In this blog post, we are so grateful to share the reflections of one of the participants who helped to shape the Generations: Stories of South Asian St Albans exhibition. Please be aware that it includes racist language.
I was moved to tears when I first spied the photo of my father and our voucher in the ‘Generations’ exhibition at St Albans Museum.
The first time I had seen that photo was mere months ago when we had discovered the voucher amongst my father’s papers. This was perhaps the third time when I showed the voucher to Elanor Cowland, the Community Engagement Officer leading on the exhibition. Now the tears sprang to my eyes, taking me by surprise. I suspect that they emerged primarily from seeing a blown-up photo of my father as a young man, sitting alongside a larger than life-size photo of the voucher itself. The larger size was unexpected.
I had been reflecting on the theme of belonging anyway – partly due to being involved with the exhibition, partly through the act of creating the mini-manji in the accompanying workshop, which had catapulted me back to my younger childhood in India of the 1960s.
A large portion of my emotional uprising was in seeing my father and MY gateway into ‘a better life’ centre-stage in this way. If it had not been for this slip of paper, my personal destiny was set to be very different.
This exhibition has contributed significantly to my personal exploration of ‘Belonging’, a topic I have long pondered. Belonging to a place or a community has always eluded me, and that elusive nature has proved to be the root cause of much sadness as well as a deep sense of feeling untethered in the world. I have previously recognised that experiences such as being called ‘w--’ and ‘p---’ will have contributed to the sense of exclusion from the Britain that was my physical home. Equally, being referred to as a ‘Non-Resident Indian’ in India and being subjected to worse treatment that a visiting white person will have also contributed to that sense of not belonging that I have carried for most of my adult life.
Some semblances of community more recently had enabled me to start calling St Albans ‘home’ a few years ago. As I have grown older, that same community has fallen away, in parallel to my realising that community actually means a lot to me.
Yet now, with an exhibition in my city of residence, I am reconnected to that sense of community as I form new connections in a direction not envisaged before. More than that, this exhibition has been a lengthy one, lasting for several months. Whilst itself a very small exhibition, it is packed with emotional power. It has restarted an emotional journey for me and amplified it by being able to see and hear about other stories of home, uprooting, transitions – issues that we can all identify with, whatever the colour of our skin or the culture we are born into.
As a person who works with others around such issues (as a Psychotherapist) I know first-hand how the roots of our identity lie within our sense of belonging and community, which in turn can impact our mental health. So this is an exhibition that resonates on both a personal and professional level.
- Indu Khurana
