Orson and Jreena

Orson - Mother from Austria and Holland, father from Mexico - Director

Jreena - Mother from Barbados, father from Pakistan - Dancer

When we look at each other, we see a common experience, a physiological and psychological sense of 'mixedness', reflected in each other's features. Is this narcissism or solidarity? Either way, it is something we both need. It re-enforces our sense of ourselves and tell us 'we are not alone'. Sometimes, we joke about how we will explain our children’s identity to them (and we do intend to do our bit for racial mixing by reproducing). We will have to tell them they are Pakistani, Caucasian, Caribbean, Jewish, Spanish and Mexican Indian, and should be equally proud of each strand of their varied heritage. Their 'hybridity' should be a strength, not a burden. Our children will be the continuation of a process of 'racial mixing' that never really began and will never completely end, but has been marked by some key 'convergences'. 

Forty years ago, a young African Indian fisherman meets a British woman of Dutch Austrian descent on a beach in Mexico. A few years later, a Barbadian woman becomes friendly with a Pakistani man at the factory where they both work in Birmingham. Then, a generation after these events, the offspring of these two couples meet at a party in the West End of London. In this way the process of ethnic melting continues its trajectory. Who knows what form it will take in twenty or thirty years time, when our children are grown up and choosing the people with whom they will conceive the next generation? We are all a part of this process of diasporisation and hybridisation. 

It does not mean we are living in a perfect world of racial intermingling and co-operation. Quite the reverse. But it means there is no return to a source of ethnic or cultural 'purity'. There is no harking back to a moment when we were 'just one thing'. Only the present where we constitute part of a living dialectic and the future where we will inevitably produce a new 'synthesis' of races and cultures.