Girlhood Read online

  I like to go to school, I want to have classes; if we have free hours I get bored. I would like to study medicine, if I study this I would like to specialize in traumatology. I like the type of work they do, I have seen it up close with so many injuries that I had playing ball, doing another sport, or simply because of how awkward I am.

  How nice to get home and that my mother welcomes me with a plate of homemade food. After lunch, I did a bit of schoolwork. After taking a little nap, I got up because it was time to go train.

  Sometimes I arrive late, but that is my role in the group, being late always and everywhere. I do not say it proudly, but I accept it. I am unpunctual, but I try to be as responsible as possible. I’m working on changing that, I do not like it, but many times there are other factors that I don’t take into account, like traffic, or the odd thing to do at the last moment as I leave at home. Yes, I know, I’m a disaster.

  At practice, after hearing an instruction from Juli many times and trying it, today I was able to do it correctly. I have a weak kick when I hit the ball, but seconds before, a thought passes through my head that I have heard a million times from Juli, “To hit the ball hard, you make your abs firm, the strength comes from there accompanied with the movement of both legs: the one that steps firmly to give it direction and the other with the movement accompanied by the whole body,” and bam I hit the ball. It worked well and it was not by accident, I felt good about myself and in a certain way proud, much more so when I hear her words of congratulation.

  I often think about what would have happened if I, at 8 years old, had not wanted to play football like my dad or my older brother. At first, I only saw them from home, I saw how the kids got out on the field to play and train, I saw more and more girls of all ages coming. I was encouraged to go out to play with them. At first I was afraid, of not knowing how to play, of not knowing them, for being small and for my physique.

  I started to go out more often as the days went by. I really felt comfortable with the support of my coaches, Juliana and Mónica, who took care of the bigger girls but who were also with us.

  I also had great support from my mom and dad, who told me, “If all those girls are playing, why are you not going to be able to do it?” So with time I left the fears I had behind and I was able to play freely, play in a place where we are all equal, where size, color, physicality, sexuality, or tastes do not make a difference. On the field we are all partners, we are sisters who share many things, from training, matches, tournaments, chores, birthdays, in-depth conversations full of emotions, joys, feelings of pride, sadness, tears, and above all laughs and smiles.

  Every day we learn something new, which can be something technical or something for our lives.

  Thank you to La Nuestra Fútbol Femenino for connecting me with Alejandra.

  Lightning rounds are often shorter matches. In tournaments, lightning rounds allow more teams to play in a short amount of time.

  Amiya

  14 years old

  London, United Kingdom

  What music do you like?

  Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Queen, and AC/DC are among my favourite bands. I also listen to some ’90s music here and there, like Nirvana or Nine Inch Nails or TLC. Duran Duran is my fave band from the ’80s.

  What are your favorite films?

  The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Beetlejuice, Heathers, and Back to the Future. I think, at times, that I was born in the wrong generation. I’m an ’80s kid at heart.

  What are your favorite subjects?

  History. I love to learn about different societies through time and how mankind has evolved over the last millennia.

  Tell us about your best friends.

  I’ve had the same best friend since 2017. Her name’s Sadja. She really likes Eminem (the rapper). I’ve got another best friend who’s a boy, and his name’s Hassan. He likes watching anime and playing video games. I’ve got two other close friends, Zenab and Marwa. Zenab’s a talented artist, and Marwa is addicted to Netflix.

  Amiya is fourteen and a half years old and lives in London, one of the most vibrant cities in the world. She describes her neighborhood as one that’s both close to the bustle of the city and also where foxes roam at night. She lives around the corner from a big park that fills up with children in the summertime. Her neighborhood was bombed heavily during World War II, so many houses, including hers, were rebuilt in the late 1940s.

  Amiya has a close-knit family and she lives with her mother, stepfather, younger brothers, and cat. While she doesn’t live with her biological father, they remain close and she sees him regularly.

  “When I’m not at school, I typically attend my swim classes and my Chinese kickboxing classes. I meet up with my friends every now and then, and we’ll go to the cinema or go shopping,” she says. Her interests both inside and outside school are wide-ranging. She loves law, sociology, criminology, astrophysics, ballet, writing, and swimming.

  In one of her diary entries, Amiya writes about wanting to be an astrophysicist. But when I ask her what she dreams of doing when she grows up, she says, “I don’t necessarily know what I want to do when I grow up. I love a variety of things . . . it’s too hard to choose now.”

  When she was younger, Amiya wanted to become an actress. “At some point, I enrolled in Sylvia Young, a renowned drama school in central London. But then I stopped going. I’m currently trying to look for acting classes but they’re all very expensive,” she says. ◊

  Amiya lives in a very diverse city and a country that’s growing increasingly racially diverse. She’s one of 1.2 million people—about two percent of the population—in England who identify as multiracial, according to the 2011 census.9

  But what does that mean for Amiya’s daily life?

  In one diary entry, Amiya starts to describe a trip to a beauty shop to buy hair product, but it turns into a thoughtful exploration on race, identity, and otherhood. She writes eloquently about growing up in a world where Western beauty standards and culture often mean that hair like hers isn’t seen as beautiful or professional. And about the specific experience of not being treated with respect and feeling like she’s being treated like an “other”—a curiosity, instead of an equally respected person—when strangers touch her hair.

  In Amiya’s words, “I’m not an animal in London Zoo, thank you very much, I am a human being.”

  Amiya isn’t alone in her experience. Many black women in the UK and other countries deal with judgment and the policing of their hair. Pop music star Solange perhaps said it best, in a 2016 interview with NPR about her song “Don’t Touch My Hair.” “Black hair has such a significance in black culture. And also, it’s such an insular experience. Growing up, being a young girl, transitioning to junior high school, then into adulthood, the hair journey of a black woman is so specific, and it’s really hard. Your hair can send so many different messages to so many different people in the world that it becomes political. It becomes social . . . It encompasses a much bigger conversation of appropriation, of ownership, of protected space.” 10 ◊

  Dear Diary,

  Today I woke up not feeling like myself. For some reason, I feel so unhappy. And the worst thing is, I have no real reason to feel like this. I know that I live in a great place with a ton of opportunities, and I have a beautiful home, a nice big garden, two pets, electronics, and a functional loving family. I just don’t know why I feel so sad. Maybe it’s because every day is a repeat of the last.

  I wake up to the sound of my Echo Dot, 6 a.m. sharp every morning. I go through my daily hygiene routine, ride my bike, get dressed, feed my cat, walk down the road to the bus stop, wait a couple of minutes for the big red bus to approach, which will take me straight to the place I’ll spend the next 8 systematic hours of my life.

  Of course, I should be grateful for the great educational system I’ve been born i
nto, blah blah blah . . . I hear all the time from teachers that I should feel grateful that I’ve got a free education. I am grateful. Never said I wasn’t. I don’t consider myself a spoilt brat. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I should always be content with the teaching with a big smile on my face, and act like some clone of happiness.

  I come home and I binge-watch some shows on Netflix and hear my parents moaning about chores I haven’t done in the house.

  What about the things I have done? No one ever drones on for hours on end about that.

  Everyone in this black-and-white world seems to solely focus on the negatives, and it seriously bugs me.

  Dear Diary,

  I cleaned my room today, turns out I own hundreds of clothes I’ve never worn, and some I never knew even existed. Also, I actually managed to leave the house today. Whoopee! A beautiful, glistening gold medal for my fantastic achievement. At around 6 p.m., as the rain was pelting down from the sky like literal bullets, I got on the bus down the road to a hair centre that also specializes in beauty cosmetics. I bought some hair stuff from there: flexi rods, Cantu curl activator cream, and some Australian mousse. I’ve always struggled with my really thick hair since I was a little girl, so I’m always having to buy new products and test them out. At times, I wished I was born with curly hair that all the other mixed race girls have. The hair that’s both admired and accepted. It came to the point where 5 years ago, when I was in year 5 or 6 in primary school, I actually used a permanent relaxer in my hair; I regret that stupid decision of mine till this day. But hey, silly decisions are there to be a lesson for whenever I plan on doing something idiotic like using chemicals in my hair again.

  I was born with an afro and I must embrace it, because that’s how God intended it to be. I may occasionally feel like the odd one out, but that’s who I am. I’m Amiya. I’m mixed-race, biracial, polyethnic, multiracial, “half-caste,” whatever you want to call it (but not half-caste because I find it incredibly offensive), and I’m PROUD to be . . . Finally.

  It’s also made me realise that as black women—and black men, too—we’re constantly put down because of our hair unless it’s conventionally straight or curly. It’s bloody irritating. Why is straight European/Asian hair only socially accepted, yet black hair is seen as being “too political” or “not professional enough.” Oh, I’m ever-so sorry, I didn’t know that my culture isn’t acceptable enough for some. My tight coils must be affecting them so much that they simply can’t go about their day without making a comment about how “I should straighten it” or “wash it more often so that the ringlets are much more defined and not so nappy.”

  And I find it very rude when people just touch my hair without my permission. I’m not an animal in London Zoo, thank you very much, I am a human being. Sure, they may not realise what they’re doing, and I get it—black hair is fascinating and different to those who are not accustomed to it. But still don’t touch it.

  Dear Diary,

  I want to become an astrophysicist when I’m older, but I’m worried I won’t be able to be because of my poor maths grade. I excel in science, yet my maths is diabolical (it doesn’t make any sense). It’s terrible. Physics is heavily related to maths yet I’m so laughably bad at it it hurts.

  I don’t just pass all my subjects at school, I excel at them. But maths is the only thing letting my report down. I’ve been revising maths much more recently and going over my weakest subjects. But no matter what I do, including all this extra work I put in, I just can’t seem to achieve higher than 30% in any one of my mathematical tests. Even my friends get higher than me, and it makes no sense because I put in a lot more effort than them.

  My dad and grandma keep saying they want to get me a maths tutor and I’m glad they want to help me. But my grandma is living in Africa right now with my Ghanaian family, so it’ll be hard for her to get me a tutor halfway across the world. My dad’s a major procrastinator so I doubt it’ll ever happen from him.

  Anna

  14 years old

  Sydney, Australia

  What are your favorite subjects?

  English, history, Latin, and Mandarin

  What are your favorite books?

  It’s a long list, but they include a collection of Jane Austen’s works, Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Useless Magic by Florence Welch (the singer from Florence and the Machine, my favorite band).

  You may also notice the doll in the picture—I’ve had her since I was 3— she’s Alice, from Alice in Wonderland, one of my favorite children’s books.

  When I asked Anna about herself, she shared a long list of her favorite books—from Jane Austen’s novels to Anna Karenina. Books are central to her life. Even her dog is named Boo Radley, after a character in To Kill a Mockingbird, a book she loves.

  Anna lives in Australia with her parents, who are both doctors in the same hospital (and who, she’s quick to note, also love to read); her younger brother; and her dog. She spends her days going to school, spending time with family, doing homework, going to piano lessons (“I love to play the piano, but have no natural talent,” she says), and reading books. Anna says she doesn’t know exactly “who or what I want to be when I’m older” but shared a list of the things she is certain about:

  • I want to write and publish poetry, or a novel.

  • I want to be bilingual (or possibly trilingual).

  • I want to help people (cliché as it sounds).

  “As you’ve probably guessed, I absolutely love literature,” she says. “I also love languages.”

  Anna writes with curiosity and enthusiasm about exploring her hometown and places beyond it. For Anna, understanding the world and her place in it comes primarily through the words she reads and writes.

  Through the words she shares, Anna gives us a peak into her world, and how she travels to other worlds—through the books she reads, the languages she learns, and the dreams she builds. ◊

  Anna has grown up in Sydney, a multicultural coastal city that is dotted with more than one hundred beaches.11 Her family lives close to Sydney Harbor, in a house where you can see the water from almost every room.

  The city is also incredibly diverse: about 40 percent of people who live in Sydney were born in a country other than Australia, and about the same percentage of people speak languages other than English at home—with Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Greek being some of the most common.12 In all, more than 250 languages are spoken in Sydney.13

  Growing up in this diverse city with a grandparent who speaks another language, Anna writes about her own love for words and her efforts, both in school and on her own, to learn other languages. She takes Latin and Mandarin in school, and she’s also tried to teach herself some Greek to be able to talk to her grandfather. He moved to Australia from Lesbos, Greece, when he was just a teenager. ◊

  Saturday

  Today, I woke up early, and listened to the rain, drifting in and out of sleep. After showering and eating breakfast with my mother and brother, I spent the day doing homework. I didn’t really have that much to do, just maths exercises, work from science and geography, a history essay to finish, and the Mandarin test to study for. However, I am notoriously good at wasting time—I don’t know how or why, but somehow everything I try to accomplish takes so much longer than I originally planned.

  I did, however, manage to spend time doing things I enjoy. Every weekend, a friend and I have a tradition of calling each other and talking about our week. We met through our younger brothers—they became close friends, and now we’re close friends.

  I also spent time reading. I will admit that I do not spend as much time reading as I did when I was younger; the high school workload has devoured my free time, and I feel my attention span is
slowly shortening. (I can be quite melodramatic sometimes . . .) The book I’m reading is dark and interesting and arty.

  My grandfather ate dinner with my family this evening. He was born in Lesbos, Greece, and migrated to Australia when he was 16. I’ve tried to teach myself Greek, so I can have more in common with him, but I only know simple phrases (Hello, how are you? What did you do today? ) and I can read the alphabet. It’s a start, if nothing else.

  After dinner, my brother and I ate way too much chocolate and binge-watched television together. I am an absolute hypocrite—complain about not having enough time to read, and will then waste an hour in front of the television . . .

  It’s 9:45 p.m. I’m going to get to sleep.

  Sunday

  I set an alarm for 6:45 so I could wake up and get my homework over and done with. I finished my science homework, and then my family and I walked to a local café for breakfast. Afterwards, I began my history homework. I’m probably giving the representation that I have a lot of homework, and I do, but keep in mind that I’m incredibly inefficient . . .

  At around 11:30, my dad drove me to a friend’s place. We’re working on our English assignment together and decided to meet up over the weekend to make some progress on it. We had originally planned to go ice-skating afterwards, but unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time. Nevertheless, it was a fun afternoon: we worked on the balcony, drank tea, and played with her cat. Her parents prepared an incredible two-course lunch. At 3:30, my dad picked me up and took me home. In our front garden, we have two olive trees (hearkening back to our Greek heritage). I helped pick some olives, then my father brined them.