The Good Immigrant Page 2
It’s an effort to type this way. In a way that’s palatable to Westerners. In a way that’s markedly different from my speaking voice, because my speaking voice holds rhythms that weren’t made in the West.
My mum had three voices.
She had her white-people-phone voice, her Guj-lish talk-at-home voice and her relatives voice.
I have three voices too. I talk in Guj-lish, my normal voice and white literary party. I don’t know whether my normal voice, where I feel most comfortable, most safe, even feels like me anymore. I’ve splintered into personas. This is the trick of living publicly online with increasing watch and scrutiny by others. When I first started out on Twitter, I had 10-odd followers, all people I knew in the real world, people I could be myself with. As my following increased, I had to become less of myself and more of the public perception of me as the writer. And it made me lose track of who I was and what voice I spoke in.
Nowadays, I ensure that whenever I tweet about literary things, I add the odd ‘fam’, ‘bruv’, ‘cuz’ or ‘innit’, just to ensure the execution of my thought or praise comes with the necessary rooting to where I’m from. I’m a hip-hop fan, and much as I agree that it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at – actually, it’s where you’re from.
An agent who has rejected me twice tweets about an impending apocalypse because his intern referred to clothes as ‘garms’. This sends me into a shame spiral. I’ve been using this word in two of my three voices since 1994. I reply to his tweet, saying ‘slang’s more important that “proper English”, fam. No one talks in proper English, innit.’ He doesn’t reply. I delete my tweet. I know he’s still smarting from when I pulled him up on a snarky tweet about diversity in publishing and his ennui towards it. His response was to say that there was a debate of merit worth having. I told him that it wasn’t a debate for me, it was my life. I can’t change my skin tone. White people debate it. We live it.
My conversation with Nerm makes me feel lonely.
I watch you in your mum’s belly, squirming about, experimenting with spatial awareness, waking up as she and I settle down to bed after the pub. I wonder what voice you’ll have? Who you’ll be? What you’ll sound like? And whether you’ll have Gujarati reference points or if the extent of your lingual heritage will only be namaste?
I knock on my neighbour’s door.
I know someone is home because a window at the top of the house is cracked open. I can just about make out the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster.
I wait, thinking about my opening line. I don’t know whether to be angry or polite and firm, or treat it like it’s a joke, like we’re all friends here, like I know you guys were just dicking around and that’s okay, but just know that words have impact.
Or whether to tell them how I feel.
One of the many online arguments I’ve had about the importance of language, how language can hurt, has been about tea. Chai means tea. Chai tea means tea tea. The number of times you see this on a menu makes you wonder why people can’t be bothered to do their research. Like naan bread too. Bread bread.
A comedian, Kumail Nanjiani, an avid gamer, once expressed his delight that the Call of Duty series finally set a level in Karachi, the city of his childhood, now one of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world. He was appalled, on playing the game, to see that all the street signs were in Arabic. Not Urdu. He talks about the effort put into making each follicle on each soldier’s head stand out, into making their boot laces bounce as they ran, the millions spent developing this game, and how at no point did anyone decide to Google the language of Pakistan.
In Jurassic World, they refer to some pachycephalosaurus dinosaurs as pachys, or pakis – ‘the pakis are escaping’ one of the techs exclaims. The budget for the movie was $150 million. If I had to place a value on how much people would have to pay me in order to call me a paki, it would be more than $150 million. Words matter. Words are important.
The casualness with which someone I’m working with refers to ‘two coloured girls’. The casualness with which a person having her photo taken with a nice view, and me obscuring the corner of it asks her husband to ensure he gets one ‘without the Indian in it’. The casualness of being on the last train home, from London to Bristol, in the same car as the bar, listening to two drunk men in their early twenties shout at each other, ‘n****r, we made it’, repeatedly, with excruciating enthusiasm. They’re just quoting rap, someone might think. They’re drunk, they’re harmless, they’re being exuberant. Dickish, but exuberant.
Language is important.
Years before, I sat in an Indian restaurant round the corner. It’s called Oh! Calcutta!1. I found the exclamation mark alarming. The place was owned by a white guy. As I sat with my best friend and his then girlfriend, starring at the disco lights, I listened to Kula Shaker sing about ‘Taatva’, about ‘Govinda jai jai, gopala jai jai’. I read the menu. One of the dishes listed was Chicken Chuddi, described as an exotic blend of authentic spices, tomato and peppers. It sounded so generic. What was an exotic blend, what were authentic spices, also – tomato and pepper? These were the biggest tastemakers aside from chicken in the dish? What was Chicken Chuddi?
Also, as you know, chuddi means pants.
I told my friend and his then girlfriend. They laughed at the whiteness of it all, ahahahaha, they said, cultural misappropriation is hilarious, they said in so many words. I felt mortified for the white guy owner, he had probably been duped by some guy he’d asked for a word that sounded ‘Eastern’. Maybe the chef was having a laugh with him. Maybe he was having a joke with his clients. I looked around. Everyone in the restaurant was white. It was a hipster student paradise. The mix of cod Eastern Britpop, minimal red lighting like a moody Ryan Gosling film and the prices, it felt like puppetry of food. The biggest crime. Not only was the Western balti curry now synonymous with my country’s cuisine, but now we had white guys aping the food we made to fit in with the white guys.
I called the manager over.
‘The Chicken Chuddi,’ I said. ‘You know chuddi means pants, don’t you?’
He laughed. ‘You having me on, right?’ he replied. ‘It’s a specific blend of spices. Nice try.’
‘It means pants,’ I repeated.
He smiled, itching to get away.
I let him.
Language is important.
The door opens.
He stands in front of me. A boy, not yet 20, wearing a T-shirt that says GEEK on it in the all-caps of shouting pride. He holds a controller for a games console in one hand and a cider in the other.
‘Hello,’ he says politely. Nervously.
‘Namaste,’ I say, pressing my hands together in prayer. ‘Hello.’
A car, a street away, pumps out a bhangra loop. The subwoofer bounces around my eardrum. I shake my head, turn around and head back across the street. Usually, when I leave for work, you’re in the window, waving, propped up by your mum. Your smile is free. It doesn’t know nuance yet. We should keep it that way.
1 Oh! Calcutta! was a long-running, avant-garde, sexy theatrical sketch revue put together by Kenneth Tynan the theatre critic in the late sixties/early seventies, mainly famous for the fact that the cast was naked a lot of the time. The title of the show was taken from the title of a nude painting by the French surrealist artist Clovis Trouille, ‘Oh! Calcutta, Calcutta!’ which was a pun on the French, ‘oh, quel cul t’as’ roughly translating as ‘oh, what an arse you have’. It has nothing to do with India.
A Guide to Being Black
Varaidzo
With most people, their race is perhaps the only aspect of their identity guaranteed from the moment of conception. They’ll be whatever race their parents are, and stay being that for life. For mixed-race children it’s a little more confusing. We don’t always come out looking like our parents, and often we’ll be racialised differently to them. The process can take a little longer to figure out.
Because of this, I spen
t the first decade of my life unaware that I was black, and spent the decade that followed being not very good at it. They had a word for this in the playground, an ‘Oreo’: a kid that was black on the outside and white on the inside. I had 10 years of catching up to do, and it was showing, and I wished someone had written a guide to being black that I could have read and then just got on with it. Instead, I had to figure it out the hard way, through actually living.
Here are a few of the key lessons I learned, like what to do when you’re the only black kid in a party when a Kanye song comes on, or how to decide which is the right hairstyle for you. It’s the guide I needed when I was younger: this is the unofficial guide to being black.
1. Black is the New Orange: Explaining the ‘One Drop’ Rule
I first acknowledged that I was black in the back seat of my best friend Jenna’s car. I was nine. Her mother was driving us, her older sister, and a couple of other kids that she carpooled, to their house for dinner. The older children had been having a debate over whether they were allowed to call someone Chinese if they looked Chinese but their country of origin was unknown. The word they were looking for, Jenna’s mother informed the car, was Asian. Then she delved into a brief lesson on race.
‘It’s the same way our family is Scottish but yours are Irish, yet we’re all still white, do you see?’ she said, and Jenna, presenting further evidence to prove her mother’s point, looked at me and declared, ‘It’s like you. You’re English … but you’re also black.’
Nine is a young age to discover such a thing. My first four years of life had not really included race. A better description would be that race was so commonplace as to make it obsolete as an issue. I had a white mother and a black father, an Indian godmother and a Japanese lodger. I’d been moved from London to Zimbabwe and back again. When we finally settled in Bristol, my group of friends in nursery resembled a Benetton commercial, all races and genders playing together after lunchtime milk. We owned the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella on video over Disney’s pretty white animation, and I thought nothing of the Filipino Prince Charming having Whoopi Goldberg and Victor Garber as parents.
This post-racial utopia dissolved when I was sent to a primary school in Bath and I was the only brown-skinned child in my year. Around the same time I developed an obsession with the colours red and yellow. My bedroom had pairs of red and yellow walls, and I exclusively used those crayons to scribble. I understood how these colours interacted, that if combined they created a new colour: orange. I applied this logic to my own family. With one black parent and one white, I was the orange to my father’s red and my mother’s yellow, not quite either but rather something altogether new. Does an orange thing ever stop to think that it might actually be red?
I never had reason to consider I was anything other than mixed-race.
Until the car journey. Jenna sat back in her seat and grinned, triumphant that she knew more about the world than the other children in the car.
‘I’m mixed-race, actually,’ I mumbled, trying not to draw the entire car’s attention to what I was or wasn’t. And Jenna, relishing her new found state of knowing everything, rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.
‘Well, obviously,’ she said. ‘But you’re still black. That’s just what we’d call you.’
She was right, of course. As a term, mixed-race could never fully illustrate my experiences. It described nothing; the act of being not one thing or another. To be a mix of races is to be raceless, it implied, and yet that had never been my reality. My race was distinct and visible, the thing that defined me as different to the rest of my classmates. Mixedness alone couldn’t describe this difference.
Blackness was something more convincing, more tangible. It spread out across my features in big lips and long forehead and hair that grew out rather than down. It filtered through me like a beguiling beckon, drawing security guards towards me when I entered a store and tricking my teachers into thinking I could outrun anyone. The world saw blackness in me before it saw anything else and operated around me with blackness in mind.
There was a drama to blackness, a certain swagger and verve, an active way of experiencing and being experienced that mixedness could not accommodate, one that I was committed to embodying fully.
There was one thing I’d never considered about mixing red and yellow: a drop of yellow into red paint won’t do much to change the colour, but one drop of red into yellow and the whole pot is tainted for ever.
2. Political Follicles: Black Hair
Growing up under the wing of my white mother and with no other black children around me, most of what I know about blackness I learned through an autodidactic education. Nowhere is this more true than with my hair.
For the most part, I perceived my hair the same way I did my elbow. It was just there. I had no teachers to show me what to do with it. No experts to learn from. The best I could do with it was attempt to copy what I saw on television.
Sitting on the bath, a mirror in one hand and cold blue gel in the other, I tried to work out how to slick my baby hairs down into swoops and spirals to frame my face (this is what the TV showed black girls were doing with their hair in ’06). Instead, I’d ended up frustrated and crying, with my curls crispy and my forehead sticky with the attempts of my unsuccessful gelling. What was this black girl magic that I hadn’t inherited? What was the secret to this process that they had all learned and I hadn’t?2
I assumed these bathroom breakdowns were unique to me, the result of being a black kid in a white town. When I migrated back to London, I realised most black women have some variation of this story in their memory banks. It’s not uncommon for black women not to have learned how to care for their natural hair until well into adulthood. Instead, we learn that Afro hair is difficult and that it doesn’t grow. We learn that it looks unprofessional and that it will prevent us from getting jobs. Hairstyles designed to keep Afro hair neat and healthy, like locs and braids, are often considered too wild and wacky for professional settings. On one occasion, I remember my Afro was described by a teacher as ‘distracting’ to others in my class. So what can we black women do? Well, we straighten it and cut it and cover it and we pretend that it is not our problem.
Certainly, I’ve never felt validation like I did when I got my first weave. I had to get a train all the way to Bristol and beg my mum to pay for the hair out of my allowance. The women at the hairdressers brushed out my small Afro with the vigour of a mother scrubbing stains out of school jumpers. Then they took it in turns to cane-row my hair so tightly that my whole scalp stung, cocking my neck at impossible angles, talking amongst themselves in languages I did not speak whilst fighting to be audible over the sounds of MTV Base on the wall-mounted TV screen. There is no need for customer care in black salons. Not when you’re paying for miracles.
It never occurred to me to complain about pain because afterwards, with this coarse dead hair resting below my shoulders, I felt beautiful. I entered the hair salon with three packs of long black human hair and I left as Beyoncé. Nobody could tell me otherwise. Wearing a weave was like uncovering a version of myself that I could finally see reflected in mainstream media. I looked like the black movie heroines and music icons I looked up to. I walked taller and smiled at myself when I looked in the mirror for the first time in my life.
Nobody knows the transformative power of a new hairstyle like a black woman. All too often, aspects of our personality become attached to the way we wear our hair. Or rather, certain hairstyles become attached to rigid structures of personhood. Sometimes, it feels like changing your hairstyle is changing your entire identity. The Afro is the hairstyle for black radicals whilst locs are for Rastafarians and hippies. I enjoyed wearing weave because I enjoyed being accepted, for donning the modern black woman’s style du jour. It made me feel like I belonged.
Although my hair was different, the real change wasn’t the hairstyle, but in my attitude towards feeling accepted. By conforming, I felt like I had a place
in the world, and the feeling felt good. The real lesson is learning to hold on to that feeling no matter what your hairstyle is.
For myself, and I don’t doubt for many others like me, learning to look after our natural hair is also to learn the lesson that our hair does not define us, and it shouldn’t determine our sense of belonging either. It’s removing the comfort barriers of conformity; straighteners, extensions and perms, and confronting the insecurities that lie beneath. Nowadays, whether my hair is straight and conforming or unbrushed and everywhere, I don’t rely on a change in hairstyle for a change in attitude. I’ve learned how to look after my hair, both when it’s in its natural state and when it isn’t. But more than that, my hair taught me how to look out for myself.
3. That Which Cannot Be Spoken: The N Word
At some point, the inevitable will happen. It will happen at a rave, or a club, or a party, where music is playing and people are dancing. A song will come on, usually a rap song, and amongst my generation it will nearly always be a song by Kanye West.
This is when an elephant will sneak into the room, walking straight out of Kanye’s mouth, dressed as a word that can’t be spoken. They will notice it at the same moment they notice me: the only black kid at the party.
It’s Kanye, so everybody knows the lyrics, and everybody is looking at me. I’ve got 30 seconds to a minute before the chorus hits to decide what to do. If I chant the word it will be a public confirmation of my blackness, a deliberate display that says this word is mine and mine alone to say. That I am allowed. That this is damn near a birthright. And in that moment of vindication it seems obvious that I’m going to sing along, because if rapping along to Kanye is one of the few privileges afforded to me as a black person, then of course I’m going to take it.