Imposter
The first time I appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, a researcher telephoned me at my desk at a University where, unbeknownst to them, I worked as a receptionist. I was working to support myself through a part-time PhD. So when the telephone rang in the admin office, and I cheerfully answered, “Good Morning, [insert name of Department here]!” I’m sure my caller, who’d been patched through, was a little surprised. When they asked to speak with ‘Janine Bradbury’, I think I offered something along the lines of ‘I’ll check - please hold’, separating myself in two, creating concurrent universes like in the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. I became Janine ‘the academic’ and Janine the administrator. Which one of us was real?
The researcher asked whether I’d be interested in being on the programme to talk about one of my favourite authors, Zora Neale Hurston. Her iconic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God had been chosen as BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, and my interview would help promote it. She passed the phone to a producer, who asked me some questions to suss me out. I passed the test. I got the gig. I hung up the phone and returned, in a daze to support the ‘real’ academics in the department.
Sometimes, I send my dad a GIF of Guy Goma on BBC News that captures the moment he realised he was an inadvertent imposter who’d gone undetected. In 2006, Goma went to the BBC to interview for an IT job and was mistaken for the late Guy Kewney, an established IT journalist. He was one of the Guys, but not the right Guy. He was escorted into the studio and sat in front of the camera for a live interview about internet streaming culture. In what has since become an iconic piece of British television, Guy Goma actually answered the questions. Whenever I watch the video of Goma’s appearance (which I do quite often), his face kaleidoscopically capturing the full range of human emotion (startled, excited, worried, delighted…), I think of my Woman’s Hour appearance. I send the GIF whenever I think I’ve done something I shouldn’t. What if at Woman’s Hour they knew I only did the photocopying? I was qualified to do the interview, by the way. I just didn’t believe I was.
I wasn’t one of those girls whose mother listened to Woman’s Hour while washing up the breakfast bowls, and I didn’t grow up in the sort of house where the sounds of Radio 4 susurrate in the background while grown-ups make cups of tea and flicked through the papers and mowed the lawn (is this image a fiction in itself? Do people live like this?). So I had to get up to speed. I spent the next three weeks before my appearance listening to Radio 4 almost non-stop, drifting off to The Shipping Forecast, waking up to Today, and nodding along to Woman’s Hour. And I became, like millions of other listeners, a devotee.
The big morning arrived. After I scraped myself off the bathroom floor (the nerves had gotten the best of my stomach), I caught the bus to a regional BBC studio, was shown to a small red room, given headphones and a mic, and I said a quick hello to (now) Dame Jenni Murray whose voice, reassuringly familiar by this point, beamed into my headset. The programme began, and I sat in silence through a segment on vaginal dryness (!) until it was my turn to speak.
The second time I was on the show, seven years later, I approached them. By this point, I’d finished my PhD, wound up my time as an administrator, and I’d become one of the UK’s leading academic authorities on my research specialism - books and films about passing for white.
My PhD research had asked why iconic, incredible, trailblazing black women writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker kept returning time and time again to this idea of passing-for-white given that it was so…old-fashioned. They borrowed, I suggested, from fictions of passing, the typically tragic stories of light-skinned African Americans (often women) who crossed the colour line seeking that safety and privilege that being white typically confers. Novels and films about these were so commonplace that we can read them as a genre, and it is one of the most recognisable genres in American literature.
When I read that the author Brit Bennett had achieved roaring success amid the Black Lives Matter protests with her novel The Vanishing Half (a novel about a light-skinned African American woman passing for white), I knew they’d mention it on Woman’s Hour. If one day, while eating my muesli, I heard somebody else being interviewed about this topic, given how long I’d been researching it, I knew I’d feel sore about it. So I got in touch and wangled a slot. As my dad once said to me, you can’t complain about not playing the game if you don’t get off the bench. Don’t wait for somebody to give you permission to do the work, to be an expert.
“These books, these films,” I told Jenni Murray (again) from the comfort of my lockdown bedroom office, “They are seriously problematic! The so-called ‘tragic mulatta’, the mixed-race woman at the heart of these stories? She almost always experiences a downfall of epic, almost Shakespearean proportions. She drinks poison, falls out of windows, or succumbs to fever. She loses the people she loves the most.” Or something like that. I haven’t listened back in a long while. I waxed lyrical about how sexist, colourist, and racist some of the genre’s tropes were and how excited I was for a rewrite.
I argued my case with such clarity and passion that Jenni Murray asked, in a tone of sheer astonishment, “If these books are so problematic, why have you dedicated your entire career to researching them?”