Growing up as a mixed race child, former Victorious star Avan Jogia knew he felt underrepresented in culture, and now the 27-year-old is doing something about it by releasing a poetry book titled, Mixed Feelings. The book, which is also partly a collection of thoughts on social issues, was an opportunity to work out a lot of the thoughts and feelings he had been harboring for years.
In an exclusive with PopCulture.com, Jogia, who is set to star in Zombieland 2 later this month, admitted the whole thing started out almost as a “sort of documentary.”
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“I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Jogia told PopCulture.com, adding how it all really stemmed from his inner most admiration for the art form. “I remembered that I love writing poetry and I’ve been doing it for years, so I thought maybe poetry would be the best, most direct way to write about this.”
Jogia added that he felt with a mixed race identity it was as if living “between worlds.”
“I started to question [it], like is there a shared mixed experience?” he said. “Because a shared experience is what culture is about, based on shared experience, so we have shared experience then we have a culture, we have a culture then we have union.
He adds it “doesn’t matter” about one’s particular lineage or racial background, because in the end it’s “what makes us all the same.”
“That’s what I [found] interesting,” he added. “I’ve reached out on social media and through the internet to sort of just to see if anyone else was mixed and wanted to talk about it, and I got thousands and thousands of emails, which is amazing, really truly amazing.”
In addition to his own experiences and perspectives, Jogia also included expressions and poetry from other individuals who have similar experiences.
After coming to a “dead end” while working on the book, Jogia said to himself, “what is going to help me advance this subject more?”
“Then I realized that this was the problem with being mixed,” he explained. “A lot of people are experiencing it on their own because they’re not able to see like, ‘Oh, I’m looking for another mixed Indian-Irish person to understand my dilemmas.’ It’s like, no, you realize that you brought the idea of being mixed a little bit, or even a lot of bit. You start to get unity.”
“So that’s where I was like, okay, so I probably try to meet with people, or interview with people who [are] trying to get another, context or to try to collect, a shared experience instead of just my own,” he added.
Jogia also opened up about another circumstance mixed race children face, stating that at some point society in society you need to make a decision: “Which one are you? Which side are you on?” he asks. “So, we’re going to need to know where you stand in all this.”
“For me it was just like about sort of cultivating the idea that like not stripping mixed people of their mixed identity, which is their mixed-ness, regardless of what mixed it is, that’s the thing I want to concentrate on.”
Mixed Feelings is currently out now, on Andrews McMeel Universal publishing.
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