Nickel Blogs - 21 years of articulating the identity spectrum

Finding a place to be known

Negotiating the identity spectrum has been a feature of my blog, though when I consider the situation, it has always been a feature of my life. However, having a blog has helped articulate the issues around how identity is more defined by influences than by progeny.

I can think of the many experiences and realisations, the earliest being when I first arrived in Nigeria, barely a 5-year-old and I noticed there were more people like me than where we had left. How was a little black English boy to know that Nigeria would be different?

English, people have issues with that, I am supposed to be Black British, yet on those atrocious forms, I would write in Black English. That aspect of being English became ascendant when I had to tackle the question of where I was from when I lived in the Netherlands.

The many questions of where

“Where are you from?”, they would ask. I answer, “I am from England”. The next question usually was, “Where are you originally from?”, The answer, “England”. Confusion or frustration clouds their faces with a further inquiry, “Where are your parents from?”, The answer, “Nigeria”. Enlightenment, “So, you’re Nigerian”, “No, I am not, I was born in England.”

The best question in that vein was, “What is your birth country?”, I answered, “England”, and my interlocutor asked no further questions. This brings me to the other matter of my accent, it started as a typical Brummie accent influenced by associations in Nigeria especially in schools that had a large international pupillage.

Strange juxtapositions of identification

It's funny that most of the Caucasian kids were Nigerian-born, and many of the black kids were foreign-born, with foreign accents, too. However, reading an article by a friend of mixed-race parentage revealed another interesting thing about identity. Those of mixed-race parentage were othered from afar. We looked like everyone else until we began to speak, and then we were put aside, too.

It was like we never really belonged where we thought we belonged; we had to work out how we wanted to be identified. For instance, how do you tackle a statement like, “You’ve always thought like a Westerner?” I was 42 years old, which was what my father said in a conversation.

The privilege and the opportunity

In my case, I have found both privilege and opportunity by the accident of birth that is not of my making, how it has helped me navigate situations in life and at work cannot be covered in a blog. Too many examples come to mind.

Maybe, I am more fortunate that working with my sense of identity and the quality of my education has taken me to interesting places.

I have little time for identity politics, but woe betide anyone who attempts to pigeonhole me in dockets where I neither identify nor wish to place in. Such is the life of a Third Culture Kid.

Some additional context

A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who spends a significant part of their childhood living in a country or countries that are different from at least one of their parents' passport countries:

The child's parents' culture is the first culture.

The host country's culture is the second culture.

The child's own cultural identity is the third culture, which is a fusion of the first two.

The child adopts some traits from each culture. [If I may add, some kids even live in bubbles different from the nominal culture too.]