Do I Belong?

Reflections from Europe

Antony Lerman

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745399942
• eBook ISBN: 9781786801005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

*Shortlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize, 2017* 'Belonging' is both a fundamental human emotion and a political project that affects millions. Since its foundation in 1957, the European Union has encouraged people across its member states to feel a sense of belonging to one united community, with mixed results. Today, faced with the fracturing impacts of the migration crisis, the threat of terrorism and rising tensions within countries, governments within and outside the EU seek to impose a different kind of belonging on their populations through policies of exclusion and bordering. In this collection of original essays, a diverse group of novelists, journalists and academics reflect on their own individual senses of European belonging. In creative and disarming ways, they confront the challenges of nationalism, populism, racism and fundamentalism. Do I Belong? offers fascinating insights into such questions as: Why fear growing diversity? Is there a European identity? Who determines who belongs? Is a single sense of 'good' belonging in Europe dangerous? This collection provides a unique commentary on an insufficiently understood but defining phenomenon of our age. Authors include: Zia Haider Rahman, Goran Rosenberg, Isolde Charim, Hanno Loewy, Diana Pinto, Nira Yuval-Davis and Doron Rabinovici among others.

1

Europe’s Problem with Otherness

Zia Haider Rahman

In an interview in early 2016, the American critic and public intellectual Leon Wieseltier argued that America ought to take in more Syrian refugees. When his interviewer countered that the US might share the same anxieties as Europe, Wieseltier’s response was that Europe’s problem was that its tradition of national identity had no natural understanding of a multiethnic society. ‘According to traditional European nationalism,’ Wieseltier said, ‘the political boundaries and the cultural boundaries should ideally coincide. In a nation state, the state should personify a nation and a nation should be incarnated in a state, so that you have a series of happy homogeneous societies living side by side. Europe has a cultural problem with otherness.’

In New York in the 1990s, when New Yorkers asked me where I was from, all I’d say is that I grew up in Britain. Mentioning that I was born in Bangladesh only drew more questions: New Yorkers quite evidently just wanted confirmation of what was to them the distinctive cultural marker, my British accent.

That accent was learned from imitating BBC newsreaders on a cassette recorder. At a young age, in the days when children on council estates and in subsidized housing could rely on decent public libraries, I learned about the Holocaust, the destruction of millions of Jews at the hands of Europeans. The fear that gripped a child was that if they – the Whites – could do that to people who looked like them, imagine what they could do to us, to me. There was nothing I could do about my skin colour but there were certain things that I could mould to make myself less alien to these Europeans who seemed so ill at ease with difference. I grew up in a Britain that, only the other day, spat at non-Whites, beat us, and daubed swastikas in public spaces.

Britain constantly exhorts its immigrants to integrate better, constantly frightens its natives with the spectre of the fifth column, and in a million subtle ways tells anyone with a touch of dark skin that they should do more to become British and adopt British values. Do it and you’ll earn your stripes. But the promise is hollow, for Britain and the rest of Europe fail to keep their side of the bargain, and never had any intention to do so.

In January 2016, the hugely popular Daily Mail ran the kind of front page that makes it the laughing stock of thoughtful people, or at least those with a taste for irony. On the right was a picture of Johanna Konta, the Australian-born tennis player who moved to Britain at the age of 14 and was the subject of some controversy concerning the legitimacy of her playing under the British flag. ‘Hands off our tennis golden girl, Aussies!’ proclaimed the Mail. Meanwhile, the main headline on that same front page, referring to the British prime minister, declared in vast bold caps ‘PM: WHY WE MUST NOT TAKE 3,000 MIGRANT CHILDREN’. Later in the year, another front page in the same paper trumpeted demands that child migrants should be subject to dental tests to verify age, while at the same time the page sported an image of model ‘Cindy Crawford, 50, and her daughter Kaia, 15 ...’ and posed the question: ‘Spot the difference’.

But progressive Britain, readers of the Guardian and listeners to BBC Radio 4, rely on the likes of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph as an alibi, taking comfort in the thought that bigotry and blindness are confined to the pages of such papers. Yet if you want to grasp the deeper underlying assumptions that dominate White British thinking (or European thinking, for that matter), it is to the writings of the progressive elites, the presumed standard bearers of openness and enlightenment and the self-proclaimed allies of the oppressed, that you must go, writings rich in parapraxes.

Early in 2016, I was invited to join the judging panel for the PEN Pinter Prize, English PEN’s award for an author of a significant body of plays, poetry or fiction of outstanding literary merit; a writer who, according to English PEN’s terms, ‘casts an unflinching, unswerving gaze upon the world, and shows a fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’. Previous winners include Carol Ann Duffy, Salman Rushdie and Tom Stoppard. Unusually, the winner shares the prize ‘with an international writer of courage selected by English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee in association with the winner’. This makes it a rather special prize, in my view.

When my agents learned that English PEN intended to issue a press release about the composition of the judging panel, they sent them the text of my preferred bio: ‘Zia Haider Rahman is the author of In the Light of What We Know, a novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador 2014), for which he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize.’ PEN replied that they wanted – entirely understandably – to issue something that would give a sense of why they’d ask me to judge an important prize with a human rights dimension. We agreed to their suggested text and the press release included the words: ‘Born in rural Bangladesh, Zia Haider Rahman was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich, and Yale Universities. He has worked as an investment banker on Wall Street and as an international human rights lawyer. In the Light of What We Know, his first novel (2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize.’

A few days later the Man Booker Prize’s administration issued a message congratulating Peter Stothard, a former Man Booker judge, for his appointment to the PEN Pinter committee. It’s a long message in which they mention the other two appointments, ‘Vicky Featherstone, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre, and Zia Haider Rahman, a Bangladeshi banker turned novelist.’

I have no idea what citizenships Peter Stothard and Vicky Featherstone hold; rather unhelpfully, Man Booker evidently did not feel compelled to supply that information. It does, however, come as a surprise to learn that I’m Bangladeshi. I don’t hold a Bangladeshi passport; I do however hold a British one. In fact, until one of them expired in 2015, I held two valid British passports (to enable me to travel to so-called incompatible countries: two countries that each won’t permit entry if your passport shows a stamp from the other). Clearly, holding two British passports doesn’t make me doubly British, but surely we can agree that in order for something like the Man Booker Prize administration, a bastion of the British establishment, to call me Bangladeshi they ought to have sufficient reason to believe that I am precisely that. Shall we just put the error down to carelessness, a slip born of ignorance of the fact that millions of British citizens are descendants of people born in the post-colonies? Of course, keeping me Bangladeshi does have the advantage of enabling some people to tell me to go back to my own country.

Had the Man Booker’s message been drafted by an educated New Yorker for an American audience, it might have described me as Bangladeshi-American. Arguably, much more likely, ethnicity and nationality would have been deemed irrelevant to the context; drawing attention to such things would have been embarrassing (though they might instead have mentioned my human rights background for its obvious relevance, and not banking). Educated New Yorkers might pause to consider. It is worth noting that a few weeks after the New York Times published an op-ed I authored discussing this matter and including a hyperlink to the Man Booker post, the post was taken down.

The issue is not what I choose to call myself but what the supposedly educated Briton chooses to call non-White British citizens.

In 1999, William Macpherson delivered a report following the public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young Black man, and the subsequent failures of the British police. Macpherson, a former High Court judge, overcame his establishment pedigree and delivered a stunning report that ought to have roused Britain to begin a process of ongoing introspection. Too many natives still take any criticism of racial bias as a charge of bare, outright racism. In your defensive pose, you cannot listen. Macpherson brought ‘institutional racism’ into mainstream vocabulary. But what Britain and other European states, particularly the post-colonialist ones, have failed to undertake, including their liberal elites that believe themselves exempt, is a sustained enquiry into their own assumptions. Only with hard work, only when it is uncomfortable, will such an inquiry then begin to yield its rewards. Macpherson’s report highlighted how an institution’s processes can deliver outcomes that are racist. The intractable matter, however – the one that pervades every issue to do with Johnny Foreigner, including immigration or asylum seekers or membership of the EU or wearing the hijab – is that Britain has a cultural problem with otherness.

Perhaps it was too much to hope of a legal document. After all, the problem is cultural, and culture moves slowly or in unpredictable ways. The image of a dead boy lying on a beach, his head turned away, thereby allowing us all to project on to him our own beloved son, nephew or godson, arguably did more to move the debate on refugees than all the earnest roundtable discussions in Brussels. Cultural change is so slow that, aside from the occasional shock, all that is available to us is to engage in introspection as a society on a level that is necessarily deeply uncomfortable. Unless I am wrong, this is a project that will find no political champion. What must come under scrutiny are the assumptions embedded in the psyche; assumptions borne of hundreds of years of looting and oppression, of colonial presumption and racism. Those pictures of Tony Blair standing shoulder to shoulder with George Bush, the leader of the last remaining superpower in the world, both males readying for war – those images of sublime hubris only make sense against a history of violence.

You’re talking about the empire, you say. All that was so long ago. Time to move on. But do we ever hear the same said of the Second World War that came to an end long before the sun set on the British Empire? Your finest hour is well remembered but the colonies’ darkest days are best forgotten, old chum.

Instead, the BBC turns out documentaries about India with the same tired content and format – 2015 was a bumper season. The Guardian published a hilarious and serious piece by the novelist Amit Chaudhuri ridiculing these shows, in which White talking heads opine on Britain’s legacy of democracy and clueless White hosts take you on those railways – those bloody railways. Meanwhile, the Indian account is rather different and scarcely gets a look in. No doubt the British media machinery will continue to ill-serve the British people, not to mention history, and churn out the same nonsense in the next cycle. At the Oxford Union last year, in one of the finest defences of historical accuracy (including some solid facts about those fucking railways), the super-articulate Indian MP and former UN under-secretary-general Shashi Tharoor successfully argued that reparations be paid to India. The video went epidemically viral. Intelligently, he said that for him even one pound every year for the next 200 years would be enough, thereby moving the focus away from quantifying harm and on to admitting guilt and embracing history. A phalanx of gout-addled, White, establishment fogies opposing him looked on bemused. Meanwhile, according to a recent YouGov poll, 59 per cent of Britons think that the British Empire is more something of which to be proud rather than ashamed.

In February 2016, Prince William, who is British, gave a speech at the Foreign Office. ‘For centuries, Britain has been an outward-looking nation. Hemmed in by sea, we have always sought to explore what is beyond the horizon ... wherever we go, we have a long and proud tradition of seeking out allies and partners.’ Not to mention colonies and plunder, of course. Referring to his and his wife’s forthcoming trip to India, he added that their visit ‘will reflect the best of the modern, forward-looking relationship between India and Britain’.

Let’s set aside the optics of this, the inherent comedy of a British heir to the throne in the twenty-first century speaking of ‘forward-looking relationships’.

But what that speech exemplifies by its conspicuous omission is the fundamental denial of a nation of its colonial history; the denial, that is, of a country otherwise obsessed with its history, if daytime television is anything to go by, or the popularity of historical fiction, or period dramas. The psychic rupture involved in denying its colonialist guilt and all the horrors and the energy required to maintain that rupture exacts a penalty.

There will be no new reckoning of its changed and changing place in the world – a vastly diminished place – until that history is interrogated at home. The dissonance was evident in the contortions of the former British prime minister, David Cameron, when he and an entourage of business people visited India. British newspapers obliged by refraining from showing their home audiences the PM as supplicant. But how could he manage to persuade Indian businesses to invest in Britain; how could he urge Indian students to come to the UK and pay hugely over the local odds for a British education? The number of Indian students coming to the UK had already fallen off sharply. Those shockingly bright graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology now go to MIT and Stanford for their graduate degrees, after which many stay on – horror of horrors – and already dominate Silicon Valley. How could the PM represent Britain as open for business when it isn’t even open culturally?

In November 2015, I received an invitation to Christmas drinks at the London Library. The invitation card, relayed by my agents, gave no clue as to how I came to their attention. The London Library, by way of background, is a 175-year-old institution; its patron is the Queen, who is British. Membership costs about £500 a year. It is not a public library.

When I looked it up on the internet and discovered that its president was Tom Stoppard – who is British, by the way – I recalled that in an interview for Vanity Fair, the playwright mentioned that he was reading my novel. That’s why I was invited, I supposed. But it was something else on the London Library’s website that caught my attention.

I wrote to Howard Davies, former British director of the London School of Economics, former head of the UK’s financial regulator and chair of the trustees of the London Library, copying each of the trustees and the president. The first substantive paragraph of that letter reads: ‘London is routinely trumpeted by British politicians and commentators as the most diverse city in the world, a melting pot. According to the Greater London Authority, ethnic minorities constitute 44 per cent of the city’s population. On the library’s website, the faces of 16 trustees and 13 staff are proudly displayed, every one of which is White.’

I pointed out to Davies, the former financial regulator, whose grasp of elementary probability could surely be assumed, that even with an absurdly low assumpt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Europe’s Problem with Otherness
• 2. When Do You Eat Lunch?
• 3. The Missing Link? Building Solidarity among Black Europeans
• 4. From the European Puzzle to a Puzzled Europe
• 5. The Bird’s Religion
• 6. The Constructed European
• 7. Guilty Pleasure
• 8. A World of Difference
• 9. A Never-Ending Story: My Belonging Journey
• 10. The Paris 2015 Attacks and the Eclipse of Senses of Belonging in Europe
• 11. Home and Homelessness in Europe
• 12. The Undiscovered Continent
• 13. Growing Up under Different Skies
• 14. The Profound and Ambivalent Nature of Belonging in the EU
• 15. Questioning Belonging in the Post-Diasporic Museum
• 16. The Accidental European
• 17. Belonging to the Contact Zone
• 18. The Unfinished Business of Our Own Belongings
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Index