- So Jaspreet, thanks so much for joining us
for an Audible Sessions interview about your brand new book,
"Brown Girl Like Me".
- Thank you, thank you so much for having me.
- To start with, what is the book about,
how would you describe it?
- So we're calling it a lot of things at the moment.
We're calling it a toolkit.
We're calling it a guide book.
We're calling it a manifesto,
but the way I've been to describing it
is that it's the book I wish I had growing up.
It's the book I wished existed for me as a young brown girl
who was born and raised in the Western world
but having to navigate
all these different parts of my identity
and it's collated together
and not only kind of my own anecdotal stories growing up,
but I've been interviewing
lots of different South Asian women from across the country
for the last four years,
collating all their stories, their advice,
and putting that all together as this guidebook
for other South Asian girls like myself
to know that they're not alone in this
and to hopefully guide them in all those struggles
and issues that might come up in their daily lives.
- And lots of people who already know you
might know you from your poetry,
but also talking about mental health.
- Yeah. - So I wondered
from your perspective what your first experience was
telling someone about your anxiety.
- I guess the first experience for myself
was using poetry as a way to explore
and express a lot of those emotions I was bottling in
as a teenager.
And because I was growing up
in quite a traditional Punjabi family
where we didn't speak about mental health at the time
like many other South Asian cultures,
it was still quite a taboo subject,
something that we did brush under the carpet.
I was really reluctant to speak to my teachers about it,
friends about it, didn't even wanna go to my family GP
because I thought would that kind of spread
amongst my family and the community.
And I know that's something a lot of South Asian women
can definitely resonate with.
And then I finally plucked up the courage
to really be honest with myself and my family and my friends
about my mental health journey back in 2017.
And I think that was kind of the transition point for me,
when I'd been asked by TEDxLondon to do a talk
about how I'd been using creative writing
to support my mental health journey.
And I thought, okay, if I'm gonna stand
in front of this audience of complete strangers
and talk about my mental health journey,
it's about time I speak to my loved ones about it too
and be honest with them.
- And there's another element of secrecy you bring up
in the book in terms of growing up in secrecy
around menstruation and periods
and not knowing you what you were allowed to ask
or not allowed to ask.
How do you feel now talking about that
versus how you felt as a teen?
- Oh God, I talk about it all the time.
I think the people in my life, men included,
are probably a bit sick of me talking
about periods and menstruation but I think it's so important
that we do.
And I'm an ambassador for a really great charity
called Binti International that are doing just that,
trying to kind of tackle the stigma around menstruation
so that we can talk about it.
And so that women and girls and boys
are getting the adequate education
around menstruation as well.
But growing up, it definitely was not an open conversation.
It was that, okay, I started my period,
got told how to use menstrual products,
and that was about it.
No ongoing conversations about it, none of that,
'cause it was so taboo and not only in the home
but this is kind of something that parallels
within schools and within the education system as well
that I think a lot of us can resonate
that when we were learning about periods
and menstruation in school, it was like this little assembly
that we did at lunchtime or after school
and it was like one hour where like the school nurse
would quickly teach everybody about it,
hand you a packet of pads and then off you go,
and that's all we received.
And maybe there would be a little bit more education
around it when you're doing biology lessons
at secondary school level, but other than that,
there was no really kind of thorough knowledge
being given to us about how our bodies work.
And it's only now in my 20s
that I've really taken the time
to understand how my body works
and how my menstrual cycle works.
And I feel like if a lot of young women learned
about these things earlier on,
it would save us from a lot of the struggles
that we might be facing.
So that chapter is a really interesting one
about kind of tackling that taboo of menstruation,
and hopefully we get to a point
where it is just an open conversation.
It is normalized because it is a normal bodily process.
- Yeah, and talking of curriculums,
one thing you write in the book
is how the history curriculum and other curriculums
can influence and change and build the confidence
of young South Asian women.
And I wondered what those kind changes are
that you think would mean
that they could grow that confidence
and they could understand their history better.
- There's been a lot of interesting conversations going on
over the last couple years about the curriculum
and perhaps decolonizing the curriculum
and lots of kind of debates around that particular topic.
But I think specifically, as a history teacher
and what I've seen in the history curriculum specifically
is that for a long time, the history curriculum
has been very Eurocentric, very white male cis dominated.
It was the case when I was in school,
it was the case when I was then studying it
at an undergraduate level.
And then when I became a teacher, that was still the case
and it felt like it was on the teachers themselves
to try and make the curriculum more inclusive.
And there was a lot of times
where I was kind of bringing in extra resources,
bringing in all these other stories
about more diverse histories to show students
that history can be relatable to them
and it can be accessible.
And there's people that look like them
at these moments of time in history.
The only time at the moment
the young South Asian women see themselves in the curriculum
is maybe in a PSHE lesson when they learn about Malala
or when they're learning about FGM and grooming.
It's all these narratives that are around,
kind of tropes around South Asian women
and the way that we've been stereotyped and labeled
rather than anything that can be kind of empowering
and inspiring and aspirational,
there's so little of that kind of included.
But ultimately towards the end of that chapter,
I have highlighted the fact that politically,
as governments change, as policies change,
as leaders change, that curriculum will change as well.
So putting the onus back on us
on kind of an individual level
about the kind of self-education
that we can be doing for ourselves.
So we are not just dependent on the classroom
and we're not just dependent on the education system
to provide us with this knowledge.
That there's books to read, there's videos to watch,
there's documentaries, there's literature,
fiction, nonfiction, there's inspiring role models
perhaps in their communities that they can look to
to provide themselves with the education
that they might not be getting within the classrooms.
- And when we go beyond school
and we go beyond the curriculum,
what do South Asian women experience in the workplace?
Are there specific things that they're coming up against
due to their background and the fact that everyone else
has the kind of the white vision?
- Yes, the white vision, absolutely.
I think that's the perfect way to describe it.
It's really interesting when we kind of look
at the experiences of South Asian women in the workplace,
because academically before that point,
they're doing exceptionally well
and South Asian girls academically,
some of the second smartest in the country,
we follow closely behind Chinese boys and girls.
So academically, we're doing really well.
We're getting the grades, we're getting the qualifications.
We then kind of go on to university.
A lot of South Asian girls are then kind of going on
to doing undergraduate degrees
and maybe kind of postgraduate degrees.
But then something seems to happen
when we get to the workplace where all those aspirations,
that hard work we've been putting in
doesn't seem to be valued.
And I think a lot of that comes down
to how the rest of society see Asian women.
And for so long, we have been labeled
and we have been stereotyped as quite passive, quite docile,
quite weak and quiet compared to other women.
And I think alongside those labels,
the minority myth of us also being very hardworking
is sometimes put against us.
It's really interesting kind of hearing some of the stories
of South Asian women,
of some of the things that have been said to them
in the workplace about some of these labels and stereotypes
and these microaggressions that they might be facing
on a daily basis.
Things about the way they look, things about their identity,
their culture, their name was a really popular one.
And the way that I've described these microaggressions
and micro-assaults are that they might just seem
like meaningless comments here and there
and they might seem like they're harmless,
but it's these kind of daily little paper cuts
that are happening that really impact us over time.
And it's this sense of hyper visibility.
That everybody can see we are there as women of color,
but they're not really seeing us.
They're not really seeing us for who we are.
And a lot of South Asian women were describing
that they are one person within the home.
And when they leave the home and enter the workplace,
they're morphing into this other person
and they put this other armor on
and become this whole new person
when they come to work everyday,
and they're finding that exhausting.
That tiredness seems to be something
that a lot of South Asian women and women in general
were really resonating with.
Why do I have to change who I am every day to be accepted?
Why do I have to come closer to whiteness
to be accepted in the workplace?
And the advice that I was giving in that chapter
is how to deal with those moments when they do come up.
When you face these daily microaggressions,
sitting in silence about it
and perhaps never doing anything about it
is not only gonna be a detriment to yourself
and your own self-confidence,
but also will impact those around you as well
to not improve and to not change.
So putting a little bit of the onus on ourselves
of standing up for ourselves when those moments do arise,
but also in the wider sense of what workplaces
can be doing better.
And there's lots of conversations going on about that,
about diversity and inclusiveness happening
in the workplace, but rather than seeing it
as kind of a tick box exercise,
doing it in a meaningful way.
And the book is suggesting
some of those kind of more meaningful ways to do that
so South Asian women can feel happier
when they enter the workplace.
- And what would you say you are most hopeful for
for South Asian girls?
- Most hopeful, I love that.
What I'm really hoping for is, I guess,
one of the main aims of this book
and what was at the nucleus of this book
was a sense of healing.
And I know that sounds very lofty
and quite a heavy thing to expect from this book
but it is this sense of healing
that I hope a lot of South Asian women and girls
feel moving forward
because I do consider us the generation of healing.
And I kind of look at perhaps my mom's generation
or my grandmom's generation,
and it's something I've highlighted in the book
about this intergenerational trauma
that have been passed on from generation to generation,
where those women before us and our ancestors
may have never necessarily had the time or access
or privilege to work on their mental health.
If we think about my parents' generation
who were migrating from India during the early '60s,
they had no time to think about their mental health.
They had to set up a foundation for our families.
They were working two, three jobs,
and it was just buckle up and carry on.
There was no time to really turn inwards
and think about how their mental wellbeing was going.
Whereas now the current generation
can definitely take that time.
And I think we need to kind of tap into that
so that we can heal.
And with that healing,
will also come a sense of self empowerment,
more self confidence
and that strong foundation of self love.
So yeah, I'm hoping for healing.
- Brilliant, well, thank you so much.
It's been such a pleasure to chat
and I really enjoyed reading the book.
- Thank you.
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