The Good Immigrant Read online

  Except, there are a few other things going on here. For a start, by being in the room, I am the only reason why the rest of the party can’t say it. I’m a big red stop sign in the middle of the dance floor, a symbolic reminder of why they shouldn’t use such a word and who they will offend. Without me there, the word is just another rhyme in a lyric. It’s a tree falling in a forest conundrum: if a white kid raps all the lyrics to ‘Gold Digger’ and there isn’t a black person around to hear it, is it still racist?

  Secondly, I’ve never grown up with the circumstances where this word has been used. Never learned the difference between the -er and -a suffix, never picked up on the nuances of context. Where Kanye comes from, vocabulary has changed, history has been re-claimed in linguistics. That Which Cannot Be Spoken means so much more: means brother means friend means fool means black. I only ever learned the white rule for this word, of which there is only one: this is a word that should never be said. By anybody. Myself included.

  Growing up with all-white classmates, there was no context in which this word could be used. I attempted it once, around the age of 12, the same age I was trying out other swear words in my vocabulary to see how they worked. And this was the only one that didn’t. My friend responded, at first, with confusion, and then with a face full of pity. As if she thought me unaware that this word’s purpose was to be derogatory towards me and only me, as if she was worried she might have to explain what it really meant. I felt embarrassed, and so did she.

  Even when, at 14, I finally joined a school with other black people in my classes, it never came out comfortably when we used it.3 We said it because we could, because it was cool, because it was delicious to be entitled to something that everyone else wasn’t. Not because it came naturally.

  Which is my third point. My white peers knew that we had only learned this word, not through any culture of it being used, but in the same way that they had, through hip-hop and American films. This was Somerset. Even those of us who adopted it smoothly into our lexicon would be lying if they said they hadn’t done it consciously. Just because we could say it, didn’t mean we could pull it off. And because it becomes so glaringly obvious that this word doesn’t saunter so comfortably off of my tongue either, there is always a worry that white people will take me using it, me who was brought up by their rules, as confirmation that they can as well.

  This is when duality hits me in the face. Is the problem that I grew up as a black face in a white environment? Or is the problem that I possess whiteness within me, that I came from a white household, and was brought up with the white rule books? I can’t provide the answers of what to do in this situation just yet. All I can suggest is to cross your fingers and hope for a radio edit.

  4. The World is a Stage: The Performance

  For as long as black people have been visible to the Western eye, our collective role has been that of the entertainer. From being ogled at in the human zoos of the nineteenth century, to now, where our television sets still mostly show us in limiting, stereotypical roles: the thug, the hooker, the fresh-off-the-boat minister, there is much fun to be had observing our queer, primitive ways.

  The only way to control this gaze is to indulge in the role of the performer. To entertain is a passive process, it happens whether we wish it to or not. Whereas to perform implies the intent to entertain. And as anyone who has been to a black family gathering before will know, we are excellent performers.

  We learn this, as with any art of performance, from the generations before us. We learn specific ways to dance, to sing, to tell stories, to laugh and make others laugh, to cook, to rap, to make a beat with anything at hand; with our fists, our mouths, our bodies. It is so deeply embedded within our culture that we appear to know these things innately, and of course, we don’t. We learn these things just as anyone could.

  I was only ever around my black family during school breaks, so all of these things I perceived them as knowing innately I sought to learn in other ways. I turned to the internet to teach me, because it was the only access I had to black culture as a pre-teen. There were the obvious (and with hindsight embarrassing) Google searches: ‘how to dance like Beyoncé’, ‘how to gel my baby hair’, and ‘what are the full lyrics to Dizzee Rascal – “I Luv U”’.

  Then there were the lessons I picked up more subtly. I spent hours in black haircare forums, dominated by African Americans, and without noticing I was mimicking their grammar, their way of speaking, to fit in: ‘are’s’ became habitual ‘be’s’. ‘She does’ could end up being replaced by the rather more decisive, ‘she do’.

  But this was the wrong kind of blackness to be learning. I knew nothing of America, had never learned this new grammar, these new words by ear. Being black, partaking in this performance, was not as simple as just knowing I was black from birth. I was engaging in it as a conscious practice. And the more I recognised this, the more inauthentic I felt. I was not performing. I was acting. This deep sense of paranoia crept in, that invisible forces were going to catch me out for faking my own blacknicity.

  I debated whether being in these online communities from such a young age meant that this was an authentic way for me to be now, the same way a child picks up an accent when they move to a new place. Of course, it doesn’t really work like that. Anybody is capable of going online and selecting access to blackness. From fashion houses adopting black hairstyles on their runways to white pop starlets claiming they invented black dance moves, anybody is able to mimic the art of black performance and mistakenly assume that they are included within it. Just because I picked up on a dialect, albeit one used predominantly in black communities, doesn’t mean it was authentically mine. Its creation is rooted in a certain space and a certain time, one I don’t intend to misrepresent myself as existing in. Their lived experiences inform their online words which have accidentally trickled down to inform mine. And as long as that stays the case, there is no reason for me not to let my lived experiences do the same. Because, after all, I’m black too.

  While being black can be a shared experience, not all black experiences are the same. With my family, we share the experience of being black through being Zimbabwean, through food, through music. With my friends, the context is being young and black in Britain in the new millennium. When it comes to the world online, sometimes the shared experience is as simple as being a confused black kid who hasn’t yet worked out where they fit in. And that’s enough.

  My authentic self is my default performance, the person I am when I’m not thinking or when I think nobody is looking. And sometimes this is a person who tries to dance like Beyoncé in her bedroom with her eyes closed, or listens to ‘I Luv U’ by Dizzee Rascal because that song is a certified jam, or says all the lyrics to a Kanye West song because she knows all the lyrics to a Kanye West song and isn’t concerned, in that moment, about what they might mean. Sometimes she is none of these people. My authentic self stays black. She stays black when people are present and she stays black when people are not.

  My blackness is both a performance and a permanence, it will exist with me despite my actions. And another part stays with me too, the part that dictates how I experience blackness: with the awkwardness and the puzzlement and often with the privileges of being a light-skinned black child who is ethnically white too. My mixedness plays as much of a role in the way I’m experienced as a black person as my blackness does.

  Because the truth is this: there is no singular way to be black, no universal set of experiences that we all share, no stereotype that can accommodate the vast array of personalities and histories and ethnic backgrounds that black people possess. And though a guide would have been a gift at times, especially as a confused, adolescent outsider, all of that confusion was just a small part of my experience. There is no one way to be black. Our worst performance is entertaining the idea that there is.

  2 A toothbrush, it turns out, used like a mini brush especially for baby hairs.

  3 There were still only eigh
t of us, a particularly high number in comparison to other year groups, and every single one of us was also mixed-race.

  My Name Is My Name

  Chimene Suleyman

  One September I wrote my name as it would be seen in Turkish letters in fountain pen across my desk. The teacher, a thin woman with high cheekbones, wiped it clean despite my protests that she look at it first – Şimen. I don’t know where the desire to do so came from. My parents had never spelled my name like this, nor wanted to. But I had seen the Indian and Nigerian kids in my classroom become Bobby’s and Ziggy’s as the heritage of their authentic monikers was redesigned. Standardisation is the backbone of the Empire, after all. But survival is forgiving. And these were kids who knew that the blow of being called ‘paki’ on the climbing-frames could be smoothed away faster with a whiter-sounding nickname.

  Years later, I remember the surprising tastes of the Bangladeshi food from a workman’s café buried behind a bus lane in Stepney. The collective flavours of what we grew to know as ‘Indian’ food were, of course, aspects of three or four nations’ dishes and muted for a British palate. On TV and online, famous chefs even now attempt their ‘own’ versions of such resonant dishes as jollof rice, or rice and peas, one going so far as to ruin the dish, and enrage Jamaican viewers, by using green garden peas instead of kidney beans. Over the years, on mainstream radio stations where N.W.A., Souls of Mischief, or Kendrick Lamar should have played, Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and Macklemore did and still do. If cultures were to survive in England it would be on the shoulders of bastardisation. This was clear to people like my parents, who understood this to mean that simplicity and effortlessness were of themselves the root of Anglicisation.

  They had the foresight to see that Chimene would sooner be pronounced ‘chimney’. That schoolchildren would sing ‘chim-chiminee, chim-chiminee, chim-chim-cheroo’ in front of thoughtless teachers. Instead, my name was offered to the English in phonetics: Shimen. They had quite literally spelled my name out. At home my name would appear on birthday cakes and cards as Chimene. On my birth certificate, passports, and bank card it plainly read, Shimen.

  The name itself is not a Turkish one. Pierre Corneille wrote the French play Le Cid some many centuries ago about the tortured love between a Spanish man and woman: Don Rodrigue and Chimène. The story is essentially that of Romeo and Juliet and my parents had enjoyed the sound of the name, perhaps even that it belonged to literature and love. It is scarcely recognised that my name is a French one. It is foreign, and I am foreign, and it is within this framework that I move. With family and friends I am Chimene – layered in cultures and afforded the romance of such a name. With the state I am Shimen – conciliatory and afraid that my difference is a thing of difficulty for the British.

  One evening my father drove me to yoga. It was a practice then new to me, and in the freshly painted walls of an old Finsbury Park clothes factory a white woman with long hair would fold and bend until we repeated her motions.

  It was as I stepped from the car that my father said, ‘Your grandmother used to work here.’

  Here, my mother’s mother would stitch clothes behind a sewing machine with Turkish women who had only wanted from life the privilege of work. Some decades later I was rolling a mat out, as one rolls the carpet of gentrification over our ancestors’ footprints, onto the floor of a room of exercising white bodies. I remember laughing when the instructor closed her eyes and placed her mouth in a way to make the ‘Aum’ sound. Others followed and I thought how easy saying things came to them without understanding their essential nature.

  Words, names, and their noises are careless in England. They are not put to use in the way that obstructed communities have learned to pronounce every violence put upon us as though it is sacred. We carry our trauma in every word that we say. The three religions that this chant spread across did not exist in the instructor’s mouth. Spirituality cannot be borrowed. Religion belongs to the cultures we are brought up in, and cannot be studied and replicated without family. There is no ‘Aum’ without Indian dharmas, as there is no ‘Allah’ without Islam, nor ‘Pull-up!’ without UK Garage, or two hands coming together to form a W without Wu Tang. That is to say: You cannot have meaning without knowledge of the environment from which it stems. This woman was not speaking of the infinite, the world, the truth. What she meant was, ‘This is a calming noise for you, this helps you focus, this is the end of the session.’ It did not mean ‘Aum’.

  There is a wretched scene in Brian Friel’s play Translations, where Irish place names are transcribed at the behest of English soldiers. Poll na gCaorach – meaning ‘hole of the sheep’ in Irish – becomes Poolkerry in English. Druim Dubh – ‘black shoulder’ – turns into Dromduff. Words with significance become sounds without any. To repeat a word as it has been told to you is not to be invested in its force. As is calling me Shimen without knowing that my name is Chimene.

  The Cyprus my parents were born to used characteristics and nicknames in place of surnames. A defining feature – a bushy beard, a long moustache, a hunchback, limp, or loud voice would attach itself to your first name – Ahmet the Beard, or Crazy Hakan. Last names became signifiers for your place in the family tree. Mustafa may have a son, Hassan, whose name would be Hassan Mustafa. Hassan would then have a child, Zalihe, who would take her father’s name as her last, to become Zalihe Hassan.

  As one might name their child after a beloved deceased relative, the rotation of names are as much the rotation of souls. Will a child named after her departed aunt bear further resemblance to her namesake, they will wonder. See how she speaks with her hands just as her aunt did, they will say. She loves swimming as the woman before once did. It is reincarnation for the spiritually shy. Just as the Juniors, and Junior Juniors, of African American communities know the importance of preserving identity. Such is the way for those communities who prepare for their fathers’ murders. My father and his father continued the tradition. Suleyman Recep bore my father, Recep Suleyman. On a spring morning in 1964, Suleyman was tortured first and then killed.4 Walked by Greek soldiers to a pig farmer’s house, his body was probed, cut, then desecrated with a severance that belongs to those who have learned to take. I have seen this sense of property in the eyes of men who step to their girlfriends, who walk into children’s bedrooms uninvited, in the policemen who slam a brown or black body against a wall for a half-smoked zoot – no, often less. It is there in the white men and women who do not understand, to the point of frustration, why we still walk with the noose of our ancestors around our necks, as we cannot comprehend how they do not carry the indignity of their ancestors tying it there.

  But tradition is an inescapable trait of our communities – those who cannot rely on land or home for their identity. Our parents, and their parents, and theirs before, have little more to leave us beyond their names, beyond their language. We have inherited the knowledge that community means to remain. When we cannot return to our homes – or are waiting for them to be taken from us again – we must get the hang of how to recreate it elsewhere. It is in the particular smell of rice, or aubergines, the pastry that survived on the windowsills of our mothers’ kitchens. It is present in the familial catchphrases of a sentence once uttered decades ago, resurrected every mealtime, ‘The koftes are burnt!’ We have been shown to grieve beneath beautiful scarves tied around our hair, and to eat and drink water in back rooms with shut windows so we may not be seen replenishing a life that another has lost. We are heirs to their favourite chairs, and wedding rings, and the noose around their neck.

  Ten years after my grandfather’s death, Cyprus would be divided through its middle – the South for the Greeks, the North for the Turks.5 My grandmother was assigned a home so recently abandoned in war that her children and their partners bore the task of burying the 15 or so bodies scattered throughout the house. One blisteringly hot afternoon in the ’80s my cousins and I threw a football against a freshly painted wall that left a mark above the door. Inches below
were bullet holes. There were more in the doorframe of the living room and around the windows of a room to the side. On her bedroom floor, beneath a worn red Turkish rug, the ageing stains of blood spread across marble. We were children who found leg bones of unmarked men beneath the lemon tree. We were children who listened to our parents crack jokes about being prisoners of war as one might recount a story of a badly gone date.

  One evening we set about digging the mound in front of our grandmother’s house where we knew there to be a body. We went at it with spoons. Perhaps someone had a stick. Our parents carried coffee over our heads and crescents of watermelon as we played in such a manner. This was not neglectful. Remember that in the capital, sandbags still lined the streets. In No-Man’s Land6 windows stayed open from where owners had never returned to close them. Such a ‘business as usual’ response to war is a poison. I know that now. But it is also an oath to our family and countrymen that is born of belonging to something so remarkable. It is a kinship I do not have with the English despite being born, educated, and brought up by the streets of London – north, east, and south.

  When the border was put into place the official records on the island began. It was more practical to document the lives of Turks now that whole Turkish villages were no longer burnt and buried alive, or churned through mincers like those neighbourhoods of Sandallar and Murat Ağa. During this time my father was obliged to register a family name and from the ashes came a new one – Şehitoğlu. ‘Şehit’ to mean martyr, ‘oğlu’ meaning son. Recep Suleyman now carried his father’s name twice.

  I tell a lie. He carried it three times. High on his shoulder were the stains of a 13-year-old boy who had inked the Turkish flag into his own skin. Know that for many of us to be proud of our nationality is a death sentence. That my father was then a 13-year-old soldier and the only provider for his mother and her five children. Know that brown and black children are not allowed freedom from maturity. How can we call a child ‘the man of the house’ and not expect him to mark his body with a target so he too might be killed and taken from this responsibility and almighty grief? Some 10 years later he found himself a prisoner of war for a second time. With his brother they tattooed their father’s initial ‘S’ into each other’s arms. Stroking my own ancestral noose, my first tattoo mimicked theirs – a sweeping tail coming from the letter, jabbing towards my chest like a sword. It is not antiques and money we are waiting to inherit from our families, but their skin.