Other

I can’t queue. If I see a long queue (anything more than four people), I walk away. I don’t care if they’re handing out fresh ten pound notes once you get to the summit, I’m gone. Apart from being long and boring, there’s something else. They’re oppressive, quietly controlling. You’re literally falling into line. You’re ordered, managed. You stay where you belong, you shuffle, you wait. You mustn’t complain in a queue, you must simply stay, nudging forward on a set, narrow trajectory as minutes - or in some cases hours- of your life melt away like snow in June. Queues scream of prescribed fairness, they tell you what to do without saying a word. Like a menacing despot with previous, they command respect; the mere sight of one enough to cow even the most recalcitrant among us into civil obedience. 

You might have spent your evening joyriding a stolen car or drowning puppies or stealing from an old lady. But you’ll obviously join the queue. 

Maybe it’s because I’m Iranian. I’m genetically incapable of queuing. Can’t we just get our elbows out and battle our way to the front? Wouldn’t that be more fun? More authentic? How about I bypass the queue and walk straight to the front - and if you can stop me, stop me. A Battle Royale-style Survival of the Impatient. If you want to send your parcel, Jim, you’ll have to fight me first.

I remember getting on a bus once with my aunty in Iran. I must have been about 10. We stood in the afternoon heat, waiting. The bus arrived and everyone moved at once, pushing their way to the front, shoulders touching. Nobody cared how long anyone had been there, who had waited longer. Nobody was angry or complaining. Here was a wholly accepted and consensual bit of argy bargy. The rules were simple: if you want a seat badly enough, shove your way through. My dream, right? You’d think. But I can’t quite handle this type of anarchy either. I think I want it but, as it turns out, I’m too British. Too Iranian to queue, too British to barge my way to the front. What to do? I’m in queuing purgatory. And it’s not just queues.

If you’re a child of immigrants you are, effectively, oil and water. You’ve imbibed both the culture outside your doors and the culture within. They mingle, they co-exist. They lap about each other, neither one able to dissolve and vanquish the other - one rising to the top but the other still, unquestionably there. And so I find my sensibilities at war with themselves. If you come to my house for a cup of tea, I won’t spend three hours laying a table with a feast of treats like my mum would. Equally, I could never just give you the tea without something to eat - I’d have to put a few things in plates or bowls. My mum thinks I’m as English as the Queen. The Queen, I’m certain, would disagree. I’m more Iranian than an English person and less Iranian than an Iranian. So what am I? What are you if you’re both? 

For me, it means I’m neither. Not neither at all, rather neither definitively, exclusively. I’m a kind of a non-moving nomad, not from anywhere really. I have two passports but it’s as though they cancel each other out. Not because of the queuing or the nuts in bowls. That’s just subterfuge, a talking point - it’s academic, funny, even. As I said, those things co-exist. No, it’s something else.

Here, you never quite belong. There’s a rug, sure (it may even be Persian) but you’re only renting it. It can be pulled from under your feet at any time. You’re not fooling anyone. You are other. From somewhere. A general ‘exotic’ or probably a Muslim, maybe Jewish or possibly South American, or could you be half-Jamaican or Egyptian or Turkish. Who knows? It’s a fun guessing game, but the answer is always: elsewhere. 

You came here, you arrived. You left the place where people look like you and landed here, where people don’t. They think you look exotic. They think your English is very good. They want to know how come you don’t wear hijab? You friend’s dad says, with some confidence, that your parents won’t let you go on that school trip because you’re a Muslim. How do you say your name again? Those two syllables are very difficult. Not like, say, Peter or Rita. 

But you didn’t arrive, you didn’t come from somewhere. This is the only where you’ve ever known. There was no boat, no plane. Just your mother’s birth canal. You squeezed yourself through and arrived with a yowl here on a small Island in the Western hemisphere. Home. Sort of. 

For a while you don’t notice - maybe the first four or five years. And then people start to let you know. If not every day, most days. With words, with actions, with silence. You absorb it, without question. It’s just how it is. And by the time you’re 18, calling yourself British or English sticks in your throat like a chicken bone. You can’t call yourself that because you know it’s not true. Here, nobody is racist. Here they know words like diversity and inclusion. Yet somehow the message has been loud, resounding, unending: you must explain yourself, your brownness, for this is a land of white. And you are a blemish in so much snow, you’re the mud that creeps in. We can’t stop you from being here. But it is our right to say and do, well, whatever we want. What’s the point of supremacy, after all? 

So what of the other? 

It’s complicated.

You go and the air is hotter than you’ve ever felt. It feels... foreign. There are men at the airport wearing army overalls, holding rifles like they’re nothing, revolvers swinging from their hips. They look serious, in the way people do when they carry guns. You’ve only seen this in films, on TV. The place you’ve come from is not the same. Back there the people at the airport smile, they wear name badges and uniforms in airline colours. It was raining when you left. You wonder if it ever rains here, if it’s possible. You wear a scarf on your head to cover your hair because you must. The other girls are doing the same, because they must. 

Here, the people look like you. Their skin colour, their eyebrows, their eyes. But they are not the same. They have lived a life you could never know. The kind of life you only read about. Here, freedom doesn’t hang from trees like ripe cherries. It doesn’t fall in abundance, until there’s so much you don’t see it anymore. Here they have known fear, oppression, force. It hasn’t always been like this. It’s new, relatively. Like the Handmaid’s Tale: one day you could and the next, you couldn’t. 

Here they live in secret. They exist behind closed doors, under cover of darkness. They wear more make-up than you’ve ever seen, maybe because their faces are the only part of them visible to the world. They get dressed up like they’re going to a club even though there are no clubs. They have parties in their homes. They listen to loud music, drink alcohol, take drugs. If they’re caught they’ll be arrested, lashed. Here there are rules, but not like where you come from. These are the kinds of rules that take away your choices. The kind that explicitly tells you: women are inferior, less. The kind that leaves your skin flayed. The kind that leaves you swinging from a noose.

You speak the language but not like the people who were born here, the ones who can also read and write. You talk but you have an accent. And you don’t know all the words - the long ones - the ones that speak of politics or feelings, the language of stories. To learn those words you have to read - but here you are illiterate. The signs above shops, by the roadside, to you they are only cursive lines and dots: beautiful but meaningless. 

But still, you are of these people. 

Here you are not other, not in the same way you are where you were born. You realise then, how much the colour of your skin matters, the shape of your eyes, the blackness of your eyebrows. Your life has not been the same, your cultural references, your experiences, your expectations. You couldn’t be more different. And yet. Why does this somehow feel like lightness, like resurfacing from the deep and drawing breath? Only now do you know the true weight of being other. Only now do you understand what racism means, what it does, how it permeates like air, how you’ve sucked it in every day.

But it’s not that simple. 

Scratch a little deeper and here is not home either. It’s beautiful but alien. There’s a profound pleasure in being here, a pleasure in your face requiring no explanation. You are them, if your parents had stayed; they are you if their parents had left. But as it stands, the distance between you is far greater than the miles. This is not your life. Your hopes, your wants, your thoughts, you - this was all formed somewhere else. Underneath your skin, you bear no real resemblance. Some things can’t be translated. And so you go back to where you came from.

There, they think I’m English. Here, they think I’m other. 

And now they speak of racism. They’ve discovered it, found it, claimed it like all those lands. Did you know? And did you know? And did you know? They’ve read the books. It’s new, exciting. They’ve shifted from silent, unknowing oppressors to allies. It was easy. Too easy. They question if this or that is racist. You want to say: Bitch, please. It’s the air we breathe, it’s the water we drink, it’s always and it’s everywhere. Endemic doesn’t cover it, institutional doesn't cover it, white privilege doesn’t cover it. 

You see, in this country it’s simple. British means white. English means white. Your passport says otherwise, we tell ourselves otherwise, they tell us otherwise. But they’re just words. In reality they have no substance, no more weight than a fairy’s wings. And so. 

I was born here, in Exeter. My skin is the colour of caramel, olive. My foundation says it’s warm beige. It could almost be a tan, were it not for my eyes, my hair, my name. If I stop to imagine my skin being darker, being black, it’s inconceivable. I will never be able to imagine it, to understand that weight, and how people bear it. I’ve been let off lightly, if you’ll pardon the pun.

And still the message has been loud, resounding, unending: you must explain yourself, your brownness, for this is a land of white. And you are a blemish in so much snow, you’re the mud that creeps in. We can’t stop you from being here. But it is our right to say and do, well, whatever we want. 

What’s the point of supremacy, after all?