THE LONG READ
Massey recently compiled an antholog y of
life writing called Who Are We Now? which
includes similar tales of prejudice and hos-
tility. ‘Before June 2016,’ one contributor
writes, ‘I felt perfectly at home here. Now I
don’t know any more. I am afraid the word
“foreigner” is glowing in bright letters
on my forehead when I walk the streets.
Should I do an accent-reduction course?
Should I take my husband’s last name?
Should I become English? Or should I
leave?’ Another contributor writes of a
confrontation with an elderly woman who
asks – aggressively – where her husband
comes from and is told ‘Germany’. (He has
lived in Britain for decades but still has an
accent.) Ah yes, Germany has nice moun-
tains, the woman concedes, then adds:
‘If you like the mountains so much, why
don’t you people go home?’
The odder your surname, the darker
your skin, the less familiar your accent,
the more likely you are to be addressed
in that way. Politicians have legitimized
it. Before Theresa May’s ‘hostile envi-
ronment’ policy, and Boris Johnson’s
description of women in burkas looking
like letterboxes, came Enoch Powell’s
rivers-of-blood speech, Margaret Thatch-
er’s description of the country being
‘swamped’ by immigrants, and [former
Tory MP] Norman Tebbit: ‘If they
[Muslim women] wish to cover their faces
and isolate themselves from the rest of
the community and so thoroughly reject
our culture then I cannot imagine why
they want to be here at all. Perhaps they
should just push off back to their own
countries.’
‘Go home’ the bigots cry. But home
isn’t a place you come from. Home is a
place you make. In the 1940s my mother
came from Ireland to make hers in rural
Yorkshire. Though prejudice against
the Irish was rife then, she never to
my knowledge had anyone tell her to
go home. Nor were the Poles I knew
in childhood – who included Rick, a
classmate at school, and Lucy, one of my
first girlfriends – subjected to prejudice.
Their surnames might have been dif-
ficult to spell but nobody bullied them
or beat them up. That their parents were
immigrants or wartime refugees was no
reason to treat them differently. They
were like the rest of us. Yorkshire was
their home.p
Only connect. It’s dispiriting to think that
things have got worse since the years of
my adolescence, that the dreams we had
of global harmony and understanding, a
world purged of racism and xenophobia,
now look deeply naive. I have to remind
myself that not all is gloom, and that in
some respects the UK is more outward-
looking than it was. A recent survey
commissioned by the Man Booker Inter-
national Prize reveals that sales of trans-
lated fiction were up by 5.5 per cent in
2018, with more than 2.6 million books
sold – the highest figure since sales were
first tracked in 2001 and part of a pattern
of steady growth. At the same moment
that British voters chose isolationism, so
British readers are buying more novels
from Europe than ever before. And not
just from Europe (not just Jo Nesbø, Elena
Ferrante and Scandi noir). Fiction from
China, Korea and the Arab world is also
reportedly in more demand. And sales of
translated short stories and anthologies
are up by 90 per cent.
The younger generation of students
and aspirant writers I’ve worked with
also give me grounds for hope. I remem-
ber, as a sixth-former, being told by the
professor interviewing me for a place
at Leeds University that he had never
learned anything from a student. I’ve
learned plenty from mine. Three in par-
ticular – all doing PhDs – come to mind:
Anthony Joseph (in what became his
novel Kitch) writing about Lord Kitch-
ener, the calypso artist who arrived onthe Windrush in 1948; Bernardine Evar-
isto (in her novel Loverman), brilliantly
ventriloquizing an elderly gay Jamaican
in London; and Season Butler (in her
novel Cygnet) describing an island occu-
pied, with one exception, by geriatrics –
the exception being the narrator, whose
wise reflections on age, race, class and
global warming belie her tender youth.
I feel lucky to have worked with such
talents – they taught me as much as I
taught them.
And that’s the point of reading widely,
to learn things you otherwise wouldn’t
know – not just issues affecting other
cultures (from another PhD student I’ve
learned about the practice of bride price
in Uganda) but those that resonate with
our own. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouch-
able might have been published in 1935,
but something one of its sweepers says- ‘They think we are dirt because we
clean their dirt’ – echoes the experience
of many immigrants working as poorly
paid cleaners in the UK today. Even the
opening conversation in EM Forster’s
A Passage to India, published 11 years
earlier, has its resonance. Aziz and his
friends are discussing ‘whether or not it
is possible to be friends with an English-
man’. They mean their colonial masters,
but it’s a question that goes beyond the
Anglo-Indian relationship explored in
Forster’s novel. Are the British in general
and the English in particular the kind of
people other nations want to be friends
with today? The obstacle used to be our
arrogance and stiff upper lip. Now it’s
our talent for making fools of ourselves.
p
‘Call yourself English?’ Yes and no. It’s
the country to which I’m most attached,
but at some point I dropped ‘English’ for
the more inclusive ‘British’. Now it too
is tainted, through adoption by the Far
Right. I’d not go so far as to call myself
Irish, though I do now have an IrishAre the English the kind of people other nations
want to be friends with today? The obstacle
used to be our arrogance and stiff upper lip.
Now it’s our talent for making fools of ourselves
70 NEW INTERNATIONALIST