Cultural impact not an accident
Serena Patel is the author of a new series of adventure books for children – the first Anisha Accidental Detective is out now. Here she talks to Rob Green about the lasting impact, feeling like she didn’t belong and the importance of representative and inclusive characters in children’s books.
SERENA Patel lives and grew up in the West Midlands. As a child in Walsall she was “the only brown face” in her primary school and also felt different as one of the few children growing up in a single parent family. She says: “There weren’t many Indians in the area I grew up in. There were no other children of colour in my entire primary school. I was the only brown face. I became more aware of this as I got older and experienced racism – the word ‘Paki’ being shouted across the road at me as I walked to school. “We were a single parent family and no- one else I knew came from one. In those days, divorce was a dirty word. My best friends all had dads and I didn’t. I can’t say it didn’t affect me.”
Even within her own family Serena struggled to feel accepted, saying: “I had one foot in my Punjabi heritage and the other in my Gujarati heritage and really didn’t feel like I belonged to either. Truthfully, in every part of my life I always felt slightly out of place.”
A lasting mark
Those early experiences understandably left a mark, and Serena says bullying during secondary school exacerbated her confusion and self-doubt. She says: “It’s taken me to get into my forties to find myself and be comfortable with who I am. For a long time, especially in my adolescence, I felt lost and unsure of who
Spring-Summer 2020
I should be versus who I wanted to be. I was bullied at secondary school, nothing horrific but still scarring and it defined me for a long time. When other people make fun of you, see you as different, it devalues your self-worth. Mine was rock bottom for a long time.”
Serena’s experience will ring true for many and she says that she still feels the effects today, but adds that: “I think my confidence came with age. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still socially awkward at times and big groups of people terrify me. But, especially in this last year or so, I feel I’m coming to terms with who I was and at the same time realising I’ve become the person I wanted to be all along. It takes time and effort to un-train your brain from seeing yourself in a certain way.” Serena realises now that part of the problem when she was growing up was the lack of characters like her in the books she read. She says not being able to see herself reflected in the stories she read reinforced ideas about self-worth, adding: “The message it gave me was that my story was not important and that’s something we need to correct for this generation of children. Every story matters.”
Comfort in words
Despite a lack of characters, she could identify with in the books she read, Serena was drawn to writing and found comfort in her own words. She says: “I always wrote as a child, it was an outlet to keep a diary, sometimes to write
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poetry. It helped me externalise the things I couldn’t say to anyone. I lost that for a while, busy being a grown up, making a life and having my own children. I’d jot the odd idea down but never actually finish it.” Those seeds continued to grow and some of the ideas took root – setting Serena on a journey that has found her doing a job that “has been my dream for a long time”. She says: “After my son was born and I went back to work you’d think I’d have enough to keep me busy. However, the words and ideas started coming and I couldn’t ignore them so
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