Title: ‘I lost my hands, I guess a knife and fork will do.’
This project was an exploration of cultural belonging, using my family and it’s Tamil heritage as a case study. Through starting conversations with other multicultural people, as well as my own family, I have realised that I am not alone in feeling disconnected from my heritage, and have gained some comfort from this realisation. I suppose this whole research journey has allowed me to recognise the obvious, which is that we may never be content with the extent to which we engage with our cultural heritage, and this is something to accept. I hope that my final publication will allow multicultural people to find a community in the realisation that, we are maybe all a little lost.
My outcome includes interviews of family members across the generations, ranging from my younger cousins to my great uncles. I ask questions such as, ‘How do you engage with Tamil culture?’ or ‘What is being Sri Lankan all about?’. Each individual had a different viewpoint. I think that the breadth of answers within one family shows that there is truly no standard to meet, when it comes to identifying with a culture. Within the concertina, I also included instructional elements based on my primary research. As a means of becoming closer to my Tamil heritage, I learned to drape a saree, wearing it daily over a two week period. I also learned to cook curries from my parents, which I am now passing to those who may not have the means of attaining such knowledge. Whilst researching, I found that learning about a culture from word of mouth is uniquely trustworthy, and I am trying to emulate that process through these informal, instructional pages – where I am teaching what I learned.
