Elsie #mixedmonday
My name is Elsie, I use she/her pronouns. I live in Bristol, I am a mother and a mental health practitioner by profession, but in the last 3 years I have been running a floristry business- @divinabotanica.
I grow flowers at @bridgefarm_bristol, I sell the flowers, and I also explore the intersection between floristry and mental health. I use floristry as a tool for nature connection and I lead workshops exploring those themes.
I grew up in Gloucester and was born in Cheltenham. My mum is Black South African and my dad is British. They met in South Africa during the apartheid, so obviously they couldnt be together, it was illegal for them to even entertain the idea, so through much scheming they hatched a plan to get my mum out of the town she lived in in South Africa, onto a plane and over to England.
My mum arrived in the UK in 1893 in Bishops Cleeve, a small village outside of Cheltenham. It was extremely rural and extremely white and she was the only black person in the village for a long time. My parents moved to Cheltenham in around 1984 when they bought their own place, and it was really racist. It was atrocious, my brother had a really hard time and was bullied a lot, in quite severe ways throughout his childhood. Cheltenham is a predominantly white area and has a quite interesting demographic as there is a really strong class divide.. They then moved to Gloucester in the hopes it would be more multicultural, but it wasn't as we lived in the suburbs and it was again really white, so we were the only black people there. I am one of 3, I have an older brother and a younger sister, and growing up, altogether there were about 20 children in the area, and we were the only black kids. Living there came with a lot of challenges. My upbringing in predominantly white spaces.
How would you describe your ethnicity?
It depends who I’m speaking to. I think there is a chameleon-esque aspect of my personality that also comes from being mixed race and not having a fixed identity. My identity shifts depending on who is perceiving me. When I was younger people would describe me as half caste, and at the time I didn’t really mind because I didn't understand the colonial legacy of the term. I don’t really like the term mixed race, because of that sense of shifting identity, it doesn't feel like there's anything concrete or fixed to hold onto, that's why it doesn’t sit really well with me. A lot of people call me black, and for a while I did identify as black, but that’s more in question these days.
Has your mixed-ness influenced your career in anyway?
Yes, in as much as being raised by the parents I was raised by, has led me to where I am. Very much from my mum's side I have a very deep relationship with spirituality. From my dad’s side, I come from 7 generations of farm labourers. Their relationship with this land lives within me and I feel very at home here, and I feel lucky to have the relationship with this space. So I think working with the land was always going to be something I did. The way in which I work with the land is influenced by my South African heritage.
I started working in mental health through a social justice route. I worked with people who had been detained under the mental health act, and I worked as an advocate for them informing them of their rights and helping them to enact those rights within a hospital setting. I think my capacity to empathise with people with poor mental health probably comes from being raised by my mother, a mum who needed lots of support growing up. I think that compassion has just extended itself into my working way.
If you could describe your mixed identity in one word, what would it be?
Hope.
What is the best thing about being mixed heritage?
Being melanated. Melanin is beautiful, and I'm really glad I'm a melanated person. It feels good! I’m my grandmother's dream. This is what she really wanted for my mum. It was her dream for her daughter to go to the UK and to live in this county and have access to everything we have access to. My melanation is something that gives me access to my grandmother and her experience which is a blessing. When I think of melanin I think of the African sun, that continent and I think of the richness of that heritage, and that's an exquisite thing.
