Though I read this book much earlier this year (and indeed, it was released in 2016), it’s stuck with me over the last few months. I picked it up in my continuing search to broaden my knowledge of other people’s experiences, particularly people of colour; I was wary of being labelled a white feminist, and willing and hopeful to learn. Until that point, though, my learning (at least as it related to the area where I could do the most work, the UK) had been hampered by the continued ‘Americanisation’ of the world – that is, the tendency to see various issues, but in this case particularly the issue of race and racism, through the American lens. Though America’s race issues can be extrapolated across the West to some extent due to the ubiquity of colonialism and slavery, variations in those histories mean that the way racism works in the US is not necessarily the way it works in the UK.
If you’re also facing this point of discovery in your intersectional journey, The Good Immigrant is a great place to start. The volume, edited by Nikesh Shukla, collects 21 essays by black, Asian, and minority ethnic British writers and creatives, speaking to their experiences of what it means for them to live in Britain today as immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. I’m ashamed to say that the only contributor with whose work I was familiar before reading the book was Riz Ahmed, the actor and rapper, but the eclectic range of perspectives was refreshing and exposed a wide range of experiences and specific injustices. I’ve since gone on to read other works by the contributors, so besides being an interesting and useful book in itself, it serves as an excellent jumping off point for discovering a wide range of great reading, listening, and watching material.
My Punjabi identity back home is a fairly typical second generation one. It’s Hoshiarpur football T-shirts as streetwear in London, Bhangra and grime playing out of your cousin’s BMW, sending pictures of you in Air Max 90s and a sari to a WhatsApp group. Being a British Asian in 2016 is about being in on the joke when it comes to reclaiming parts of our identity you’re supposed to feel ashamed about.
I wear sari tops in the rave, blast Bhangra in the car, make friends with corner-shop owners and teach co-workers about Vaisakhi, delicately explaining to them why saying ‘Salaam Alaikum’ to a Sikh is a misstep. I grew up revelling in being a typical Southall girl, finding familiarity in the shaved eyebrows of my older male cousins, before moving onto a white community where people didn’t get me and I noticed just how different I was. Being dragged out of my comfort zone enabled me to discover a new kind of British identity and eventually my family got used to my weirdness, that I wanted to be a writer, that I had white and black friends, that I wanted to stay in reading Harry Potter instead of going to the Mega Mela on the common.
At home, the coding is pitched right and I’ve learned how to navigate my identity in white spaces, in family spaces, in my own. But here, in this village, my specific adoption of Punjab through my own lens is scrutinised by my family and found lacking. They don’t understand my jokes, my observations, my London-twanged Punjabi.
Though the messages are plural and greater, one thing I took from Yates’ essay is that home is what you make it and who you make it with.