First draft essay so far

How does a culturally mixed background influence the forming of an I?

As I played in the clear water, waiting for the little waves to take me and my cousins closer to the beach while we screamed and laughed, just to swim back into the sea and let it happen over and over again, I never really doubted if I fitted in. It just felt very natural to me. It was normal to go to Aruba in the summer whenever we could and spend our time there with our family. I grew up with a father who is completely dutch and a mother who is from Aruba but in her blood has roots all around the world. As I got older I started thinking more about the connection I felt with both cultures and where I fitted in. In my personal experience, lately I’ve been getting a very awkward feeling whenever the topic of my cultural background comes up in a conversation. This is because 99% of the time people’s reaction is: ‘ooh really? I never would have guessed, you look completely dutch.’ This makes me feel kind of discredited and uncomfortable, as if people almost think I’m lying. Both my sisters don’t bump in to this situation as often because they inherited more features from my mother, like darker hair and eyes, and I look more like my dad. A few days ago I talked about this uncomfortable feeling with my mother for the first time and she was very surprised, almost laughing a little bit because she didn’t believe me. She said ‘but baby you look so much like me, people always say that’. And i know what she means but people mostly say that we have the same smile and the same look in our eyes, but not the same features. She said to me: ‘But why does it bother you so much what other people think? You know who you are and besides that, your cultural background isn’t everything that makes up your identity’. On the one hand I know she’s right, other peoples opinions don’t define me, but that thought doesn’t make the awkward feeling go away. I was even doubting writing about this subject because I was worried about what the people in the class were going to think. But this fear is exactly the reason that I decided I need to write about this. I want to discover what it is that makes me feel awkward, how I fit into my cultural background and how this influences the forming of my I.

Why does multicultural identity matter.
Sometimes the thought ‘But I’ve lived my entire life in the Netherlands, why does it even matter that I have a multicultural background?’ crosses my mind. But in my opinion having more than one cultural background gives you a different world view in a way. From my own micro perspective, I’m not just looking at the world from my dutch eyes but also from the perspective from my Aruban family. And going even further than Aruba, my mother is also Indonesian which is gives a different perspective as well. Angela-MinhTu Nguyen and Veronica Benet write that bicultural individuals shift between two cultural orientations in response to cultural cues, this is a process called cultural frame switching (P.8 Multicultural Identity: What it is and why it Matters). This Frame switching allows individuals to see situations from different cultural perspectives.

Feeling connected to your background
When researching this topic I came across an article called ‘'Racial Impostor Syndrome': Here Are Your Stories’ written by Leah Donnella where they introduce a podcast. I immediately was interested because of the words ‘racial imposter’. The article is about these people from different mixed cultural background and their experiences with what they identify as. A big part of this is how other people perceive them, but I will go in to that topic in the next part. First I want to talk about what experiences in my life make that I do feel partly Aruban even though I live in the Netherlands. The first big thing is that I’ve had the privilege to visit the island over 10 times and we always stay for about a month, which has given me the opportunity to really spend quality time there. I have a very big family who we spend a lot of time with, and they treat me like an Aruban, always greeting me with ‘Kon ta bai’ and calling me dushi. I’ve also spend the Christmas holidays there last year and celebrated new years and the beginning of carnival with family and friend. So being there, I feel at home and welcome. The thing is that here, without my big family around me other people don’t recognize me as anything else but dutch.

I read a piece by Silvia Cristina Bettez where she talks about ‘positioning through your parents’. This is something I catch myself doing. When asked about my background I introduce myself by saying: My dad is dutch and my mother is Aruban. I think I partly do this to distance myself from the cultures, or mostly the Aruban culture because of my fear of being rejected by others.

The visions of others
I think that language and appearance are the two most obvious things that others look at when talking about cultural identity. In my case I look white and my Papiamentu is like you’re talking to a 4 year old, so I don’t pass the test in either of the two subjects. But the question is, why do these visions of others on me make me feel less Aruban? In the article I mentioned before from Leah Donnelle, she writes about Helen Seeley. Helen is a light skinned biracial woman who says:

"It's a vulnerable experience, but it becomes even harder when I'm with black Americans. It may sound strange — and there are so many layers to this that are hard to unpack — but I think what it comes down to is: they have more of a claim to 'blackness' than I ever will and therefore have the power to tell me I don't belong’’

Just like Helen, I also feel the pressure from others and I feel that other multicultural individuals that do pass the tests have more of a claim to their multicultural identity that I do. But nobody has ever really told me: ‘well no you’re actually not really Aruban’. It’s more subtle than that, it’s the way that people react when I tell them that I don’t speak the language, it’s the disinterest. But why do I care? I think it’s that I feel like I’m a part of a certain group of people but at the same time I don’t because I think they won’t accept me.

Language
Why don’t I speak the language? When I was little I would hold my mother responsible for not speaking the language to me, but from a certain age it became my own responsibility. There have been so many times where I told myself: ‘Now I am going to commit and by the end of the year I’ll speak the language’. But still the level of what I can speak and understand is below average. Is this a result of my lack of interest of the Aruban culture? In ‘Identity Formation for Mixed-Heritage Adults and Implications for Educators’ Khleif states that the solidarity of language is perhaps the key to how language influences ethnic identity. ‘Language is also one of the major influences on identity formation in mixed-heritage individuals’. Would this mean that because I don’t speak the language, I feel less connected to the culture? Could this be the key? Maybe I project my own insecurity of my knowledge of the Aruban culture on others. But what is it to speak a language? Is that what will make me a true Aruban?

When I spoke to my mother she said, ‘but that won’t change anything, it’s in your blood’. I asked her but do you feel Indonesian? She said ‘yes I do! I don’t speak the language but when I’m talking to Indonesian woman I really feel connected to them, even though I don’t look exactly the same, I do share features with them.’ Then I asked my uncle, her brother, the same thing. He looks very different from my mother. He’s a tall bald man with a very light skin and freckles, but without the Indonesian features that my mother inherited. He told me that he feels connected to Indonesia 0.05 percent, more because it reminds him of his grandpa and grandma but not because he connect to it on a personal level. He told me he sees their Indonesian heritage in my mother and their father but that he feels more connected to the white side, Sint Maarten and Aruba.

embodied appearance
If I look at how my uncle and I both feel, this tells me we are more likely to feel connected to the part of our culture that resembles our bodies. I think this has to do with the feeling of belonging into a group in which you recognize yourself, but I also wonder if it has to do what we think others expect us to feel connected to. This brings me back to the quote of Helen Seeley where she speaks about having a claim to a certain culture, or rather lacking to have a claim. I was talking to a friend of mine who is half German and half Dutch to ask how she feels about this and she told me something very insightful: ‘Sometimes it feels like how I’m culturally formed has more to do with how my body looks than how my soul is.’

I do still think that a part of the reason why I feel awkward speaking about my Aruban side is the fear about how others will perceive me, but I think this fear grows from an inner struggle. I feel this disconnection to the culture because of all these components like appearance and language. But I’m starting to realize that it isn’t a bad thing that I don’t feel just as connected to my Aruban side as to my Dutch side. It is about what I feel inside and inside I know that I am also Aruban, but that doesn’t define who I am. The experiences I’ve had on Aruba have formed me and gave me a love for the island and my family, but that doesn’t mean that I should identify just as much with that part of my culture as my dutch side. It’s okay to know that I am Aruban and I do feel it inside me, but I think I’ve been hoping for this big revelation where I would go ‘Ah now I finally feel fully Aruban’. This revelation is not going to come, it’s about accepting who I am and what parts I took into my soul of my cultures and that this helped form me and my soul.

Research literature

Understanding multiethnic and multiracial experiences globally: towards a conceptual framework of mixedness

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1654150?src=recsys

Beyond being either-or: identification of multiracial and multiethnic Japanese

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1654155?src=recsys

Identity Formation for Mixed-Heritage Adults and Implications for Educators

https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.hro.nl/stable/3587846?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents

Multicultural Identity: What it is and why it Matters

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232460772_Multicultural_
Identity_What_it_is_and_why_it_Matters

But Don't Call Me White : Mixed Race Women Exposing Nuances of Privilege and Oppression Politics

https://web-a-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.hro.nl/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/ZTAwMHh3d19fNDc4MTA1
X19BTg2?sid=2ab3e6bc-01a0-4da4-8cb8-5f14dda7119b@sessionmgr4007&vid=0&format=EB&rid=1

'Racial Impostor Syndrome': Here Are Your Stories

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/06/08/462395722/racial-impostor-syndrome-here-are-your-stories?t=1603102268439

When talking to my mother she told me she does feel a connection to this side of their heritage and I asked her if it was because she has Indonesian features in her appearance or if it was something different. She answered she doesn’t really know why she feels that connection but maybe I could ask her brother (My uncle) how he feels. He looks very different from my mother, he has freckles, a light skin and a bald head. He answered me that he doesn’t really feel the connection that my mother feels to Indonesia. It does remind him of his grandparents and he knows his father and sisters have Indonesian features but he feels more connected to the white side of their history in Sint Maarten and Aruba.

My uncle and mother when they were younger and now.

How my mother and her brother feel connected to their indonesian heritage

This is the video I made for Amy's exercise about family history. I made a audio experience about the story of how my parents met. I asked them both to speak in their 'own' language to show the different perspectives.