Brown Baby

by Nikesh Shukla

  The writer Teju Cole writes about this particular solipsism about our worldviews, but he posited it as one of the West’s problems with seeing the rest of the world in accordance with its own image and thus, themselves. He wrote: ‘I don’t like this expression “First World problems”. It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re Black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.’

  He has a point about how America, and England and Europe view other parts of the world. As poor people to be pitied because they could never have everyday tedious problems. Because the idea of a First World and a Third World, a developed world and a developing world, shows a lack of precision in our language. How we can rank countries by number in order to render complex people uncomplicated. How the last thing on any poor Indian’s mind is WhatsApp being down. It also shows a complete ignorance about communication in the so-called Third World. Global solipsism means that we deem our problems bigger than those in places deemed to be less than ours.

  In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, we are introduced to the perfect torture device, the Total Perspective Vortex. The prospective victim of the Total Perspective Vortex is placed within a small chamber wherein is displayed a model of the entire universe – together with a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot bearing the legend ‘you are here’. The sense of perspective thereby conveyed destroys the victim’s mind; it was stated that the TPV is the only known means of crushing a man’s soul.

  Our sudden realization of how utterly small and insignificant we are when it comes to the prospect of infinity is supposed to crush our id, and cause an existential crisis so pure that our ego crumbles away and we realize how pointless we are, how pointless life is, how pointless doing anything is.

  If anything, it shows how framed by ego the middle-class straight white dude is. How precious it is. How it must be preserved.

  Zaphod Beeblebrox, an intergalactic outlaw, is placed in the Total Perspective Vortex, and sees that he is the most important person in the universe, baby. He emerges, unscathed, emboldened to continue being his usual ego-ridden prickish self. Zaphod is a Tory. Zaphod is a cypher for the straight white dude. Zaphod is entirely consistent with how humans, especially those of us in the global West, would see ourselves.

  When we see the sum of us, we never consider what parts of us are in development. By the time we reach adulthood, we’re supposed to be clear on who we want to be and what we want to do and how we wish to spend our lives. I didn’t know myself until my thirties and even then, I was a person in development. When you spend your entire twenties thinking you’re going to be a world-famous political rapper, known for their experimental approach as well as the political allegories contained in their bars, and then realize, as you start to approach your late twenties, that perhaps music isn’t the career for you, you have to start again on how you view yourself. When you work for a bunch of charities, doing community cohesion work, and anti-racism work, and sneak off to the studio to record raps no one will hear, thinking ‘this one is the one’, when you do a law degree that cements your moral compass but not your career, when you find yourself spending less time in the studio and more time in front of a blinking cursor hoping the words will come, and in the right order, do you then start to begin a conversation with yourself about who you are?

  As an aside, I look forward to Amazon reviews that tell me they generally like this book but disagree wholeheartedly with my description of Zaphod Beeblebrox as an intergalactic outlaw. ‘Well actually,’ they’ll write, sorry HE’LL write, as they push their glasses up their nose, ‘he is president of the galaxy . . .’

  In a strange way, they are thinking about the things they can control.

  Who will you be?

  That’s what I think about every single night when I hover in your doorway. As I come up the stairs to bed, I linger, listening to you breathing steadily, and I think, who will you and your little sister be?

  You’ve both decided your careers.

  You want to be a vet.

  And she wants to be a dentist.

  The vet thing started with Nick Sharratt’s You Choose book. You were amazed that such a job existed. A doctor. For animals? Because whenever we played doctors and nurses I was always elected to be the doctor. You were always the nurse. Your mum and I worried that something had fixed in you that positioned men as doctors and women as nurses. Whenever we forced you to be the doctor, and me to be the nurse, you got uncomfortable. Finally, I asked you why you never wanted to be a doctor. You said, ‘Boys are doctors.’ You only said it once and it was quickly corrected. I texted my oldest friend, Shalini, now a doctor in A&E and asked her to take a photo of herself in scrubs. She obliged and I showed you the photo. You didn’t remember her but you saw she was clearly a doctor.

  ‘Is she a nurse?’ you asked.

  ‘No, darling, Shalini is a doctor.’

  ‘Oh,’ you said, chewing this new information over. ‘Is she my cousin?’ you asked.

  You had started assuming that all brown people were your cousins. Probably because the only ones you met were related to you somehow.

  When our friend Anita came to visit, you asked what she did for a living. She told you she presented television shows and you were astounded. This was . . . a job? She showed you a video of her on Strictly Come Dancing and you were besotted. She read you a story and you cuddled into her and asked her to teach you to dance. A month or so later, you asked me, at bathtime, ‘How is my cousin Anita?’

  You had so much to figure out. Shalini was a doctor, a she-doctor no less, and she was brown, but not related to us. She was just my friend. Same with Anita. But something happened in that realization that Shalini was a doctor. Something shifted for you. You saw who you could be. And it was further cemented in You Choose, where you saw there was such a thing as a doctor for animals. In the picture in the book, it’s a female vet as well. And when we got a book about a vet from the library, it was Paula (she’s a vet and a very good vet, she opens the door and says ‘NEXT PET!’: the curse of reading children’s books over and over again is the rhythms never leave your brain). You were ready to see yourself there. So you fixed yourself to this idea. A vet.

  Looking for a Christmas present for you, your mum and I decided to get you a vet outfit. On looking on the internet for doctors and nurses costumes and vet costumes, I noticed that the internet confirmed the unconscious bias. All the children dressed up as doctors were boys and all the children dressed up as nurses were girls. Vets were all girls.

  You never took to the green vet scrubs we got you.

  The thought of being a vet became an ideal, a fixed centrifugal point that required no further clarification. You didn’t need to be curious. You just assumed that’s what you’ll do and you’ll work out how later on. I like that this is such a fixed idea for you.

  At times, fixed ideas of who we are become terrifying in an uncertain time. How are you welcomed into a bleak world? There is the love and the joy that we as your parents can bestow onto you. But what of the outside world that asks so much of you?

  You are brown. And mixed race. And a girl. In a time of political upheaval. The climate emergency is almost irreversible. You want to be a doctor for animals but animals are going extinct by the day. What is this time? Have we had you in a time of kaliyuga? Will you live through to nirvana?

  I’m scared for you. Because whatever decisions you make about these elements of your idea, whether they loom large or get pushed aside for other choices
you’re yet to consider, the world will always view you as such. A brown baby. In the West. I have birthright status to get an OCI card to make you an overseas citizen of India. It means you can travel and work in India, a booming super-economy, with ease, without visa or work permit. Your parents or grandparents have to have been born in India and held an Indian passport in order for someone to qualify. My mum’s parents both had Indian passports. And ba as well. Your grandparents are from Bristol, Aden, Kenya. You won’t have the same birthright privileges unless I get the card. And it may give you a freedom in the future as borders close and freedom of movement becomes a thing of the past.

  I started broaching the labyrinthian paperwork needed to complete the form and realized something: the constant acrid cry of the Empire-proud Brit that we should be grateful to colonialism and the British Empire, not only for civilizing us savage Indians, but also for the railways, ignored the day-to-day irritation that comes with Indian administrative bureaucracy, which includes paper trails that haven’t been updated since the 1900s, so overly complicated and unnecessarily hard that the only real option is to just give up.

  I gave up. The way I justified it was that you were British and that was enough for you. But it meant we had to have difficult conversations as a country about what that even meant.

  ‘Am I Indian?’ you asked me once, in that innocent way you do. The house of cards question that makes everything crumble.

  ‘No,’ I tell you. ‘Your family is from India, and Kenya, and England.’

  ‘And Bristol?’

  ‘Yes. Bristol is in England.’

  ‘And Canada?’

  ‘You have cousins in Canada, yes.’

  ‘Am I from Canada?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  What does it mean to be British when conversations around the subject have their core in protecting Britain’s whiteness? When the multiculturalism ‘debate’, if you wish to call it such, doesn’t scratch any deeper than ‘saris, steel bands and samosas’. Where debate events by sixth form debate clubs like the Institute of Ideas present multiculturalism as a threat to the West, as something worthy of debate, as if we never got past that basic point, as if the only conversation we can have about immigration and the place of people of colour in society is about their inherent threat to Western values, rather than how we come to a decision about what an inclusive Britishness looks like.

  Year 7s at school learn about British values. And yet we as adults can’t even bring ourselves to stick to them. The most basic of beliefs. British values are: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without faith.

  These . . . are so fucking basic, I can’t even tell you. Basic to the point of generic. Which is why you have ‘hilarious’ Twitter accounts that spawn toilet books like So Very British that tell us that queuing and the weather and washing-up bowls filled with disgusting stagnant water are British values. The actual British values taught in schools are beyond generic. Anywhere in the world I’d expect a respect for democracy (if the rule of law is robust enough to be trusted), for the rule of law (if the rule of law is robust enough to be trusted), individual liberty (as long as individuals don’t think their individual liberty trumps that of their neighbour’s) and a mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without faith (even our politicians can’t save themselves from messy behaviour here). These conversations about Britishness are generic at best. And any criticism of these British values are treated as a suspicion of the country as a whole. So go back to where you come from, if you don’t like it.

  If the idea of multiculturalism in this country hasn’t progressed beyond saris, steel bands and samosas, and our national identity is wrapped up in respect for authority and each other, how can we have honest conversations about what it means to be British, especially as a person of colour?

  The problem with being a person of colour in Britain criticizing the status quo is that your critique is seen as un-British, rather than justified. And if you don’t like it, surrender your passport and fuck off. Whenever I have taught about the institutional racism in this country, or the attitude towards those from immigrant backgrounds, or even the treatment of marginalized communities, I do it from a place of tough love. I want this country to be better. Not just for you. Or me. Or our neighbours. Or family or friends. I want this country to do better. And if that doesn’t allow me the freedom to critique then my passport was never worth as much as a white person’s in the first place. I critique from a place of Britishness.

  And that is a hard thing to consider. That I am British. I always thought myself in-between. As Hanif Kureishi described in The Buddha of Suburbia, ‘an Englishman, born and bred, almost.’ Norman Tebbit’s basic-as-fuck cricket test helped to decide who you were. If you lived here, you supported England, not the West Indies or India or Pakistan. If you supported any of those other teams but held a British passport, well, you could go back to where you came from, quite frankly. If identity and heritage were as basic as what country you currently lived in, then I wanted to be counted out of the conversation.

  If anything, I feel sorry for all the Asian boys in north-west London who supported Liverpool, despite having never gone beyond the Watford Gap. Were they even Londoners? Were they now Liverpudlian? Two of these fans at school used to talk to each other about their team in Liverpudlian accents, except they were just doing impressions of stereotypical Scousers from a mid-nineties Harry Enfield sketch.

  The Tebbit test was a surface scratch. It barely drew blood. It didn’t understand nuance. In the same way, we hang on to this idea of British values as a core component of this country, cited without really knowing what they are, in the same way that multiculturalism was a celebration of saris, steel bands and samosas. Much in the same way, for a summer in 1997, it was cool to be Indian, cos Talvin Singh sampled sitars and tablas and put them over drum and bass beats, in the same way the British Empire is a source of pride for those who choose to ignore its brutality, in the same way that no matter what I do and how I feel, especially watching the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony in all its pomp and silliness, I will never truly be British. Not unless I shut up and accept that my critique is worthless and should cost me my passport.

  But I couldn’t bear to go through the rigmarole of getting you an OCI card. And I had to draw a line in the sand for you. You are British. And this is your country. And you can say whatever you want about it. Because you were born here. As was I. As was your mum. You have the right to criticize what’s going on here. You have the right to push back, to say this is not right, this is not fair. You have the right to say that the country’s values and how politicians execute them do not align with your own. You have every damn right to do so. And any criticism is not because you’re mixed race. It is because the right is yours. As it is with everyone who chooses to call Great Britain their home.

  So say it with the whole of your chest when you need to say it. And try not to let the pushback get to you. People are fine with inequality. There’s an old saying: ‘To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.’ So say it with your chest. I say this as I increasingly find myself despondent and unable to.

  How do we find joy in these times? ‘Joy is an act of resistance’, is a line often quoted from The Telly Cycle, a poem by Toi Derricotte. Or, if you’re a white hipster, from an IDLES album title. I understand its intention. Because resistance is hard and painful and time-consuming and exhausting and bruising. To find joy in moments of oppression is to actively resist that oppression. Oppression isn’t about you, on your knees but smiling. Oppression is about your submission. So seek joy. Otherwise, what are we fighting for?

  How do we find joy then?

  You told your mum that one of my favourite things to do was look at my phone when no one was looking. You have grown up knowing that my damned phone is pretty much attached to my hand. Once, when we wer
e playing, I put it on the table. We huddled on the floor and played whichever game we were playing. It must have caught your eye because you stood up and handed me my phone. I was ashamed. Is that how you viewed me? Constantly scrolling?

  So years later when you told your mum that my favourite thing was alone-time phone-time, I was sad, because I knew you were right. It did give me joy, to take a break from the mundanity of parenthood. To disappear into my phone for a few minutes. Chat shit with friends on WhatsApp. Read the news. Replace the drudgery of parenthood with the despair of world politics.

  So how do we find joy then?

  If we’re constantly distracting ourselves in the swamp of rolling news, the infinity of Twitter, the endless Instagram story.

  The worst Oasis album is their third. Be Here Now.

  What it lacks in a coherent quarry of songs that hang together in a traditional album format, it makes up for by being named after a misquoted but quite decent life lesson cribbed from a random John Lennon interview.

  Be here now.

  We’re thinking a lot about the future, about climate change and what is happening in the country, as simultaneously as the fucking Tories are obsessively mining the past for new ideas. We’re forgetting about this moment here. Being here. Now. God, how many songs have been about this moment here? Martine McCutcheon’s ‘Perfect Moment’. That Moloko song about making this moment last.

  Each moment with you is stretched so that it lasts forever. Which is why I’m always so grateful for your bedtime.

  James Baldwin wrote, to his nephew, in 1962: ‘Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.’