Beneath the silky creamy crack and caked on makeup, there was a little black girl with kinky hair plaited and adorned in colourful bobbles, begging to fit in. My coming of age was quite lonely as a young black expat in the Middle East. I survived, but oftentimes I wonder if it came at a cost that could’ve been avoided.

At the age of six my parents moved me from the tiny twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean to the even tinier island kingdom of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. My family were not new to this region, my uncle and aunt having already lived in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates for decades before moving to Bahrain. The small yet prominent Trinidadian and West Indian diaspora in the Persian Gulf has steadily grown since the 1980s.