Here's Atima's story

I can't find any turmeric

These days, the task of filling out an employment form is easy, it’s the filling out the sheet of identity that takes up all your time.  No longer restricted to Caucasian, Afro Caribbean, Asian, let me see: Am I White of Commonwealth origin, Asian of British birth, Afro-Caribbean of Indian descent, am I Chinese? British Asian or Indian British?  Mixed parentage?  Of more than one country of origin?  Or, my favourite:  Other.  I tick.

Am I the Other?

Whole PhDs have probably been written on this irony, so I’ll turn your attention to a skinhead with a stone.  He sees a brown man who has taken his turn and he throws the stone.  The brown man’s sense of identity changes.  Now it is no longer about the particularity of his family and their ways.  Identity becomes synonymous with difference.  In response, the first generation of immigrants wary of corrupting their identity, recreate authentic Home for their children.  This is how you must pray, act, dress and talk.  This is how it is in India.  This is how it is back home.

But, Home is never here, it’s always there.

Even the most authentic of people, places and ideas are but a sum of hybridity.  A small town dweller speaks in one language at home, another at work and perhaps a third if they have a computer! Hybridity is not a substitute for authenticity.  Both notions exist simultaneously.  We can be of here and also of there.  We can still support the West Indian cricket team even if we have a British passport.  Here is part of there and there is always continuing here.

For me, the engine of creativity is revving highest when I am amongst diversity. In my street, you see Greek Cypriots playing cards in Turkish cafes, red faced Englishmen demanding proper English food – a good curry, Nigerians drinking Irish Guinness, Spanish cafes run by Moroccans, the Nation of Islam boys in bow ties greeting you with salaam-aley-kum outside Macdonald’s, a Chinese kosher restaurant, acupuncture practised by English aristocrats, mixed race children in African garb, and I am part of it… right here, right now.

And yet.  And yet…

I am overwhelmed sometimes by my longing for Indian-ness, a term I cannot define.  Last month I was in Bulgaria and went on a coach trip to a village.  A brown girl stepped on to the bus and we immediately smiled at each other, lost no time in asking the question that used to embarrass me as a child and heard it uttered by my parents to any brown stranger on the street.

Where are you from?

I with my quasi-cockney accent, her with her “I’m like, hell-ooo” sassy American accent, and we still want to know, where are you from?

London , I say.  England.  India, Bombay.  Also UP (Uttar Pradesh) where my family is from.

We both know this is not going to be a simple one line conversation.  The States she says, and grimaces.  L.A. India.  Gujerat too, where my family is from.  I’m working here for five months.

She lowers her voice:  I can’t find any turmeric.

No respectable Indian dish can be cooked without this spice.  The world suddenly shrinks.  We smile.  Other people see two brown girls.

A skinhead somewhere picks up a pebble on the shore.  A man’s head turns.  Someone watches.  

Which one are you?

Now try this activity to help you understand Atima's story. This second activity will also help you to understand this story.