My grandfather married my grandmother in England. Both were far away from their homes and families. Their wedding was a small affair— my grandmother’s sister was the only representative from both their families combined. They were both warned about the folly of marrying a person who was ultimately the other. But for the most part they proved their naysayers wrong. My final project is about all the times they couldn’t.
Interracial love is born from a contradiction. Both possible and impossible, it exists as an antithesis to itself. And what better way is there to address contradiction than through fiction? My project will take the form of a short story through which I will aim to address the interplay between history and the individual.
The story will attempt to construct a decolonial aesthetic through the lens of a marriage between two people of different races. Fiction gives me the space to not only tell the story of my own history but to take liberties with it that I wouldn’t be able to do in a non-fictional piece. I am greatly inspired by James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk while working on this project. In particular, it is this sentence upon which the crux of my story rests: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass”. My grandparents spent much of their life together doing just this. If nothing else, my project is an attempt to pay homage to their struggle.
Decoloniality and Decolonization 