Emma Dabiri - ‘We are still so obsessed with how we look’

This episode of How To Fail was recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy theatre. Emma Dabiri is a broadcaster, historian, and bestselling author whose work delves into the complexities of identity, culture, and race through art history and current affairs. She's now written a number of books - culture shifting works which are a radical re-imagining of what we consider to be beauty. Her first book was an Irish Times bestseller and inspired a conversation around race that led to change regulations in schools and in the British Army. It was later adapted into an award-winning documentary. She's a fellow in African studies at London, SOAS and is the mother of two boys. Over on Failing with Friends, Emma talks about advice for someone in the audience who feels their singleness is a failure; what success looks like; when to know when to stop fertility treatment, and Elizabeth and Emma’s thoughts on Botox among other things! To hear Emma tackling your failures join our community of subscribers here: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com 🌎 Get an exclusive 15% discount on your first Saily data plans! Use code [howtofail] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to to https://saily.com/howtofail ⛵ Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Mix Engineer: Richie Lee Live Engineer: Will Kontargyris Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

  Did you know that you can hear all of the things that my guests might have failed to divulge in the main episode by joining us in our subscriber community, Failing with Friends? It's where you will hear really riveting pieces of information like Olivia Atwood's dream date location, or Miranda Hart's advice on performing bodily functions in front of your partner. Just follow the link in the podcast notes and we will see you there.

• 0:35Elizabeth Day?

  Welcome to How to Fail. This week, it's with the brilliant Emma Daberry, live from the Bordgosh Energy Theatre Dublin. I hope you love it as much as we did.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  This emphasis on our appearance is just, you know, so, so, so dominant. And I bought, like, whatever the, however much booze you could buy, I bought. I bought, like, all the bottles of vodka. My life just felt like I was in a hip hop, like, music video. Like, it was so different to, like, Dublin in the 90s.

• 1:05Elizabeth Day?

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• 1:47Elizabeth Day?

  Friday, go to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial. That's Shopify.co.uk/fail. Go to Shopify.co.uk/fail today to hear your first

• 2:02Elizabeth Day?

  Emma Daberry is a broadcaster, historian and bestselling author whose work delves into the complexities of identity, culture and race through art, history and current affairs. She was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Nigerian father. After spending her early years in Atlanta in the US, the family returned to Dublin when Daberry was five, an experience which saw her become the target of racism and informed much of her later work. Books, in many ways, were her refuge. So it's a heartening twist of fate that she's now written three culture shifting works: Don't Touch My Hair, What White People Can Do Next and Disobedient Bodies,

• 2:47Elizabeth Day?

  which was a radical reimagining of what we consider to be beauty. Her first book was an Irish Times bestseller and inspired a conversation around race that led to change regulations in schools and in the British Army. It was later adapted into an award-winning documentary. She is a regular on TV, presenting several series for the BBC, as well as taking part in debates on Question Time and Have I Got News For You? Alongside this, she's a fellow in African Studies at London Soas and is the mother of two boys. "All I ever really dreamed of when I was younger was having two children and writing a book", Daberry recently wrote. Well, I've got two beautiful babes

• 3:32Elizabeth Day?

  and I've written three books with more on the way. Anything additional now is just blessings on blessings. Dublin, please welcome to the stage the one and only Emma Daberry.

• 3:53Elizabeth Day?

  Blessings upon blessings. And I'm so blessed to have you here with me because you almost didn't get here, Emma.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was circumstances were conspiring against me, but yeah.

• 4:04Elizabeth Day?

  Tell me what the driver said when you were stuck in traffic on the way to the airport.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  How important is it that you get to Dublin today?

• 4:12Elizabeth Day?

  And I was just like, that's like the worst question. And I wanted to start really with the importance of books for you. So I mentioned in the introduction that books were your refuge. What were some of the books that you remember as a child reaching for?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  I read like really, really widely. I read like whatever I could, whatever I could get my hands on. And I think like the first book I read on my own was like a Victorian children's book called Five Children and Eight. Yeah, I think I read that when I was about six and I think that's, that's what got me like obsessed with books. But I also read like a lot of stuff by like black authors or books with black characters. And it was actually remarkable how many of them I was able to find in the 1980s in, in Ireland. And a lot of that, I always shout out this, this bookshop and my friend who's in the audience, her mum actually worked there at the time.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  But it's called Books Upstairs and that had a lot of books, that had a lot of books by like black authors. When I got older, I realised it was actually quite like a radical bookshop and it had a lot of black authors, Marxist authors. So I think I was like exposed to a lot of the ideas that really went on to like inform my, my, my work and the direction that my life took in terms of what I studied. But from, from some of those books, but that's the kind of stuff I was reading from a young age and was really fascinated by.

• 5:33Elizabeth Day?

  And I think that just brings it home to us, the power of a great bookshop and people who really care about books, running those bookshops. So shout out to all of them.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, big time.

• 5:42Elizabeth Day?

  So much of your work deals with.

• 5:46Elizabeth Day?

  What we think of as beauty and unpacking that and unpacking it in various ways, including the ways in which it oppresses us. And we're going to talk a bit more about that, but I just wonder if I could start by asking you now, what beauty means to you, Emma?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. When I was writing Disobedient Bodies, I really wanted to think about beauty just beyond something that was physical and physical visual and maybe quite superficial in ways. And not to disregard the visual as immaterial, but to think about how beauty could be understood as a verb. Beauty could be something that one does or how one behaves, like beauty as an action. So maybe thinking about beauty in terms of our behaviour, how we are and the things that we do.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  And I drew on like a concept, so my paternal, my dad is Nigerian, he's Yoruba. And I studied and taught Yoruba philosophy at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. So I feel like I draw on ideas from that kind of tradition quite a lot. But they had this, in the kind of pre-colonial context, they had this idea of outer beauty. But also very important was this concept of inner beauty, which was actually somebody's like character and their integrity. And actually, without having inner beauty, which was what animated the outer beauty, outer beauty wasn't really something that was held in particularly high esteem. So it was far more about kind of like, yeah, character and integrity.

• 7:26Elizabeth Day?

  There's this idea of connectedness and integrity, which I really admire and appreciate. And you introduced me to a new word through reading your work, ocular centrism.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:38Elizabeth Day?

  Which makes me sound very clever.

• 7:41Elizabeth Day?

  But explain to us what that means, particularly in this time of social media and the sort of visual importance we place on those little grids on Instagram.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I discovered the concept of ocular centricism as well, I was just like, wow, this is like, I felt kind of like mind blown. So obviously, we have like lots of different senses, but in Western kind of philosophical traditions, sight became privileged as the noblest of the senses. So sight was prioritized as the kind of, as the preeminent or the most important sense. And we're kind of told that this idea that you can't judge a book by its cover, but we are going to be really, we believe that we can see something, we look at something and we believe like we can make a value judgment, we make a value judgment based on the appearance of the thing or the person or the object,

• 8:36Speaker 01

  on how the thing looks, on its appearance or the person's appearance. And I think I believed that that was something that was universal and that was just like, it's just human nature. And when I discovered that it's actually not human nature, it's a particular way of approaching the world called ocular centricism, and discovered that there have been many, many other cultures and many in different places and times throughout history that actually didn't see sight as the preeminent sense. So there wasn't, there wasn't really a belief that you would look at something and be able to kind of make a judgment or infer the value of the thing or the person from its, from its appearance. That would be measured in other ways that are not visible.

• 9:19Elizabeth Day?

  So fascinating, because you also make this excellent point, that representation can only go so far. So purely because we might see ourselves represented now, I think your phrase was, well, we're not feeling any better about ourselves just through seeing.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's been such an expansion on the types of, the features and the types of people who can be perceived as beautiful. You know, the boundaries of that have expanded hugely from our childhoods, even in the past 10 years. But I still feel that there's like a limitation because we are still so preoccupied and obsessed with how people look and how we look. And I think the visual landscape that we inhabit, the way so much of our lives and interactions are mediated through social media, this emphasis on our appearance is just, you know, so, so, so dominant.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  So while the beauty standard has been expanded or diversified, the way we look is still given like far too much, far too much emphasis. And I think it's like, it can be very, can just be very destructive and very, very oppressive in many ways.

• 10:34Elizabeth Day?

  Final question before we get on to your failures. So how do you personally cope with that? Because you do have a sort of Instagram presence, although I know that you're careful about it. How do you, how do you cope?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  You know, I'm pretty, I'm pretty active on there. In terms of like protecting myself or presenting myself or?

• 10:54Elizabeth Day?

  I guess they're both intertwined, but primarily protecting yourself.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually, I don't really scroll like that much. So I feel like I'm not, I, I try not to be bombarded with too many images of other women. Like I don't want to be caught up in a, a cycle of constant, constant comparison. We're just bombarded with so many images. I feel like we just need to protect ourselves. I read a great deal, I read a lot of books and they don't have pictures.

• 11:25Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. You, you post, you bounce, you eat a spice bag.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:31Elizabeth Day?

  That's your mantra for life. I, I interviewed Yuval Noah Harari for this podcast and he talks about going on an information diet in the same way that people are careful about what they eat or want to work at the gym. He actually does that for his mind. He just gives himself space from information.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:48Elizabeth Day?

  I mean, he takes it to an extreme. He, he meditates for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:52Elizabeth Day?

  That's why he's a giant brain.

• 11:59Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD, because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable, so you can live more of the life you want to

• 12:43Elizabeth Day?

  live. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15-minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail.

• 13:00Elizabeth Day?

  So your first failure, Emma, is that you failed Irish in your junior leaving cert. And you put in brackets, "big deal in Ireland."

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:13Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Tell us the story. That was for drama. So I didn't actually fail.

• 13:17Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  But I did do foundation Irish, which in and of itself is a failure.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  I think I got a B though, to be fair. There's like honours and pass.

• 13:31Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Honours Irish, pass Irish. And then for a special, small selection of us, there's foundation. I think probably three people in my year did foundation. I just really, really struggled in school. I got diagnosed as being hyperactive when I was about nine. I think I was eight, actually. Nothing was done about it. I just kind of continued. I just had, I found it very, very difficult to concentrate in school. I just can't really learn in that kind of environment. And I particularly struggled with Irish. And I think what was going on there was that, first of all, the way it was taught to us, it was

• 14:16Speaker 01

  very punitive. Like, it just, it felt like...

• 14:21Speaker 01

  You were being punished the way it was taught to us. And I also associated with punishment because like you could only go to the toilet like if you could ask in Irish.

• 14:31Elizabeth Day?

  Oh my god.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or if you got in trouble, which for me was quite frequently, you'd have to write lines and I'd have to write the lines in Irish. So like I associated like Irish language with punishment. And then it was just like it's such an extraordinarily like fascinating and beautiful language that as an adult I have tried to like go back and learn. So my relationship with the Irish language is like unrecognizable to what it was when I was a child. And I think that just goes to show there was such a real failure actually in the way it was presented to us. I think none of the magic that exists within it was apparent to me, was made apparent to us.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  It also just felt like a dead and useless thing that was a waste of time. That's the way it was presented. When I'm back in Dublin now or in Ireland like more generally, and there are just so many people who are Irish and who aren't white. I almost feel what my childhood was like didn't happen because it's so dramatically different to how it is today. And the fact that such change has occurred over such a short period of time is like kind of mind blowing. But when I was growing up, I was like very much, very, very much an anomaly. And so there was quite like a constant like refrain that I wasn't really Irish.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  So I was being told this all the time, having to learn this language that I didn't enjoy learning, that I associated with being punished, that didn't feel relevant to my life. When I was told that I wasn't even this thing, I just felt very disconnected from it and kind of like just very resentful towards it. So you had to do it in school, like it wasn't, it wasn't an option. Yeah, I was just like scraping through, I just hadn't learned anything. So I ended up in this kind of remedial. Place, yeah.

• 16:24Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things that I feel first bonded us was the similarity, although by no means the equivalence, of our childhood experience in that you moved to Dublin when you were five and I moved to Derry when I was four.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:42Elizabeth Day?

  And obviously, as you can hear, I did not pick up the accent. And if you've seen Derry Girls, which I sincerely hope you have, I'm like the weird English cousin, James.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:54Elizabeth Day?

  And I constantly felt like that I was making excuses for living there, even though it was my home.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 17:02Elizabeth Day?

  And I still consider it my home. And it was really amazing to speak to you about that feeling of outsidership, even though it is your home.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:12Elizabeth Day?

  And I wonder if I could ask you a bit more about it from your specific perspective, which is one of race.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 17:19Elizabeth Day?

  Because you do, you wrote in Don't Touch My Hair about some of the exchanges that you had with friends and nuns. Like, there was a nun who wanted to look at your teeth.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  She didn't want to look at my teeth, she actually pulled my lips back and exposed my teeth.

• 17:34Elizabeth Day?

  Do you mind talking to us a bit about?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  God, I wrote that ages ago, but yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. God. Also, when I moved here as well, I had an American accent as well, so I wasn't just, it wasn't just race, it was also like my accent, but I got a Dublin accent like pretty, pretty quick.

• 17:50Elizabeth Day?

  Smarter than I was.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a school friend of mine, her great aunt had been like a nun in Nigeria. She was very elderly and we went to visit her in, I think, a home for elderly nuns. I don't know why she brought me with her. I actually don't even know why I went, but we ended up there. We went in and I think, like, she, I think the aunt was like quite senile by this stage, she was very elderly. She saw me and her eyes just like lit, lit up. I didn't know that she knew I was Nigerian, but she obviously like knew I was, I was black and of, of African descent. She just kind of like came over and she was just like. I can't even remember exactly what she said, but she was saying something about you people always have beautiful teeth. And she kind of pulled my lip off.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And I was just like, uh.

• 18:41Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  What? I was about 12. Um, so, yeah, I had just weird, I had so many weird situations like that happened to me. But the, the hair, the sleepover, yeah, so one of my friends, well, my former friends, we're no longer friends. Um, but this was, this was a very long time ago when we were teenagers. We had like a slumber party at her house. And I remember like the next morning, she started screaming and like squealing and everyone was just like, oh my God, like what's happening, what's happening? And she was just like, eh, there's pubes in my bed, there's pubes in my bed. And then she like picked one up and then she was just like, oh no, it's just Emma's hair. And everybody was laughing. Yeah, I was like 14 and I was already like really insecure about my hair and just felt

• 19:27Speaker 01

  aware of my otherness. So that was just, was just felt really like degrading and, I don't know, exposing. And I feel like because I was really isolated, it wasn't like I had other friends that were going through anything similar. I just felt like very, very alienated and like very alone in those, in those kind of things. And they're just like two examples. This stuff was like pretty like constant, things like that.

• 19:53Elizabeth Day?

  I know that you don't like to talk about age necessarily because you make-

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Not averse to it either.

• 19:59Elizabeth Day?

  But I think with a, a similar age.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  With the same age.

• 20:03Elizabeth Day?

  Okay. So we grew up at a similar time and the culture-

• 20:08Speaker 01

  The exact same time.

• 20:09Elizabeth Day?

  The exact same time. Yes. Again, that's why she's the brain.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I appreciate you like trying not to like put me on blast, but my age is out there, it's all good.

• 20:21Elizabeth Day?

  And there was also this cultural fetishization of thinness.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:27Elizabeth Day?

  How did you experience that?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  So I think much like all my friends, I just wanted to be as skinny as possible. That was very much the beauty standard, to just be very, very thin. But again, like in that context, my body shape was like quite different. And again, it's weird because like now, when there is so much more diversity in the world, there's nothing, I think, that would particularly stand out about my body in that way. But at that time, like I didn't even really know that sometimes black women have like, you know, maybe like a more rounded posterior. So I was just, why is my arse so fat?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And all my friends, oh my god, that thigh gap had us like in a chokehold. But most of my friends like had a thigh gap. But I could be like six stone, I've never been six stone, but I could be six stone, I still wouldn't have a thigh gap. Because I have like a bigger bum, I also have like bigger thighs, like there's no gap. But I just thought that was fat, like I just thought that was me being like obese. But it was literally, you know, just, I guess, like, you know, like a racialized feature. Like I had a, I had a different body shape than my friends. And this was also before having a bigger bum had been like popularized, you know? Like this is pre Kardashians, et cetera. So I just felt like very self-conscious and also like weirdly sexualized. Like I remember, we'd all kind of wear the same clothes, but I remember like we'd all

• 21:49Speaker 01

  have these little body con like dresses. And my friend just being like, oh no, you can't wear them because you look like a prostitute.

• 21:55Elizabeth Day?

  Oh my god, these friends.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Right?

• 22:00Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah. Did you feel Irish then? And do you feel Irish now?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so interesting. I not just feel, I'm so Irish, especially not living in Ireland. I feel like very rooted in and kind of like grounded by being Irish, actually. But when I was growing up here, no, I, I didn't. Primarily just because I was always told that I wasn't, that I wasn't really. I was just like, you know, as soon as I can leave, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go to university, like I really want to go to America, but I know we're gonna, we're gonna come to that. I went to, I went to the UK. And it was moving to London that made me have to really like confront my Irishness. Or just made me initially like aware of how Irish I was.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Like I got a really, really big culture shock when I moved to London. There were so many things about me that I just thought were my personality or or just me. And I realised in the UK that these were actually things that were very Irish. Like that my perspective, my worldview, my sense of humour, so many things about me were Irish. And then I was just like, how do I reconcile that with feeling like I can't like I've had to leave? And always being like, okay, well, I'm not, I don't feel accepted there. So I'm not going to like beg to be to be considered Irish. So I had also kind of rejected Irishness.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And then leaving and discovering how Irish I was was a bit of like an an identity crisis. So that really took me quite a quite a few years to to reconcile.

• 23:41Elizabeth Day?

  You said earlier that you felt alienated and there wasn't someone that you could talk to. And I just wonder whether one of the guiding motivations for doing the work that you do, for having written the books that you've written, is to be that person for your younger self or for someone else who's going through it now.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you know what? I don't think I've really like conceived of it as me as a younger person. But I do think for other people, I don't think I realised how many people across the world had very similar experiences. And not even always about race, but just like some level of outsider-ness, you know? It's actually, it's actually pretty common. So I feel like riding out of a place of maybe like loneliness or like outsider-ness. And then that giving you community or like that being the vehicle that then creates community is like something that. Just I'm kind of overawed by.

• 24:41Elizabeth Day?

  So beautifully put, and that's exactly my experience of this podcast, really. That ability to show up as my flawed self and be accepted by this community who also have their flaws and the strength to explore that vulnerability. That is an agent for such powerful change.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

• 25:04Elizabeth Day?

  Let's get on to your second failure because you mentioned it briefly there. So it's a failure. Interestingly, all of your failures are academic.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  I know.

• 25:11Elizabeth Day?

  Which you only realised today.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, when we were running through it, yeah.

• 25:15Elizabeth Day?

  So your second failure is failing to get a scholarship to study in America, which had been your dream, hadn't it? And so instead you went to the UK as a plan B.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:24Elizabeth Day?

  So as someone who I imagine because of this sense of outsidership, your intelligence, did it become a really important factor to you for your identity and your self-worth?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Not in terms of being like a high achiever in school. Like I said, I really, really struggled in school. Like I did well in like English and history because they were the only two things that I could like concentrate on and just had a kind of natural, it's like if I had a natural aptitude for something, I could do it. But like anything else just felt like virtually, virtually impossible in that, in that context. But I had always been an avid reader. So I was quite like scholarly, like kind of in an independent way, but not, not in terms of like academic success. But I knew that I really wanted to like go to university and study something that I was like really, really passionate about.

• 26:14Elizabeth Day?

  So what did you want to go and study?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  So I wanted to go to a university called Spelman, which is a HBCU, which is a historically black college. And these historically black colleges were set up in America during like segregation, when black people weren't able to go to universities that, that white Americans could go to. But there's a few of them, like Spelman, Morehouse, Howard's, that had like grown into these really like prestigious institutions. But the idea for me then of being somewhere that was, that was a black space was really appealing after the feelings of isolation and kind of like alienation that I had, that I had experienced growing up.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  And the reason that I had been in Atlanta when I was a kid was because my dad, so my Nigerian granddad came to Ireland to study in the 1940s. He went to Trinity. And then they moved back to Nigeria, but my dad had been in Ireland for a little while as a child and had like kind of very happy memories of it, actually. So when he came to go to university, when it was time for him to go to university, he also wanted to come back to Ireland. So he came here, went to UCD, met my mum, decided he didn't like UCD and wanted to go to HBCU. So wanted to go to Morehouse, which Morehouse and Spelman is like a man's college and it's actually gendered. It's like a man's college and Spelman

• 27:38Speaker 01

  is like the women's one. So my dad had gone to the man's one and then I wanted to go to the women's one because it was kind of like in the family.

• 27:46Elizabeth Day?

  So there was a lot wrapped up in this for you.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:49Elizabeth Day?

  So when you failed to get the scholarship.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:52Elizabeth Day?

  Did it really feel crushing?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I wanted to go there so badly. I had come back to Ireland, spent my childhood here and my teens and then my parents separated, my dad, we all came back here from America. Then my dad spent about two more years here and was just like, I'm out. He went back to Nigeria. And then we were like estranged. I didn't speak to him again until I was like maybe 16. He came back to Ireland to see us. Once I spoke, once we got back in contact, I connected with the rest of his family, lots of whom were still in Atlanta. So I started going back to Atlanta as a teenager. So like all of my friends would go like interrailing or like around Europe or they'd go to like Berlin, they'd go to like the Berlin Love

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Parade. We were all like massive ravers, but I wouldn't go with them. I'd be like, oh, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go to Atlanta. So I was like spending my summers in Atlanta. And this was like Atlanta in the 90s, like it was absolutely popping. My life just felt like I was like in a hip hop like music video, like it was so different to like Dublin in the 90s. I was like literally obsessed with it. So I wanted to go to university there. Yeah. And I was like, I wanted to be like a cheerleader and like all of that like American like college campus stuff. And then I didn't get in.

• 29:08Elizabeth Day?

  And that sense of belonging, which must have just felt so important, belonging in terms of being closer to your dad, but also belonging in a place that felt like your people.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was actually a weird one because like it was like I belonged, from the way I looked, I belonged. But then as soon as I like opened my mouth or.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Spoke, or just even like culturally, I was so different. So I guess I did have like that kind of schism or identity thing there as well. In that like culturally, I was re- the South, particularly in the nineties, like the black culture in Atlanta is like something very specific. And I was a girl from Rialto, very, very different. I remember like going over and this was like in the days where like duty free was like really exciting. And I bought like whatever the, however much booze you could buy, I bought, I bought like all the bottles of vodka. This was the first time I was meeting my cousins as well. And I think I turned up with like two liters of vodka. It was like a Saturday and I was like, oh, like are you going, are we going out tonight? And they were just like, uh, no.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I was just like, so are we gonna drink these like? And they were really like, they were really shocked.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  That, that, that wasn't like normal behaviour there.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  So, yeah, there was again, like this, this big culture shock and them just being like a bit, you know, kind of confused by me as well. And it was weird because here, I think the way I behaved, the way I behaved, like I was just culturally, like, you know, completely Irish. But then the way I looked didn't fit. And there it was like the way I looked fit, but the way I was there didn't. So I just actually, I felt kind of like uneasy there as well.

• 30:55Elizabeth Day?

  So when you went to the UK and that was your plan B?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:01Elizabeth Day?

  Was that another level of culture shock?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yes. I hadn't really spent that much time in England before. And I didn't understand like how different English culture was to Irish culture until I was, until I was in it. And then so I went to, I went to SOA and went to African Studies. And that just had like a very particular type of person as well that I had never, ever encountered before. Like this kind of trust a farian class of person. So just these very, very privileged white English people. I'd never heard of a gap year before, like. So everyone had just doing African, African studies or learning Chinese, something, everyone was studying something to do Africa or Asia.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And most of them, it was because their parents had been like diplomats in one of those countries and they'd maybe been born there. Or many of them had spent like a gap year in Kenya and were like obsessed with Africa.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  And I was just like, these people are mad.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  And again, me with my vodka and I was just like,

• 32:10Speaker 01

  and they'd all be drinking like herbal tea and doing like poi and playing like, kind of like African thumb pianos and stuff. And I was just like, not ready.

• 32:19Elizabeth Day?

  I wish I'd known you then.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  I wish we'd known each other as well.

• 32:24Elizabeth Day?

  So what do you think this failure ended up giving you? Apart from an annoyance with Gapian tritopharians who played African thumb pianos.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  You know what, I feel like if I'd gone to America, Atlanta specifically, I would have like completely assimilated. I wanted to be American like so badly and I feel like I would have just completely assimilated and now I'd be a yank.

• 32:50Elizabeth Day?

  Right.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  And I'm glad that I'm not.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  I'm just joking, I love America a great deal. I feel like I've retained my Irishness more because I went to England than I might have if I went to America. I don't know if that makes sense. I feel like London is such a multicultural and like diverse place. And I actually think because of the relationship specifically between Ireland and the UK, me remaining very aware, well first of all, becoming very aware. But then after that, just remaining very aware of my Irishness just had a very different flavour to, I think, how it would have if I'd, if I'd gone to Atlanta. And also, I'm just really happy with like what I studied and like the direction that my life has gone in.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Like, England has been, England has been good to me, like, you know? I think things worked out pretty well there. And then I also, because I'm a slightly impulsive little nutter, got engaged to this guy that I met in a mall in Atlanta.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  After about six weeks of knowing him. And I feel like if I'd moved there, I would have married him. And that would have been a disaster.

• 34:09Elizabeth Day?

  So many questions. Because initially, I thought you said you'd met him in a morgue. Which, no, she said a mall. So it was like, in a mall.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Not a morgue, but I kind of wish.

• 34:19Elizabeth Day?

  Have you stayed in touch? Have you stayed in touch?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  We reconnected about 10 years later. And we actually met up a few years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not like romantically, just catching up.

• 34:33Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

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• 35:42Elizabeth Day?

  Your, your final failure is that you haven't finished your PhD yet.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 35:49Elizabeth Day?

  What's your PhD in?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  It's in sociology is like the discipline. And then like specifically like the topic I was looking at was I was looking at like the like racial categories and I was looking at the category mixed race and exploring its history and its like ideological function. But I've been in the completion stage, which is the last year of the PhD. I've been in the completion stage for the last six years.

• 36:21Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  I keep extending it. They keep giving me an extension, but the extension has like actually run out now. Like if I don't submit it by October, like that's it. But I've been doing it for fucking ages.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Like most of my adult life.

• 36:45Elizabeth Day?

  Will you submit it by October, do you think?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  I actually think, do you know what? I think, I think I will. Yeah, some version of it.

• 36:51Elizabeth Day?

  Let's manifest it, let's manifest it.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, please, let's, everyone can manifest that period.

• 36:56Elizabeth Day?

  To be fair, in that time, you have done a lot of other stuff.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how I justify it.

• 37:03Elizabeth Day?

  Including becoming a parent for the second time. You've got two sons. And as someone whose work is so much about beauty, the ethics of how we see each other, what's it like raising two soon to be men?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  You know what? So I have a 12 year old and a five year old and they actually seem pretty untroubled by their appearance. They don't really seem, this is probably like not so surprising for the five year old, but for my 12 year old, he's pretty unconcerned with and disinterested in his appearance in a way that I think would probably not be the case if he was, if he was a girl. I mean, I don't have daughters, so, so, so I don't know. He's, he also really doesn't like people commenting on his appearance. I think beyond my own bias, he is gorgeous.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  But he's very gracious when people tell him that, but then he's just like, I mean, it's a bit tiny violin, but he's a bit like, he's a bit like, oh, it makes me feel really uncomfortable when people like say that to me, when people like kind of focus on that, because I don't think that's what's, that's what's important, or I don't think that's what's the most interesting like thing about a person.

• 38:25Elizabeth Day?

  And your five-year-old, is it too early to tell?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  He's another kettle of fish. So I think it's, it's too early to tell, but he's like way more like performative. And as I was saying earlier when we came out and I was admiring these very blinging cups, I was like, he would love that because he loves anything that's like, you know, kind of like shiny and glam. So I think maybe he'll be more into his appearance. I'm not, I'm not sure yet.

• 38:52Elizabeth Day?

  Talk to me a little bit, I mean, we're talking about the fact that you failed to finish, finish your PhD because life can be messy and life doesn't turn out according to plan a lot of the time. But you have introduced me to the radical nature of mess.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:08Elizabeth Day?

  Tell us a little bit about this because this has honestly changed the way that I've thought about failure. Tell us about the undercommons is basically what I'm getting at.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, my God. When you messaged me the other day and you were saying that you'd been introduced to the undercommons through kind of doing the research for this and how much you loved it, I was so happy because I feel like I'm just banging on about the undercommons like all the time. But it's, it can be a bit abstract and in certain ways and some of the reading material is like quite dense. But I feel like it, yeah, it's, it is, it's radical in its, in its, in its propositions. And one of the concepts I've written about a lot that I find very, I'll, I'll get to mess in a second. Before I get to mess, I'm going to talk about inclusivity and fugitivity and then I'll come to mess.

• 39:53Elizabeth Day?

  And will you just explain what the undercommons is? Because they sound like an indie band, but they're not.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  So the under commons is kind of like the wild beyond. They actually liken it to the world of where the wild things are in the children's storybook. But it's kind of like the world that exists beyond properness and order. And I feel like colonial logic. And it's the place where wildness and refusal and the subversion of the colonial order are like the order of the day. And actually, I will talk about mess. So it's kind of like the embracing of chaos and mess.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  And mess being seen not as something that is negative, but actually mess as a generative space where like beauty and resistance can emerge.

• 40:50Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, isn't that brilliant? It is so good, yes.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. I mean, it's Fred Moten.

• 40:57Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. Because I got to thinking about it as it pertains to failure and the fact that in a society that wants us to be perfect and often wants to sell us stuff under the illusion that we can become perfect. It actually is a radical act of honesty to fail.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:16Elizabeth Day?

  And to be messy and to own the flaws. So actually, we're being revolutionary in owning our failures.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  So obviously, life and the world is chaotic. And I sometimes think if you try and be too controlling and too predetermined in things, it can actually cut off possibility. And sometimes, honestly, like this manifesto or ethos is very appealing to me because I'm like a messy, disorganized person. So I'm like, yeah, let's make this radical. But I honestly feel for me that some of the best things in my life have come about

• 42:04Speaker 01

  because something that would have been perceived as the more successful outcome didn't happen.

• 42:13Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  You know?

• 42:15Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, well, what an amazing note to end the first half on. In all of your beautiful, messy, intelligent glory. Thank you so much.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Please give it up for the amazing Emma Daberry.

• 42:33Elizabeth Day?

  I wanted to mention our subscriber podcast, Failing with Friends, where my guest and I answer your questions and we offer advice on some of your failures too.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  But it's actually quite difficult, like, logistically in many ways, to live as a single person. Yeah, there's this structural underpinning.

• 42:50Elizabeth Day?

  Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.