One part of my culture that I love has to do with is family. I once got a fortune cookie that said “Cherish your family.” and I thought yeah, you know what, I really do and I want to work on it more. My family is very much about everybody supporting and being there for everybody regardless of what’s happening. If one person is fighting with someone else, it doesn’t matter, we’re family and it will get worked out because we’re all on the same team. I really like that and I aim to share it with the chosen family in my life as well.

What really bothers me about cultural appropriation is that it’s a continuation of everything that colonization was and is. It’s about taking the pretty things that are nice to look at or wear -like a bindi or Black hairstyles – but the whole underlying reason behind their existence is not even considered, much less the discrimination people from those cultures experience when they wear the same things. I think there needs to be much more thought and dialogue in terms of how we can do cultural exchange.

I am mixed race; my Dad’s family was from Goa, he was born in Malawi, in Africa, and my Mom is Zimbabwean. I was also born in Zimbabwe and the world reads me as Black so I identify as African/Black. My parents met in Apartheid-era Southern Africa, and so that was very interesting… them getting married as two people whose skin colours “didn’t match”. Being their first-born child has been a unique experience in cultural exchange and belonging to two very different cultures, but at the same time being read as a Black woman and identifying very strongly as a Black woman, especially in present-day North America. I remember food as always being a key element of learning about each of my parents’ families growing up, whether that was watching my aunt make a curry from scratch or my grandmother cook real sadza.

What is challenging as somebody who has moved from Zimbabwe to Vancouver is almost having to take on a North-American history that isn’t my personal family’s history in addition to my narrative as an African immigrant…and feeling that I want and need to address that additional history now that I live here because I totally experience what it is to be black in North America. That’s a very interesting thing to have had to learn.