by Kate Clanchy
But it won’t do any good. Here in my ears is the sound of a bomb, a homemade one, a glass and fertilizer one, in a small town in Afghanistan, and it sounds like the school bell. And here on the desk, disguised as a sheet of A4 paper, is a head cut off at the neck, its eyes shut, its bloodstains minimal, its skin greenish, like John the Baptist on a plate. Shakila’s head, in its elaborate hijab, for how else am I to picture the Hazara people – Persian speakers, lovers of the poet Rumi, eaters of apricots, guardians of the Buddhas of Bamiyan – other than as my dear, my swift-running Shakila? Does she feel the lighter of it, I wonder, now it is me who has to carry the head home? Or will it be equally heavy, however often it is passed, just as much a head? Well, we can find out. Shakila’s head: the weight of it, the warmth, the cheekbones, the brains. Here you are. Catch.
Aadil’s Blood
Aadil is supposed to be helping on Open Evening, but he has arrived late with a bleeding nose. This is not picturesque, so I am hiding him in the empty staffroom and handing him cotton wool and paper towels from the medical bay. I am also trying to work out if he has been in a fight. I can’t quite believe he has. Aadil always seems so grand: a tall Somali boy with a deep, African voice, and the almost aristocratically calm manner that sometimes goes with being extremely good-looking.
‘I hit him first,’ he says, before I can ask.
‘Who?’ I ask.
‘Cumar,’ he says.
‘Cumar? You hit Cumar?’ Now I’m really baffled. Cumar, as far as I am concerned, is super-nice; not as spectacularly clever as Aadil, perhaps, but bright and helpful and always opening doors for you.
‘I thought you guys were from the same country?’ I say.
Aadil sighs. Then he looks at me: a long appraising look.
‘Is that how we look to you, Miss?’ he says. ‘Really?’
I think again. Cumar is long and slender as many of the Somali kids are, with a thin nose, narrow skull, and very dark, almost black skin. Aadil is more muscular and square-set, with chocolate-coloured skin, a broad-based nose, and rounded head. Very different, now I think about it. About as widely different, in fact, as I, with my Nordic height and Celtic colouring, am from a petite, olive-skinned, Mediterranean woman.
‘Aren’t you both Somali?’ I ask. ‘You told me you were Somali.’
‘Miss,’ said Aadil, ‘I’m mixed. Like . . . Kenya–Somali mix. My mum and dad, they’re from different . . .’ He hesitates. He won’t say the word ‘tribe’; we’ve talked about that. ‘They’re from different groups. It’s all mixed up, there, Somali and Kenyan? My mum – she looks like me. My brothers – they look like my dad. They look like Cumar. I look different. I look Kenyan. Cumar says I look Kenyan.’ And his nose starts bleeding again and he reaches for the paper towel.
‘If you’re Kenyan don’t you get asylum?’ I ask.
Inside the paper towel, Aadil shakes his head.
‘What about your story?’ I ask, because Aadil has written me a beautiful memoir of witnessing and escaping Kenyan government violence as a four-year-old.
Aadil raises his head. ‘Miss! That’s all true.’
I know, instinctively, that it is. Of course it is. People on every border, deep into every country, are mixed heritage. The Kenyan border will be no different.
‘Is Cumar from the border too?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Somali–Kenya border. Like me.’
So Cumar has identified Aadil, because he looks different, with his family’s persecutors, who were Kenyan-looking. Probably, he hates Aadil more because he is so close to him, because they ought to be friends. I think for a minute, proceed carefully. I know that Aadil’s papers, like those of so many of my students, are still in process.
‘Are you worried,’ I ask, ‘that you might not get your papers if they think you’re Kenyan?’
Aadil takes a long time to reply. His shoulders are shaking. At last he says: ‘I’m worried my whole family won’t get their papers if they think I look Kenyan.’
I can’t pat his back; he’s a boy. I look at the heaving paper towel. I rack my brains for something comforting to say.
At last I try: ‘Look, don’t worry too much. Cumar, he’s totally not the British government, you know. People like me, that’s who’s in government. And what did I just show you? You look Somali to me. I’ve got no idea. Most of us – white people, English people – you look the same to us. We’ve got no idea.’
Aadil has the grace to put down the towel, and to smile.
My Papers
One of the things Aadil and Shakila teach me is how white I am. To these young refugees, or to the son of a Lithuanian hospital porter or the daughter of a Bengali warehouse worker, I am a super-empowered, incredibly lucky member of the world’s ruling class; someone whose ‘papers’ – the visa, passport, work permit, the possession or lack of which very often dominates their family destiny – are perfect, wholly intact. They sum it up in one word: ‘English’, and I never correct them.
But I am Scottish, really, not English. Scottish by birth and Scottish by upbringing: a tiny difference which has had a surprisingly strong impact on my sense of self. Sometimes, too, talking to kids about the byzantine workings of the Home Office, I remember my own applications for ‘papers’. Because the fact is, mine are not perfect, and I did not emigrate from Scotland; I was asked to leave. This is my story.
I went to school in Glasgow and then in Edinburgh in two almost entirely white schools, monocultures, like Blastmuir High School. The effect of this seemed to be to highlight small differences: for example, I was white and Scottish born, but because I had an English father, and an Irish (Catholic) name, I was often counted among my peers as English. When I was little, I worried about this a good deal, and especially about my voice which was deemed to be very English indeed. I dreaded opening my mouth in front of new people, and often tried to avoid talking altogether, because I had a second weakness, which was bursting readily into tears.
But all things pass. I decided, as I was so English, to go to university down south, in Oxford. Once I got there and met the sons of London barristers and the daughters of cabinet ministers, I realized I was not English and posh at all, but Scottish, and squarely middle-class. As I trained as a teacher in Oxford, then worked in London, I even began to feel I wanted to go back permanently to Edinburgh: where I had friends; where I was writing, already, occasional pieces for the Scotsman; which was, after all, my native city. I wanted to live there, not in London, and to teach in the schools in Broughton and Leith I had been frightened of as a girl. They looked to me then – they were, they are – strong, splendid comprehensives, better funded than the schools of the south.
Scottish educational institutions were stronger too. Then, as now, Scottish teachers were more firmly regulated than their English counterparts; they could not apply for jobs at schools independently but were recruited and allocated by the local authority, and they had to be registered by the General Teaching Council for Scotland. The GTC ensured, for example, that teachers of French had spent time in France; that everyone had O Level Maths; that all teachers had degrees. I thought this was a good thing, especially as I was smugly sure I had all the right qualifications and experience. I filled in all the forms, and though nine months later I had only been provisionally registered, I resigned my English job and moved north. My provisional registration would let me work in short-term cover jobs, and thus I arrived in Blastmuir, and met Callum and his classmates.
Two years after my original application to the GTC, though, my application was still open. Supply teaching is always rough and I was getting tired of it; I have a memory of removing a child from my class by the headphones of her Walkman. By now it was spring, new job season in schools, but without registration I could not apply for any permanent ones. On the supply circuit, I met another English-qualified teacher who had been waiting three years for permanent registration, then another, then one who had been waiting for five. I met a Canadian who had been
waiting for nine. In fact, I couldn’t find any teacher qualified outside Scotland who was permanently registered with the GTC. Why wasn’t it happening for us? It couldn’t be because we were under-qualified, for Canadian teachers are probably the world’s most thoroughly trained; and it wasn’t because we were unable to teach Scottish exams, for we were teaching them already, in our temporary positions. It felt as if it was because we weren’t Scottish, or in my case, not Scottish enough. All of us had written many letters about our applications, but to little effect. No rule was being broken: if you looked at the GTC small print I could see that there was no mandatory time scale for the registration of outsiders; it was always ‘discretionary’. In schools, no one seemed to think there was anything wrong with this practice: ‘It’s natural folk will want the local person,’ said one head teacher, and another: ‘You can’t expect to go ahead of someone who’s stayed in Scotland,’ while a head of department opined that I might do better with Official X because: ‘He kicks with the left foot and you’ve a Catholic name.’ The year was 1991.
Perhaps I should have taken her advice. Instead, being young and easily outraged, I wrote a piece about the whole thing for the Scotsman, quoting my Canadian friend’s story as well as my own. The results were surprising. Within a week, the Scotsman published an article from the GTC saying that English teachers could easily register in Scotland, and a suddenly unfriendly editor refused both the letter and article I offered in reply. Then, and I swear I am not making this up, a senior official of the GTC rang me up at home in the middle of the afternoon and said, not only that I would never be registered, but that I would never again work in any state school in Scotland. He did not leave his name; perhaps he was merely a stray bigot in the GTC building with a free afternoon. But he had access to my file and my phone number and I certainly believed it was true.
I didn’t know what to do. I had a fantasy of self-educating in law and taking the GTC to the courts of the European Union. But that would have taken years, and most probably would not have worked anyway; Scotland qualifies as a region when it comes to specialisms like the GTC, and so is not subject to the laws that apply to nations. I interviewed for a private school, but halfway through, after the Head of Department had shown me classrooms that reminded me of the ones I had been a pupil in and told me they studied Muriel Spark only with the lower sets, I burst into tears and ran away.
At the very last minute, I saw the job in Essex. I was interviewed in a prefab hut, so new was the college. They asked me how I would teach Antony and Cleopatra, and I told them. Nobody asked me anything about where I came from, or where I’d lived, only what I had learned and what I could do. It was bliss. So I went back to live in London and worked alongside Jamaican and Zoroastrian and Irish teachers in a thriving, dynamic, growing college. No one thought about my national identity, and I tried not to, either. The question which had carried so much weight in my childhood – are you really Scottish? – seemed settled: I wasn’t. I married an English man, I had English children, I was fine with it, I always said.
And I am fine. I am better than fine, as Aadil and Shakila constantly remind me. Nevertheless, I miss my country in underground ways, like a covered river running through a town. The Scottish voice, the Scottish hills, my sea, my islands, my precipitous city: they spout up without warning in my dreams and in my fiction and poetry. The independence debate of the last decade fascinates me and alienates me, for I can imagine a Scottish government only as a giant GTC: bureaucratic, anti-English, rejecting anyone with outside experience, asking what foot I kick with. Still, all these years later, thinking about my papers can make me cry. But I suppose the experience gave me some solidarity with Aadil and Shakila, and perhaps some small insight into what institutional racism might feel like. It must be a little similar to the dumbfounding mixture of disgrace and rage I felt when I was told that it was ‘natural’ that folk would prefer the local person; that I couldn’t expect to go ahead of someone who belonged in Scotland, when I looked around and felt that everyone agreed. And now at least when my students tangle with the awful bureaucracy of visa applications, I have had a small experience of having the wrong ‘papers’ and of being judged by where I had been, rather than what I could do, or, as Dr King once put it, by the ‘content of my character’.
About Writing, Secrets, and Being Foreign
Priti, Farah, Priya, and Amina
Priti’s Canoe
I was unlocking my bike outside the Inclusion Unit when a small round girl in a hijab approached me. ‘Miss,’ she said, ‘are you the writer?’
I said I was, and solemnly and carefully she handed me an A4 notebook. ‘Me and my cousin,’ she said, ‘wrote a book. Miss B said you would read it.’
Thanks, Miss B. The book was quite hard work. Not only was it in Year 8 handwriting (two different sorts, multiple colours; they’d clearly been taking turns), and long, but it really wasn’t my sort of book. It was a version of a teen novel and took place in a summer camp in America. There were mean girls in short skirts and nice girls in white shirts ‘teamed’ with jeans and a hero with blond hair falling thickly on his polo shirt and a boating accident . . .
‘But what I really want to know,’ I said, to the small round Priti and her taller, silent cousin Priya, whom Miss B had solemnly gathered for an ‘editorial conference’, ‘what I really want to know is, why is everyone white? In your book?’
Two pairs of brown eyes gazed at me, baffled, sorrowful.
‘Did we get it wrong?’ asked Priya.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘not wrong exactly. But you can sort of tell, as a reader, that you haven’t been to that American landscape? That camp?’
Priti and Priya cast down their eyes.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘canoes don’t have engines? Usually.’ The girls shuffled their feet, soft and submissive as a box of kittens. I ploughed on.
‘I mean,’ I said, ‘you’re both Bengali, right?’ They looked up and nodded enthusiastically. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘why not write a story about that?’
‘Miss,’ said Priya, looking directly at me. ‘We are not in books.’
That was news to me. That is, I knew, vaguely, that there were not enough teenage or children’s novels, or novels full stop, with people of colour as their protagonists, but I wasn’t overly concerned about it. I thought, if anything, that it was a problem that would sort itself out in time, that one shouldn’t be too ‘politically correct’ about these things. I hadn’t understood at all how this could affect the way you imagined yourself, your inner life, even your fantasies; above all, your writing.
But in my own early reading there had been white bookish girls everywhere, from A Little Princess to I Capture the Castle to Jane Eyre; girls, moreover, who were the authors of their own books. I remembered how much it bothered me then that Jane Eyre dislikes tall women so palpably, because I was tall; how much easier I found it to love Maggie Tulliver just because she was big and dark; how very much merely hair and skin colour, not to speak of the rest of it – language, nationality, class – just matter in books, perhaps especially to girls. What if, I thought, what if all my childhood reading, all my beloved novels and stories, had not featured a single person who looked like me or spoke to me? How would I feel if I was not in books?
I looked at Priti and Priya, so soft-eyed and polite. They had no advantages at all, no one at home who wrote or read English novels. Nevertheless, they had written a substantial amount of one. It was quite a thing.
‘Maybe you should write a novel with Bengali girls in it,’ I said. ‘There’s clearly a need.’
Farah’s Secret
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them
OTHELLO, OF DESDEMONA
When you come to a new place, you tell your tale: the story of where you came from and how you got here, because that is the story of who you are. Everyone does this, even if their journeys were short and internal. For migrants, whose d
islocations are wide, vivid, and sometimes violent, this telling can become hugely important. Aadil, for example, is very strongly motivated to write, and to write the story of leaving his country: that’s how and why I got to know him. Over several years, I watch him tackle the tale over and over again, in verse, in prose, as a play, often very successfully. And then I witness him destroy his efforts, either by physically tearing them up, or with the more developed pieces, with last-minute sabotage: not turning up when he is scheduled to read, withdrawing pieces from competitions, editing contributions to magazines down to the title, replacing subtle protest poems with rhymes copied from the internet, cancelling the play.
Getting him to explain his reasons is always hard, but when we get to it, it’s always the same: fear of discovery. Fear that the perfectly understandable, the really very small untruth his parents told when they arrived in this country – that they were of entirely Somali, not mixed, heritage – will be discovered through him; if not through his handsome Kenyan features, then through his words. This lie was terrifying for him as a child, and he is unable to overcome the fear of it in adulthood, even after he and his family get their passports. The lie is a lump in his throat; he has to keep clearing it, he can never start his speech. The lie sends him to study Pharmacy, not English, at university. The lie may be why you haven’t heard of him, now, as a writer.
Lies are especially heavy for children – think of the novels Atonement or The Go-Between – but they hurt adults too. It was easy enough, for example, to persuade Farah, from Iraq, to write about her homeland; words and images came flooding out. But when, after a school poetry reading, I’m approached by her dad, asking in broken English how he can write down his story, things get more complicated. I’m barely home before I get an email from little Farah: