Sister Collective
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Sister Collective
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Arts & Culture
Words By: Cass & Siobhain
Artwork: Emily Pearman
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Sister is a creative collective based in Glasgow. Our main focus is to explore race and identity within a Scottish context through sound, writing, and performance. We are childhood friends but it was only until we left Scotland for London and lived together in our early twenties that we started to discuss our experiences of growing up mixed race in Glasgow. In many ways, we think we needed distance from the place we were so deeply rooted in to be able to understand and articulate our experiences from afar. These experiences were different, but the underlying and somewhat suppressed emotion was the same: continuously being made to feel ‘not’ Scottish because we’re not white.”
Siobhain was fortunate enough to attend a multicultural school in Glasgow where other cultures were explored in lessons. She went to Chinese school on Saturdays to learn Cantonese but ended up sitting next to the teacher drawing since all the other children spoke fluent Cantonese. It took until her mid-teens before she actively embraced her Chinese heritage and it wasn’t until her early twenties that issues of identity began to play an important role in her creative practice. She feels that one of the major barriers is language. “Being able to speak fluent Cantonese would make me feel that I belonged. It’s hard to be the ‘gweipo’ (white woman) in Hong Kong and then be ‘foreign’ when you get back to your home city.”
This idea of belonging (or rather unbelonging) is intrinsic to Sister’s experience and therefore has shaped so much of the work.
Cass was also brought up by her mum (who is white) but never knew her father. “I always felt physically different from everyone else in my family but because I had very fair skin as a child I was never necessarily conscious of being part black or black until I was a bit older. I had notions of someone somewhere coming from Nigeria but it was confusing for me. I was always asked where I was really from since I was a child and this has followed me my entire life, no matter where I go. I was and still am quite racially ambiguous and this was something I struggled with. I wanted it to be obvious; one parent is white, one parent is black, but this isn’t the case for me. The gene pool is more mixed than this.” As she grew into her teens she felt an overpowering desire to know more about this unknown side of her family in order to “understand myself, why I looked the way I did, why my hair was the way it was, why my body was different to the bodies around me. My father’s father was from Nigeria and his mother was a white woman from England. He was mixed-race black and I wasn’t so sure what this made me.”
Furthermore, attending a Gaelic school made her feel more isolated and misunderstood. She says “Gaelic culture, for all, its beauty and richness is overwhelmingly white and I have not only felt that I didn’t belong but that I didn’t want to belong to the culture from which I felt such strong rejection.” She threw herself into reading about Nigeria, Igbo culture specifically and black cultures more universally in terms of important historical figures such as Paul Robeson, Elaine Brown, Angela Davis and writers like Paul Gilroy and Benjamin Zephaniah. Reading and identifying with these stories was a significant time for her, however, she says tellingly “you will notice there are no Scottish people on that list! I was still at odds with black Scottishness and later on living in London only intensified that. People perceived me and my accent as an anomaly.” She believes this is why it’s so important that as a collective the pair explore Scottish identities through the black lens and through as many diverse backgrounds as possible.
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Illustration: Emily Pearman
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“Gaelic culture, for all, its beauty and richness is overwhelmingly white and I have not only felt that I didn’t belong but that I didn’t want to belong to the culture from which I felt such strong rejection."
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Black Scottish people have existed for centuries, as have other minority ethnic Scottish groups, it’s just there isn’t enough research or promotion of this history. Think about the Caribbean for example; Scotland and the Caribbean are completely intertwined historically, that's what I love so much about Alberta Whittle’s (recent winner of the Margaret Tait award) work because it deals with this directly, and through so many mediums. Everyone should know this. People shouldn’t be surprised that our national poet Robert Burns was going to go to the Caribbean as a ‘book-keeper’. There is even evidence to suggest that ‘Ae fond kiss’ was written about a landowner and his slave mistress (anyone doubting that should read Geoff Palmers’ work). There are connections everywhere. Cass acknowledges that Glasgow has done more recently to emphasise these links through tours and talks during Black History Month and Glasgow universities recent acknowledgment of slavery profits, but still feels that it's not enough. This should be in our curriculum of education, not specialist knowledge that only a few privileged groups have access to.
It wasn’t until later in her twenties that she discovered the artist Maud Sulter, who became a source of affirmation. “People always mention Jackie Kaye to me but Jackie shouldn’t have to do it all! There are so many more of us expressing ourselves and our identities. That’s why we do this work and it's a constant evolution because we are constantly learning, about ourselves, about our histories and about each other. Why did it take me so long to discover Maud Sulter? These histories should not be erased”. Cass says there are times in her life she has identified solely as black but as she’s gotten older it's important for her to identify as mixed because ‘ I don’t want to erase the lineage that raised me. White working-class Glaswegian culture is an important part of who I am, although for years I felt that I didn’t fit in. I mentioned previously that I wanted to know more about Nigeria to better ‘understand myself’, but myself is all these things. It sounds very cliché but it’s a reality for me.”
Though at ease with her white working class background she doesn’t feel a deep sense of connection to Scotland (even as a Gaelic speaker) but definitely has an appreciation for Scottish culture. “I feel a lot more Glaswegian than I do Scottish and I’ve never really identified with Britishness, I don’t think a lot of Scots do. I’m not patriotic, in fact I feel a great shame at the atrocities we’ve committed with our involvement and compliance with colonialism. Britain is not great but guilt doesn’t serve anything in moving forward”
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“Despite going to a multicultural school I was bullied for being half Chinese as a young kid so I rejected that part of me."
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For Siobhain Britishness was, and still is, hard to define. She was obsessed with the idea as a teenager, although she never considered the British colonial history in her father’s homeland of Hong Kong until later on. Her mother was born and raised in Manchester but her grandmother is Irish. “That always seemed like a stronger part of me than the English side, in my early teens I learned Bodhrán and took an interest in the Irish part of my heritage.” It took until even later before she began to embrace the Hong Kong Chinese side. “Sometimes I feel guilty about it but I think it took so long because I thought it was something to be ashamed of. Despite going to a multicultural school I was bullied for being half Chinese as a young kid so I rejected that part of me.
I suppose that was the easiest thing to do since my Chinese family all lived in Hong Kong, maybe if they were in Glasgow it would have been different. It was weird, none of the other ‘fully Chinese’ kids were bullied, I think it was completely arbitrary.” She agrees with Cass about feeling more Glaswegian than Scottish. “I’m not Scottish, by blood anyway, but that doesn’t stop me from being a Glaswegian.” This feeling also intensified when the pair lived together in London. “It was really nice to not be the only person with a Scottish accent.”
Studying at Goldsmiths was when her Hong Kong Chinese heritage really became something Siobhain was proud of. “I really began to realise what an amazing place Hong Kong is, I even wrote my dissertation on Wong Kar Wai and Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity.” She still struggles to fit in with the Chinese community in Glasgow however. “It comes back to the lack of language and not feeling ‘enough’, I’m very aware of what I lack as a mixed race Chinese woman.” Siobhain has tried to connect in other ways; from cooking more Chinese food to sampling Hong Kong transport system announcements in her sound art. She took Cantonese classes when she moved back to Glasgow and hopes one day to be fluent in the dialect.
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"The underlying and somewhat suppressed emotion was the same: continuously being made to feel ‘not’ Scottish because we’re not white"
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All of this lead the pair to form Sister in 2016 after nearly 10 years of friendship. Our first project Hotline was broadcast live from the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow as part of Radiophrenia, a pop up experimental radio station.
Using interviews with our friends and live performance we aimed to shed light on what the experience of being a mixed-race woman in Glasgow is like. The whole process of creating and performing the piece was a catharsis, to finally create something from years of frustration. The audience that night was predominantly white and middle class. Several members of the audience, some friends and some strangers, told us afterward that they were guilty of micro aggressions towards people of colour. It came as a shock to them, they had never considered the weight behind questions like “where are you from?” but it wasn’t a shock to us. We then performed Hotline again at women of colour showcase in the Glasgow Women’s Library. To be able to share our work and experiences with other women from similar backgrounds to us was a beautiful thing. The whole point of Hotline was to air our frustrations instead of brushing them off and to find solace in our shared experiences. Nyla Ahmad, who organised the event, created such a special atmosphere that night; one of sisterhood, strength, and unity. From there we have been lucky enough to work with Where People Sleep, and Project X, along with creating a new audio piece for Panel’s exhibition at the Cubitt Gallery.
The next project for us is something we’ve been looking forward to working on together for a long time, is our zine. We’re keen to have a series, some that will include the work of other women in Scotland, not just Glasgow. The first one will pick up from where we left off with ‘Hotline’. We aim to continue the conversation. We have to strive forward and do better, use the frustration and anger and turn it into something positive that can make a difference in some way. I know a lot of people who deny these histories, or that there are still problems relating to race in Scotland today and it makes us angry because it erases our identities and our authorship. We’re here, we’ve always been here and we always will be here. Though at ease with her white working class background she doesn’t feel a deep sense of connection to Scotland (even as a Gaelic speaker) but definitely has an appreciation for Scottish culture. I feel a lot more Glaswegian than I do Scottish and I’ve never really identified with Britishness, I don’t think a lot of Scots do. I’m not patriotic, in fact I feel a great shame at the atrocities we’ve committed with our involvement and compliance with colonialism. Britain is not great but guilt doesn’t serve anything in moving forward
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Twitter: @sisterglasgow
Instagram: @sister_collective
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