The Good Immigrant

by Nikesh Shukla

  As you grow older, as a mixed-race person, you become a chameleon, you are born with natural camouflage. When you travel everyone assumes you are some version of Latino or Spanish. In the first minutes of meeting you, people have to figure out what shade you are and this is your superpower, it buys you valuable time. People will show their hand and ask,

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  And if you reply, ‘I just jumped on the tube at Tottenham Court Road,’ they’ll tut and shake their head.

  ‘No,’ they say, ‘where do you come from, as in …’

  Pause ‘… come from, come from?’

  You earn time to chameleon, to camouflage, to make your shade darker or lighter. To morph into what is required or expected. Whatever it takes to survive, whatever it takes to be heard, whatever it takes to get the job. Whatever armour you must wear that day. It’s all positive discrimination. Right? No. Wrong. Very. Wrong.

  You hesitate, your pen hovers over your boarding pass.

  You tick: Other.

  Being other, another shade, hasn’t ever been a free pass: at the time of writing this I have been reading articles about the aggressive backlash aimed at actress Zoe Saldana for not being black enough to play Nina Simone in a new biopic of Simone’s later years. As far as Saldana is concerned she is black enough, and woman enough and good enough. When confronted like this, are they asking her to pass up the opportunity to play Nina? Should she know her shade and therefore her place? Decent lead parts for strong female actors are so few and far between, I am keen to see how she plays it. In spite of the shade thrown her way, I suspect Saldana will have worked ten times harder to prove she is good enough, a skilled actor, to portray the legend that is Nina.

  For me, being another shade has not been a guarantee of being published by a BAME publisher, to be included in black literary magazines, or that my work will be supported by the black press or BAME media. I haven’t relied on tokenism or any positive discrimination. I have, however, always felt that I have to work ten times as hard and that my voice is mine, but that it is different. I keep my head down, I keep on keeping on and I show up to work to write every day. I like to believe that I am booked for festivals and events and published for my merit and talent, and not for the tokenism of my shade or even my gender. I have hope and feel strongly that diversity and equality is improving in the UK, it’s a long and slow simmer, but I have seen improvement since I started out in 1994. I perform regularly, and share the stage with a comparatively even mix of boys and girls, black, mixed and white. But we still have such a long way to go; the headline acts are still mostly white and male. I continue to survive and thrive due to my own tenacity and the generous support of others, people who identify as being other: the warriors and outcasts, rebels and renegades, the revolutionaries, the circus, the outsiders and underdogs, the working-class heroes, the punks and the poets and the LGBTQ+ community too. We have learned to belong in the un-belonging. Spirited and colourful souls, of all shades.

  We tick: Other.

  Some people seem to think that BAME writers, coloured folk, are all in some clique, saluting our saviour Zadie Smith sipping coconut water and sharing jerk chicken sauce recipes. That is not true. And neither is it true that BAME writers write with BAME readerships in mind. It also isn’t true that all our books solely contain stories for each other, about each other, and about our roots, like travel diaries, tales that will only interest other homesick BAME people. I call bullshit on all of that. The shade of your skin is not the whole content of you and your work. The shade of your skin should not be the measure of your worth. The shade of your skin is not your only audience nor should it be a limitation.

  The universal job of being a writer is to write, to write with empathy, to be brave and honest, to find joy conveying a journey and in sharing your passion. Your ink is replenished by your life experiences, by taking off the mask and using your limitless imagination, by stepping out of the shade and into the light. As a woman may write in the voice of a man, I don’t see why a writer cannot imagine the voice of another shade and culture, that is what imagination is all about. Whatever shade you are, as a writer, you have just one task each day, one battle, and that is you against the blank page. Every writer should have just that in mind, nothing else matters, just that one fight is more than enough to contend with, each and every morning.

  You and your pen against the empty page.

  Britain is an island surrounded by salt seawater and inhabited by people of every shade. On a whole I do not think of people as flocks of sheep but more as shoals of fish, swimming to find food and heat and migrating to survive. We could protect each other better if we swam together in unison, we could protect each other from great white sharks dominating everything. We could, but we are like fish, as fickle as fish.

  I finish writing this piece at Arvon. I’m working at the writing residency, The Hurst in rural Shropshire. This week I’m tutoring an all-BAME and all-female group of writers, poets and playwrights. I just discovered that this is the first time that Arvon have programmed an all-BAME and all-women course since Arvon began in 1968. I feel honoured to be chosen to be here this week. I observe the women sharing stories, the challenges of being women writers, the struggles to be funded and to publish work. I am stunned by the openness of the dialogue, moreover the shocking lack of confidence which comes from having to lower your expectations, shrinking your dream because of a stream of constant rejection and the lack of opportunities here in the UK, especially if you are a BAME woman and aged over 30. Above all, this week is evidence to me of things improving, new platforms being provided and good people helping to change things. Things are slowly getting better, I can see an improvement since the 1990s, but it is just taking way too long.

  All I can do is keep on keeping on, keep sailing my Good Ship.

  Human colour is the colour I’m truly interested in, the colour of your humanity. May the size of your heart and the depth of your soul be your currency. Welcome aboard my Good Ship. Let us sail to the colourful island of mixed identity. You can eat from the cooking pot of mixed culture and bathe in the cool shade of being mixed-race. There is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world. Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboard. United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained-glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. Raise your glass of rum, let’s toast to the minorities who are the majority. There is no stopping time, nor the blurring of lines or the blending of shades. With a spirit of hope I leave you now. I drink to our sameness and to our unique differences. This is the twenty-first century and we share this, we live here, in the future. It is a beautiful morning, it is first light on the time of being other, so get out from that shade and feel the warmth of being outside.

  You tick: Other.

  The Wife of a Terrorist

  Miss L

  Doctor.

  Lawyer.

  Farmer.

  Librarian.

  A villain with a good heart.

  Hairdresser.

  One by one, accepting smiles spread around the room as our fates were tantalisingly dished out. The person next to me is bequeathed ‘Nurse’. She’s happy. She tells me later that she’d been fearing ‘Student’. We are all pleased for her.

  It’s my turn next. I’m in a drama studio, sitting in a circle with the 33 other people that I’ve spent the last three years with. Three years spent desperately clinging to the hope that we will leave this place and won’t spend the rest of our days working in a call centre instead of setting the BBC alight with our acting majesty.

  Today is an infamous day in drama school folklore. This is the day that we are all going to discover how to best market ourselves. After three years of trying to make ourselves as versatile as possible, we are now going to be told how the world would be
seeing us. Our training is almost at an end. Just a few weeks to go until we’re kicked out into the world, desperately waving our Complete Works of Shakespeare like it’s a ticket for the Titanic. Sat before us is the head of the acting school, a woman who has been getting to know us for three years and is now telling us what it’s worth.

  She turns to me and there’s a pause. Wow, I think. A dramatic pause. Clearly this is going to be good. My versatility over the last three years must mean my tutor can’t possibly pick just one role for me. I can practically hear every film studio sweeping their doorsteps in preparation for my arrival. She takes a deep breath and I suddenly realise what she’s going to say.

  ‘Terrorist.’

  People laugh. I even think I laugh. I’d honestly been expecting ‘pharmacist’.

  ‘Actually, no,’ she says, changing her mind. Well of course, she’d realised what a narrow-minded thing that was to say. That’s okay, we’ve all been there, we’ve all put our recycling in the regular rubbish without thinking of our great, great, great-grandchildren and the awful world we’re creating for them.

  She looks at me again and says, ‘The wife of a terrorist’.

  Now I’m definitely laughing. Three years of getting up at 7am, three years of movement classes that made my feet bleed, three years of singing that made me cry at my atrocious voice, three years of phonetics that made me want to rip my own soul out, three years of time, money, effort, hope, love, hate, hangovers and it was all to play the wife of a terrorist, the most silent, unseen role you can possibly think of.

  I wish I’d had the courage to shout back. I wish I’d found my voice before she moved on to tell me that the man sat next to me would be best suited to play a politician. I’m reeling harder than the time Dad was doing Ramadan so it meant we had to wait until the evening for our Christmas dinner … I know, our household was nothing if not multicultural.

  Until now, acting was being everything that I wasn’t. I, the brown girl at school with a funny name, had played everything. I’d been a villager from Oz, I’d been Jack Frost, I’d even played Gordie from Stand By Me when, aged 10, my friend and I inexplicably decided to turn it into a full-length play for our class. Yes, I, a 10-year-old girl with frizzy hair and a better moustache than all the boys in my class, had pretended, in 1993 in front of our Year Five class and painfully patient teacher Mr East, to have a leech on my penis. It’s this kind of tolerance of my foolish endeavours that almost definitely lead me to believe I could prance about for a living. When you’ve spent most of your life wanting to make a living out of pretending to be someone else, suddenly being told you can only play one role because of how you look is quite the rap across the jazz hands. One of the first steps to becoming an actor, after the realisation that people will always ask if you’ve been in anything they might’ve seen, is telling yourself it’s okay to want to be other people. It’s not that you don’t want to be you, it’s that you also enjoy not being you, and that’s fine. You took the Halloween fancy dress invite, and instead of just buying a cheap wig like most people, you decided to make a career out of it.

  The whole point of acting is versatility. Of course, there are some actors who make a glorious living out of playing the same role for ever more, but the reason why we become actors is because we never know which role will come in next. Look at Meryl Streep, you need to set aside a whole day if you want to spend some time with her CV. I kept telling myself there would be other roles on offer to me. If Renée Zellweger could play Bridget Jones then I was allowed to dream of being more than sad set dressing. I’d played Jack Frost, goddammit. Really though, that wasn’t the problem on that warm spring afternoon in April. The problem was that I’d finally been told how the industry would see me, and it was only on my walk home that I had the withering realisation that I was being judged by both my skin colour and my gender.

  The first question I had to deal with was why I was being seen as the wife of a terrorist. I’m going to go out on a pretty strong limb here and say that, despite the fact I once drunkenly broke a locker, this wasn’t due to any particularly disruptive tendencies I’d shown at drama school. In fact, I was so keen to not disrupt things that I even rather foolishly once came in for a dance showing with chronic food poisoning. I often wonder how many people in the world have attempted a grand jeté to Kanye West and contemplated which orifice is going to give way first. So no, that can’t be it. Therefore, I’m going to have to make a pretty bold assumption, much like she did, that my terrorist casting is down to the colour of my skin and my slightly unpronounceable name. Apparently, because of this, I was much less likely to be a doctor and far more likely to be something that has sadly become synonymous with the Middle East.

  Now don’t get me wrong, I was under no illusions that I was going to be the next Lizzie Bennet. I’d already come to terms with the fact that I was probably never going to appear in a Sunday teatime adaptation. Those quaint period dramas were never going to be for me, girls with my complexion don’t get to wear a corset as their father worries about the upper field drainage. I mean, it’s supposedly fine to cast white actors in ethnic minority roles (Angelina Jolie, Emma Stone, Mickey Rooney, I could go on …) but the other way round? There’s more chance of seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in the dole queue. This would be fine if ringlets and riding crops didn’t reign supreme on our TV screens, but you currently can’t look at a screen without seeing a white person worrying about a dowry. It’s no wonder ethnic actors are heading to America instead, somewhere they have a chance of not being elbowed out by corsets and fancy hats.

  As a kid who grew up being mildly obsessed with Brief Encounter, the realisation that I’d never get to be in any of these of course made me sad, but I consoled myself with the fact that this was the twenty-first century. This was the era of diversity and I, a woman once called ‘funny-coloured’ by one of her drama school peers when wondering how she’d be best described, should surely thrive. I hate to go on about it but, come on, I’D PLAYED JACK FROST. The sallow-skinned girl with a big nose had played the whitest male character the world has ever seen. So why was I being pigeonholed before I’d even begun?

  I should be used to assumptions being made about me since it has been happening pretty much my whole life. From kids at school incorrectly calling me ‘paki’ to teachers constantly presuming that I and the other Middle Eastern girl at school must be sisters, despite us having different surnames. And then there is, of course, this conversation:

  ‘So where are you from?’

  ‘Oxford.’

  ‘No, where are you really from?’

  ‘It’s a little village in the sticks. You really won’t have heard of it.’

  ‘No, like where are you originally from?’

  ‘Do you want my address?’

  ‘No, what’s your heritage?’

  Your heritage, like you’re an antique vase or a listed building. The other lesson I quickly learned was that being unwhite also seems to mean that people make assumptions about what you can do. I remember once going to an audition for another familiar scenario, ‘Middle Eastern woman in a relationship with a white man and they have to fight everyone’s prejudices’. The audition was so far away that I nearly had to pack my stuff up in 100ml bottles, and I got there to find it was being held in the director’s attic. Already this didn’t bode well. We did the scene and he frowned at me. ‘Can you do the scene in Hindi for me?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I think it would be a good idea.’

  ‘But I can’t speak Hindi.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m not from India.’

  He grabs my printed out CV. ‘Well, what do you speak?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘And you don’t speak any other languages? You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  Should I? Would they be saying this to a white actor who hadn’t bothered to learn German? At no point had I claimed to speak Hindi, and nor should I, but people can presume I can, ju
st because I look a little bit like I might come from somewhere near there. It’s also been presumed I can speak the following (deep breath) Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu and Turkish.

  The wife of a terrorist.

  Suddenly being released into the world as a newly trained actor is tough enough but I also had to contend with being both Middle Eastern and a woman. This is something I’ve battled against since day one and is the reason why I set up my Casting Call Woe blog. Born out of frustration and horror, it’s a look at the very worst casting calls I’ve seen on my desperate hunt for work. From female roles described as ‘her cleavage is her best feature’ to actors being asked to do an ‘immigrant accent’, it’s a terrifying insight into the stereotypes still being maintained despite it supposedly being the twenty-first century.

  I’d love to say that once I stepped out into the big, bad world I actually got to play a whole host of interesting roles. I mean I did, sort of. Over the last 10 years I played an eight-year-old boy, a nine-year-old girl and even a stag, but a good 75 per cent of the roles I went up for very much fell under the heading of Middle Eastern Women. If I wasn’t auditioning for the wife of a terrorist (yes, she was right), then I was up for the role she hadn’t warned me of, that of a woman in an arranged marriage. It was nice that there were some surprises still in store for me but, really, a BAFTA nomination would’ve been nicer.

  In fact, it was the arranged marriage situation that I found myself in most. Pretty much every role I went for was either being set up for an arranged marriage or was suffering terribly during one. One particular role I went up for was of a woman desperate to escape her marriage. I turned up to the audition to find a note tacked to the door saying the room was no longer available and instead to go and wait outside the McDonald’s. Odd, but whatever. I wandered around to find that the audition was actually being held inside the McDonald’s. Great. Because there’s nothing that aids getting into the character of someone who’s just set themselves on fire than seeing someone tucking into their cheeseburger. I checked a few months later and saw that the very white director had decided to cast herself instead. I consoled myself that night with a KFC.