Welcome to Cornwall: Kernow a’gas dynergh
University is sold to you as the best years of your life. At 18 years old I was naive enough to believe that this was the case. Travelling to university on the other side of the country was exciting. I felt ready to explore and enjoy this newfound freedom! I revelled in my freedom: leaving my student halls at the time I’d usually be ready for bed and heading home only as the sun rose. No wonder that in my first, dreaded two-hour 9am seminar I didn’t even realise that the lecturer had called me by the wrong name.
I was slumped in my chair, and it seemed like a miracle I’d made it to class. After a round of introductions, we broke into smaller groups to discuss the text, Gulliver’s Travels. As our conversations drew to a close, the lecturer asked the groups to take turns sharing our findings with the class. At this point a wave of nausea hit me and I focused all my energy on settling my nerves. By the time we got to my group there was not much left to say, so no one spoke.
My lecturer encouraged us. He said each of our names. Except, he didn’t say my name… He called me by someone else’s name. I later learnt that he had called me by the name of the only other Asian girl in my year. At the time I found it funny. I went home and told the story to my flatmates, who laughed along with me.
The humour soon wore off as my time in Cornwall continued. A string of incidents like this – both inside and outside of the classroom – were beginning to make me feel disheartened and uncomfortable. A friend of mine shared that he’d been followed around the Tesco in Falmouth. Another friend of mine was verbally and physically abused by a bouncer. I got told by a man in a club that he was never usually attracted to women like me.
I grew up in an incredibly diverse community in North West London. I had genuinely never experienced what it meant to be an ethnic minority. I’d been surrounded by people who looked like me, and by people who spoke like me. I was also equally exposed to people who don’t look or sound like me. However, in Cornwall – according to the 2011 census – only 2% of the population identify as other than White British. All of a sudden, being a brown woman was my defining characteristic. In the classroom, too, I felt as though I was asked to weigh in on discussions from my position as a minority ethnic woman.
In that first-year module it seemed like people would turn to look at me when they made a point about the role of race in a novel. Or they’d ask me whether I thought it was fair to say that a novel or poem was commenting on race.
I felt limited in the comments I could make in those class discussions. I felt I was always being asked to approach things from the perspective of race, or to consider the intersection of race and sexuality. The feeling of being boxed into that identity shaped my academic experience. It dictated the essays I wrote, the weekly reading I chose to do, and the conversations I got involved with in seminars. Why should I inevitably be obliged to focus my studies on race or women?
Two years on, I’ve seen a lot of change in my academic experience. As a cohort, we have grown together. We understand that personal experience can help to form insight and analysis, but it is not the sole basis from which literary understanding comes. Yes, there continued to be misnaming incidents, but I have grown more confident in calling them out. In fact, my classmates often called it out before I had to. At Penryn, we have learnt as a collective to help and support each other through our academic journeys. We’ve created relationships with our lecturers that don’t imitate the teacher-pupil relationship that you see in school. Rather, they put us on equal footing, which allows us to feel confident addressing things in the classroom that make us uncomfortable.
