My Mum is White: Exorcising 'Half-Caste' Ghosts
When I first hear Professor Adam Danquah speak, I imagine it is going to take a while to overcome our professional distance. Chancing my hand, I mention my mum’s drinking. By the tone of his reply, I know he has experienced the loneliness of a white woman ostracised, trapped outside of society, because of her relationship with a black man and the toll it has taken on her life and their brown child. Using our complementary skills — artist, psychologist —over 8 private mutual therapy sessions we open our lower-socio-economic past. Allowing us to be who we really are. We learn to trust each other. Building an emotionally safe space to invite our participants into.
Challenges the project addresses
‘Half-caste’ feelings, dissociated through inter-personal, inter-political and inter-racial trauma, under the regime of a societal caste system.
Invited into the psychology practise as a pale skin safe black, the shame of Adam’s kinky hair curl in the bathroom sink, and their historic offence, drives him out of the prestigious setting. Is it their caste privilege — or Adam’s internalised caste shame?
I struggle with: My dad is yam. My mum is cabbage & ribs. My dad, third world. My mum, western. My dad fears money. My mum calls him mean. When the world becomes woke and black lives matter, my white mum is no longer supposed to matter to me.
We want to open these multilayered conversations with 6 other mixed-race professionals. Who may find they are not black enough. But are never white in any circumstance. A gallery makes the implications a public conversation.
Aims
We aim to synthesis: memoir; psychotherapy, visual art, social anthropology, history, performance art to create an exhibition; and immersive experience; that integrates ‘half-caste’ feelings. By materialising a forest of 16 wall-high, 8-station mind-maps. [See tools] That encapsulate our trauma. Blinds down. Moonlit. In a grotesquely lit fairytale forest, 8 professional and 56 audience members [see audience] ritually exorcise our childhood ghosts. Blinds up. Dappled sunlit forest, 8 professionals each host 7 audience members on their picnic rug. Sharing their basket as they plan their adulthood.
Objectives
HOME. 32-day residency. 4 x 8-day cycles. Me, Adam and 6 mixed-race professionals.
Cycle 1. 8 days. Individuals generate 8 memoirs.
One per day, we each write a memoir ignited by my 12-words writing technique.
Unpacked with Adam’s psychology skills.
I use 8 images from each memoir to generate a wall-high 8-station mind-map.
Cycle 2. 4 days. Group unpacks memoirs 1 — 4
Using 3 tools. 1. Wilkerson’s Caste. 2. Fraiberg’s Ghosts in the Nursery. 3. Mentalisation-based therapy (MBT), we unpack each memoir.
Using 8 images from unpacking, I generate a wall-high 8-station mind-map.
Cycle 3. 4 days. Group Unpack memoirs 5 — 8. Same method.
Day 24 a forest of 16 moonlit, wall-high 8-station mind-maps engulfs us.
·Cycle 4. 3 days. Inside the forest. Night-to-day
17.09.24 Blinds down. Moonlit. Fairytale forest. 8 professionals, 56 audience members undergo embodied grief counselling to exorcise the ghosts we have conjured. Blinds up. Sun dappled. Picnic. Informally generating projects.
18.09.24. Group picnic in the forest bathed in sunlight.
19.09.24 Group and visitors evaluate the project with 8-station mind-maps.
Visitors experience during opening hours.
Forewarned in my blog and the Whitworth’s social media, The Reno @ the Whitworth visitors embraced an evolving exhibition. Returning to see how it looks now often.
Cycle 1. What the visitors will see.
Morning day 1. Me. Adam. The memoir writer — private. Empty walls.
Afternoon 1. Me. A single wall-high 8-station mind-map. I welcome questions.
Morning day 2. Me. Adam. Memoir writer — private. Single mind-map.
Afternoon 2. Me. 2 wall-high 8-station mind-maps. Questions welcome.
Morning 3. Me. Adam. Memoir writer. 2 mind-maps.
Afternoon 3. Me. 3 mind-maps.
This will continue for 8 days. Now the gallery walls are half full of mind-maps.
Cycle 2. What the audience/visitors will experience.
Friday. Free. Ticketed. Me, Adam teaches audience Wilkerson’s 8 pillars of caste.
Weekend. No participants. Visitors roam. Leave feedback.
Morning day 4. Group. Private. Whitworth visitors were fine. They view 8 wall-high mind-maps & audience Caste work on school-like sugar paper. Feedback.
Afternoon day 4. Me, 8 memoir mind-maps. 1 unpacking wall-high mind-map.
This will continue for 4 days.
Day 8. Friday. Free. Ticketed. Me, Adam teaches audience Ghosts in the Nursery.
Cycle 3. Same as cycle 2.
Friday. Free. Ticketed. Teach audience mentalization.
Cycle 4. What the audience will participate in.
17.09.25. 56 places. Prioritising who can produce 2 of the 3 tickets, audience members join professionals to undergo embodied grief counselling exorcising ghosts. Blinds up. Sun dappled. Picnic. Informally generating projects.
18.09.25. Morning. Final Fri. I teach group, audience, 8-station mind-mapping.
19.09.25. Afternoon. They use, to answer 4 evaluation questions and generate a single good idea we will follow up by email in the first instance.
Aesthetics
Designed by the Whitworth curator, mixed-race Hannah Vollam, HOME’s gallery is studio. Refreshments. Relevant books. Mess. Taking participants and visitors away from institutional gallery boxes like churches still entombing the arts today. 8-station mind-maps swallow HOME’s walls. Frenetic. Key life scenes. Associated emotions. The gallery immersed in our collective subconsciousness bathes visitors in our experiences. A beautiful forest. Immediately pleasing. It draws them in to examine each tree.
Tools
1. Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste. Penguin UK. Excavates the correlations between the ancient Hindu caste system, transatlantic slave trade, and Nazi racial supremacism in Germany. Focusing on ‘Eight Pillars of Caste’.
2. Fraiberg, Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to impaired infant-mother relationships. ‘In every nursery there are ghosts. The visitors from the unremembered past of the parents, the uninvited guests at the christening.’ Very specific ghosts enter a ‘half-caste’ nursery. 1940s, GIs; 1950s, Windrush; 1960s, Civil Rights; 1970, Black Power; 1980s, The Riots; 2020; George Floyd’s death and Black Lives Matter. Though the dominant caste and the subordinate caste comprise the child’s body, mind, soul, DNA, the world at large allows that child to acknowledge only the subordinate caste.
3. Mentalisation-based therapy (MBT) is the ability to think about thinking. It helps to make sense of thoughts, beliefs, wishes and feelings and to link these to our actions and behaviours. Mentalisation-based therapy promotes self-control, stability and specific skills to remain thinking in the face of difficult feelings and relationships. We will use 8-stations to support assimilation of these skills.
8-Stations
8-stations. Developed over 25 years. Used to generate all my art. Derived from mind-mapping. Enables me to capture my thoughts in images. Example, Columbus discovers America. A galleon. 1492 on its side. Association: First Nation teepees. Associations have associations. As you draw these aligned to their station you inhabit your subconscious. You can analyse with your conscious mind. Each mind-map evolves from 8 stations. With values like tarot cards.
Derived from mind-mapping
1. Fallen angel protagonists.
2. Shading canvas wash.
3. Mask hidden.
4. Recurring like the moon’s cycle.
5. Change is forced.
6. Creating a world supporting climate.
7. Ghosts emerge.
8. The action, hammered, forges a sword.
These 8 simple stations evolve into complex worlds
Application. Benefits. Impact.
If you want to keep your distance, you can safely witness the evolving exhibition. If you want to exorcise ghosts, you can participate in the immersive experience. If you want to shape future projects, you can use 8-station mind-mapping to digest your past and present immersive experience to generates a single idea you can mine with your chosen professional. My Mum is White is a succinct methodology. Globally replicable in art galleries, museums, theatre spaces and psychology practises.
Evaluation and Aftercare
Including audience, at the end of each we’ll dedicate 30 minutes to an A4 of 4 questions.
What did we do?
What worked?
What could have been done better?
What did we learn?
12.12.25. Friday. Me, Adam will spend a day with the professionals & visitors.
Morning. Write a 12-words generated memoir titled what did we do. Share.
Buffet lunch.
Afternoon. Use 8-stations to ask: What do we do now? Share.
Schedule the next meeting.
Dissemination
UoM Creative Manchester will facilitate network connections. Internally. Externally. Strategic industry partners. Create project awareness Recruit participants. Publicise engagement activities. Curate, organise and deliver a research café of academics, students, artists. Evaluate. Event survey. Disseminate findings at the end of the project.
Publication
MY MUM IS WHITE: Exorcising ‘Half-Caste’ Ghosts will be told as a triptych.
Part one. ACE application. What we planned.
Part two. HOME Residency. What we did.
Part three. What we built.
Composed of photos 16 x 8-station mind-maps generated. Participant feedback. Visitor feedback. Theory. Process. Analysed outcomes. That tells the journey towards greater self-acceptance for those who contribute towards and witness this work.
We will research and contact potential agents and publishers. Plus, potential global museum and galleries offering MY MUM IS WHITE interventions. Widening it beneficiaries. Deepening research. Growing its book audience.
Nutshell
06.08.24. Adam writes, ‘If UK society constitutes a dominant ‘White’ caste and subordinate ‘Black’ caste and never the twain shall meet, what happens when they not only do so, but come together pro-creatively? Rather than giving the lie to a supposedly natural order, the babies born of White-Black unions were labelled half-caste and left to bear the brunt of shame, denial and a foot in both camps but homes in neither.
30.09.24. Our last sessions, Adam says, ‘My mum visited for the weekend. I didn’t feel as triggered. I was able to sit easier with who she is. Who I am. Who we are to each other.’
The difference in the way he is inhabiting his skin, is what I’m looking to achieve.