and Clara knew she had a small window of opportunity before she would be forced to stay till the end of the wedding reception. Extracting herself from her reluctant dance partner, she arrived at the high table and politely waited for Jennifer to finish the conversation she was engaged in. She didn’t recognize the woman she was speaking to, but overhead snippets of their conversation as the woman complimented Jennifer on her lovely wedding. Clara had to admit, the wedding had been lovely.

It was the type of affair she had always imagined her and Frank, her last boyfriend, would have. Finally, Jennifer finished speaking to the woman and turned to Clara.

“Clara. I hope you’ve had a wonderful time?”

Her voice sounded forced, she had laid too much emphasis on wonderful.

“Yes, I really did, but I’ll be leaving soon, I leave for a business trip first thing tomorrow”.

She didn’t have a business trip planned, but enjoyed the look of intimidation and jealousy she could easily summon from Jennifer.

“Of course! But first you must say bye bye to my husband o,” Jennifer said jokingly. At that moment, Clara heard a familiar husky voice.

She turned around and gave Frank a hug, which perhaps lingered a second too long. He seemed taken aback, albeit momentarily. They chatted briefly about mundane things such as the economy, how it was affecting her line of work, and about his honeymoon plans. As he spoke about how excited Jennifer was about visiting Doha for the first time, Clara tried to feign interest and pretend like she was receiving a new piece of information. Two months to the day, after waking up to a sunny morning at the Grand Hyatt Doha, Frank had turned to her and said he knew where he wanted to go for his honeymoon.

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olivia lam Hair

Isn’t it funny how I finally understood Simone de Beauvoir, While squatting over my bathtub, in a late evening On an insignificant day, Attempting To pluck out every last bit of my pubic hair.

“Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself.”

My pubic hair screamed.

We humans have hairs on our bodies, As if they are remnants of incomplete evolution.

We like keeping some of them long, And destroying some of them.

As if some of them bring glory, And some of them bring shame.

For instance, my pubic hair.

I shave my pubic hair.

To be accurate, I pluck them out.

To pluck them out, you have to first trim them down, To about three millimetres, Then pluck them out, one by one, with a tweezer, But make sure you pull upwards towards yourself.

If there is an ingrown hair, make sure to break The thin layer of skin before you pluck the hair out.

Not too hard so that you do not bleed, but Not too softly, because an ingrown hair is quite resilient.

You have to do it with so much precision and meticulousness, As if you are nursing a strange life inside your uterus.

Just like me picking out my pubic hair, alien.

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With each unrooted hair came a sense of liberation, Definitely not pleasure, But pain, And redness, Redness of every hair follicle, Swollen, For a second – I thought they are rashes, Or tiny humanoids, red with anger.

They asked, “Why do you do this?”

In a language foreign to me.

I don’t know.

Ask me how I feel when my pubic are grows red again, Red from the friction in bed, Like a naked child with red cheeks In the cutting wind of December, When the rest of the street is blushing in warmth.

But I applied cream to numb the red, And picked my best underwear for the date.

I think I am fine now.

I don’t think De Beauvoir will mind, Because my Brazilian strip of hair looks great.

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jade cuttle The Art of Anarchy I have begun to paint my lips black in anarchy against the aesthetic ideal of beauty and the pursuit of love. I am divided, protesting both for my soul and against it. A chaos burns inside, the flames of which I both ignite and dampen.

I want to see how far the flames can reach before I tumble in on myself in a crackle of bones, swallowing the flames that choke me because my lips cannot resist their warmth. I paint my lips black so that the stains of my kiss will never fade, so that they will seep into skin and swallow from the outside in. There is a dark abyss in place my mouth, dangerous and deathly. I wear these dead lips, the corpse of a kiss, how they will be worn in a hundred years’ time when I am gone, when my flesh begins to consume itself just like my cannibalistic heart. If these lips in their blackened state rot off and fall onto the floor, they would neither be stood upon nor lie there pitiful, waiting until someone picks them up, but slither away down the cracks of the pavement, leafing through cigarette butt ends and delighting in the dust they discover. It weighs more than a man, this heart that hauls me from passion to prison and back again.

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I am my own uncanny, Infernal, internal struggle.

Black, White, Both?

None?

Best of both?

Or the worst?

Half of both, Fully none.

I feel the guilt of the half that enslaved the other, The anger of the half that suffered rises against the half that reigned supreme.

Last year was dislocationdisassociation.

fenja akinde-hummel My Uncanny

Malcolm made me hate the blue eyed devil.

I spat, scratched, screamed him into exile.

I wanted him goneFor clarity of emotion, To ease the discomfort.

How can I overcome the colonial past in me?

But how can I reject it?

Him? Who I love.

Tainted from dual perspectives, They clash and quarrel until‌ Stasis.

Or symbiosis.

Mother, Father.

I cannot choose, Nor do I have to, Nor do I want to.

I cannot separate my blood, Assign colours to my cells, I will not dismember myself, Cut myself into palatable portions for your convenience, Or mine.

I fuck up those unspoken laws, I’m my uncanny, but mostly yours.

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I like capturing bodies in their own worlds.

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hanna stevens

I try and make sure that the people I photograph aren’t aware that I’ve taken a photo.

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I think you can infer things about people by the photographs they take so phtography does speak volumes.

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I think also that it’s a good and accessible tool to express yourself when there might not be the language to do so, and so I think it’s an interesting alternative to words to communicate things..

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sienna hewavidana Accents are invisible.

Or at least - I believed they were. Growing up in my household, I had become deaf to my parent’s strong Srilankan accents. I believed they sounded like me; eloquent, well spoken, articulate - and most importantly - English. Normal.

When I was 11, my mother trialled as a teaching assistant in my class.

As she introduced herself, suddenly, amplified for all to hear, was a strong Srilankan accent. In a room full of well-spoken white children (and I, the sole minority), my mother was an alien. Her foreign accent was a foghorn screeching in my ears- I couldn’t understand where it had come from. Had she really always spoken so abnormally? Why couldn’t she pronounce these words? She stuttered over a word and the class nudged eachother. Shrinking into myself, I prayed for her to stop talking. In that moment, I realised the gaping difference between her and everyone else.

She was Srilankan. Foreign. Subhuman.

Nothing is ever truly invisible.

After that defining episode, I took it upon myself to ‘save’ my mother from humiliation. I was the brave (white) knight saving the poor (brown) princess. Whenever she spoke loudly in public, I would shush her. Take over whenever she struggled. Rolled my eyes at her out-ofplace, in-your-face accent and gently but condescendingly corrected her. When we were with other people, I jumped over hoops to illustrate that I was not “one of them”: I was intelligent, sophisticated, advanced, civilised. I was white.

To me, intelligence and English were intrinsically woven. The image carved of brown accents is of the slums, urinating in the street and arranged marriages. Oppression and unintelligence. For a long time, I truly believed this. I feared people would hear my mother’s accent and shun her for her foreignness. It took me a while to realise that what I was shushing was more than an accent. I was shushing my culture, rolling my eyes at my history, cringing at my origins. I shushed brownness in the fear that I would be tainted by it.

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As the daughter of immigrants, I have walked the tightrope of being both English and Srilankan. My accent is without a doubt the former.

Although my parents are Srilankan, I was born and raised in Kent which borders Essex. The Essex and Kent accent are almost identical which means that (and I really am sorry to break it to you so late) I possess an accent that could rival Joey Essex.

When I arrived in Cambridge, bright-eyed and desperate to fit in, it all switched. Now mine was the accent being amplified for everyone to snigger at. The foghorn that people would raise an eyebrow at. Years of media revulsion about The Only Way is Essex (who could forget Martin Freeman’s condescending headshake when Towie won a BAFTA) meant that everyone held a preconceived notion of my intelligence. For my first term, I recoiled and deliberately silenced my ‘bimbo’ accent. I spoke eloquently. I used no slang. And I never let the word “init”- that famous signifier of poverty, lower class and ugliness - escape from my lips.

It took me far longer than I am proud of to realise that history was repeating itself.

Now that I was the one cowering from my accent, I realised what I had done to my mother. Had I really sneered at her like that? Had I made her too ashamed to speak in public? I realise now what I had done. I had gagged her, silenced her. I had removed who she fundamentally was. Because - and this is very important: an accent is more than an accent.

It is a story.

To my mother: I am sorry. Your accent is a work of art, crafted over centuries. It is a story of your country, culture, history and what is everything special about Srilanka. When I hear it (and I hear with intent, I no longer cower), I remember the palm trees, the blazing heat and the people whose accents signify that they are my people and not my enemies. I wish I had known that to proudly speak with an accent - whether it be an Essex or Srilankan - where you are told not to is an act of bravery and defiance. Wear your brown, uncivilised, coarse accent with pride and I will wear my bright pink, tacky “Essex girl” badge..

I truly believed that I had been saving my mother from other people’s mockery. But in saving her, I was destroying who she was.

First published in Blueprint Zine 19

i make my name up turn it into three syllables so that it is palatable, sweet in imitation of the ripe yellow fruit under which i was born. i mispronounce my east until it tastes like west because the brown wrapper of my skin is a let down did you know that in the musk of my country the setting sky isn’t yellow at all but that the universe goes orange and purple like it is on fire i learn this as i unlearn my name my mumbles boil over into chants, into flesh i hoist a flag in my stomach. i claim both, an unmarriage of two halves, two wholes i deploy one for you and one for me. the sun-cased lilt of my home is too much for them to touch again

amiya nagpal mariam ansar The Notion of Responsibility Your mother did not raise a coward.

Fight the inclination to run when the race hasn’t started.

You have to hold the pistol in your mouth. There are no false starts. Wind through teeth, and a body like a reed - this is the opposite of silence.

Newspaper noise turns legs to whispers, wakes the face like water, and worries us Who set you to dance like this? Do not wake to speculate.

Tie your shoes twice.

Smell the smoke, hear the click, the birth, the bright white light of becoming - how it begins.

How it does not end, nor jar. How it leaves nothing unsaid. Like a bullet.

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rebecca tan # what is the colour of silence? nothing to do with loudness softness cadence when felt its most exact colour is vacuum occupying my head the sucking away of oxygen colourless blood escaping my fingertips when seen it is the fray on the Dr.’s carpet as she tells me to breathe in and out it is the winding road with the forest noises it is the colour of the morning sun as it filters through the curtains reflecting off my muted fingertips my hand half-curled like a baby’s atop these crisp sheets 21

jun pang You are waiting and the feeling of waiting is stuck in your throat like a cheap lozenge lodged just where you need the traffic to ease. There are no words – but of course, there are words – just none that you are willing to say aloud in case they actually come true. You are waiting for a train that you know is coming but another could arrive early and so you stand below the screens and gape upwards, willing the platform to reveal itself, willing whatever it takes to speed up a train into being, if only to get it over with. You wait and you wait and you think, perhaps, the river is a better way to go.

There would be no pain, no mess; only the slow grind of gravity winding its way downstream – only the predictable reaction of water against skin.

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You are waiting and the book you picked up at the library tells you that fear is something that passes you by rather than something that eats you up whole; fear is something birthed by proximity, not something that blooms under your wrists, in your blood, spreading in your body like sickness between small children.

The same book tells you that fear is not the hardest part.

It is the nausea that comes from lying in a hospital bed and wondering how the world got so white and so red so quickly. The banks are already bursting with flowers; gravity is doing its quiet work – has always done, will always do. You think to yourself: the boats could stand to wait a little longer.

You are waiting and while you are waiting you think about your day at the Tate: “I am not being truthful enough yet.” You think about bodies clambering over bamboo rebar, about how those reinforcements could’ve passed as train tracks, or nests, or both. You think about the reclaimed harbour – reclaimed from whom? – and wonder if the ferries still run exactly one minute behind schedule.

You wonder if anyone else has noticed.

Your shoulders are aching now but there’s nothing to do but to wait; you think to yourself, if you still lived there, you’d be home by now. You think, again, of rivers, of being washed away by passages of pale current.

“Being here, I wish I was somewhere else.”

You are waiting for a train that you know is coming and you wonder if there’s someone like you, waiting, too; if they have an answer for where, or who, they think they’ll be in ten years’ time. If they have ever thought about running. You are waiting and you are thinking about bodies and water and how it would be so much easier to let those bodies have their way with you than to keep waiting on something to change.

You wonder if fear is just the way of things.

You look outside: canopies strain tight against bone, ribbed sails pull so close to one another that not even the heaviest of rainfall can puncture their skin.

At the end of the day, you think, at least you’re going somewhere.

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How did you come up with the idea for Scene? Did it come from a conversation between you and Martha about your own experiences, like in the play, or were you inspired by something else?

Scene Lola Olufemi and Martha Krish are the co-creators of SCENE, a play about an interracial queer couple who write and stage a play that tackles key moments in their relationship. SCENE was performed at the Corpus Playroom from 14th-18th March 2017.

We went to see a play called Made Visible at the Yard Theatre in London. It used metatheatre to talk (very simply) about race and the dynamics between three women, one white and two south Asian. In the bar afterwards we got chatting about what it would be like to honestly explore race on a more a personal level - especially in a queer relationship. We’d never seen something like that before and race has always played a big part in our relationship and how we understand each other, so we kind of jokingly made a pact to at least try something. I really wanted to try and make it as challenging as possible, one of the things that I disliked about Made Visible was how it skirted around the anger involved in racism, how it catered to the audience and tried to make them feel comfortable - I wanted to just say it and have white audiences be obliged to listen, for once.

Was it a conscious decision to focus on the relationship and its history rather than a coming out arc or coming of age narrative?

Yes it was, but coming out and existing as a queer person was always going to be bound up with that. Coming out never stops, it’s something queer people do almost everyday and I think we wanted to get across what it’s like to be a functioning adult (or at least trying to be) but still dealing with the repercussions of ‘coming out’. Having to mend or endure relationships with parents, changing your body around strangers, being aware of the danger you put yourself in when others read you as queer - we wanted to include all those things and how they might shape a relationship.

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One of my favourite things about the play were the various moments of physical intimacy we got to see between Ayo and Flo. Did you have any reservations about including those scenes or about how an audience might react?

Not at all! It was something I was so excited about. There’s a way that people in relationships move, how they touch each other, look at each other and we really wanted to get that right. We wanted Flo and Ayo’s relationship to feel believable and one of the main ways to do that is to make it look like they are completely comfortable and at ease with each other - that informs movement, it informs everything. Queer women always feel the weight of mens eyes on them and lesbians especially are constantly sexualised. We wanted to portray women who could be tender and romantic but not desexualised - we wanted them to control of the gaze.

Difficulty is an interesting through line in the play: difficulties in communication (particularly in the context of an interracial relationship), in navigating the intersections of identity, in being a creative. Was it daunting having to think about how exactly to stage these difficulties?

Absolutely. We had recurring argument about the best ways to express those difficulties. Do we just say it - in the academic language we’ve been taught to say it in? Do we make it ‘human’ by hiding the difficulties in in jokes, or in looks or in silence? I’m skeptical about the laughter but I think it’s one of the strengths of the production. We managed to do both, to say it unapologetically and not compromise but also make sure the audience had a good time - laughed, sighed, awwed. I think communication in relationships is key, having two characters and virtually no set/props made us really think about the words. At the end of the day, the strength of this relationship carries the play and the expression of the difficulties these characters go through is explored constantly through what they say and how they say it. So we spent a lot of time pouring through words - does this sound natural?

Would you actually say this? Does it sound like this character is listening?

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Do you think it is possible to distance art from its creator, just as some people insist that it is possible to insist politics from personhood? How would you respond to people who interpret the play as autobiographical?

I think it’s possible to distance art from its creator but art always says something about the person who has made it. Always. You make an argument just by choosing to write in a certain way, paint in a certain style, by choosing the artists who influence your work etc. This play is deeply personal but also it belongs to the people who see it and I’m totally open to their interpretations of it. I think it’s harder for people who know us, who can say “ah you’ve said that before’ or “that was a very martha thing to do,” it’s harder to hide from those people because they can see when you’ve unconsciously betrayed yourself or slipped. We took experiences that were autobiographical and mapped them onto the characters who I hope are very different from us.

It’s an interesting mix.

A line that sticks out to me from the play is about the ‘narcissism that comes with putting on a play about your own lives’. Creators who are people of colour often encounter difficulties in deciding whether or not they want to center their own experience as the basis of their art, given that it may contribute to cultural essentialism and orientalism, or simply be perceived simply as narcissistic and self-serving. Why do you think these accusations of ‘narcissism’ exist when straight, white men have been telling the same tired stories for hundreds of years?

It’s never narcissistic to centre yourself when your life, body and experiences have historically been relegated to the margins. Centering yourself is an act of rewriting.

I think the accusations are just another way to silence you, and I refuse to be silenced. White men, especially through literature, have been allowed to explore every single facet of their being and thoughts, from the most noble to the most base ideas - and they’ve been praised for it. Why shouldn’t we? Just by producing material you start a discussion. When we were writing there was an initial fear and then we just gave ourselves the permission to tell this particular story, to take it seriously and not spend time doubting its validity because our lives and our love deserved this kind of creative attention. It deserved engagement - whether you loved it, hated it, found it boring, whatever - it should be allowed to exist.

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Did you find yourself actively trying to write your characters in a way that defied stereotypes? Did you feel the burden of representation in your work, and if so, how did you deal with it?

Definitely, especially with Ayo’s relationship with her family - I wanted to move away from the idea that black families were somehow inherently more homophobic than white families because that is simply not true but it’s an idea that is so pervasive.

I wanted her parents to love and embrace and affirm her. I wanted to show that she wasn’t necessarily burdened by the need to ‘do her parents proud’ or ‘respect them’ by hiding her queerness. But the burden of representation is not a task I resent, I think stereotypes say more about the audience than they do the characters and say something about how black bodies are not allowed to exist in all their forms.

They must be boxed, whiteness makes one instance, every instance. But being able to portray people with full lives, as they are, as I know them to be is not a hard thing for me. It’s easy.

What advice would you give to women and non-binary people of colour thinking about embarking on a creative project?

That idea you have in your head is a good one. Do it. Write the outline or some notes or hum the tune, or draw a sketch. You don’t have to show anyone, it doesn’t have to be good - just trust yourself. Do it.

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jay kaur Hurting and Healing

When my mother was 19, she was forced into an arranged marriage.

Her new husband, my father, became abusive shortly after the wedding.

3 years later, she had the courage to divorce him, an unprecedented step to take in Punjabi communities in Britain at the time. After the divorce, older members of the community, particularly older women, repeatedly asked her: “What have you done? How will you cope by yourself?”, “You know that if you had had a boy things would be different?”, “How will you get your daughter an education alone?”. I now study Modern Languages at Cambridge University. I grew up in a home full of love thanks to my mother and her sisters, and we never heard from my father again. The strength that my mum had to escape a life of misery that so many South Asian women continue to face inspires me everyday. Unfortunately, being a Punjabi woman brings challenges such as these, dictating the type of life you will live as soon as you are born a girl. However, this is just considered as a ‘duty’, with the conversation surrounding these issues almost non-existent.

Before I began studying here at Cambridge, I felt a strange sense of pride in my background. I was so proud of myself, coming from a single-parent, working class home (at one point my mum was raising me on £6,000 a year), going to a shit school and somehow ending up at one of the best universities in the world. However, I had no idea how difficult it would be fitting into an environment where everyone else’s privileges were shoved in my face. From friends, to boyfriends, to people I didn’t even care about on my timeline, it seemed like everyone went on three holidays a year, had a ton of friends from home who threw lavish 21st birthday parties, and had parents who had been married for their whole lives and now come and see them once a term for a family formal. All things I didn’t have. For me, on the other hand, the pain of my family history had never felt heavier. The pride I felt before coming here vanished overnight, I became bitter and resentful, and my mental health took a bit of a turn.

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Then, I found FLY. Being around such a strong group of women of colour, all with their own hardships and similar feelings to mine about the life we have here, helped me to heal. Instead of feeling like I’d been dealt some kind of horrible card in life, I began to see that I wasn’t alone. I realised that there are other women like me, who carry within them stories of hardship and heartache of some sort. But, I learnt that that doesn’t need to define us. I am now starting to rebuild from that vague sense of loss (I don’t know if you can feel a loss for something you never had but anyway) I had during first year, and I now use the stories of my mum and her three sisters, who raised me together, as a source of strength. Yes, Cambridge is difficult. Yes, it can be lonely and isolating. Yes, it’s sometimes hard to get up in the morning and go to your supervisions. But, being here is an act of resilience itself.

I have began working with a project called Pink Ladoo. In South Asian cultures, traditional sweets, called ladoos, are handing out at the birth of a new boy in a family. The moment ladoos are given out for the birth of a son, and not a daughter, is the moment the problem is created again. Working to eradicate these harmful gender-biased traditions, and opening up a debate about these practices, instead of just accepting them as ‘tradition’, is the first step in creating a better life for South Asian women across the world. Pink Ladoo is a project so close to my heart, and I encourage each person who reads this to read more into the work that we do, and to talk about it with their families, friends, and anyone else that will listen. I now have a life full of opportunities that my mother never got a chance to have, and I want to same for all girls my age, and the girls of the generations to come. Find out more about the project here: pinkladoo.org

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