The Good Immigrant Read online

  Wole, the lone contact I had in the theatre industry, took me to the spots he knew but they were either staffed by non-English speakers or barbers who, without payment dismissed the project. On one of the dejected rides back to the hotel, I asked why ‘This House Is Not For Sale’ was spray-painted on so many properties. Wole explained that Nigerian conmen had perfected a way of breaking into and selling properties when their owners holidayed. The writing on the wall was the only sure way of safeguarding homes.

  ‘419 …’ he added – the moniker for Nigerian con men – ‘… refers to section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code which deals with obtaining property by false pretences.’

  On my last day, I poured my woes into the open ears of Wallace, the driver who taxied me to the airport. He patiently listened, feigned annoyance that I hadn’t called him and without missing a beat, did his best to portray barbershop culture on the mainland where he and the working class lived. It was a whole other world. Men come specifically to talk, food hawkers come by to feed clients, and because of the constant lack of electricity, boys in the hood come to charge their phones. In the darkness of Nigerian nights, they’re the only places with electricity, they glow, literally, like beacons of the community where ‘men come to be men,’ Wallace told me.

  As the plane took off, I remembered something Wole said. ‘There are phrases you see when arriving in major cities, “Welcome to LA” a billboard will say, “Welcome to London” another, but ours reads “This is Lagos”.’ It is a statement. Its subtext is “Enter at your own peril”, “Sink or Swim”, or as Wallace put it: ‘Hustle or die’.

  I can’t fault that mentality, it is relentless and enterprising.

  #IfAfricaWasABar Nigeria would own it.

  – @MduThaParty

  Ghana

  On landing in Accra, I noticed the country felt like the older, calmer, wiser brother to hot-headed Nigeria, as though it had harmonised its 70 tribes where we had failed desperately. Because there is a healthy rivalry between the two countries, as a Nigerian, it pains me to say this.

  The first two days were spent with Aunty Mary, a friend’s mother, who embraced me as her own, and the rest of the week I stayed with a mentor and his family, so perhaps the cumulative effect of their domestic lives slowed me down. I was no longer a travelling bachelor. I was a surrogate son in one house, a new uncle in the other. Whatever it was, something had changed. I found barbershops easily and the best one within walking distance of the house. The conversations were not of business, politics, infidelity or crime, but of family, language and fatherhood. A client recounted a childhood memory involving his father. Another, the beauty of the Ga language. An experienced father gave advice on raising daughters to a new father. A linguist talked on similarities of pidgin languages.

  ‘It takes a whole village to raise ’is child’ is one of the many sayings indicative of the nature of African communities. It points to the deeply socialist structures many were built on before colonisation and capitalism changed them. Of all the cities I’d visited, this philosophy seemed most alive in Accra, such that it had inhabited Christianity and localised it. Aunt Mary was in the church business. On the first day, Ebo, who worked for her, asked if I’d accompany him on his morning errands. It involved visiting a church Aunt Mary was building. I jumped in the taxi and minutes later, we stood before an unpainted concrete structure the size of a small sports stadium. Inside lay high-tech sound systems, pulpits and podiums for preachers, a broad stage with a cascading blue curtain, magnificent natural light through slits cut in the roof and large windows for cross-ventilation. It sat four thousand people comfortably. A primary school was attached to one side of the church, architectural plans for a secondary school had just been completed, and behind lay a small but rapidly expanding shop. Ebo explained about the financial ecosystem built into the church, those it employs, the lives it supports, how vital it’d become to the neighbourhood, how, some Sundays, so many attend that they set up a canopy and cinema screen to relay the service to those standing outside.

  #IfAfricaWasABar Ghana would be that guy who gets drunk and starts – for some reason – talking about how much God loves us all.

  – @SiyandaWrites

  England

  One night in Battersea a young actor entered the barbershop and admitted he doubted he’d get the role he’d just auditioned for. We asked what the role was.

  He said, ‘Black man.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘Strong black man,’ he said and continued that he doubted he fitted the director’s concept of ‘black’ masculinity.

  I asked what his concept was, he said he didn’t have one. I claimed this was his problem, until he asked if anyone really had a definite grasp on what ‘black’ was, or ‘masculinity’, for that matter. We failed to answer him then, and I fail still, but travelling had given me a broader sense of the issue.

  The term ‘Black’ was employed by African Americans as both a political and socially conscious alternative to ‘negro’ (or the much darker nigger). It was as an act of defiance, self-identification, and as a way to distance themselves from the ‘African’ label, which had abundantly negative connotations at the time. Nowadays, the label is used for darker-skinned people of sub-Saharan descent everywhere: in the Americas, Asia, Europe and on the Africa continent itself. In Europe where whiteness is the default, blackness stands in contrast and any race is ‘other’. On the African continent, not only is blackness NOT the default, given North Africans who are generally lighter-skinned, but blackness isn’t the default in all sub-Saharan countries; countries like South Africa, Angola, Namibia or Zambia have large British, French or German communities. In the countries I visited that have a greater percentage of ‘black’ nationals, the concerns, motivations and emotions of the men I met differed, not just from country to country, but within countries, along tribal and socio-economic lines – differences so sharp and clear they had become stereotypes. Dividing them along tribal lines, those six countries alone break down to 558 different types of ‘black’ men. ‘Black’ men from all 54 African countries live in England, so even a conservative estimate would put a least 1,000 different types of them in the country.

  England is also home to ‘black’ men from the various Caribbean Islands, from North and South America, as well as ‘black’ men born in England, who have never touched African soil … men of different tribes, temperaments, natures, political and socio-economic backgrounds and beliefs. Despite these obvious nuances, phrases like ‘black-on-black crime’ or ‘black community’ are used to suggest a monolith and when there are disagreements within said monolith, it is portrayed as dysfunctional, rebellious, animalistic and mutinous. The African continent is so vast the land can hold Portugal, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Eastern Europe, India, United States, China, Japan and the United Kingdom at the same damn time. As we know the earliest human, ‘Lucy’, was found in Ethiopia, it’s safe to say inhabitants of these countries and all of humanity came from sub-Saharan Africa, that sub-Saharan Africans are genetically coded with all of humanity’s assemblage, that they contain all hues, variations and cultures: eye shape, pupil colour, hair texture, hip thickness, bone density, finger width, tongue and skin tone. To put it mildly then, it is insulting, reductive, counter-productive, lazy, disingenuous and deeply, deeply, deeply, problematic to attach a single label – one of Western invention as a shield against racism, one as porous a description of skin pigmentation, as ‘black’ – to a group of people so vastly varied and numerous. Whenever we beg for nuances, for our differences to be articulated, for more diversity and accuracy in how our communities are described, in the characters written for ‘black’ actors on stage, on television, or in film, our voices are either silenced or ignored.

  #IfAfricaWasABar there would be a load of groupies hanging around outside claiming they know what’s going on inside better than the bar staff.

  – @fil

  Wearing Where You�
��re At: Immigration and UK Fashion

  by Sabrina Mahfouz

  I thought you’d be, you know, darker … You don’t look at all how I imagined … Well, I have to say, I thought you’d look more, ha ha, I suppose, foreign … You look a bit, English though … It’s quite a relief you’re, well, you know …

  These comments were spoken by different people of different backgrounds at different times of my life, but put together they could easily be one continuous musing by a confused person on what it means to have a name that indicates non-whiteness, but a skin tone that indicates a happy harmony with the politically and economically dominant racial group of the previous few centuries. There is so much to delve into from this that it would require another essay with a different focus. What I’d like to particularly point out from it for the purposes of this piece are two things. Firstly, that the way whiteness is defined seems to differ person to person, country to country. Many people from North Africa and the Middle East regard themselves as white, whilst stating that there are also black people of that nationality. In Egypt, for example, those who have a darker skin tone and more of a sub-Saharan African physiognomy may be called ‘Black Egyptians’ by other Egyptians who, if pressed, would self-classify as ‘White Egyptians’ – even though they themselves would most certainly be regarded as a non-white ethnic minority in a white majority country such as the UK or USA. It is interesting to note that the classifying seems to be done by those with lighter pigmentation. This is a direct colonial legacy of course, encouraging racial divides and appealing to those with a lighter skin tone to self-classify as white in order to create feelings of superiority and aspirations of assimilation into the politically dominant race, which they are not recognised as being once outside of their locality. The first existing documentation on racial classification was François Bernier’s, written in 1684. Bernier divides all of humankind into four racial groups – calling those who live in Europe, North Africa, South Asia as well as the Native Americans to be of the same race, whilst sub-Saharan Africans were another, as were the Lapp race (indigenous people from Lapland area). The Central, South and South East Asians were the final category.42 This ‘typological model’ influenced later anthropologists such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who created explicitly racist theories, which in turn influenced the eugenics movement and the persistence of the slave trade. Although these theories, and Bernier’s simplistic classification system, are thankfully now wholly discredited, we can see from the self-classifications of Egyptians, as mentioned above, that this original theory still permeates the consciousness of people. There are those who would narrow these outdated categories even further. I have had conversations with educated people of all ethnicities in the UK who truly believe that if someone is not black, then they are white and vice versa. This narrow and negating dual classification tool has been promulgated so that people are unwittingly encouraged to choose ‘sides’ and discouraged from regarding race as something unfixed and far more complex than many seem ready to admit. I see this as a huge societal issue that can only be dismantled by constant discussion, hence my inclusion of it here, even though it could be argued to sit slightly outside of the remit I have set myself. However, as this is an essay that talks of race throughout, I’d ask the reader to bear in mind the above and to note that despite the imperfection of all classification systems, I will be using the classification of whiteness throughout which relates mainly to Northern and Central European ancestry.

  The second aspect of the above I’d like to pluck apart is my own discomfort at feeling as if I don’t meet people’s expectations of what somebody from ‘somewhere else’ should look like. This reclassification of my identity by others has often made me feel guilty that I have this background, and even more so that I am connected to and highly interested in it. It is part of our endemic racism that we immediately attribute the experience of otherness to somebody who fulfils what otherness is supposed to aesthetically be. Whilst I appreciate that any negative experiences of otherness are exacerbated if you do occupy that aesthetic, it is part of the problem if we do not accept, or expect, diverse heritage experiences from those who don’t conform to our inherited and constructed ideas of what ‘diversity’ looks like.

  I am a bit white. I’m part-Danish and part-English via Wales. I’m also as much part-Amerindian and Madeiran Guyanese. But the largest part of my heritage is Egyptian, which is where the Arabic Muslim surname comes from and why some of the (openly pleased) people quoted at the start of this piece thought I would look ‘more foreign’.

  I have seen these surprised smiles enough to know I am not in a position to complain about my ability to assimilate into the cold embrace of dominance due to my pale skin tone; but on a micro level, I think that whenever anyone questions your identity, you have the right to get a bit pissed off and on a macro level, what this questioning represents is problematic, as I’ve already talked about. What I’ve found interesting and worrying in varying degrees is the extent to which my ethnic identities can be validated, dismissed, or even prove offensive to others in the UK, just from me wearing a particular piece of clothing, arguably a luxury others who look ‘less white’ don’t ever get.

  I’ll share a couple of examples. My Egyptian great-grandmother and my Guyanese great-grandmother both wore headwear in styles reflective of the country and time they were in. My Egyptian great-grandmother wore a thin, silky turban of sorts, with a costume jewel in the middle, fashionable but conservative in the days when not many middle-class women in Egypt covered their heads. She was a practicing Muslim, but in those days this did not mean what it often does today in terms of Egyptian women’s attire. She chose it partly because her husband was an active Islamic scholar and both of them felt more comfortable if she covered her head in public, as they were often attending places of worship and religious importance. The other factor was that despite Egypt being credited with the emergence of the turban thousands of years ago, it had unexpectedly become globally fashionable in the 1950s, so she was doubly happy. My Guyanese great-grandmother wore colourful cotton scarves tied up around the front of her head in little knots, a style that those with African heritage had popularised in the country, many of whom she had grown up with in the city orphanage as a mixed-up, light-eyed child, nobody would take in.

  Waiting at the bus stop in South London one day, I was wearing a black turban similar to the style my Egyptian great-grandmother wore. I hardly knew her, but I have always been more comfortable with my head covered, albeit not in a traditionally religion-specific style. When living in Cairo for a few years of my life at various times and whilst exploring aspects of my faith, I have worn hijab, but in London I have always worn a wide variety of head coverings. On this particular turban-wearing day, a white English man came up to me just before I stepped onto the bus, pointed at my head-covering and shouted, ‘All Muslims should die’, before scurrying away to dissolve in the acid of his hatred (hopefully). I am well aware that this is light conversation compared to what Muslim women wearing hijab or niqab have to face every day in this country. But it astounded me, as it always does, that somebody could be driven to such vociferousness by a piece of cloth and the ‘difference’ this might represent.

  Another day, once again in south London, but this time on a bus (all of this is making me think I should probably just save up for a car), I was wearing a headscarf similar to the ones my Guyanese great-grandmother used to wear. Two girls who appeared to be of mixed heritage behind me were loudly complaining about ‘white people wearing black people’s headscarves like a trend ’ and stared at me pointedly when their stop came along and they left the bus. I understand appropriation is a very real, very sinister thing. Cultures who are left devastated by Western power and policies – in some cases almost entirely annihilated by them (such as the Aboriginal and Native American peoples) – are constantly used as sources to ‘inspire’ fashion trends and art of all kinds.43 At the same time, in the case of this scenario, I feel strongly that
headscarves are not owned by one culture and, even if they were, what the comment made by the young women highlights again is this problematic assumption of an individual’s heritage based purely on an aesthetic they appear to fulfil. Maybe I should have said all of this to them through the open window. But I didn’t because I was busy playing a game on my phone and let’s be honest, confrontation on London transport is always better as a ‘shoulda woulda coulda’.

  Except for the one time on a night bus to Lewisham around 12 years ago, when I heard two drunk, young, white men abuse two much younger black men at the back of the top deck. There were quite a few passengers, but they all stared ahead. I got up and told them to leave it out. I was wearing a faux snakeskin pink biker jacket from Morgan (don’t, I know). Both of the young men left the boys at the back and came swaggering towards me. As one of them started taking his belt off to presumably threaten to hit me with or take down his jeans more efficiently, the other one provided the commentary.

  ‘You think you’re fucking J. Lo, don’t you?’, he said, pointing at my jacket.

  The upside of this distraction caused by my dubious fashion choice was that the other boys ran off the bus unbothered.

  Meanwhile, I was trying to simultaneously figure out why my wanting to be J. Lo in a snakeskin jacket (which I didn’t, I really only ever listened to UK Garage) made him so angry he was ready to unleash a belt buckle into my face. I was saved by a tannoy announcement that the driver was recording what was going on and the two racists rushed down the stairs, out of the doors and on their merry way. That story, though loosely related, was a slight detour on what is basically a wondering on my part as to both fashion’s impact on the identity of immigrants and the children of immigrants in the UK and the impact of immigration on current British fashions.