NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ARTISTS' LIVES Lubaina Himid
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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ARTISTS’ LIVES Lubaina Himid Interviewed by Anna Dyke C466/249 This transcript is copyright of the British Library. Please refer to the oral history section at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History British Library Sound Archive 96 Euston Road NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] IN PARTNERSHIP WITH IMPORTANT Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ( [email protected] ) BRITISH LIBRARY SOUND ARCHIVE NATIONAL LIFE STORIES INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET Title Page Ref. No.: C466/249 Wav files Refs.: C466-249-0001.WAV to 0023.WAV Collection title: Artists’ Lives Interviewee’s surname: Himid Title: Interviewee’s forenames: Lubaina Ramadhan Sex: Female Abdulla Occupation: Artist Date of birth: 25 th July 1954 Mother’s occupation: Textile designer Father’s occupation: Teacher Date(s) of recording and tracks (from – to): 11.09.06: (track 1-2); 12.09.06 (track 3-5); 02.10.06 (track 6-7); 03.10.06 (track 8-10); 06.11.06 (track 11-13); 07.11.06 (track 14-16); 15.01.07 (track 17-19); 16.01.07 (track 20-23) Location of interview: Interviewee’s home, Preston Name of interviewer: Anna Dyke Type of recorder: Marantz PMD660 Total no. of tracks: 23 Reading Format: Wav 16bit 48kHz Mono or stereo: Stereo Burned to DVD: Duration: 30 hours 10 minutes Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: Full clearance Interviewer’s comments: Lubaina Himid Page 1 C466/249 Track 1 [Section 1 ] [Track 1] Okay, September eleven 2006. Okay. Could I start with your full name and your date of birth? Okay, my full name is Lubaina Ramadhan Abdulla Himid and I was born on the twenty- fifth of July, 1954. Where? In Zanzibar, Tanzania and, but I came to England when I was four months old on, I think I arrived here, just about arrived here on Christmas Eve of 1954. I came because my father had died on the fifth of November 1954 and my mother, who’s English, brought me back to England to her family. It’s kind of, I don’t know, it was a sort of funny way to begin really [laughs], funny way to begin being in England. And the sort of, I suppose the sort of melancholy of it has never really left, it’s certainly never really left the work although I kind of think of the work as quite optimistic stuff, but that was the beginning of it. What do you mean, melancholy? In terms of coming here? I think, although I really cannot think of anywhere else that I would rather live – and I’ve travelled quite a lot round the world – I think I was, all the work is about trying to belong, trying to find a sense of belonging for myself and trying to get a sense of recognition and recognition of contribution for African Caribbean diasporan people really and I sort of think it’s a kind of, without getting too cosmic, it’s the result of having been sort of slightly wrenched away from where I was born, aged four months. You know, or well, seven months by the time I got here. And it took me, you know, forty odd years to get back again. But I kind of painted my way back. Just find that lots of the paintings are making those references to that place and references to how it looked as well as references to what it meant. So there is a kind of optimism, there’s this kind of longing, I guess, something like that, I think. I don’t know. Lubaina Himid Page 2 C466/249 Track 1 Do you know anything about your birth over there? Did your mother tell you stories about what it was like when you first arrived? Well yes, strangely she, I mean she’s an Englishwoman, she was a textile designer, she went to the Royal College, did textile design, worked for a while for firms in London and met my father when he was here. He comes from, well in fact he came from the Comoran Islands but he was born in Zanzibar. He went to England to university and met my mother there, so obviously they fell in love, or I guess that’s the term she would use. Sounds like it, sounds like they fell in love [laughs] because he asked her to marry him and went back to Zanzibar and said I’ll send for you. So, you know, obviously not very long went by, I’m not really sure how long went by, and he sent for her and because it was 1952 or whatever it was, she sailed there and it took six weeks to get there and there are some fantastic stories of her trip, you know, the people she met, the parties she went to. Fantastic, sounds absolutely brilliant and tons of people on that trip got married to people they met. Obviously she was on her way to marry this guy so she didn’t marry anybody else. Anyway, she got there, she married him and then when I was born I, because she was English and he was African, in those days you, there was the white hospital and the black hospital and everybody insisted, I guess including my father, that she could go to the white hospital to have me even though I would turn out to be black. This was, you know, this is just how it was, I mean incredibly segregated place. And so I was born in the white hospital, but my grandmother and all her friends wanted to come and see me and were allowed to come and see me, but they would never usually be allowed in the black hospital – oh no, in the white hospital, sorry – so it was a kind of, I don’t know, I think it was a bit strange for everybody, but obviously the hospital was rather smarter and they took a bit more care I guess. I don’t know really. I just find that a bit, the beginnings in some way of a kind of strange double life, a strange sort of double life that I feel I lead in a strange sort of way. But four months really after I was born, just really suddenly, my father who got malaria all the time, I mean you know, like you do, was struck down with a particularly sort of attack and was dead within a week. And I was four months old and my mother had to go through the kind of Muslim ritual really of being in an enclosed space for forty days and forty nights and I, actually I’ve never asked her and I kind of meant to but I didn’t, as you kind of don’t, you know, whether I was with her all the time in that enclosed space. I guess at four months old I must have been, I can’t see what else I would Lubaina Himid Page 3 C466/249 Track 1 do. And there were plenty of other women who would look after me, my grandmother, other women around, but I don’t know whether I was in that space or not. But I kind of felt, always when I was a child I felt, I don’t know, you see photographs of me and I look really kind of as if I’m having a great time and I was a lot of the time having a great time, but I felt a kind of melancholy even then, a kind of – I think, but now I look at it of course, I suppose my father had died three years ago, four years ago, five years ago as I became that age and it took my mother a while to kind of get over it, but I don’t think I realised that as a child but I was very aware that my father had died from being a very early age and that this made my mother unhappy, but I can remember thinking it’s such a long time ago. But as I was four, then I guess I didn’t really realise that it wasn’t such a long time ago. So yes, I guess my birth was quite an event really, but it seemed to be in the history, you know, so soon superseded by my father’s death that there don’t seem to be any kind of jolly tales about it particularly or stories about it. I was, you know, you can see from the photos, I was kind of big and jolly, so nothing’s changed. [laughs] Wasn’t one of those sort of thin, sad looking babies, you know, I was suitably fat. Yeah, it’s nice looking at photographs of myself. There are lots of photographs of me; there are photographs of me with my mother, with my grandmother in Zanzibar and with my father even, so that’s quite nice to sort of have that. So obviously busy with their Box Brownies, you know, immediately taking photos, so that’s kind of good really. And then coming here, my mother took me straight to where her mother lived in Blackpool, sort of almost she arrived in London on Christmas Eve and my auntie, who’s a musician, and her friend; a very, very good friend of my mother’s who’s still a friend of my mother’s, so the three of them still meet, still go for lunch in the V&A, still send each other birthday cards and see each other, you know.