Identity

Editors: Anmol Kejriwal, Srishti Kochar Deputy Editor: Madi Hopper identity@oxfordstudent.com Identity | 21

Identity

Differences, Delhi and Lady Danbury

Ayushi Agarwal on her experience of Adoja Andoh’s BAME-centric workshop

Iloved reading Enid Blyton as a child. The characters from Secret Seven and Famous Five lived rent-free in my head, and I often imagined myself solving mysteries, even where they didn’t exist. I wanted the kind of pleasant and long-awaited summers the books spoke of, where the characters took picnic baskets out into lush gardens and drank lemonade. Never mind that I always got a long summer - too much of it in fact - growing up in Delhi. The kind of summer that burnt my skin, gave me a headache walking back from school, and made picnics an impossibility. I longed for the world that my beloved characters belonged to; a world that was different from my own.

I first set foot in UK when I was twenty-two. Slowly, I began to see the context for Enid Blyton’s stories. I too took picnic baskets to the gardens, spoke of the welcome warmth of summer, bought lemonade, and made no efforts to hide from the sun. But I also thought of home. Home where summer meant gorging on watermelon slices after playing at dusk, early enough that it wasn’t dark, late enough that the sun wasn’t beating directly down; where summer meant feeling the chill air of the watercooler that smelled like fresh hay against my skin; where summer meant mangoes on the top of my grandfather’s terrace in Lucknow, far away from Delhi and homework (and parental supervision).

What does language bridge, and what does it leave out? Could the simple fact of being able to read English mean I was privileging stories and narratives from the English-speaking world at the cost of my own?

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to find some answers when I joined Adjoa Andoh’s workshop at St. Catz on 22nd May -the actress who gave one of the strongest performances of the Bridgerton series. I was thrilled to see her play Lady Danbury - a strong female character holding her own, guiding the other characters, prodding and participating in power play, often taking a difficult stance. In keeping with the characteristics of Lady Danbury, Adjoa spread the message that she would like to see strong BAME representation in the workshop group, and I was lucky to receive the sign-up form through the BAME chat of my college.

Even though I knew in advance that BAME representation was encouraged, I was still struck, as the 100 or so participants formed a tight circle in a garden at St. Catz, by the proportion of the representation. It was certainly the most BAME representation I had ever seen at an event at Oxford (of course, counting out events organised specifically for BAME students). I later reflected on why that struck me at all: what do I think is the appropriate level of representation? Have I been conditioned to believe that a certain minority threshold is enough?

The day was to provide many such moments for reflection. “I am interested in widening the embrace, swinging the lens, find-

“The commonality was human experience and emotion. ”

ing a new way of looking at stories, finding different stories,” Adjoa declared to the group. She introduced us to a game, where the person in the middle of the circle would have to shout “anyone who…” followed by an activity or fact, and individuals who found it applicable to them had to run out of their spot and find a new one. What started off with regular, everyday references like “anyone who took a shower this morning” and “anyone who had a late night yesterday” turned into deeper, more introspective ones like “anyone who has fallen out with their parents”. The switch to such vulnerability was quite quick and quite seamless. Adjoa, as she rounded off the activity, made us aware that there are many more stories that bind us – and make us similar – than different.

This emerged once again when several participants shared what they had written in response to a one-word prompt – “Home”. I wrote, obviously, about my dog (okay, among other things). But I was deeply touched by so many of the pieces I heard from people whose accent was different from mine, who looked very different from me, who were studying something very different from me. The commonality was human experience and emotion, ranging from upbeat and hopeful to nostalgic, yearning, regretful, confused, torn. As others spoke, I heard echoes of my own voice, too.

Adjoa had selected short scenes from four texts for us to read from: Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat, Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet, and Kobina Sekyi’s The Blinkards. As a person from an underrepresented group, I was absolutely delighted to see the diversity of the authors’ personal characteristics as well as the kind of stories the plays explored. When Adjoa told us that Sekyi’s play was one of the most popular ones in Ghana and her father’s favorite, yet virtually unheard of within the theatre circles in the UK, I couldn’t help but ponder about the similar fate of countless other authors. Just as I was thinking that, Adjoa mentioned “Which stories make it and which don’t? It is as if this work never existed….”

Why were the summer mangoes on my grandfather’s terrace any less of a story than the summer picnic baskets in the gardens described by Enid Blyton? I wondered, as I wandered back home after the workshop. Though I was enlivened by the similarity of human experience, resonant in the words that participants shared at the workshop, I was left with an even stronger sense that my own lived experiences had been diluted because the stories I read were not about me, or about people like me. Our hopes and aspirations are surely shaped by the characters that are represented in popular culture and stories - so events like Adoja’s, where a platform is given to the need to widen the lens, are invaluable. We must do all we can to bring lost works back to existence.