Episode Seven - In the Half-Light

In the seventh episode of 'In the Half Light', curator Phil Mullen returns to a conversation with three writers about their experiences of growing up mixed-race in Ireland: Marguerite Penrose (author of 'Yeah But Where Are You Really From?'), Jackie McCarthy O'Brien (author of 'We Made It, Kid') and Leon Diop (author of 'Mixed Up: An Irish Boys Journey to Belonging') 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:06

So, welcome to this episode of In the Half-Life Voices from Black Ireland. Today we'll be talking to three people who've written about their own lives and experiences of growing up mixed race in Ireland. They come from different generations and different parts of Ireland, and each has chosen to tell their story in their own way. What we're interested in today is not just the events themselves, but how memory works and what feels possible to say at different points in one life. But also how personal storytelling becomes a way of making sense of a society that leaves these experiences out of the record. So I'd like to introduce you to Marguerite, Jackie, and Leon.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

She asked. Yeah, I'm okay. But deep down I wasn't okay. Something was off. I couldn't really explain why. I had just started school, but I already knew some of the kids in the class and the school was only around the corner, so things should have been fine, but they weren't. I plodded along beside Mam for a couple of minutes on our short walk home, not saying much. She continued with her questions. I obviously wasn't very good at lying. I mean, I was only four. Leon, if something is making you sad, you can tell me. My mum was concerned something bad had happened or someone was picking on me. I'm okay, ma'am. It's just I was struggling to figure out how to say it. It's just what? She stopped walking and stooped down to my level. Though she didn't have to stoop far because at the age of four I was nearly as tall as she was. I finally blurted out, it's just that there's loads of white kids, a couple of black kids, but I'm the only brown kid. Man took a couple of seconds to think. You see, she didn't look like me either. She was a white woman in a mostly white neighborhood, raising a mixed-race kid. She was probably struggling to figure out it as much as I was. It's okay, you're no different to other kids. You're just Leon, she said cheerfully, probably relieved that nothing serious had happened. Mam had a great way of making me feel better. But deep down, something inside me was still uneasy about being the only brown kid. Although I didn't know it yet, this would be the first of many times that I would separate myself from others.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

I am just one woman who has never been in the public eye before, but the circumstances of my birth and adoption, the wonderful family life with which I have been blessed, and my experience as a child born into Irish institutional care as a black Irish woman, as an active, happy person with a significant disability, all shed light in all sorts of unexpected ways on our shared history as a nation, as Irish people, and I sincerely believe on how we can work together to make our society a better and more nurturing place for us all. So here I am, this is me.

SPEAKER_03 3:13

Were there certain things that you found easy to write about? Were there things that you avoided? And how did you make those decisions?

SPEAKER_04 3:22

I would say, you know, funnily enough, the traumatic things were easier to write about. Because when I spoke about the industrial school and how I ended up there simply because I was an illegitimate child of colour, they were things that I had put away in a box, and it took me a long time to be able to hold little Jackie's hand and see. And I suppose it was only later in life I adopted my youngest daughter, and when I went to therapy, not for to deal with the industrial school, but to deal with a breakup. And within dealing with the breakup, it took me back to why it broke down, why I was looking for love, why why did the breakup bring me to my knees? I'm so resilient. I could go out and play against England on my own rather than go through a heartache. Yeah. You know, uh um, so they were the questions I started to ask, and I started to find that because of my start in life, the little Jackie inside me was please love me, please see me, please love me. I want you to love me. And within that, learning that my self-esteem was so low that I would make the jokes at my own expense, that I wanted to fit in with a society that didn't really accept me. So within my resilience to become people, oh look at you, you played soccer and rugby for Ireland. I went and I played that sport. So I could stand in front of an Irish flag, sing all Ron Navan, and say, Look at me, can you see me? I am Irish, I am Irish because that sense of wanting to be loved and the sense of identity that wearing the green jersey gave me was so important. And like I had an incident where my Irish soccer jersey was gone, and I was like, the resilience came out again. But I was back in that industrial school less than, but I was determined to get up, and within six months I was playing for Munster, and six months later I was back on the Irish rugby team. And when people said, Oh, you're you're brilliant, you're brilliant, they don't understand why I'd done it. Yeah, yeah. And in writing the book, when my friends pick up the book, they're like, I didn't know that about you. I thought you love sport. Yes, I love sport, but the drive that was behind it was from something else completely trying to prove myself, trying to bring up that self-esteem. And on the soccer pitch or the rugby pitch, my head was high. When I came back off the pitch, I was the black person again. And I suppose it's why I played sport up into my 40s. You know, I played my last match in Toma Park and went, come on, Jack, you have to stop. Yeah, you know, and then it it was that kind of sense of wanting to be long. And it's funny when I when I look at you in particular, Lean, with black and Irish and you knowing so much at such a young age, because you're way younger than me. And um, I'm like, I'm in awe of you, and going, Oh, why I wish I met him earlier, you know what? I could, you know, grow from you. And I remember having a conversation with Emer O'Neill um about two years back, and um I had met her at the Black and Irish event and at the um the Claire Byrne show, and we became friends. And Iam uh Emer turned to me and she said, Like, I wish I knew you. Why didn't I know there was a black superstar? And I was like, Who? And she said, You I said, No, Emer, don't be. I feel like an imposter now because that's not why I played sport, and it was, you know, it was just to be, but she said, You're the first black woman to play both codes. And I'm like, Yeah, but that's not what it is. You don't get me, you don't get me, and you whitewash over why it is, and she started to cry, and so you could have helped me so much if I could have picked up a book and read about you, and I'm like, there was nothing to know about me, and what what you might think you want to know about me, I might be ashamed of because I'm doing this for the wrong reasons. And when I went to Black and Irish, and you said to me, like, the whole room's gonna celebrate you, you done us proud. I'm going, No, no, I'm an imposter coming in here, you know. He doesn't know, and I'm like, wow, he can talk like that, he can articulate how I feel and how important it is for me to be seen. So there's moments like that, even into my 60s, yeah, where I'm still grown. And even sitting here with both of you today and seeing, you know, your stories, what you have come through, and what it makes mine real as well. It's like you, what's the word I'm looking for? You validate my story as well, even though we're three different generations, we still have in part the very same story, we're still fighting for the same thing. Like for me, it's now for my grandchildren, yeah. So that they're not racially profiled in any way. It's kind of sad in a way, also, that we're still talking in the same way. I hear in your stories, you're experiencing the very same thing. That makes me sad.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

And I think what makes me sad listening to you as well, Jackie, um, is the proving yourself. Like I actually feel sick about some of the things that I did to make to try and prove to people that I was a good person. And um, you know, trying to feel, you know, that I belong, you know, even though like so many people accepted me for who I am, which is great. I think it's about learning to accept yourself, Leon, as you were saying, and that you're 100% yourself. I loved that you're 100% me. You don't have to be 50-50, you don't have to be black, whatever, you know. I think that's a big thing. And I'm still learning today, the proving yourself. And like my mum always said to me, you know, and she still even says it now when I go out, oh, how many friends will you gather tonight, you know, when I go out? Because I I I talk to everyone, I'm really social. Um, and I don't know. I think, like as we were saying from being younger when you're growing up, I think you have to prove everything, you know. There was, and with a disability, like I wasn't good at sport, you know, I'd load the things against me as well. So in other ways, I became a stronger person, as in the chatty person, you know, the empath, the friend that listened. So that was my role in life, you know, and I'm quite protective of people as well. Um, so I think when I look back at things I did to, you know, make myself shine, whereas I felt like I always had to prove myself, you know, if somebody gave you that look, and I'd be saying, Oh, they don't really like me now. And everybody like, no, don't be silly. Well, you know, that vibe, you know, that racism vibe, as I like to call it. And you know that they are racist against you. And everyone, like years ago, they'd be saying, Oh, I think you're just imagining it, you know. And that would just get me so annoyed, you know, that way I'd be like, but why don't people believe it?

SPEAKER_04 10:36

And that's the thing, isn't it? That you become the aggressor if you say it out.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

And then as well, I felt like I had to win them back, I had to win them over. So, say when I worked in retail, you know, people would, I was like a manager in a stock in a shop, and you know, people would bypass me and they'd be like, Oh, I want to speak to the manager. And, you know, the girls turn around and say, Oh, Mags Margaret's the manager. And you could see the look first that they give you, you know, and then I'd be like, Oh, this isn't going to go well, you know. And then they were so pleasantly surprised, you know, and like they'd nearly be hooging you when they but they came in and looked at you with this different attitude. Yeah, not everybody, obviously. There were so many people that were actually so curious that they wanted to be your friends, they wanted to learn, they'd asked the questions, you know. So, what the the proving myself thing, I'm very, very guilty of it, you know, in the past. And that one, that's one thing that, you know, I think, Leon, for yourself as well, as Jackie and I were saying, like you're much younger than us, like you're so well educated and it you're so confident as well. And it's all work that you've done yourself because everything we've done is work that we've done to get us to this spot. But I love the way that younger people have more confidence, whereas I didn't have that when I was younger. And even now I come across very confident, but I'm not a confident, and people don't believe me. And I'm like, no, no, I do this like publicly speaking, I know I don't like it, yeah, but I do it because I feel how can people learn, how can people educate themselves, and how can we move forward if we're all sitting here with all these experiences and we're not talking about them, you know.

SPEAKER_03 12:11

So did you leave anything out of the book that you thought might be hard for other people to hear about your life? Or do you know what?

SPEAKER_02 12:19

No, because I said I wanted to be totally honest and I always speak from my heart and my soul, and that's the way I wrote the book. So if I'm going this far to write a book, I want it to be the truth, you know. So I didn't hold anything back, and there's stuff now that I read, and I'm like, more cringe, but it's stuff that needed to be written, you know. And again, like Jackie was saying about healing, that was the biggest therapy session that I never thought I was ever gonna have, you know. So that gave me such a different and the freedom to speak, and the freedom to be black, and the freedom to be disabled. And that everybody has said, God, we never knew that about you. We never thought that's the way you felt, you know, feeling unsafe sometimes. Like we were only had this, I only had this discussion with a friend the other day, and uh, she was saying, like, do you feel unsafe again? And I said, Yeah, I do. You know, it's not safe to be out there in Ireland anymore. You know, for a couple of years it all got okay again, you know, and now it's suddenly okay where are you going, what you're doing, who's looking at you, you know, is something gonna kick off?

SPEAKER_03 13:19

So yeah, it's it's what about you, Leon? Did you kind of put it all out there, or were you conscious? And I suppose for all of you, were you conscious that you who you were writing for or to who your reader would be?

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Yeah, I think like there was a couple of elements that I I I didn't think were important that were more just personal stuff that I was dealing with or going through in terms of like some connections, like relations that I had. Um, I mentioned the relationships that I have in the book, but you know, of course, there's there's a lot more to it that I could have written about that I didn't feel would add to what I was trying to do um for for myself, you know, or or for the reader. Um I mean the the the point about proving yourself I think is is is really really important and like that manifested very differently for me. So I manifested it in ways of like trying to fit in with the people that I was hanging around with who at times could be uh getting into not so good things, you know, engaging in activities that were not that they weren't supposed to.

SPEAKER_03 14:27

Then let's just say in your book it comes across you made some unwise choices.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Unwise choices, you know. I was getting into like I was like you, you know, if my friend group were getting into a fight, I'd be getting into a fight. You know, there's a lot of violence around me at the time, and that like I really should have distanced myself from that, you know. Um uh but at times I I I didn't, and and those are definitely things that I I re regret, you know, because I was doing it to that day, it'd be like, he's like, yeah, he's one of us, do you know what I mean? Yeah, he fits in, like, you know, so um that that was that was a huge challenge, you know. Uh and you know, I'm proud of myself now because I know I had to go through that, and I hope you're the you're the same, you know, because that's how I I I view you, you know. Um, and then the socializing element of it as well. I talked to a wall for it to talk back to me. Do you know what I mean? Just because now for a while it was because of that, like I just want it, like I want you to like me, I want you to get on with me kind of thing. Um but now it's like because I recognize what loneliness feels like, and I I I want to make sure that you don't feel it, you know, and I think we learn from these things, and it helps us to become, you know, I I feel the experiences that we go through helps us to become better people. Exactly. In my opinion, don't you?

SPEAKER_02 15:34

Not that we're angels or but you're right, it's just build up your character, and um, you know, I often think like if I wasn't born in a mother and baby home, like I really put everything to my birth, you know, and how I came into the world. I came into the world in unusual circumstances, shall we say, um, a bit like yourself, Phil, you know, we didn't go, you know, home with our mothers, you know, and our dads or whatever, and we didn't have a family life, you know. I was three um before I left the mother and baby home. So sometimes I think back and I say, God, like when you hear the horrible stories, you're kind of thinking, well, I'm glad I can't really remember anything, because that to me is a positive, as in, I don't want to think that something horrible, lots of horrible stuff happened to me. Um, but I think as you said, it definitely shades it into the person. And I think I came into this world fighting and I'll go out fighting, you know, and people are actually interested. Like that. I didn't think anybody'd be interested in me either, Jackie. I was like, I'm just an ordinary person, you know, will anybody read it? You know, and like my parents obviously were so excited. I think, like, I'm like, no, like I'm not like Prince Harry writing a book, you know, I'm not a celebrity, it's just me. Probably five copies will be sold, or and they'll be family and friends. So I was already putting myself down. And then when the interest was so huge, like I couldn't keep up with the messages, like you were saying as well, Jackie. And Leona know yourself from even black and Irish, you know, it's it's amazing to see that there is that huge interest, and then trying to build on that community, I think, of people that actually are interested and want to form an alliance, shall we say, with us. So it's trying to grow that. Um, this is what we have to do to do it, because we have to keep talking about it. The message has to keep going through to everybody.

SPEAKER_04 17:24

And for me, it's like what Leon said about you know, we'll talk to anybody who talked to them all, and whatever. I think the three of us have that common tread that I think our starting life, even though they're years apart, it's like you can tell me if I'm wrong, but it makes you an impact. Like you said when when you said about wanting to make sure somebody else isn't lonely. Yeah, I really feel that sense of burden and responsibility. You know, if I'm in a room and I see somebody on their own. It brings me back to my childhood. You're the only one. So I'll gravitate over there, and here's this black woman coming towards them that they've never spoken. Well, how's it going? How's things? Do you know how did you get here today? And yeah, you know, before the end of it, we're exchanging phone numbers and we're best friends, and we're going to the monster match. But it's I I love, I suppose, one of the things I embrace through the trauma is that sense of being an empath and the the want to be part of something or to be liked is not as important anymore as somebody reminded me, somebody else's opinion of me is not my business. And once I could get that in my head, then I could kind of go, Well, it's not as important, but I think as Irish, um, we have this inside thing of us to want to communicate and be part of the tribe. And I look at it in a different way now. It's a different tribe. I want to be part of. I want to be part of something that educates, that makes it easier for somebody else that can reach out in those moments and make sure nobody's left behind, nobody's sitting in that corner, you know. Like my book is called We Met a Kid because in Limerick everybody walks around going, Bye the kid, how are you, kid? Well done, kid, and like looking back at little Jackie to say, it's okay, we met it. I now haven't read it or written it and read it, it's like I know somebody else is going to hold somebody else's hand in them and say, It's okay, we met it, kid. Come on, you know, and it it is that sense, that's what I feel more, that I'm more empathetic for having written the book and I have more of a sense of belonging that I haven't forced, you know, like having to play for Ireland, having to green Jersey. My self-esteem has come up. Knowing who I am, I know that I'm part of a bigger picture now and I walk a little bit taller. I know who Jackie McCarthy O'Brien is.

SPEAKER_03 20:15

Can I just ask you? One of the things that comes across really clearly in the books is the role of family and how important family is to all of you. And I suppose I found your story of your mother coming to take you out of the institution and not even understanding the concept of family and who the people were, that they might even be such a thing as parents, and that you talk about like people thinking about their mothers, and that you had never even dreamt of a mother because you didn't even know what that was. And I suppose it's really interesting then that family becomes your focus, and you, Marguerite, you write constantly about your parents and the support that they give you throughout. And when you describe your time in hospital, yeah, that's quite traumatic. And and the fact that they're there constantly, like you say, never giving up either.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:20

But I'm just wondering, in terms of family, because Leon, you talk about your mother, you know, and how she kept everybody going as well. But I suppose what really interested me in reading the stories was you're living life through a racialized lens with all of these white people. And how did you understand that at the time? Because you're the you're not because you have siblings, but you're the only one, even within your own family. And how did that feel?

SPEAKER_04 21:58

For me, I That is when going home with my mother is the trauma, start of the trauma. I don't know that at the time. It's my, if I even understood the word family, would have been nuns, very cruel, you know, especially to children of colour in institutions. As you know, like when looking back, I go, oh my God, last into the bath because I'll dirty the water. How dare they, you know, and always being Blackie O'Brien growing up and not being called by my first name. But for me, going into a white family back then, it was okay because I didn't see my colour. It was more they don't look like me. Um, not knowing that my mother was actually my biological mother until I was 12, that was pretty hard.

SPEAKER_03 22:51

Was it not knowing or not feeling? Because I I it comes across in the book that you don't feel it rather than that you don't I don't know it or feel it because what is the feeling of being part of a family?

SPEAKER_04 23:04

My family is the eight or nine children in the dormitory wetting the bed together and trying to get a breakfast the next morning, you know, because the punishment was no breakfast if you wet the bed. So my family were the people that made me make rosary beads or scrub the floors and whatever. And I'm out with these people that I don't know or I don't feel anything for, other than God, they're a bit mad. They're not punishing me, and they're giving me food to eat, and they're doing all this, and you know, it's it's like it's only on looking back that you can see the damage that's there. It took me two years to be with these people, as I called them then, and start to go, mom, dad, because the other children were calling them mom and dad, feeling the safety, and you know, it's my love was self-taught. It literally was self-taught from watching, you know, um the Waltons or whatever. Oh, this is what love looks like, this is what a family looks like. John Boy and all of them are part of this. So these people, that's mom, dad, and I'm child. Loved is not being slapped for wet in the bed, it's not having food take. That feels good, but it actually takes time to sit with that. So the things that we take for granted or people take for granted from a babe in arms of being rocked, being comforted when you know whatever happens to you, that looks completely different to me. I have to teach myself that's what love looks like, and then within that comes the problem because nobody goes hungry into Alton's and everything works out all right, but real life isn't like that. So you go into a crisis mode when something happens that you haven't seen on TV. Hang on a minute, how do I deal with death? How do I deal with grief? How do I deal with being part of this family? Where do I fit in? And then your colour comes into play then from the outside with other people going, that can't be your brother, that can't be your sister, that can't be your mom and dad. You don't belong there, and it's other people that take away that sense of what you're building up to what you think a family should be. And as I said, coming out of the industrial school, that was the trauma for me in those first two years of trying to fit in, not just dealing with my colour, just dealing with being with complete strangers, you know. Um it it was, and I suppose I think that's the start of the resilience, and I do, I think my book is a homage to precious Mickey O'Brien, not educated people as we think of education today, but the love and the simple way that they cocoon me from bad people and equipping me in the craziest ways to look within myself and say, do I want to fight this for the rest of my life? Or do I just want to make something of myself in spite of what people think of me? And I think that was the greatest gift that precious and Mickey O'Brien gave me. So my book is a homage to them as well.

SPEAKER_03 26:53

What about Julian? I mean, you had siblings who were also mixed, like you. So you weren't the only one.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

I had a a few different people who had who influenced my kind of racialized experience. So, like, well, deal with the immediate too, my mother and father. My mother is a a wonderful woman who gave me a very good upbringing, you know, as best as she could, despite a lot of challenges that she faced with my father and stuff like that. You know, and as a white woman, she tried her best to uh, I suppose, help me to understand that I'm just Leon, you know, so a lot of the kind of rhetoric that I use today is actually her teachings, you know, um just maybe packaged differently. But I do like you, I I do prescribe to that now. She struggled a little bit to kind of help me with understanding the kind of black side of myself as you know, as as anyone would struggle, you know. Um, and then there was my father who um quite a uh volatile human being, you know, um came from a different culture, was uh prone to like substance abuse at times, and yeah, could could could get very violent and stuff like that. Um but he was very comfortable in his African identity, very confident, you know. Um someone I remember someone calling him the N-word and he said thank you. And like and he just didn't care, do you know what I mean? Um so that that was strange, and then becoming disconnected from him uh and kind of you know, obviously having as a young child been very angry and very frustrated with him, um, and and finding out that he has another family and that I'm not actually the eldest child, I'm like fifth in the line, you know. Uh that can cause a lot of uh cognitive dissonance. Do you know what I mean? Then there's my brother and sister. Megan is the youngest of the three of us. He didn't necessarily lean too much into her racialized identity. She just I'm an Irish person, I don't care about any of that. Adam, he stood up for himself more than I did when I was younger, um, and was the reason why I ended up taking uh a case against Lewis because he was the first ever person to stand up to my buddy in the big field around the corner from my house. For me, he was always like the strong, he was stronger than me uh when it when I came to this. When we had an incident then with with Lewis Security, he was like, Man, this stuff happens all the time. And I was just so mad that that was what encouraged me to do it. So he's educated me a lot in many different ways. Uh and we travelled together to Senegal for the first time and had lots of different conversations. So there's been many different influences. In fact, the senders actually my my maternal grandfather who had a lot of challenges as well, uh and was very quick to like use my birth as like you know a way of attacking me and stuff like that, you know. So there's people who are positive influences for different reasons, people who are negative influences for for different reasons. Um you have to you you have to learn to navigate that and and kind of say, right, well, like the end goal is that I'm comfortable in my identity and that I'm comfortable with who I am. Uh that's that is the the end goal. Regardless of where that lands, you know, I need to be comfortable, I need to be happy with it. Because it's like you know, as been said, this is it. You don't get the you don't get the go back to the you know the wheel of fortune and go, maybe I'll land on white this time, you know. Um, so it's about making the the the best of of of what you have. But my family have mostly been, you know, a really kind of positive force in in my identity shaveny.

SPEAKER_03 30:34

Did they get you? Do you think your white families got you? They understood what you were going through.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

They to a certain extent, maybe. Um, I suppose even now when I look back at the difference of I thought, you know, what I thought then and what I thought now, you know, and we were saying about like obviously I came into a white family, and um again, it was always a positive thing about my colour, which was brilliant, and it gave me that positivity. Um, I think the one thing that got me about the family was that I never looked like anybody. So we'd be out, and like my sister say, Oh, or people would say, Oh God, your sister's the image of your dad or your cousin or your mom or something. And I never looked like anybody apart from people that maybe were on television because we've the same colour skin or whatever. So, you know, and I always thought that I'd look more like my African side than my Irish side. But then when I messed my Irish side, I was like, oh my god, the similarities, like the Irish side, yeah. Yeah, I feel like I look more like my Irish side, which is something that completely blew me away.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Thinking Aloud, Thinking Together is a new conversation series from Skeen in partnership with the Museum of Literature Ireland, amplifying voices that have been silenced in Irish cultural life. It brings together artists, writers, and thinkers whose work offers a radical new perspective on existing narratives. Thinking Aloud Thinking Together provides a space to discuss points of connection and concern in contemporary culture. These conversations explore topics that are seldom spoken of in mainstream public discourse in Ireland, such as identity, relationships, shame, exclusion, and reversing the impact of erasure from history and culture. It offers a space for us to reconsider our relationship with one another, to reimagine the ways in which we live, and to rewrite the legacies we leave behind. Supported by the Roan Trust and the Arts Council of Ireland, produced by Ian Mullaney, music by Ushin Walch Pilo. For more information, visit Skeenpress.com.