KYLA DANQUAH
BEING A WOMAN, WHAT MAKES YOU POWERFUL IN THIS COMMUNITY?
"Before we didn’t have a lot of rights, women have struggled and there’s been a suffrage movement where we started really representing who we are. Now as a society just being a woman is just more powerful than before. Being a woman itself is just a better thing because now we’re trying to bring more attention to women rights and its become a better and stronger thing now. So now, if you’re a woman, you are much more important, there’s so much more to do in society but being women just in itself is a really empowering thing because being a woman now shows the progression we’ve had back then. So being a woman now has shown the progression that we’ve had back then, it has also shows that we’ve been through a lot and just everything going on in past has shown that being a woman, you should be really proud of it."
TALK TO ME ABOUT YOUR FUTURE PLANS AND DREAMS...
"I’ve realised that I may not want to be a doctor because I don’t know if I really like biology anymore… I may now want to be a chemist, a biochemist so the plan is to do HL Chemistry and SL bio… I want to pursue different languages so I may drop French and most likely do Korean. I really like the cultures there just because I can familiarise with it… For college, I think I’ll do my undergrad at Brown, Columbia or Stanford but I’m not really sure but I'm trying to get in any medical school because I also am thinking about being a perfumer, you know me."
WHAT ARE SOME PERSONAL EVENTS THAT HAVE IMPACTED HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT BEING A WOMAN?
"I was talking to my mother about the career I wanted to pursue and she was talking to me and I told her that I wanted to be a chemist and she said, that’s not things women do now. And that was my first wake up call, like oh, why? why aren’t people pursuing this career like for example, Marie Curie you know, she’s amazing. So I thought like you know if I’m the first black women to be a perfumer, which probably many others have done it, I'm still going to pursue it. So I guess I was like why not pursue it anyway because I can do it."
DO YOU HAVE A ROLE MODEL, SOMEONE YOU LOOK UP TO?
"My mom. Every woman in my family just pursued a different career so if you look at what they’ve been through to get to that career, its a whole different story. Life, for example, my mother, she’s a doctor right? But she had to move from Ghana to America knowing nobody, barely knowing the language, going into college not knowing what to do and meeting all these people, especially back then, being a woman is hard. its all different stories, and so every woman in my family has a different story and they all are powerful in a different way."
IF YOU WERE TO BE PORTRAYED IN A PORTRAIT, HOW DO YOU SEE IT?
"I feel like I’m an onion. I have different layers. If you draw me, there would have to be different things to draw. Section me off… There are some people who could just be like, this is how I want to be seen but I feel like I’m something different. I'm a fun person, a picture that can picture my hyperactivity, my fun side you know. Another to portray my serious side, my get to work side, and lastly a picture to portray my soft side, my sadder side."
