I wrote ‘I too Hear the drums’ for a mixed race anthology. At first, I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t even know that a mixed race anthology existed and that people wrote about that. Years ago my father had told me to write what I know, so I started off with my own experience. I talked with many of my mixed race friends and family and discovered that we all had very similar experiences: our hair changing at puberty is the physical but for those of us who moved to North America, we became aware of being slotted in categories depending on the shade of our skin yet not feeling fully accepted by either black or white. The actual incident at York University really happened, not to me, but to a close friend of mine. It comes across as my story because when I heard it, I was indignant, angry, shocked and these emotions came out in the writing. How dare anyone question our “Jamaicanness” by asking such an inane question, ‘Can you hear the drums?’ Being from a place doesn’t always have to do with colour: it’s a shared history of so much more. I look around and listen to people and I hear all these assumptions and stereotypes and I write about them. Even among mixed race people there are all these prejudices. I’m not writing to expose people. I’m writing to understand them.