Four years ago, I wrote an essay that appeared in a collection called The Good Immigrant. The story, based on an episode from my life, opens with a South Asian girl waking up in the bed of a (white) stranger after a one-night stand in the dark. Dawn is breaking, and as the light fills the room she notices something: he has flags. Union jack flags hanging all around the room. I won’t spoil the story, but if you’re beginning to panic, don’t. No hate crime occurs (well, not there anyway), and the piece is a comedy.
My reason for writing it was relatively simple. At the time, Britain was in the midst of a campaign to leave the EU. For us – the writers, the children of immigrants – it was urgent to counter the xenophobic rhetoric that reduced people who love, hurt, bleed and dream to £-signs.
I never saw myself as an expert on race issues. Sure, I’d read books about racism, but I’d also read books on workers’ rights, feminism, environmentalism, and also once a book about spanners that I found surprisingly hilarious (I was in hospital and on many drugs). I just liked reading. Fiction especially. My favourite books featured rebellious young women on a journey of self-discovery – but those characters always had money and seemingly never worried about chin hair. Whereas the characters who looked like me had terribly sad plotlines that went like this: born, married, chapatis, chapatis, chapatis, terrorism, chapatis, death.
I wanted so deeply for there to be different stories, that for a while I wrote my own, in an online diary called Brown Around Town (because I am brown and I was around town, duh?). It documented my life as a broke arts grad, trying to find work and get a date. At one point, a publisher approached me to turn the blog into a book, and even though books are my greatest passion, I crumbled. I was too young to handle the shame of Mum reading about that time I dropped acid and laughed for 20 minutes at a street sign that read “Heavy plant crossing”, thinking about the Little Shop Of Horrors. I panicked about the blog being too well read, and employers seeing it. I closed it down.
But I missed it. When the opportunity to contribute to The Good Immigrant arrived, I knew what I wanted to do. It also helped that I thought no one would read it.
I was wrong. Many people read it. That was when the emails first started arriving: “Dear Coco, I read The Good Immigrant and I realise now that I was wrong to dismiss your concerns about racism when we worked together.” There was a stream of apology emails – from former colleagues, exes, friends – some heartfelt, and others bizarre. Someone I briefly flirted with emailed to say that he was sorry for calling me “his own Jameela Jamil” (definitely racist, but she’s fit: so result!). Other emails were defensive, admitting to hurting my feelings but not understanding why, forcing me to explain myself over and over, as though – in the same way a word repeated starts to sound like nonsense – I might conclude my truth was meaningless. Nearly all of the emails promised change. That it would not happen again.
In retrospect, I don’t think I handled those early emails well. I regret my inability to sit with the discomfort, often choosing to minimise and pretend it didn’t hurt. It was patently obvious that some of those messages were sent not to a friend, but to a priest – our conversation a kind of racism confession box where I was meant to provide absolution. (“Forgive me, ethnic friend, for I have sinned. I should have offered to walk you home when those men shouted ‘Britain First’ at you. You must have been afraid.”)
And inevitably I would give it, because I wanted so desperately to be likable – as though being likable might somehow close the BAME pay gap. But soon enough, their old ways would return: comments about my work accomplishments being down to diversity quotas, wilful ignoring of any mention I made of race. Their Instagram solidarity post would slip down into the bowels of the grid, and I would grieve – once for the friendship lost, twice for the self-respect that went with it.
I still receive apology emails, but these days I’m more guarded. It’s not that I’m unforgiving; I just think my forgiveness isn’t the point: change is. And forgiveness is best delivered by a God or a judge, not a thirtysomething who is still learning. All I ever ask is that they keep learning, too – keep talking, educate others, make changes. Keep trying.
On the subject of learning, a petition asking that The Good Immigrant be added to the GCSE curriculum has now been signed by nearly half a million people. I don’t know if it will happen; I can’t think about it for more than a few seconds before my brain overheats, overwhelmed. Nevertheless, I look forward to telling my grandkids about my great contribution to race equality in Britain: a short story about a failed handjob in a Nissan Micra. But I suppose the bigger question is, when future generations ask, what will you say was yours?
