last week the receptionist in my office building asked me where i was from. by from, he wasn’t intrigued by my (superior) northern twang, he wanted to know where i was “FROM”. what my parents’ heritage is, where they were born.

i’ve been asked this question a million times, and i usually give a smart-arse comment (because i’m like that) and say that i’m from Manchester but i was born in Newcastle. when that doesn’t satisfy, people (receptionist included) normally ask where my parents are from. so i give them another smart-arse answer: “my dad’s from Sunderland, mam from Newcastle”. except this isn’t really a smart arse answer, it’s the truth. it’s where they were born and raised until they moved to Manchester when i was 3 years old.

the receptionist, who noted that he himself was from Senegal, said “no, no, your dad must be West Indian or African or something at least?”. no shit, Sherlock; of course he is ‘something’, but my inital (and reoccurring in these conversations) thought was “does it matter??”. but rather than pull a strop about it, i summed up my ‘background’ for him: my dad is half Jewish, half Nigerian and my mam is half Scottish, half Bermudan (roughly). to this he replied, “ohh, what do you think of your dad’s home?”. when i told him Sunderland wasn’t exactly my favourite of places, he seemed rather bored of what must have come across like pedantic answers. he explained he meant Nigeria, and i blathered on to say i hadn’t visited. he seemed surprised, shocked, that i hadn’t been, and that i didn’t even express a desire or an interest in visiting. 

he said i should go, that i needed to learn about where i came from, where my dad comes from, to learn about the place that made me who i am.

i don’t know if you can tell yet but i really hate people telling what to do and people formulating ideas about others based on specific yet limited information.

does it matter to my present situation that my dad’s dad (who i never met) was Nigerian? not particularly. is it therefore my duty to immerse myself in a culture i don’t really know about because of ‘heritage’? definitely not. would it be cool to visit one day and learn more? yes, of course, but it is in no way fair to say that i could claim i am FROM Nigeria. that, after all, is only part of my heritage. i consider myself completely British (whatever that means), my parents are both British, both of my nanas are British, all culture i have grown up around and fed off of has been through British eyes. adopting a (false) sense of patriotism towards the backgrounds of my grandparents seems pretty ignorant. yes, history is important but it is hard to make a complete picture from a handful of small puzzle pieces.

my real gripe about the original question is why it was asked in the first place. sure, it’s always great to find out more about people, curiosity is extremely healthy, but i can’t help feeling that most of the time people only ask me because they want to fit me in somewhere, they want to confirm their assumptions and align me with something.

so next time, when somebody asks me where i’m from, i’m still going to answer Manchester mainly in the hopes that someone cares about my first hand experiences growing up and not some bizarre clinging to cultures i know nothing of.