Rebecca Fennell – Where are you (really) from? Please meet my expectations.

When I was about 5 years old my parents decided to move to this very small village in Northern Germany. Being 5 years old this was also the time I started gaining a kind of consciousness over the fact that my family was in certain ways “different” from the people around us. At least in that context and at that time. “Different” in the way that my mother is white and my father is Black. My brother my sister, my father and I were the only (Black) People of Color I knew and (at least back then) ever got to see.

I grew up and was socialized in a very white setting and surrounding. The clear difference between us and the others was the visible attribute of my skin being darker than that of the people around me. And this, in ways I would only later learn to understand/ deconstruct/ reflect, made people treat and look at me differently.

Individual experiences with each of my parents were profoundly different. Grocery shopping for example. When being with my mum people would smile. They would come up to us, tell her how cute and beautiful her children were, sometimes ask where she “got us from”.

When being with my dad people would openly stare at us. They would stop. Turn their heads. Whisper. Laugh. Speak their thoughts out loud. It hurt. I reacted with feelings of fear, shame, sometimes amusement, oftentimes anger, always accumulating in the overall feeling of resentment. Resentment against the color of my skin.

I started working on fitting in to my white surrounding. This inevitably came with adopting and inheriting the ways people around me thought and behaved. I reproduced racist remarks, thoughts, ideas and statements that were made, without ever really thinking about ME actually belonging to the group of people these words were meant for.

I was accepted because I managed to blend in. And in the course of that, denying and suppressing parts of my identity.

After reading Stuart Halls text on “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” I was once again thrown back into my own identity-finding process. For me identity used to be something set and static. One thing I had to be and feel, in order to belong. As I mentioned before, most of my youth I tried very hard to blend into my white surroundings. This was sometimes disrupted by questions such as “Where do you (originally) come from?” “Do you feel German?” “Well, you’re not REALLY black … so …?” which on the one hand reminded me of the fact that I was acting out something I wasn’t but on the other made me even more uncomfortable and insecure about standing up for and acting out what I actually felt I was.

As part of this seminar I did an interview with my younger sister. She is 16 and lives in the same house and village I grew up in.

“Where are you from” was the first question of my interview with her. As I am aware that she has been asked this question many times before by different people in different situations I expected her to act out of familiarity and maybe react annoyed, roll her eyes, or at least hesitate a few seconds before answering. But she didn’t. “From Germany.” was her swift response. And to my second question “but where are you really from” she answered: “Germany. Born and raised.” I accepted this as an answer, because this is her answer. And this would also be my answer. When asking her how this question made her feel she admits that it did make her think for a tiny second (which I didn’t notice). My siblings and I have two passports. German and American. Two nationalities. This is it what made her think. Although we were born and raised in Germany, people who know about our Dad’s American side sometimes expect us to feel both. Or choose. Oftentimes the “Where are you from” question brings this up. My sister handles this question in the moment. Sometimes by answering it, sometimes by not answering it. To make the person who asked this feel the way they made her feel, she said. Uncomfortable.

This is how she deals with it. Germany is her answer. And whatever feeling of belonging you have - its valid, she concludes. No matter what context, time or place. One should not question it.

Looking at my sister and her answers to my question I realized that this question is inherently a question about belonging. Belonging entails identity. And identity entails belonging. Our belonging and identity were doubted by being asked this question.

And this is what made me struggle for so long.

It was only when I started recognizing, accepting and embracing my identity as a Black woman, that I began reflecting on my destructive behavior from younger years.

And it was only when I started recognizing, accepting and embracing my identity as a Black woman, that I began handling this question in a way that felt fair and acceptable to ME.

I was the one being asked questions I was urged to answer in order to identify myself and place myself within the realms of the expectations of others. For a long time, I felt I must meet those expectations. This changed with the process of searching for, finding, collecting and piecing back together those parts of my identity I dissented from. As these pieces slowly come to a whole, I become aware that identity is nothing fixed. As Hall says: identity is fluid, it’s an ongoing transformation and process – and the way towards realizing this, for me, was also a process in itself.