Brown Baby

by Nikesh Shukla

  And in the losing of their identity, it stretches the possibility of what ours can be. Because for too long, our identity is played off the perception of what whiteness allows it to be. So much work is being done in so many different quarters, to empower you and those around you to forge your own sense of selves, away from the hegemony of whiteness and what it is doing to this country.

  You are mixed race. You are a brown baby. You are here, now, and it is time to act. Be committed. Like James Baldwin wrote. And sure it’s been scary. I’ve had more than one death threat in my time of challenging the world to make space for you. Which is a strange thing. To think that pushing for equality might make others want me gone. As I said to you earlier, to the privileged, equality feels like oppression. It really doesn’t warrant murder, me asking for more books by brown people.

  Do you take it seriously?

  I chose to. It had its desired effect. I took a step back from the work I was doing for a little bit. Because one death threat is one too many. But slowly, it dawned on me that for me to stop was exactly the intention of the threat.

  I couldn’t work out if the poster was threatening to shoot me in the head or all Jewish people or me and all Jewish people and no amount of analysis made his words clearer or less scary and so I decided to hedge my bets. I put myself in danger. I put you in danger. Someone once emailed me racist abuse and then asked about you both. By name. A stranger did that. How did they know your names?

  That week I did nothing, scared offline, and scared into not writing. I spent a lot of time with you. You have this simple way of looking at the world that can pull what’s important and what’s not back into sharp focus for me.

  We were reading a book. One of those picture books about inspirational women of colour and their achievements. You asked me why one of them was stopped from doing her job. It was Katherine Johnson. I told you the truth. That there was a time in America where the government did not allow Black people to do certain things that everyone else could.

  You processed it and said, ‘That’s not fair. I don’t understand.’

  Trying to explain it to you drew me back to the work of Toni Morrison.

  She says: ‘The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.’

  One way of distracting me from the work I was doing, was to tell me that it could get me killed. Reminding myself of the fact, I grew emboldened again. I went back to what I knew best, and I wrote, and I kept going.

  I kept going. And I keep going. Because the alternative is not worth even considering.

  It’s not easy, Ganga. The road to equality is not easy. Obstacles everywhere. Roadblocks. People. The world turns cruelly whether you’re there or not. Even when you turn up, you won’t be heard. That will mess with your head. Even when it affects you the most, so you turn up and cast your vote, you won’t be heard. That might make you feel like not bothering next time. Even when you defy the doomy statistics about voter turnout in your age demographic and turn up and put a cross in the box, you still won’t be heard. Does it make you want to burn everything to the ground? I hear you, my baby. I hear you. But like me, you keep going. Because the alternative, the ‘not having your say’, is not worth even considering. In the hours after the Brexit referendum result was announced in 2016, I was told to ‘go back to brown land’, someone threatened to set my ‘greasy ass’ on fire, and a friend of a friend comforted me by telling me, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not that kind of immigrant.’ Three days later and I couldn’t leave our house because I was afraid of being shouted at on my way to work. As I helped the young people I mentored at the time make a film in the street, I overheard one man yell at another, ‘Well it’s not your fucking country, is it?’ Everything felt precarious.

  But I kept going. Because the alternative was not worth considering.

  The first general election my friends got to vote in was in 1997. I was just too young to vote, but I was invested. I was listening to ‘Naxalite’ by Asian Dub Foundation over and over again, feeling this burning sensation in my chest, because again and again until the land is ours and again and again until we have taken the power . . . I remember watching a student debate, with people making the case for the different parties. Watching it then, we were excited about Tony Blair. We knew he was dangerous, because that’s what the billboards told us. But we needed that danger. We needed to emerge from the increasingly heavy tread of Tory rule. My friend Simon made the case for the Situationists and tore up a mocked-up ballot paper. Will wore a shiny red shirt and pleaded for people to vote Labour. No one remembers who made the case for the Tories, but if my memory serves me correctly, he definitely had a briefcase. The next day Simon and Will hugged over the result, both in red this time, and it was sunny, the air felt light, we had taken the power and the land was ours.

  Why am I telling you all this?

  So you keep going. Because the alternative is not worth considering.

  We have to be agents of hope. That’s how we find joy. That’s how we stay smiling. That’s how we keep going. We have to believe in hope in these dark uncertain times. Hope brings us together. Hope unites us against the rise of fascism. Hope is safety pins on chests. Hope is making art that challenges the status quo. Hope is that moment in Network when Beale yells, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.’ Hope is knowing that turning up and voting is half the battle. Hope is the pursuit of the accountability of elected officials. But maybe the worst has happened already. How much lower can our faith in our country get?

  I’m getting distracted in my message of hope. That happens when I’ve barely slept, and I’ve cried, felt angry, numb and terrified for you, Ganga, as I’ve devoured the internet until 2 a.m. most nights, trying desperately to fathom what is going on. The future is uncertain.

  I keep running through things I can do: volunteer in grassroots projects, donate money to charity, report hate crimes and step in when you see them happening, think of small positive local things to do, tell your MP they need to do better, believe in change, because that change is you. Look at the demographics. Whatever happens next, as these generations wither away and die, is in your hands, and you know exactly what to do with it. I trust you. It’s your world. And I have to believe that whatever state it’s handed over to you in, you’ll know the right way to put things right.

  Look, I’m not going to tell you it’s okay, Ganga. We don’t know what the future holds. As my mum always told me, ‘you cannot control your destiny, all you can be is the best version of yourself.’ Whether you believe in destiny or not, Ganga, be the best you. And I’ll be the best me. It’s all we can do. But in order to be the best us, we have to hope. Josie texted me this morning saying, ‘We are all still here and none of us will give up.’ We are better and we will keep going. Again and again until the land is ours. And again and again until we have taken the power.

  Joy is an act of resistance. I cannot communicate this to you other than to show you. It can’t be said. It can only be experienced.

  You express frustration by sighing like an exasperated and embarrassed teenager. It’s a groan and a sigh mixed all in one. You have your head bowed and your hands in your pockets as we turn the corner to head up to your nursery when you make this noise, out of nowhere.

  ‘You okay?’ I ask you.

  ‘I just want to go to all the places I’ve never been,’ you say and then look up at me. ‘There are too many places.’

  You poor thing. Already, the world feels unwieldy and enormous and you haven’t even discovered the drudgery of school, the disappo
intment of ring doughnuts or the crushing inevitability of the bus that runs late when you’re in a rush and have already torn yourself apart debating whether it’d be quicker to walk or just stay put.

  Life is already too overwhelming in its scale for you, Ganga.

  Life is too big for me. And I wonder just how I can instil a sense of boundlessness in you, without making your dreams unrealistic and projecting onto you my own disappointments with everything around me. Surely there is a sweet spot between the sense of wonder at all the joys the world has to offer, and a life filled with ring doughnuts.

  ‘Where would you go if you could go anywhere?’ I ask you.

  You want to go to Canada because your favourite toy bear is from there and then you want to go to Kenya because your mummy and daddy saw giraffes there.

  You then want to go to India because you are half Indian and you want to go to England because you are half English. And then after that, you want me to tell you about the places I haven’t told you about yet.

  This all started because I asked if you wanted to visit a beach soon. Suddenly the thought of a beach led to a selection of beaches previously visited, which led to the thought of holidays, which led you to consider how big the world was, and you didn’t even know about much of it.

  Oh, Ganga. My poor child.

  Conversations with you challenge me. I’ve always found conversation too much effort. Much more comfortable with a book or with writing an email or a pithy tweet, or heck, some conversational comedic yet poignant prose. I take conversation for granted. I long to have those brilliantly quippy back and forths you only ever see on television, joking and ragging on each other, while always maintaining a signature tell about what sort of person each character was.

  Conversations with you force me to be engaged and interested and not bullshit you in any way. I can’t lie to you about why the sky is blue or why eyeballs never grow, or how to make kombucha. I have to rely on that teacher’s trick of asking, why don’t we look this up together?

  Conversations with you force me to be here now.

  ‘Where is your favourite place to go to?’ you ask me.

  ‘I like the beach,’ I tell you.

  This makes you upset. I ask what’s wrong and you cuddle into me.

  ‘Which beach? There are so many.’

  ‘We can visit as many of them as we want,’ I tell you. Watching you quantify the size of the world is distressing me.

  Often, when the world feels so bleak and unknowable and we try to root ourselves to what action we can take to make it better, we end up failing at the first hurdle.

  Going meatless on Mondays won’t bring about the reduction in mass meat production needed to go some way to fixing our environmental problems.

  Same with hashtagging your veganism. Same with only caring about cultural appropriation and not mass incarceration or social housing. Same with reading the right books and watching the right documentaries and wearing the right T-shirt.

  We think too big. We take our actions on a global scale and not on the grassroots impact we can have. Often I’m asked how someone can be a good ally to me and I remember Reni Eddo-Lodge saying on her podcast, About Race, in reference to this question: ‘I don’t know where you hold influence in your life. I don’t know your friends, I don’t know the extent of your jobs, I don’t know where you can assess where the institutional racism is really taking hold in your sector, what you as individuals can attempt to do to try and change that. I’m in no position to tell you how both of your lives can try and change the problem. I’ve spent many many years thinking about this, and fewer years writing about it, and I think I’ve done a decent job of assessing the problem. But in terms of where you hold influence in your lives? In order to attempt to overcome the problem, only you can diagnose that.’

  Where do you hold power and influence? Even if you think you don’t, you do.

  I think about that a lot. About doing things in a scalable way. I think about fixing myself, then my family, then my house, then my street, then my city, then my county, then my country, then my world, then my galaxy. That way, where I hold myself on the scale feels manageable, do-able. I know where what I’m doing is having an effect.

  And with that, I look at you and smile and say, ‘We can go wherever you want and see whatever you want to see, and we have the whole of our lives ahead of us to do just that. And sometimes it’s not about doing as many things as you can, it’s about doing what you can well. So let’s pick a beach, and go there and have the best time ever.’

  You smile and think about it and say, ‘Can we have ice cream?’

  You wake up, suddenly. We’ve been driving home and you fell asleep. It’s just you and me. We went to see your dada and fais. You look up at me and say, ‘Are we home?’

  I nod. I feel a surge of sadness in my chest. I hate leaving my family. It’s always just before I get annoyed with them in whatever way I did as a teenager. I feel the absence of my mother. I feel everything I lost. I feel not yet myself. Not quite enough of myself. I unclick you from your car seat and lift you up into my arms.

  ‘I like London,’ you say, quietly, still in dream world. ‘But I like coming home.’

  ‘I know, baby,’ I tell you.

  ‘I’m not a baby. I’m a big girl.’

  ‘Sorry, big girl. It is nice going home.’

  ‘London used to be your home. Now you live with me and mummy.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, smiling. As my cheeks expand with an open-mouthed grin, I feel my stubble rub up against your lip. You kiss me.

  ‘Daddy, don’t be sad,’ you say.

  ‘Why do you think I’m sad?’

  ‘Because you miss your sister. It’s okay.’

  You rub your hand across my shoulder blade and give me three short assertive taps. There, there, your taps tell me. There, there.

  ‘You’re home now. Mummy is at home and my little sister. You are her daddy as well.’

  Thanks for reminding me, I think, unsure whether you’re patronizing me or trying to make me feel better.

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘You are home. We are home. Are you happy?’

  I feel you against my chest, your head on my shoulder. Your whispering into my ear is quiet and intimate, like a gentle wise owl in my brain. You tap your feet against my side, as I adjust my hands to free myself to unlock the door. I let you tap the door knocker, a big stag with ornate unnecessary antlers I found for a few quid in a nearby shop. I let you knock lightly, just in case the baby is asleep.

  I open the door and peer in.

  In the hallway, your mum is waiting for us. She must have heard the car doors shut. She is smiling, with dark circles under her eyes. You look up and say, ‘Mummy, we’re home.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We are. And I am very happy to be here.’

  Home is wherever you are, my darling. I could be living in a shed in a racist village in the most rural part of the country, but if you’re there, Ganga, that’s where I call home.

  ‘It’s a funny thing about comin’ home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same . . . You’ll realize what has changed is you,’ says Brad Pitt in the film version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That change doesn’t need to be significant, or life changing or even as a new you. When you move, when your life swells, sometimes that coming home is just about actually coming home. For years, I didn’t feel like I emotionally left London or put roots down in Bristol. It took me years to realize that it wasn’t the place, it wasn’t Bristol itself, it was who was there when I opened the door and peered in.

  You run towards your sister, beaming, shouting her name. She doesn’t respond because she’s barely a month old. As you grab her bare feet and kiss them, I smile, and know that I am exactly where I need to be.

  You are shifting about in your sleep, crying. You’re having a bad dream. I’m downstairs, watching in horror as a prime minister I don’t respect defends his racist language as ‘satire’ on the ne
ws. All those questions come flooding back to me. I look at the picture of my mum on my phone. I still have her number saved. The photo associated with it is of her, in the hospital, looking solemly at your fai. She’s in her hospital bed, sitting up. She is clutching the printed-off manuscript of my first novel. The one she didn’t get to read before she died. I turn to this photo in times of crisis.

  ‘Mum,’ I tell her, ‘they’re gaslighting us again. Telling us to shut the fuck up and take the jokes because a joke is a joke and therefore if you’re hurt by the joke that’s your problem. They’re stripping away accountability, Mum. They’re telling us our feelings don’t matter, Mum. I don’t know how to do this. Mum, I need you.’

  By this point, you’re calling out for me. I put my phone down and run upstairs as quietly as I can.

  I lie you on your front so I can stroke your back. I shush you.

  ‘Daddy,’ you whisper. I think you’re asleep and talking in your dream so I continue to shush you. But you get up on your elbows, arching your back and looking at me. ‘Daddy, I need you. I thought there was a monster in the room. It’s not scary when you’re here.’

  ‘I know, Ganga,’ I say. I shush you a bit more. ‘I’ll come running whenever you need me, Ganga. Okay?’

  You’re snoring now. I rub your back a few more times and head downstairs. I pick up my phone. I hear a noise. Muffled. Doo-daa-dee. Doo-daa-dee. I realize, that when I dropped my phone, I must have called my mum. The number, not recognized, threw back those bleeps.

  She’s not gone. She’s here. In my chest. And with her there, I know I can do this. It’s not scary when she’s here. That’s how we raise a brown baby. All of us, together, making space for you, never lying to you, and always reminding you that you can be whoever you want to be. And if you think the monster is close, call me and I’ll come running.

  I’m always here for you, Ganga. I’ll come running whenever you need me. Okay?