Sarala Estruch: “It can be frightening if you don’t know how to code switch”
The poet on evolving identities, complex histories and poetry as exploration
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to poet Sarala Estruch, who is of mixed European and Indian heritage. Sarala’s debut poetry collection After All We Have Travelled journeys across time, continents and cultures, drawing on her own family’s story to explore empire, trauma and (dis)connection. It’s a collection that will touch anyone with a history of mixed cultures, and I was excited to hear more from Sarala. Read her story below.
How do you define your heritage?
I call myself mixed-race and mixed-heritage. I actually prefer to describe myself as ‘of mixed-European and Indian heritage,’ but even that doesn’t convey the complexity of all the parts of me and my history. It depends on who’s asking and how much time you have.
My paternal grandparents were Italian migrants who moved to Algeria. My mother is Algerian-born white European, but during the war moved to France. I used to say my mum was French or white French, but there's so much more there.
My father passed away when I was young. He presented as Indian, but he’s half-English from his mum, half-Indian Punjabi from his Sikh dad, so my paternal grandparents were already doing something unusual in the 1940s.
How much has your own life influenced your poetry?
I wrote After All We Have Travelled because I wanted to explore the things that separate us in terms of manmade divisions, like racism, xenophobia, culture and religion, physical forms of separation such as national borders and metaphysical separators, like death and time.
My parents weren’t permitted to marry – my paternal grandparents told them to put an end to their relationship, but they’d been together for many, many years and my mother was expecting me. Writing the book has been a way to grapple with that difficult past, as well as try to move on from it.
Poetry helps me ask these questions around identity and mixedness because for me, there are no clear answers. There is no one mixed-race experience. That’s why I love poetry, there are so many possible meanings in any given poem.
You speak about feeling like a fraud in your poetry – where does that come from?
I’m always grappling with how we create feelings of belonging and how we develop our identities. I don’t want to fall within the two mixed-race stereotypes that I think are out there – there’s one who is lacking and doesn’t feel enough of anything, then there’s the other side who see being mixed as amazing because we’re everything.
I’m striving to be the latter and embrace it all, but there are also moments of feeling lack. I guess the truth is that it’s always going to be a mixture, always evolving.
When my father passed away, my paternal relatives embraced me. Going back to the mother country, there are always going to be those cultural connections missing, but each time I’ve visited them it’s felt easier. It was wonderful to be told I belonged, but I felt like I didn’t know what the rules were. It can be frightening if you don’t know how to code switch.
How are you speaking to your family about being mixed?
To this day, there hasn’t been much discussion around my mixedness in my family. In order to write the book I did some family interviews and one aunt said she feels equally at home in England and India.
My own children are still so young, so we use the term ‘mixed’ and talk about Jamaica where their dad is from. They’ve been to India and know they’re Indian, they also know they’re English.
There’s no box for my son on a form and it’s neither here nor there for him. The younger generations don’t necessarily see it as that significant yet, but I do think it’s important to have the conversations. If we continue to ignore them, they come up later.
I don’t want to go over the past to relive past traumas, even though sometimes that’s necessary, but I want us to move forward.
Have you experienced any stereotypes around being mixed?
My experience of mixedness was that it was exoticised. I felt like people wanted to display me, or saw me as a symbol of unity and beauty. That felt dehumanising, to be seen as a poster for how equal or advanced we are without anyone wanting to hear the difficulties.
England colonised India and there were many mixed-race relationships, but it's not considered English to be mixed even though it’s part of our past. We’re starting to have these conversations. As Afua Hirsch says, it’s a crisis of Englishness or Britishness and what that means. To be English or to be British is to be so many things. The main thing is to accept that society is changing and that’s a good thing.
In your poem Freight, you speak about physicality – can you share how you’ve felt about your appearance?
I acknowledge white privilege, being able to pass in certain circumstances. It’s a complicated and painful place to be in, people decide your identity based on how you look and what that means to them, which is not necessarily how we see, think or feel about ourselves.
How I perceive my own identity is always changing, but I do see myself as brown. That’s been the case the more connected I’ve been with my Indian relatives. It was more difficult when I was younger, I just felt non-white.
I pick up colour and lose it quite quickly, so I change based on the seasons. I also think my features have gotten more Indian as I’ve gotten older. How you appear and how people relate to you is always changing. What I’m striving for is an acceptance of all of that. One thing I really need to learn is to not take on other people's stereotypes and beliefs about me that aren't true.
What’s one of the best things about being mixed for you?
I’ve always felt like a global citizen as opposed to belonging in one particular culture or country. I’m trying to learn to embrace being English, which is a work in progress. I'm English and I'm a product of the British Empire and a citizen of the world, even with discussions about that not being patriotic.
Can you sum up your mixed experience in a word?
Complex.
Buy After All We Have Travelled here. Next week, I’ll be talking to author Louise Hare. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday.
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Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi (by way of East Africa) and my dad is white British, but finding my place between these two cultures hasn’t always been easy. That’s why I started Mixed Messages, where each week I’ll speak to a prominent mixed voice to delve into what it really feels like to be mixed.