Inheritance

Last month I went for a haircut and, as I pulled off my sweater so it wouldn’t catch stray hairs, the hairdresser asked “why are you so tanned?” I was a bit taken aback, but a glance in the mirror showed that my arms and hands are nut brown, and my face close to that. I didn’t know how to respond. I think I mumbled something about that being my natural colour. But is it really?

I’m a first generation Canadian—my parents emigrated from Venezuela in 1975. My dad had been teaching at a university there, enjoying the South American life. Before then, they’d lived in the UK and in Holland, where my dad was from. My mom is from Suriname, in northern South America, which was a Dutch colony.

Suriname is a country of many races due to colonization. The original inhabitants were Indigenous, but were conquered in 1667 when the Dutch West India Company claimed what they then named Dutch Guiana. The Dutch shipped Black slaves from Africa to Suriname to work on cotton and sugar plantations. When the Dutch abolished slavery in 1863, the plantations switched to bringing in indentured labourers from British India and China. These labourers came on fixed-term contracts, and were free to go once they’d fulfilled that contract.

Given this history, we have a highly multicultural family tree, which my sister dug into in her book What the Oceans Remember. She took to the archives and made trips to Holland and Suriname to discover where our ancestors came from. She found that fourteen were Black slaves who worked on a cotton plantation named Sarah (great to have the same name as a plantation). There was also a British Indian woman and Chinese indentured labourer who are listed as being in a relationship, but they didn’t have any children together—our ancestor was the former’s son who came with her from British India. And one of our ancestors was German, who lived with his Surinamese family until he went back home to his German family.

My mom and her siblings are all brown, a legacy of their Black and British Indian heritage.

My mom (front right) and her family in Suriname, with her mom (my Oma) holding my youngest uncle.

As a child, my sister was dark enough to be mistaken for being First Nations; well-meaning (racist) women congratulated my mother for adopting a First Nations child.

My sister as a child.

I, however, was not mistaken for anything other than white, having inherited my dad’s northern Dutch genes.

Me as a kid.

My dad’s side of the family – pictured here are my Dutch Oma and her sisters.

As we grew up, my sister chased our European heritage by living and working in the UK and Holland. She described herself as Dutch-Canadian, the easiest way to explain our heritage. However, as she researched our Surinamese family, she realized that that she was brown because of that heritage, and she moved through the world differently because of it.

My Mom’s Oma Doffie on her dad’s side. Oma Doffie was the first generation born after the abolition of slavery.

I was happy to be a Canadian both by birth and nationality, and didn’t feel Dutch enough to hyphenate that nationality, even though I am also Dutch-Canadian. But as I grew up, people said I didn’t look quite white. One of my friends even said there was something ‘exotic’ about me. I tan easily, and stay brown all winter. That’s what the hairdresser saw: my brown arms, hands, and face from all the summers spent outdoors. But the skin she didn’t see is also not quite white. When I compare my bare legs to my husbands at the beginning of summer, he’s white. I’m off-white.

Does that make me brown? I hesitate to use the term as I’m well aware of the many cases in which people have appropriated a heritage that isn’t theirs to claim. For example, the people who have called themselves Indigenous until it was discovered that they had no Indigenous ancestors or family (so-called “pretendians”). Canadian author Joseph Boyden and Canadian health researcher Carrie Bourassa, to name just two examples, have benefited from programs for Indigenous people, and have been ‘outed’ as being non-Indigenous.

I also hesitate to call myself brown as I know I’m not as brown as my sister, or many of my cousins. But how brown is brown enough? While I’m no longer the white child I was, I’m just a lighter shade of brown and can easily pass as white. ‘Passing’ as white has all sorts of connotations, from being ashamed of your racial background to wanting to get ahead in a world that values whiteness. Neither applies to me, but I feel that it’s harder to justify calling yourself brown when you could easily be considered white.

There’s also the question of my nationality. I’m Canadian, of course. But am I actually Dutch-Canadian- Surinamese? Jessica J. Lee, a nature writer who currently lives in Berlin, describes herself as British-Canadian-Taiwanese, incorporating her parents’ nationalities as well as her own.

Since I don’t have the connections to my parents’ homelands that my sister does, I’ll keep calling myself an un-hyphenated Canadian. If someone asks, I’ll say my dad was Dutch and my mom is Surinamese. This is all true. As for my colour—I’m still struggling with this. I don’t feel brown enough to be called brown, but I’m too brown to be completely white. I live in a liminal space between the two, with a foot on either side of the line. Maybe my skin colour doesn’t matter. Maybe being brown or white isn’t relevant to my everyday life. I don’t know, but will keep thinking to make up my mind about it.

The featured image is of my Oma, my mom’s mom, as a child in 1913.