Stories Seldom Told

Eliza Griswold is a journalist, poet and contributing writer for the New Yorker. She was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for her book, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. She’s a distinguished writer in residence at New York University and lives between New York and Philadelphia with her husband and son.

"Basically, what we did is look at how cultures welcomed and and insisted that adolescents include a period of going to the edge of the society. Like coming of age rituals, liminal experience. You know, you get your period, you have to go live in the hut. You've got to, you are encouraged, you are required to encounter meaning at the edges of society, at the edges of civilization. And in American society in the 90s, when I was in college - George Bush - there was no welcoming of the edge whatsoever, you stay as close as you can to the centre, the edge is devalued. And so for me, who was who is a child of the edge, I was terrified..."

Amish Tripathi is a diplomat, author and columnist. He is currently the Director of The Nehru Centre in London, the cultural wing of the Indian High Commission.

Amish was been listed among the 50 most powerful Indians in 2019 by India Today magazine. Forbes India has regularly ranked Amish among the top 100 most influential celebrities in India. In 2014, Amish was also selected as an Eisenhower Fellow, a prestigious American programme for outstanding leaders from around the world.

Amish published his first book in 2010, and has written 9 books to date. His books have sold 5.5 million copies, and have been translated into 10 Indian and 9 international languages.

"One of the things that I keep arguing for in India, is that our ancient traditions are being forgotten, and our ancient wisdom is being forgotten. You see the public square debates in India as well are falling into that same paradigm. There is the right and the left, and you have to prove loyalty to your tribe. And you have to win over the other person. That is not the ancient Indian vada tradition. It's not the ancient Indian debating traditions. And all of this comes from an unconscious bias. It comes from a belief that my truth is the truth."

"I didn't write politically conscious songs or songs that talked about the skin colour of my first child. I didn't write those things, saying, I'm going to change the world and this is how I'm going to do it. I wrote those songs, because that's the way that I felt, like everything that I do with my music. There’s not a disconnection, and it's just a focus on 'how can I market and get my music out'. I write my music the way that I feel. And that's all it is. Because my music is an expression of how I feel as a distinction. It’s not a commodity to be packaged up. And that's what was happening when I was 19, when 'role model' was put on me as a label. The media and the industry infrastructure were trying to craft me into the person that they thought that I should be because I was a brown woman, I was rapping writing my own songs."

Teremoana Rapley currently works as a senior creative economy advisor for the New Zealand local government cultural and economic development agency, Auckland Unlimited. She is a stalwart of the music industry as an award winning singer songwriter. She stepped into the industry at the age of 14 with the politically conscious rap group Upper Hutt Posse and was inducted into New Zealand's Music Hall of Fame in 2018. She has worked in indigenous broadcasting for over two decades gaining over 3000 production credits as an executive producer and many production roles. Teremoana has worked in a community action and development space for the past 30 years with her latest co-created social change initiative focussing on intergenerational and intercultural place-based community building using the arts as the connector.

"And I walked away, thinking, right, okay, so this kind of dominant view as a man, that if you have an encounter, that you have to kind of become this alpha male who's gonna kick butt. Even though I spend a lot of work on myself trying to, you know, remove the idea that violence is the way to solve problems and so forth. That, in that challenge, I couldn't just say to the guy, well, actually, given the choice, I'll always sidestep an opportunity to engage in violence as the kind of dominant way in which people settle their disputes. I just defaulted back into that."

Hári Sewell is founder and Director of HS Consultancy and is a former executive director of health and social care in the NHS. He is a writer and speaker in his specialist area of social justice, equalities and ethnicity, race and culture in mental health. Hári is honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire and Specialist Guest Lecturer at University of Bradford. Hári has had various books, articles and book chapters published, with new material emerging regularly.

Hári has a reputation for being a strong communicator. He is a nationally and internationally recognised trainer on critical race theory, unconscious bias, leading diverse organisations and teams and issues of equality and social justice.

Hári worked with another local campaigner to secure services for survivors of sexual violence and currently runs a campaign “Men Supporting Women’s Rights” including “Men Against Rape”. He is increasingly studying forms of masculinity and the possibilities in practice and employee relations to recognise the intersections between masculinity and other aspects of identity.

www.hsconsultancy.org.uk

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"And so, I was brought into this family, who already had two children. They were my parents' biological children, two boys, very white. So, it was very interesting, when we would go out as a family. I would be stood there with classically sort of Pakistani colouring, you know, I have jet black hair. I have amazingly dark eyes, with my brothers and my parents who are blond and blue eyes. And it was, you know, it was quite amusing, really, because I could see people looking at us as a family, and questions going through their heads and said to say, what's happened with the daughter, she looks a bit different."

Anna Harrington grew up in the '70s in a white, middle class area on the Pennines, an area juxtaposed to the multicultural population of Oldham. She is adopted and mixed race. She has both benefited from white privilege and experienced racism throughout her childhood. This has allowed her to viscerally recognise the effects of not fitting in and how the social environment influences behaviours. She now has her own business advising on how to enable employees to be productive and thrive through work.

"There still is an aspect of always having to come out, basically, because the status quo is that you're straight. Therefore, in work and that kind of thing, there's always a bit of friction there when you meet someone new who doesn't know. You will end up telling them, you know, ‘at the weekend, what did you do?’. Oh, well, I was with my boyfriend or whatever. And there's always going to be that, well, what are they gonna think about that? I mean, it's not a problem, I suppose, in the context of, British people, or Irish people nowadays. With people from countries where it's not acceptable to be gay, I definitely do assign them. I’m maybe a little bit more worried. For example, in work if I had a colleague who was from somewhere where it's not acceptable to be gay, to tell them about, what I did over the weekend with my boyfriend, because I may be a little bit more worried about what they might think."

Seamus Beirne is 29 years old (30 next month). He lives in Oslo with his boyfriend. He works as a data analyst for a grocery delivery company.

"Let's say now, you're getting married. You've no relations to call on to come to your wedding. You're aware of that at the time. Then when your first kid is born, you've nobody to ring up and tell -  aunts, uncles or anybody. Nobody to ring up. You have plenty of friends and that, which is great. But you could always feel the other person had all the wives, uncles, aunts to ring up, whereas I had none of that. Now, I thought about it, but I didn't let it get under my skin. Because if you allowed things like that to get under your skin, you'd be seriously affected. And I wouldn't let it affect me, because I still knew I had to survive and get on with my life."

Jude Hughes was born in Dublin in 1941, to an unmarried Irish woman and a black man. He was initially told his father was from Trinidad. He spent his early life in St. Patrick's mother and baby home. The rest of Jude's childhood was spent in institutions - first in a convent, and later in an industrial school, where he learned a trade. Growing up in Ireland, he rarely saw another black person.

Linked to Jude’s story is the recent report of Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, released on 12th January 2021. The 3,000-page report details the conduct and survivors of religious institutions in Ireland. These institutions housed women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. Most relevant to Jude is the policy of the institutions preventing him from tracing his parents, or as Jude says, being told that the information was 'redacted'. Ireland denies adopted people the legal right to their own information and files. The report is understood to chronicle many of the lies and obfuscations of priests, nuns and officials.

"You get respect when you are someone, when you're doing something. When you're no one, people forget you. They forget what you have done for them. They forget who you are, or they even forget what you have done in your past. So, at that time, I learned that if I will not accept myself for who I am, if I will not respect myself for who I am, no one is going to do that. Because the world is very cruel. You have to stand for yourself and you have to accept yourself for who you are."

Naira Manzoor is from Kashmir currently living and working in Delhi. Naira says she's 24, feels like 65, but has the soul of a teenager. She loves books, deep talks, travel, singing, thinking and exploring life. Her life is focused around learning and she believes in being herself and refuses to change for anyone. "Life is a journey, a taxing one",  she says, "I am up for it".

This is an extended two part episode. Part one is just under half an hour, followed by a brief segue into part two which is approximately twenty minutes. Please do listen to both!

“The other thing that was my unconscious bias, I'd always perceived myself as a strong woman. I am a strong woman and I've coped with some pretty significant adversity in my life with pragmatism and a degree of humanity. But this one stripped me not only of my humanity, it stripped me of my motherhood, it stripped me of me. And that was very, very surprising. And I have come to understand why it is.”

Kate Nicholls is the author of Under the Camelthorn Tree in which she shares her experiences of raising her five children in Botswana, and home-schooling them, and living in a lion conservation camp. Kate is currently running a homeschool business in Rome and is passionate about integrated education. She is also writing her second book.

Content Warning: This episode deals with sexual abuse and violence.

"We  were told that everyone was butchered, was literally butchered on the  way to India. Now supposing we were there, what would happen? I think it  made me more resilient. Subconsciously, having escaped death at such  close quarters and at such a young age. It allows me to be a little more  cavalier in my approach to life. Not careless, but carefree."

SP Rawal was born in 1940 to a rich landowner in what is today, Punjab, Pakistan. At the age of seven, he was forced to go through the trauma of India's partition, travelling as part of a caravan of bullock carts, staying at a refugee camp, and doing all sorts of menial jobs. Today, aged 80 he's the chairman of a leading brokerage firm, dealing in arbitration support both nationally and internationally.