The Good Immigrant

by Nikesh Shukla

  When I complain about the lack of female representation in film and TV, I can guarantee someone will helpfully shout some suggestions in my face. Granted, these suggestions will probably be from a few years ago (yes, Girls, Bridesmaids, Mean Girls … funny how they all have something female in the title …) but they tend to shy away when I bemoan the lack of Middle Eastern females. They might flounder for a bit and then quietly – just in case they’re wrong and they can then claim I misheard it, like someone pretending not to hear a question in the pub quiz because they know they really should know the answer – they’ll mutter, ‘Princess Jasmine?’ 200,000 years of humans and all we get is a Disney princess to represent us. To be fair to them, Middle Eastern women are few and far between when it comes to the roles we see on our screens and stages. There’s a reason why you can’t think of any famous wives of terrorists, because who would remember a woman in a hijab who features in the corner of one shot? Once you’ve exhausted P-Jaz and Cleopatra, you’re already starting to run out of ideas. More recent additions include Ms Marvel, Persepolis and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; there’s progress, but it’s slow and can just as easily take a step backwards rather than forwards.

  Much of this came from the fact that I was graduating during the Noughties, a time when our perception of the Middle East was particularly primed to be one based around fear and misunderstanding. Maybe if I’d been graduating a bit earlier then I might’ve been able to play the wife of a taxi driver or a kebab shop owner, maybe the wife of a rug maker if I was really lucky.

  There are such connotations linked with being Middle Eastern that you generally can’t play a role unless it has something to do with your race. Sure, I can play a doctor or a lawyer or a street cleaner, but only if I’m being forced into an arranged marriage in the background or providing a cover-up for my terrorist husband. If there’s some really daring casting then I might get to play a character that defies my father’s wishes, if that happens then maybe I get to wear a nice dress and not wear a hijab. But very rarely do I get to play a role that isn’t defined by the preconceptions made about the colour of my skin.

  What really gets me is that all the roles are so helpless, and this is something that’s often true of a lot of female roles. Every role I go up for that is specifically Middle Eastern is a woman that is basically having her life controlled, and her story is that she’s either suffering through it or trying to escape it. In fact, I’m reading a casting call for such a role right now, ‘a rebellious Pakistani Muslim girl who lives with her traditional father and brother. She decides to run away with her boyfriend.’ Now, don’t get me wrong, these are stories that should be told but we’re mistaken to think that Middle Eastern women are limited to being in unhappy relationships. Also, not only are they hugely limiting for Middle Eastern actresses but they’re massively insulting to Middle Eastern men.

  Looking back over all the Middle Eastern Wife roles I’ve been up for, not one of them has been in a happy marriage. She’s either there because she’s been forced to or she’s dealing with a terrorist husband through gritted teeth. And of all the Middle Eastern Non-Wife roles I’ve been for, not one of them has had a father or brother who isn’t trying to get them to marry someone. How boringly limiting is that? There are no roles for Middle Eastern girls to aspire to, no roles to show the world that we’re capable of more than being a prop in a hijab.

  All this is what lead me to, shamefully, deciding to change my name when I first graduated. I’ve never been ashamed of how I look or the fact that cold callers take a deep breath before attempting the concoction of letters that I call my name, but I couldn’t cope with the fact that I was pigeonholing myself before I’d even started. I’d spent so long having assumptions made about me and now, suddenly, I was being handed this little ticket that might allow my acting abilities a second thought. Of course, it was a hideous idea. The name never really scanned properly. I’d suddenly made myself that random person from school on Facebook who gets married and changes their name. Every time they pop up on your feed, you totally forget who they are and only vaguely remember when you squint at their terrible picture. I lived with that feeling as my name for two years until, thankfully, a director I was working with was the first person to be honest with me and sat me down to tell me I’d made a huge mistake. That afternoon, I changed it back and, since then, I’ve embraced everything that being a part-Iraqi, part-Iranian, part-British actress is.

  Yes, I will play the role of a wife or wife-to-be. Yes, I know that I sometimes get work purely because I’m a good diversity box-ticker. Yes, I’ll never be cast in Pride and Prejudice. But none of that really matters because I get to represent a bunch of incredible women who are so vastly unrepresented. And that’s what acting is. It’s about telling people’s stories as honestly and faithfully as we possibly can. It’s being entrusted with a person and showing them to the world. It’s not just about us as actors being represented, it’s about the people we represent and making sure their tales are told.

  Excitingly, as I write this, I’ve just been asked to audition for the lead in a short film. It’s the role of a high-powered Syrian lawyer. She’s also married to a controlling husband. Roll on Princess bloody Jasmine.

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Tokenism

  Bim Adewunmi

  The comments section is different for every story on the internet. For stories about diversity – whether that be across gender, disability, sexual orientation or race – though, there are a few that crop up with a regularity that would be reassuring if it weren’t so depressingly samey.

  A quick perusal across the breadth of the internet throws up the one that gets me the most heated: the ‘but do you want tokenism?’ defence. I mean, practically every gathering of internet-opinions has its version of this question; well-meaning people asking – with baffled internet-expressions – if what we as people of colour want is ‘tokenism’ in popular (and not-so-popular) culture. This is how ‘reasonable’ people – the people who work alongside you, and manage to have nuanced conversations about so many things in daily life – respond to a call to have more than one type of person in the cultural representations of human life that we absorb every day. I feel sure I have seen every variant of this comment and I am compelled to ask: why is it that the only options ever offered are ‘tokenism’ (this internet-person’s objective, overwhelming concern) or total, yawning absence? How is it, that in 2016, there are only these two stark choices? To paraphrase Eddie Izzard’s classic sketch: why do we have to be so ‘cake or death’ about this?

  Sometimes, there are addenda, gracious add-ons, like: ‘I’m happy to see people of colour as characters in this TV show if the plot calls for it’ or ‘why put a black dude in the cast “just because”?’ (Again, there are many variations of these.) It is important to understand precisely what is being said there: the story that everyone can relate to, the character that we as an audience are supposed to be able to project ourselves onto with the most ease, the ‘universal’, is white. The default is always white. There are no vacancies in that spot – ever – for people of colour. No Nigerian-British everyman. No unexceptional Bangladeshi-British Joe Bloggs/Jaleel Begum. Characters of colour only make it into the mix specifically ‘when the role calls for it’.

  Let that sink in for a moment.

  Whiteness – or, you know, white people – exists as the basic template. And that template covers all human experience, by the way: the ability to be special or ordinary, handsome or ugly, tall or short, interesting or dull as ditchwater. On the other hand, our presence in popular culture (as well as in non-stereotypical ‘issue’ roles) must always be justified. Our place at the table has to be earned. We must somehow show we are worthy of inclusion in representations of the culture that we live and breathe in. Does that black woman deserve to be on that show? Give the exact reason that Chinese-British man is in this scene. Explain the series of decisions that led us to having this mixed-race boy in this film. Please sho
w your working for maximum marks.

  We live in an age where fandom is less on the fringes: regular people make their own homemade costumes and go to comic conventions now, not just the geeks of yore. So we know the patter of the showrunner who is getting some audience heat – they were ‘hesitant’ to include POC POVs in their shows because they were ‘worried’ about issues of ‘authenticity’. For about five seconds after hearing these responses, I nod and understand. That quickly passes, though; what I want to do is call up their offices to set up a meeting to discuss exactly what they imagine people of colour (usually in the city, town or village the writer is her/himself from) do so damn differently. Then I want to offer my services (for a substantial fee, obviously – I’m no martyr) to help them ‘bridge the gap’. Here’s what black people do: we breathe air, we drink water and we fart noxious gases, just like other people. Our hopes and dreams are similar, and alongside the various hardships we may suffer because of the way we look or where we come from, we largely do the same things – and that includes all the frivolous things too. Things like eating cupcakes, or wanting the chance to write a self-involved collection of essays (let’s not even get started on the publishing industry), having sex with unsuitable boys and being monstrously self-obsessed. There, I’m a consultant. NOW, WHERE’S MY CHEQUE?

  As an enthusiastic fan of popular culture – and a human being in possession of the full complement of human desires and emotions, narcissism high among them – I like to see myself in the surrounding culture. I want to see a girl with natural hair, or a weave, or relaxed hair and I want to see her doing everything: I want her to go to the movies, I want her to find a cure for a rare disease, I want her to work as a shop girl, I want her to save the world when the apocalypse comes, I want her to fall in love, I want her to fight aliens, and I want her to laugh a lot. As things stand, she simply doesn’t exist. This sad state of affairs means I thrilled quietly when I saw Storm in the X-Men movies (even though she has a frankly insulting and vague ‘African’ accent in the first one – WHO ACTUALLY SPEAKS LIKE THAT, HALLE?), and I squealed and called my sister when I saw Nicole Beharie in the trailer for Steve McQueen’s Shame. It means I got excited when I read in a 2012 report from the Directors Guild of America that Shonda Rhimes used 67 per cent female or minority ethnic directors in the making of her show Scandal.73

  I’m a big telly fan. It’s one of my favourite things in the world – I can quote most of Friends (my favourite sitcom of all time, despite its monochrome core cast and myriad flaws) from memory, just give me the prompt – but I am not involved directly in making telly. I don’t wish to downplay the importance and necessity of having a diverse writers’ room system – clearly there are too few people of colour in these rooms, and that’s before we even get into the class issue. But it seems obvious to me, a naïve layman with beautiful dreams, that there are three steps to writing a good character of colour:

  1. Write a stonkingly good, well-rounded character

  2. Make the ‘effort’ to cast a person of colour

  3. That’s it!

  I’ve seen real life applications of this groundbreaking technique in The Good Wife, Master of None, Chewing Gum, and Community, among others. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are huge hurdles to clear in order to make television that looks like the world, hurdles that the layman just can’t see or comprehend. If you’re reading this and do make entertainment television, please correct me if I’ve somehow misunderstood the complexities.

  It appears clear to me that there is a gap in what people mean when they say things like ‘we’re all one race – the human race’ and how they actually see the world. The thing that means a person cannot imagine seeing a Asian man as a superhero (you know, that set of fictional beings with special powers) is pretty much the same thing that makes a person cringe away from feeling empathy for a fictional dying black girl (Rue, played by Amandla Stenberg in The Hunger Games). It leaks into the everyday, too – if you cannot bring yourself to imagine us as real, rounded individuals with feelings equal to your own on screen, how does that affect your ability to do so when you encounter us on the street, at your workplace, in your bed, in your life?

  It doesn’t have to be this way. Consider these words from Mindy Kaling back in September 2012:

  When you are the only Indian-American female lead in a television show, you seem to be making sweeping statements about that person simply because you are that person and the only one, whereas, for instance, Steve Carell – he’s not making sweeping generalisations about white American men on his show because there’s so many different white American men on different shows. So I get worried by doing this character that people think that I’m saying that about all those people. And I just have the weight of that on my shoulders, which is something that I do envy other performers for not having.

  This is just the everyday shit of being a pop culture fan living in black skin. And it’s so tiring.

  73 ‘DGA says diversity among TV directors stalled: report’, Deadline Hollywood. http://deadline.com/2012/09/directors-guild-diversity-study-tv-directors-veep-dallas-344300/

  DEATH IS A Many-Headed Monster

  Vinay Patel

  My father’s father, my dada, is staring at me, trying to wrap his head around what I’ve just told him.

  ‘Crocodiles?’

  I nod.

  ‘Yes, Dada.’

  By the staircase in my house there is a framed photo of a woman that I’ve passed every day of my six years. I’ve always known, looking at that photo, that this woman died when I was very little, littler than I am now. I’ve always known that this woman is my mother, a mother being someone a bit like my grandma, my Ba, but younger and with better English. I know that when someone dies, it means they’re not around anymore. I even know how it can happen.

  ‘Too many angry white shells,’ is how Dad, sitting on the edge of my bed late one night, explained lupus to me. Despite mishearing ‘cells’ as ‘shells’ and imagining my insides as a tiny beach, I’m already more au fait with death than your average kid.

  But the possibilities of what death might be like for the person dying have only recently snuck up on me and they are more horrifying than any movie monster. At bedtime, before I switch off the light, I picture death. I see myself floating in a void for a finite but excruciatingly long amount of time before being allowed into heaven. Like fifty thousand years. Long enough for you to lose all sense of self, all points of reference. Maybe Mum, trembling and alone, is a few years into that long haul. Then the idea of time vanishes and I grapple with the darkest thought to enter my young mind so far: when you die, you are dead for ever. No feeling. No thinking. Just nothing. Forever. I started to leave the light on. However, the stillness of a lit room in an otherwise dark street had its own sense of a timeless void so I would throw myself into different worlds in order to escape. I would read – Star Wars novels, a copy of Great Expectations someone had bought me without irony, Improving Your Golf Swing, whatever I could find – until a drowsy adult would stumble past (I come from a family of light sleepers) and check in. I’d pretend to have dropped off mid-sentence, they would turn the light off and I would hope I had tired myself out enough not to think.

  Thankfully, this exhausting state of affairs could now come to an end since, on my way to confront my bed, I’ve poked my head in to watch a BBC nature documentary someone’s left running on the living room telly and I’ve heard something wonderful, something that’s going to change my life for ever and I’ve run upstairs to tell my dada. I repeat myself to him to dispel the confusion on his face:

  ‘Yeah, crocodiles! They said on the TV that crocodiles reincarnate and if crocodiles can reincarnate, I can too.’

  The idea of death being final might have been new to me but this reincarnation lark was not. Nobody had explicitly talked to me about it yet, but it featured very strongly in the children’s storybooks I’d been given depicting the two central Hindu myths, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. T
hese were epics about Gods-incarnate and 10-headed demons and arrows that could destroy seas. They were tales where at the start a woman could be spurned by a suitor and kill herself from the shame, only to turn up near the end, born into the body of a young warrior prince, ready to revenge herself on her former lover. What a twist! However, twists are devices for stories and whilst I thought they were awesome stories, it was clear to me that there was no connection between those mythic worlds and my reality.

  That had all changed now. Already at the age of six there was a deep part of me that recognised David Attenborough’s calm voice as one that spoke with a weight of knowledge. I could trust what this man from the documentary told me about the world because this wasn’t a story, this was science.

  It takes Dada a while, but he eventually figures out that this is yet another mishearing on my part and what Mr Attenborough actually said was ‘crocodiles reproduce’, not ‘crocodiles reincarnate’. My dada is a proud, self-taught businessman who likes to pamper his grandkids, using the gains from a lifetime of hard work to create a cushion from the harshness of the world that he never had. So to crush the hopes of a child and then round it off with a much-needed chat about the birds and bees must’ve been quite tricky. But he bloody well managed it.

  My thoughts about The End spread from bedtime to every spare moment. Showers are particularly bad. They start off well enough; I enjoy being naked, our boiler is the absolute business and our showerhead provides several options to keep things fresh. And then, as the ballast of everyday cares drop away, my mind inevitably drifts to the moment of my death and I consider how one minute I’ll exist and the next I won’t, that the line was that fine, that it was absolutely, definitely going to happen to me one day. One day I won’t touch or smell or see or even care that I couldn’t and …