Brown Baby Read online

  She is called a ‘shit-skin incubator’ online. One who deserved to be ‘raped, tortured and killed’. She was asked why she was in England if she was a shit-skin.

  Each one of those men feels bad for her. Seeing the effect words like this can have on a person. She asks them again if she should be deported.

  I don’t know what conclusion to draw from the film other than that confronting racists with the humans they abuse, to show that we have more in common, is probably a worthwhile project, but you can’t do that for everyone. Mostly because of the mental toll it takes on you. We need to look at doing the humanising work earlier in people’s lives maybe. Rather than when they’re so hate-filled they can’t possibly treat you equally until you’ve befriended them.

  It was the resurgence of the word ‘shit-skin’ that stuck with me. It’s a word I hadn’t heard in nearly thirty years and to see it still being used as an abusive stick to beat people with, made me realize how far we hadn’t actually come in all these years.

  Around the same time, a prominent South Asian commentator, Ash Sarkar, starts appearing on BBC Question Time, with her mix of political theory and grime references, making a name for herself as a funny and righteous person to quote. I watch one of her panel episodes, despite being allergic to shows like BBC Question Time. I wouldn’t watch a bun fight on television, nor would I watch bear baiting. Why watch BBC Question Time? But I do. To support her. And I watch it how most of us watch discussion-topic shows. I double-screen it. With my phone in my hand, listening and scrolling through the timeline for pithy tweets to react to and retweet. The watercooler shows of yesteryear now get talked about in real time.

  Double-screening BBC Question Time that night, I see that so many of the insults levelled at Ash are about her being dark skinned, smelly and hairy. Which have nothing to do with why she’s on the show, the words coming out of her mouth or who she is. She’s easy to dismiss cos she’s a dirty, smelly, hairy darkie. Why do people need to pay attention to her?

  They’re back, these insults. They’d been out of my life for the longest time because political correctness had gone mad and people said ‘you can’t say anything anymore’, which was code for ‘I can’t say the horrible things I want to say because you’re now empowered to point them out for being horrible anymore’ or ‘I accidentally said an offensive thing and rather than apologize or understand why I got it wrong or move on from it, I’m going to act like I’m the victim and you’re the state censoring me.’ Hmmm, maybe this is a good time to misappropriate the thought crimes trope from 1984.’

  Racism isn’t on the rise. It’s not in resurgence. It’s not had a ‘one born every minute’-style upward swing in birth rate. No one is waking up, thinking: yesterday I was just Paul, but today I’m Racist Paul who hates Pakis, cos there was one in front of me at the GP surgery.

  No. It just stepped out from the shadows. It never went away. We haven’t sprouted more racists. People have just decided it doesn’t matter as much to hide it anymore.

  Which is terrifying.

  Ganga, my love, the people who call us shit-skins or say that we smell or that our dark skin is disgusting and dirty and not pure, they’re now emboldened to say these things again, because the idea of political correctness gone mad seems quaint and archaic these days. I hope when you’re older we’ve moved beyond these horrific words. I can only hope.

  No one has sat with a yellow legal pad with two columns, internally debating the pros and cons of being a racist. Their anxieties haven’t led them to places that weren’t already there. If anything, this makes racism seem simplistic and surface. A fickle idea debated and decided upon because of current anxieties, current immigration numbers and viral videos of densely populated-by-ethnics areas of cities, like Edgware Road in London. People have held these beliefs for years. They are ingrained and core to their being. Crucially, they know these opinions are wrong or not what polite society deems palatable. So they hid in the shadows until people like Nigel Farage were constantly on our news programmes. And then they realized that this was now the time to come out of the shadows.

  Because now their views were palatable.

  And who bore the brunt of their racism? People who were visibly not ‘from here’. The shit-skins.

  One of your Playmobil figures is a brown guy on holiday. He has a camera around his neck, long Seventies psychedelic Indian man hair, one of those beige waistcoats with multiple pockets. He is always Daddy. When I’m not at home, you play with him, referring to him constantly as Daddy. Mummy is a white Playmobil figure.

  I sit and watch you bumble the daddy about, doing my voice.

  ‘Where’s my phone?’ you whisper at the daddy figure.

  My cheeks reek of shame.

  I love that you immediately see him as me but I want you to see him as anyone. A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, a friend’s father, an uncle, the guy who works at the post office who berates me in Gujarati for my illegible handwriting every time I take something to him.

  In Fun at the Shops, a father takes his toddler shopping. They go to the greengrocers, where they get crunchy green apples. They go to the florist, where they buy pink flowers for mummy – aside, this cementing of the patriarchy through gendered colours, let’s put a pin in that for a bit later; they splash in puddles because it’s raining, and they choose yummy treats at the bakery. They then go home.

  The book depicts a brown male, with a quiff, probably great-looking, probably how I would look if I was at my optimum weight and then illustrated – aside, this body shaming through self-deprecating, let’s just say I’m fishing for compliments. The dad-bod has a hold on me – and his child, a brown toddler, toddling about in a yellow mac.

  It’s only a short board book, meant for bedtime for toddlers. It depicts a normal day out, to hold a mirror up to that child.

  When we read this book together, again and again, you point out that you have a yellow mac. So do I. We are in a gang, called Mac Gang. Two badasses in two badass yellow macs. Usually, the sum of our gang activity is just us both wearing our macs outside when it’s raining. We hardly strike fear into our rivals: Parka Posse. We don’t traffic in anything nor do we really hold any territory or have a code of conduct for solidarity. We just wear macs and nauseatingly shout out MAC GANG as we walk down the street. Maybe this is designed to strike fear into the hearts of our rained-on fellow pedestrians. I don’t know.

  We graduate to hat gang when you grow too big for the mac. When we first read that book together, curled up in my armchair, I tell you that you are the child in the book. You. This is a book about you. Not many of our picture books that depict children instead of rabbits or Gruffalos have brown kids in them. They all feature what Marley Dias, the inspirational eleven-year-old responsible for the project 1000 Black Girl Books, refers to as ‘white boys called Josh and their dog’.

  In 2018, a study from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education found that 9,115 children’s books were published in the UK, but only 391 of these – 4% – featured a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic character. And the character from an ethnic minority background was the main character in only 1% of these books. In reality, in 2018, 32% of schoolchildren in England came from non-white backgrounds – so this means most of the books read aren’t properly representing children in the UK. It’s the main character angle that sticks with me.

  This book, Fun at the Shops, does have brown kids in it. As a main character no less. Your face lights up the first time we refer to the child with your name. So I continue to do it. And your mum does as well.

  You are now in the story. You can see yourself.

  You’ve long grown out of your yellow mac, but we continue to read the book, and when we do, you always point to the main character and say your name. When we’re in the bakery picking out a yummy treat, you pick at the gingerbread man or the cupcake and mime eating it. You then, without fail, pretend to pick up the doughnut and give it to me. Not only are you part of the story, but
you’ve decided to put me into it as well.

  When we have read books featuring other brown children, on two or three separate occasions you have pointed to the brown child, never the white one, and said your own name. You are delighted to be on the page. You are ecstatic to see yourself reflected back.

  So when we read books, we see a world reflected back to us. And I am trying to curate one that welcomes you and makes you feel included. Which means I search hard for books featuring Black and brown characters, animals with ‘foreign-sounding names’. I do the work to ensure that your bookshelves are aspirational. They reflect a world back to you that you want to belong to, one that validates your experience. One that treats you as a human being. A normal one who can go with a parent to do the shopping. Or save the world from an asteroid. Or have a dog called Timmy for a best friend. All your experiences are valid. Whether they are real or imagined. All set our aspiration levels. All tell us who we can be, who we are now and who is central to the story.

  We are the main characters.

  The writer Reni Eddo Lodge once said that race is ‘not a singular and distant part of our lives for it cannot be abandoned or compartmentalized’. Rather, it’s intertwined with everything we do. She talks about how people of colour deal with race in their everyday lives because their lives are racialized against their will. That is the reality of race today. And she’s right. Race compounds, affects and directs everything we do. So much of how I act and conduct myself is about ensuring that this complex part of me is not erased.

  Darren Chetty writes in The Good Immigrant that children’s literature professor Rudine Sims Bishop offers a useful metaphor for helping us think about what is at stake here. Whilst acknowledging that ‘good literature reaches across cultural and ethnic borders to touch us all as human’, she argues that books can act as both mirrors and windows for children. ‘Windows’ offer us a chance to look closely at a view of the world we may not have previously seen. Those windows might take us out to escapist fantasy or provide a view of lives we have not experienced before. These are notions familiar and vital to writers, teachers and those of us who care about stories. But Sims Bishop adds that books might also mirror our lives in some aspects and that children from the dominant culture tend to have books as mirrors while children who have been historically ‘ignored – or worse, ridiculed’ do not, and that this communicates important messages about the extent to which ‘they are valued in the social context in which they are growing up’. Recognizing that a window can be a barrier, Sims Bishop later added the idea of the sliding glass door as ‘a way to suggest that a book can offer . . . a lived experience for a reader’.

  Once, when I submitted my first novel to a man who would definitely not in a million bloody years become my literary agent, he responded to my work by saying he didn’t feel like my characters felt authentically Asian.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked in an authentically Asian way, perplexed as an authentic Asian might be, if a posh white dude questioned the authenticity of his authentically Asian characters. Because, you know, he knows what authentically Asian means more than this authentic Asian.

  ‘They don’t really act in a way that readers will understand as particularly Asian,’ he replied.

  Huh, I thought, in my authentically Asian brain. I wondered what that even meant. Did I do things in an authentically Asian way? I became self-conscious. I sipped at my coffee, wondering if I did so in a way that people might understand as particularly Asian. Reading between the dogwhistles, I knew what he meant. He meant that white is the default for most people and therefore you have to justify why the character is Asian if they’re Asian. They can’t just be Asian. An Asian can’t solve a murder or have an affair with one of his impossibly attractive younger students before being sad for three hundred pages, or have a dramatic arc that becomes symbolic of the state of the nation. No. That was for white people. If an Asian did that, it’d be an Asian story, rather than just a story. Asians had to Asian Asianly.

  I noted how I was sitting as I read his email. One foot was up on the chair as the other dangled. My elbow rested on my knee.

  Maybe I did do things in an authentically Asian way. I was wearing a jubo lengha after all.

  ‘What does that even mean?’ I replied in haste and anger, which, if I think about it, is probably an authentically Asian trait. ‘Would they feel more authentically Asian to you if there was an arranged marriage, a jihadi or a sari billowing in the wind? Maybe someone eats a mango on the first page?’

  He didn’t reply. Which I suppose, now, in hindsight, was an authentically straight white dude thing to do. His authentically straight white dude reaction was to probably think, defensively, ‘How dare this prick call me a racist?’ Which I didn’t.

  But if the racist shoe fits?

  These fetishized depictions of South Asians are a problem. And they’re plastered over the books featuring brown children. And it’s sad that so many of them are written by South Asian children’s book writers. But if that’s the only way they know they’ll get commissioned, I can see the depressing logic in it. Part of the strain of the success of The Good Immigrant was in doing a book centring the stories of British people of colour, especially in conversations around race and immigration, and it being a success, it stood to potentially perpetuate the feeling that this is all we can, should and want to write about. Especially if we want to be a success.

  Which is just utterly untrue.

  We need to break these stereotypes. We need new stories.

  You don’t see yourself in a sari, necessarily. You can if you want to. You don’t see yourself in a mangrove swamp. You don’t see yourself eating a mango as the sun sets through the banyan trees. You do love mango though. Thank god. You see yourself doing the things that reflect the life, and the society, you are growing up in. Those other things, the saris, the mango sunset, the banyan tree, they are part of your heritage and should never be erased, but you should not see yourself in books as the sum of only these tropes.

  Do you need to see yourself in books in order to appreciate them?

  No. Not necessarily. But it remains an entry point for you. You can appreciate books about boy wizards, kids with kestrels, lions, witches, wardrobes, Tracy Beakers, and not necessarily see yourself. Only their universal experience. But seeing yourself, your very self, will have been validated by Fun at the Shops. That book shows you that you exist too. In White Teeth, Zadie Smith talks about the experience of realizing you’ve been erased. Zadie writes: ‘There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection.’

  When we only see ourselves as stereotypes that have no bearing on our lived experience, we operate without reflection, and wonder, just what is England mirroring? Just who is this country saying we can be?

  Sometimes, the space we must occupy isn’t one of normality. Sometimes, the limitless imagination of story creation needs a person of colour at its core.

  I think often of the film Ghostbusters. Not the original 1984 version that is in every hashtag man-on-the-internet’s top five favourite films of all time. No, instead, I think about the 2016 reboot starring Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon. When it was announced, oh Christ alive, the internet was set alight with fury. How dare they? This was political correctness gone mad. (God, I almost miss political correctness gone mad. Almost. I don’t miss straight white men saying, ‘God, it’s political correctness gone mad. You can’t say anything anymore.’ No, you racist transphobe, you can’t. And that’s okay.) This was a feminist conspiracy (I’m sure the ultimate goal of the ‘feminist conspiracy’ is to reshoot all the favourite films of hashtag men-on-the-internet but recast with all-female casts . . . actually, I’m on board with this).

  One YouTube wingnut even suggested that they should rename it ‘LADY Ghostbusters’ just for clarification. Imagine. Imagine scrolling through your streaming platform of choice and loading THE WRONG GHOSTBUSTERS. Imagine, getting past the productio
n company idents and familiar theme music and going, waitasecond, this is the LADY Ghostbusters! I wanted the dick-swinging Ghostbusters! If only there was a way of demarcating out the correct Ghostbusters.

  Fun guys on YouTube announced boycotts and everyone’s favourite fascist-pretending-it’s-all-for-LOLs-and-if-you-ain’t-laughing-you’re-the-real-fascist Milo Yiannopoulos was eventually permanently banned from Twitter for his part in the campaign of violent racist and misogynist trolling against the only Black cast member, Leslie Jones, hounding her off Twitter. The damage was done. Leslie Jones had already been subjected to countless tweets and images comparing her to an ape, all in the name of good fun light bants, apparently. The entire thing was a racist mess. Especially that Leslie bore the brunt of the abuse. Sexists love an opportunity to one-up and go racist too, it seems. Who can resist a two-for-one?

  The thing that bewildered me, aside from all the abuse, was the lack of imagination of hashtag men-on-the-internet.

  They were willing to suspend their disbelief for a world where there were ghosts that needed busting, and a flying green splodge of slime could slurp around hotels, but they couldn’t possibly suspend their disbelief enough for the sight of four women busting ghosts. They’re the ones who need this diversity desperately. Maybe then their imagination wouldn’t be limited to man ghostbusters and white James Bonds and on and on into the primordial soup of boredom that was probably written by a man in the first place.

  Maybe you, Ganga, you’re not the one who needs better representation in the books and films and television you consume from an early age. Maybe it’s the men on the internet. They say, if you see it, you can be it. If they see it, they will make space. They can start to lift the limitations on their imaginations and believe it’s possible, that if women onscreen can bust ghosts, maybe in the real world, they can be paid equally. If brown people onscreen aren’t just tech support or the sexually repressed best friend, maybe in real life, they can be whoever they want.