The Good Immigrant
About the authors
Nikesh Shukla is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Meatspace, the Costa shortlisted novel Coconut Unlimited and the award-winning novella The Time Machine. He wrote the short film Two Dosas and the Channel 4 sitcom Kabadasses. @nikeshshukla
Varaidzo is an undergraduate student and essayist working in film and the arts. She is currently an editor at gal-dem.com. @veedzo
Himesh Patel is an English actor best known for his role as Tamwar Masood in the BBC soap opera EastEnders. He also starred in the award-winning short film Two Dosas. @himeshjpatel
Chimene Suleyman is a writer. Her debut poetry collection, Outside Looking On, was in the Guardian’s Best Books of 2014. She has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Book Slam, Literary Death Match, the Bush Theatre, Latitude and more. She has written on race and gender for the Independent, Media Diversified, and The Quietus. @chimenesuleyman
Vera Chok is an actress, writer, and performance maker. She’s also founder and director of theatre company saltpeter and The Brautigan Book Club. Her writing has been published by Rising, Brautigan Free Press, Toast, Yauatcha Life and Ether and performed at the inaugural BareLit Festival. In 2015, Vera acted for the National Theatre and The Kenneth Branagh Company as well as creating the performance piece These 12 Things Are True. @vera_chok
Salena Godden is one of Britain’s foremost spoken word artists. She is a regular performer at international and national literary festivals in a career that is now entering its third decade. Her short stories and poetry have been anthologised by Penguin, Canongate, Serpent’s Tail, Influx Press, Polygon Books and many more. She has written for BBC Radio programmes including The Verb, Saturday Live, Loose Ends and From Fact to Fiction and has authored and presented several arts documentaries for BBC Radio and Channel 4. Burning Eye Books published her debut collection Fishing In The Aftermath in 2014 to mark twenty years of poetry and performance. Her literary childhood memoir Springfield Road was successfully crowdfunded and published with Unbound. @salenagodden
Bim Adewunmi is a writer. She writes about culture for BuzzFeed, and is a columnist at the Guardian. @bimadew
Daniel York Loh has worked as an actor at the RSC, National Theatre and Royal Court. As a writer he has written the stage play The Fu Manchu Complex and, along with composer Craig Adams, was the winner of the 2016 Perfect Pitch award to create an original musical, Sinking Water, based on events surrounding the 2004 Morecambe Bay Chinese cockle pickers disaster, which is now in development at Theatre Royal Stratford East. @danielfyork
Miss L is an actress and the creator of ‘Casting Call Woe’, a site where she highlights the very worst casting calls. She regularly writes about the trials of being an actress and her work has been featured on BuzzFeed and in the Guardian and Grazia magazine. @proresting
Nish Kumar is a British stand-up comedian, actor, and radio presenter. He hosts Newsjack on BBC Radio 4 Extra. He has appeared on Have I Got News for You, Russell Howard’s Stand Up Central, Sweat the Small Stuff, and The Alternative Comedy Experience. @mrnishkumar
Reni Eddo-Lodge is a journalist and writer. Her first book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, will be released in 2017. @renireni
Darren Chetty is currently completing his PhD at UCL Institute of Education, where he teaches on the BA Education Studies course. He taught in primary schools for almost 20 years. He is the author of the award-winning paper ‘The Elephant in the Room: Picturebooks, Philosophy for Children and Racism’. @rapclassroom
Kieran Yates is a freelance writer on music and politics for NME, Metro and Dazed & Confused. She is the co-author of Generation Vexed and the creator of the magazine British Values. @kieranyates
Coco Khan is senior editor at Complex UK and editor of arts magazine, Kensington and Chelsea Review. She writes about class, culture and anything to do with hot boys. @cocobyname
Inua Ellams is an award-winning poet, playwright, and performer. Across his work, identity, displacement & destiny are recurring themes, in which he tries to mix the old with the new: traditional African storytelling with contemporary poetry. @inuaellams
Sabrina Mahfouz writes plays, poems, librettos and TV. She was recently a Sky Arts Academy Scholar for Poetry and an Associate Playwright at the Bush Theatre. Her play Chef won a 2014 Fringe First Award. @sabrinamahfouz
Riz Ahmed is a British actor and rapper. He has starred in The Road to Guantanamo, Shifty, Britz, Four Lions, Ill Manors, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Nightcrawler. He records as Riz MC, with Heems as Swet Shop Boys, and with DJ Distance as Halflife. @rizmc
Sarah Sahim is a writer of Afghan and Indian descent from the West Midlands, UK. She co-hosts the intersectional feminist podcast Not All Women. She has edited for Racked and Broadly and written for Rolling Stone, Paper, Playboy and Pitchfork on race, feminism, pop culture, and lifestyle. @sarahsahim
Wei Ming Kam is a writer and blogger. She works for Oberon Books and is the co-founder of BAME In Publishing, a network for black, Asian and minority ethnic people who work in publishing. She has written for Fantasy Faction and Media Diversified. @weimingkam
Vinay Patel is a writer for screen and stage. His work includes True Brits, which premiered at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe before transferring to the Bush Theatre, where he is currently under commission. Most recently, he wrote BBC3’s Murdered by My Father. @vinaypatel
Musa Okwonga is a poet, author, sportswriter, broadcaster, musician, public relations consultant and commentator on current affairs – including culture, politics, sport, race, gender and sexuality. He is the author of two books on football, and has written for Al Jazeera America, The New Statesman, The Independent, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Channel 4 News, Sky News, The Guardian, The New Humanist and the Financial Times. @okwonga
THE GOOD IMMIGRANT
Ed. Nikesh Shukla
For Sunnie and Timothy Patrick York (1967–2000)
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type thegood in the promo code box when you check out.
Thank you for your support,
Dan, Justin and John
Founders, Unbound
With special thanks to Joanne Rowling
Editor’s Note
This book emerged out of a comment on a Guardian article. I know, I know, it’s easy to say, don’t read the comments. But I do. Because I want to know my enemy. The commenter took umbrage at an interview a journalist had done
with five authors (including me) about their writing process. The journalist (Asian) had interviewed five or six people of colour. The commenter wondered why there wasn’t a more prominent author interviewed for this piece. He supposed (for it is almost always a ‘he’) that perhaps we were all friends of the journalist, given we too were all mostly Asian. This constant anxiety we feel as people of colour to justify our space, to show that we have earned our place at the table, continues to hound us. For while I and the 20 other writers included in this book don’t want to just write about race, nor do we only write about race, it felt imperative, in the light of that comment (and the many others like it), the backwards attitude to immigration and refugees, the systemic racism that runs through this country to this day, that we create this document: a document of what it means to be a person of colour now. Because we’re done justifying our place at the table.
For people of colour, race is in everything we do. Because the universal experience is white. Another commenter (yes, yes, I know) on a short story I once wrote, was pleasantly surprised to see Indians going through the universal experience. Much as I was surprised that I was excluded from the universal experience, it hammered home the knowledge that the universal experience is white. This book collects 21 universal experiences: feelings of anger, displacement, defensiveness, curiosity, absurdity – we look at death, class, microaggression, popular culture, access, free movement, stake in society, lingual fracas, masculinity, and more.
Luckily, there are magazines and spaces emerging to give people of colour the space to write about their universal experiences, and not just write specifically on race. Check out sites like Media Diversified, gal-dem, Skin Deep, Burnt Roti, Rife Magazine.
I chose these writers for simple reasons: I know them, I rate them, I want to read more from them. I’m happy to admit that nepotism and networks played a part in my selection. And I’m happy to create a brand new old boys’ network that circumvents the institutionalised ones we have to deal with on a daily basis. Because there is a secret cabal of people of colour, and contrary to the stereotypes we like to refute, we do all know each other. But that’s because when we’re the only ones in the room, we gravitate towards each other, and stick next to each other, because we intimately know the balance of race and universal experience particular to people of colour.
Before you enjoy these beautiful, powerful, unapologetic essays, a quick note on the title of the book: Musa Okwonga, the poet, journalist and essayist whose powerful ‘The Ungrateful Country’ closes the book, once said to me that the biggest burden facing people of colour in this country is that society deems us bad immigrants – job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees – until we cross over in their consciousness, through popular culture, winning races, baking good cakes, being conscientious doctors, to become good immigrants.
And we are so tired of that burden.
Namaste
Nikesh Shukla
Namaste means hello.
Namaste means I’m bowing to you.
It’s a customary greeting.
It’s a respectful salutation.
It has become a bastardised metaphor for spiritualism. It’s white people doing yoga, throwing up prayer hands chanting ‘AUM’ and saying ‘namaste’ like their third eyes are being opened and they can peer directly into the nucleus of spirituality.
You need to know this. Because of your skin tone, people will ask you where you’re from. If you tell them Bristol, they’ll ask where your parents are from. When they know you’re half-Indian, one person will try to impress their knowledge of your culture on you.
I can’t sleep.
It’s 2am and a party is raging across the road. The flat is rented out to students on a regular basis. Your mother is, sensibly, sleeping with ear plugs in. I can hear you purring in the next room.
I know that in four hours time I have to drive you to London, to take you to see your dada and your fai and fuva. To spend time with the Indian part of your family. To say namaste to your Indian cousins, aunties and uncles.
I’m driving so I need the sleep.
It transpires that the reason the party is so loud is because someone on the top floor of the house is leaning out of his window, smoking and bellowing a conversation down to a person at street level, which, due to the peculiarities of the houses we live opposite, is about four storeys’ worth of shouting. At 2am.
This is silly, I think. It’s Friday night, sure, but it’s a residential street. I may have been these kids once, but now I’m in my thirties. I’m a man of family now. I’m a man of red wine and Netflix. I’m a man of nights in and community cohesion. I get it. I get what life’s about. It’s about living like your actions affect the people you don’t know, as well as the people you do.
I’ve done questionable shit, pissed in places I shouldn’t have, left detritus for poor working souls to have to clean up the morning after, shout-screamed songs at the top of my voice running down streets where families lived, been oblivious to the rest of the world, carrying on like there’s something out there in the rest of the world for me to interact with. Your mother reminds me of this the next morning when I tell her what happens next.
I tell her that I don’t want to live with the thought that I’m intolerant of other people’s intolerance.
I walk out of the house, just as the conversation, bellowed across four storeys, wraps up and the man on the street level leaves to the sound of his friend hoping he gets home safely. I approach the steps up to their stoop. I notice, in the shadows, a boy and a girl are sitting in the doorway of the main door, ajar, smoking.
‘Excuse me,’ I ask. ‘Do you mind continuing your party inside?’
‘Jah bless,’ the girl in the doorway says. ‘Namaste,’ she repeats, over me.
I say it again. I change the words to become clearer. More forceful. ‘Can you please continue your party inside?’
‘Namaste,’ she says again. I hear the boy stifle a laugh.
‘Namaste,’ they both say. ‘Namaste, namaste, namaste, namaste, namaste,’ until I’m drowned out.
I’m standing under a street lamp, wearing my white bedtime kurta and lengha pyjamas. My skin is bleached out by the fluorescence of the yellow lamp. There’s probably no way they can tell I’m Indian from the lighting. It’s dickery for dickery’s sake.
The bellowing man leaning out of his window asks if the music’s too loud. I look up to him, the voice of reason and I say again, can you please continue your party inside?
‘Namaste, namaste, namaste,’ the girl says.
I shout something wounded, along the lines of ‘this is classy,’ passive-aggressive, without a target.
I go back inside and I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, watching the arrows of passing car headlights pierce cracks in the curtains.
Eventually the party quietens. My mind doesn’t. I’m rolling in a quagmire of ways to deal with this slight. Beyond writing ‘Namaste, Dickheads’ on a placard and placing it in my bedroom window, I don’t know what to do.
The house residents go home for the summer, having moved in and warmed the house to celebrate. Any call for an apology I ask for come the autumn will be muted and months too late.
* * *
I walk past an arts space that’s part bar/club, part sustainable restaurant, part hot-desking for freelance artists and part dance studio. They host morning raves and yoga classes there. Most mornings, the steps are daubed with hippies, wearing OM and Ganesha parachute pants, their hair in dreadlocks, bindis mark out the third eyes in the middle of their foreheads. They tie their dogs up to the bicycle racks using scratchy sari material and they enter the yoga studios to be natraja and ashtanga geniuses and salute the sun and greet and say goodbye to each other with a solid, heartfelt namaste.
‘Namaste,’ one of them says to me one morning as I walk down the road, listening to Jai Paul, swinging my two-tier tiffin up and down.
She offers me prayer hands as I pass and I see her
mouthing something. I take my headphones off. Jai Paul’s ‘Str8 Outta Mumbai’ is at its crescendo. But you know I’ll do anything for you. I’ll do anything for you.
‘Namaste,’ she says.
I grimace.
‘Hi,’ I reply.
‘Namaste,’ she replies and raises her prayer hands to touch to her bowing forehead.
She has faded henna on her fingers.
‘It just means hello,’ I say. She looks at me, confused. ‘Namaste, it just means hello. That’s it.’
‘Namaste,’ she says again, and I walk on.
I have three voices. I realise this when Nerm and his wife come to visit. You’re inside your mother’s stomach. Your involvement in this story comes just after your mother tells Nerm and his wife that she is pregnant, we are expecting. In his excitement, the typically expressive Nerm gestures wildly with his hands and knocks his pint of lager all over your mum’s stomach. All over you.
It’s funny, but it’s not.
The way Nerm and I interact is an intersection of our Gujarati upbringing, our east London socialisation and acknowledgment that there’s a white person in the room who needs to keep up.
Yes, bruv, we talk like goras be listening, innit. Fut-a-fut, we wipe away poi-nt spill, mite, while Katie gets fresss again. We call each other bevakoofs, cuss out each other’s pronunciation, bruv. We greet with the kem cho, mite. We’re cursive, glottal stopping, syllable-swapping rhythmic beasts of anarchic remixed English. Talking to him for the three hours he and his wife are in town, I feel like I’m with my peoples again. When I go home, it takes me a while to get my voice back.