“I wish to share the joy I feel when painting, with people of the world, testifying how great it is to be allowed to exist by God, who has given me my Japanese identity.” — Yasuo Uena, in Christ For All PeopleSO I’m “confused” about my ethnicity. But I’m not confused. Other people are. And those of you who are confused, listen, your ignorance is not my reality.

My boyfriend and I play a game we started when I moved to Central, called Spot a dougla.

It’s a game that came out of our feeling of “culture shock” to find ourselves inhabiting a community where we felt ethnically anomalous.

In the “town” area of Central, well into a month of life outside Port-of-Spain, our spot-count stands at about 15. On our stretch of street, up till last week, the dougla headcount was zip.

People will wonder at our need to play this game. They’ll say we think we’re special, better, hot stuff. They’ll insist, as they often have, often do, that there is no need for such a game.

When certain politicians do a head count of how many Indians are cops in the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service; when certain other politicians point out how few Africans are lawyers; when from left to right all up and down this nation and all over the world so-called pure-breeds keep pouting over numbers of their people in ratio to other people, this is seen as quite a natural consequence of belonging to one racial or ethnic minority or majority.

Except, of course, if you happen to be a mixed person. Then, ah then you’re not supposed to try to pick out the face that “resembles” yours in a sea of strangers in the hope that similitude of visage will add up to similitude of experience and thus make you simpatico.

No. When you are mixed it’s not considered “just natural” to cleave to “your own kind,” or to look out for your own.

See, if you do, it’s not because you’re trying to fit in and be accepted as and for who you are by people who will understand you, for having lived through corresponding situations. No. instead it’s seen as “you’re confused,” “you’re denying your identity,” “you’re racist” and “you think you’re special, better, hot stuff.”

My boyfriend and I are both dougla, but untrained eyes regard him as Indian and me as African. Yet all the time people ask us if we are brother and sister, since he and I look alike: have similar features, and hair that, changing as the weather, often looks comparable in lay and texture.

This, we understand, is because we come from analogous ethnic lineage: Indian, African, Spanish, Chinese, with a couple of other things thrown in one way or the other.

Still, people would have us named by them. People would have us live our lives according to their decree of our ethnicity. And if we love ourselves as mixed people it means something is wrong with us.

Some people would happily knock me down for “denying” my African roots; and while at it happily knock me down to make me deny my Indian roots.

I’m “allowed” to be Afrocentric, but not Indocentric, Portuguesecentric or Spanishcentric, though I’m equal parts each.

Listen, there was a time when for several years I sundered myself from all my ethnic roots save one. I was fiercely Afrocentric; so much so I made a racist out of me, and was unforgivably so to a Caucasian man who’d shown me nothing but love, kindness, respect, honour and friendship in the time I’d known him before I became racist.

Which is not to imply Afrocentric people are all racist. I’m saying it was the only way I could be in trying to live a life denying, even hating, aspects of my self.

Extremists — many “pure-breeds” among them — will say I did okay to turn my back on a true friend because of his colour.

However, as a person comprised of six different ethnicities, a person whose parents were both mixed, a person whose grandparents were — with the exception of my Indian grandmother — all mixed; a person whose sisters and brothers, every niece and nephew, two great-nieces, copious amounts of close and distant cousins and kin; a person who actually does not have a single living relative who is not mixed — well such a person cannot be extremist and racist.

Shut out any of my ancestors to pander to people’s ignorance? That can never be my reality.

In accepting the “allness” of my douglaness, this is not a denial, but a proud affirmation and acceptance of Trinidad and Tobago and all its people who came.

Come good.

Tomorrow’s BREW: