Aisha-Asher Morgan is a writer, public speaker and student of English Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Though born and bred in the United Kingdom, it is the Caribbean (or, rather, more specifically, the Jamaican countryside) which forms the thematic backbone of much of Aisha's writing, as she explores her delicate relationship with her Jamaican grandparents, their many migrations, and, eventually, their deaths which set in motion an catastrophic decline into disconnection, depression, and familial conflict.
Aisha talks about:
The story behind her pen name, “dotty daughter” How she conceptualized the complexity of her racial identity growing up and the process of seamlessly negotiating contrasting cultural contexts such as being half Jamaican, half English, Muslim and born & bred in London How she coped with feeling frustrated over being misunderstood What makes her feel most connected to herself We tackle the question: What if home isn't a place or a person but us reconnecting with ourselves and rekindling the fire that exists within ourselves? What Jamaica means to her, her fondest memories of life there and how her grandmother was her greatest female role model She talks about the power of daydreaming, how healthy of a habit it is and we discuss whether this has any link with not feeling at home in London and constantly feeling the need to ‘zone out’ How depression and loss of love facilitated self-growth and strengthened her spirituality How she will preserve her cultural heritage Lastly, she recites a choreo-poem written for her grandmother Inightful gems from Aisha's sharings:
"When I got older, the complexities, challenges and shifts in my identity started to take form. A great part of that was coming to the realization that how I see myself is not necessarily how others see me. That has been the single greatest challenge of my life."
"It's a complex place to be in when you're certain and confident in how you see yourself but others don't see what you see."
"The tensions that you grow up having to experience dealing with the realization that perhaps the person you think you are is not how others see you. Even if you affirm yourself, others may not see you that way."
"I always had the capacity as a child, of daydreaming and fantasizing. I would put myself in different hypothetical situations and navigate how I would play out in those situations in tandem with my identity."
"I was given a root within which I had to exist but I had a way of transcending those realities even if they were imaginary."
"Daydreaming is not always viewed as a wonderful thing. At work, I daydream a lot and that is because I happen to be in a job I don't enjoy. That is my way of transcending the mundaneness of what I currently do."
"People tell me the first sign of madness is daydreaming. I think it's unfair of you to write something as that off as a sign of serious mental illness. I tell people daydreaming for me is almost a spiritual thing, something healthy."
"If I was completing stuck in the reality of reality, I would just be very sad and depressed because the older that you get and grow aware, you realize the world is not as beautiful as a place as you might think. My way of healthily transcending those things is being at a distance from reality. That is how I maintain the healthiness of my mind. If anything, this is the one thing stopping me from going crazy. Perhaps this is something that only creative people understand."
"As a child I would project myself into stories I would read and envision myself as a certain character. One of those narratives was Peter Pan. The idea of a fantasy world that exists beyond earth fascinated me."
"I came to realize that home wasn't actually a place but rooted in a sentiment or a feeling. James Bordon actually speaks about this: Perhaps home is not a place but just an irrevocable condition. This validated everything that I felt."
"I am mourning the loss of my grandparents but I am also mourning the loss of Jamaica. Their house in Jamaica means a lot to my personal conception of Jamaica. Now that both my grandparents have gone and their house is being sold, it always feels as though I feel as though I have no physical connection to Jamaica anymore."
"People around me found it humorous to be born and raised in a country and not seeing yourself as truly belonging from that country."
"When you are trying to articulate yourself, you are trying to explain yourself and no one is getting it. The hard thing was being made to feel like a complicated person."
"Even now when I feel myself undergoing a severe state of anxiety I will write it out, read it out or pray it out. In times where I feel like a misunderstood person."
"Cycling and swinging give me a sense of enjoyment. Public speaking and being around good feminine energy helps me a lot in feeling connected to myself."
"Daydreaming empowers me because for me it's a form of optimism. Not only do I daydream about transcendental and abstract things but also the vision I have for my future. I can leave behind the baggage of the past and that conceptually gives me strength."
"I'm a firm believer in energy and the people you surround yourself with."
"Loss and death are rites of life that you don't know how you will react to except that you know it will impact you in some major way."
"I loved and admired my grandparents wholeheartedly and all the more since I know their narrative involved uprooting themselves and moving to U.K. to provide a better life to their family and the kind of sacrifices they went through."
"A lot of my successes and achievements in life were because of them. My love for them was always tinged with an emotion of pain because there was a physical separation between us.
"The longing for somebody but not being able to see them every day. I cherished seeing them every time I would because I wouldn't know when I would next see them."
"The first discovery and revelation being unexpectedly asked by my father to wash my grandma's body. Even though my grandmother wasn't Muslim, my father saw the beauty and honor in a tradition like that. I remember the moment he asked me to do that, it was an immense feeling of dread. I didn't feel as though I had the strength to do that since it had been 4 years since I had last seen my grandmother."
"The whole trip to Jamaica I was building myself up to a state of courage to be able to do it. I remember the actual moment I did do it: it was strange that I walked into the room and didn't have the fears and anxieties that I thought I would have. She looked exactly like I had always seen her so it wasn't a shock to the system. There was something that overcame me and I told myself 'this is the last and final thing that I can do for my grandmother as her only granddaughter' and I saw the honor in it at the time."
"I learnt about how family relationships break down when someone passes away. Death is a strange process to go through. It's always like the pinnacle of a new Discovery because you learn so much about yourself and the people around you."
"I learnt so much about my grandmother when she passed away. You learn so much about a person and get to see intimate things you never saw before. While I went through her items, I found that she owned a Quran and that she used to read it because she highlighted different quotes in the margins which was almost like a life changing moment for me as I always grew up with the idea that my grandmother was a strong Methodist Christian. Even though I knew she had a well rounded open mindedness about her, I still always saw her as Christian and that is all she ever read around. I discovered she had a personal relationship with Islam and that completely transformed the way I saw her but it was also tinged with sadness because I wished I could have had certain conversations with her, where religion was concerned. Conversations I never contemplated on having before and that is where writing comes in: to fill the void of conversations you never had."
'Sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom and losing everything that you believed about yourself to then actually realize "this is a new truth, a new wisdom that I wasn't able to fully grasp before but now I am emotionally and mentally capable of grasping it."
"There's something about having everything taken away from you and stripped from you so you're almost left raw and naked to then relearn"
"It's been very liberating from a spiritual perspective because I have never been as close to God than once I went through depression and dropped out of university - feeling as though everything around me was crumbling. It wasn't something that shattered my faith, in fact it strengthened my faith. If anything, I can now turn around and say, on a humble level, I'm grateful for how things have turned out."
"There are some trials you have to undergo in order to be reborn and discover a new sense of self and come out of the ashes."
"I just think, particularly as women, there are a lot of anxieties that women go through because we are taught to place limits on how we think and the things we should achieve and so it's radical to hear a woman say 'I'm a woman but I'm a phenomenal woman'.
"In my 22 years of living, the greatest irony of my life has been that every single stable thing I've known about myself has been thrown into question or made unstable."
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