Mixed Remixed Festival

Festival Faves Key & Peele in the New Yorker on Growing Up Biracial

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mx_key_and_peele_prize_watermarkWe are huge fans of Key & Peele who accepted the Mixed Remixed Festival’s Storyteller’s Prize at the Mixed Remixed Festival in 2014.  We absolutely love this New Yorker article written by another favorite of ours Zadie Smith.

Here are some of the gems from the article out this week:

  • “The one thing that you don’t figure out as an improviser or a sketch performer is ‘What am I?’ ” Jordan Peele observed. The essence of his talent is multivocal, and he has, in the past, attributed this to his childhood anxiety at having the wrong voice, which, in his case, meant speaking like his mother—that is, speaking “white.”
  • “They make you say what race you are, where you check out, and I think that’s ultimately an unhealthy tradition,” says Jordan Peele. His eyes, naturally rather narrow, widened dramatically. “It is crazy that as a kid we’re taught, ‘What is your identity?’ We’re asked that!” Key, who sat at the other end of the trailer, going from having hair to being bald to having hair again, is similarly struck by the irrational nature of racial categories. “The limbic system is alive and well,” he said. “And it’s going, ‘I need to find a category. I need to find a category. If I don’t find a category, I’m not safe.’ ”

  • Key: “Jordan and I are . . . we’re biracial.”

    Peele: “Yes. Half black, half white.”

    Key: “And because of that we find ourselves particularly adept at lying, er, because on a daily basis we have to adjust our blackness.”

“We find ourselves particularly adept at lying b/c on daily basis we have to adjust our blackness.” @keeganmkey #multiracial

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The wonderful @keeganmkey and @jordanpeele talk abt being biracial via @newyorker #multiracial

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[youtube]http://youtu.be/D7VRVQgbDvE[/youtube]

 

 

 

You don’t look Irish!

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I’ve been attending the wonderful Crossroads Irish American Festival in San Francisco for a number of years. My mother is Irish and I have happy memories of going to Ireland during the summer when I was a child, to visit my grandmother and other relatives.

After one of the readings at the Crossroads Festival, my friend, poet Pireeni Sundaralingam, introduced me to one of the organizers, Hillary Flynn. When I mentioned that I was a writer of South Asian and Irish heritage and that I knew a number of other writers who were mixed and Irish, an idea formed. Wouldn’t it be great, we thought, to have a panel of writers of mixed/Irish heritage as one of the events at the Festival.

Putting the Mixed in Irish! A special talk to celebrate! #multiracial

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Well, lots of conversations, phone calls and emails later, we are doing exactly that! I approached writers from the Mixed Remixed network (thanks Heidi!) and from the VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts) Writers network to join me for an event called: “You don’t look Irish!” A Reading And Conversation with Multiracial Writers of Irish Heritage”. It will take place on March 27th in San Francisco at the University of San Francisco – where I’m a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing.

Join us 3/27 for You Don’t Look Irish: Mixed Race Irish Folks Tell Their Stories

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Flag-Pins-Ireland-GuyanaIf you are in the area (or would like to come to the area!) please come and listen to: Dylan Amaro-McIntyre, Caroline Mar, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, and Clare Ramsaran, four very different writers and join in the conversation about what Irish heritage “looks like” in the 21st Century.

Location:  Maraschi Room, Fromm Hall, University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street @ Parker Street (next to St. Ignatius Church), San Francisco, CA.
Cost:  Free. Donations welcome.

by Clare Ramsaran

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