Patrice Gopo grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, the child of Jamaican immigrants who had little experience being black in America. From her white Sunday school classes as a child, to her early days of marriage in South Africa, to a new home in the American South with a husband from another land, Patrice’s life is a testament to the challenges and beauty of the world we each live in, a world in which … in which cultures overlap every day.
In All the Colors We Will See, Patrice seamlessly moves across borders of space and time to create vivid portraits of how the reality of being different affects her quest to belong. In this poetic and often courageous collection of essays, Patrice examines the complexities of identity in our turbulent yet hopeful time of intersecting heritages. As she digs beneath the layers of immigration questions and race relations, Patrice also turns her voice to themes such as marriage and divorce, the societal beauty standards we hold, and the intricacies of living out our faith.
With an eloquence bornof pain and longing, Patrice’s reflections guide us as we consider our own journeys toward belonging, challenging us to wonder if the very differences dividing us might bring us together after all.
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I bought this book after reading a review in Alaska magazine. (I subscribe partially out of nostalgia for when I lived there, and partially for research for the mystery series Talkeetna.) A Black woman in Alaska? That would be in an interesting perspective, I thought.
It is an interesting collection of essays, although the Alaska part wasn’t there as much as I had been led to believe by the review. (One interesting insight: she characterized her childhood as being a Black girl in an all-White school, several times. I don’t think Native Alaskans were mentioned in the book.) But the book was thought provoking.
Her essays deal with identity, in particular, her identity as a Black woman, and the complexity of what that means. Her parents are from Jamaica, so Black, but not from the United States. When she goes to college in Pittsburg, she meets other Black women, who are steeped in a different Black culture, and she’s not sure she belongs there either.
Ms. Gopo experiences her Blackness in Alaska, in Jamaica, in South Africa, and then back to the southern United States. She realize her Jamaican heritage isn’t just African, but also from India — 50 percent, actually.
She marries an African man, and they return to the States, to Charlotte, NC, an area that is usually considered liberal in the South. But a neighbor flies a Confederate flag, and it worries her to walk with her small child near that house. I would too.
She talks about food, and rituals, and hair, and a variety of other aspects that make up her identity.
Identity is complex, more than the labels that get attached to a person. Ms. Gopo is an excellent writer, and I highly recommend her essays.
I was reminded, however, of teaching identity in the context of diversifying sources in journalism class. Some White student would invariably protest that they didn’t have a cultural identity like minorities did. (Some envied the minority students, some disparaged it.) Of course you do, I would say, and we’d talk about them both as part of White culture, and about their specific heritage. Where did their families come from? What was their ethnicity?
It was an exercise I did in graduate school. But the truth is I know very little about my own ethnic identity. I know that most of them came from the British Isles: Scots, Irish, and Scots-Irish, Welsh, and British. I’m an Anglo-Saxon mutt, really. But I don’t know why they came, except that they were determined to leave the Old World behind. Someday I’ll do a DNA test to see what it might tell me. But there were no stories handed down. My story starts with my grandparents. No further back. (Although I know that much of the migration happened during the Irish potato famine, so I assume that had something to do with it.)
In teaching, I found that one of the first steps for White students to value other ethnic cultures was to realize that they had a culture too. With that recognition, difference becomes multifaceted rather than ‘they’ are different than the norm (people like me).
Patrice Gopo’s identity is really that of a woman of Jamaican descent with ancestry going to both India and Africa, who was raised in Alaska, educated in New England, worked in South Africa, married an African, and now lives in the southern United States. And that complexity of identity is important to recognize, and to ponder both as an insight into how complex an identity can be, and as an invitation to consider your own identity.
Beautifully written in way that makes me feel like I’m right there with Patrice as these stories are unfolding. This book was challenging but never preachy, powerful without being demanding. I highly recommend it. I will probably read it again.
A thought-provoking and meaningful collection of essays on themes including identity, brokenness, and finding our way in a complicated yet beautiful world.