Transforming the Ideas of Nation: Adoption Aesthetics in Contemporary Black British Writing Abstract “ The Family has often been the site where legislative and divisive discussions of race and nation unhappily encounter loving and often brave human relations which reach subversively and threateningly across such divides”. [McLeod.2006]. I would like to propose in this essay that it is in fact the family, the space, where identity and culture are developed and destroyed. Adoption is a test of human generosity and love; a subject of the human ability to understand what true love can be but when it becomes a place of political endeavours; it too can be a weapon of warfare. I grew up partly in Nigeria and came to England with my mother, two sisters and brother. Life as a black child growing up in England was an experience filled with normative family relations and a traumatic realisation that came from an encounter with the care system and the operation of this system in my family. My brother now twenty seven was taken into care at the age of thirteen; my mother shattered with the pain of losing a child to the system died heartbroken and in disbelief. My sisters and I, learning the ways of the system gained much knowledge and still today, live with the knowledge that a system that takes is a system that gives nothing back. The issue of adoption is an issue that has challenged my relationship to the country I now call home; when placed in care, my brother’s notion of family changed. He started to question the identity of his father, professing that his father is a white American man, his knowledge of his country of birth changed. Issues around identity became apparent, often 1