I have lived in the UK for 18 years of my life. I did my GCSE’s, my Highers, and my undergraduate degree here. My first bank account was opened here, it is in this country that I paid my first bills. For all intents and purposes and from a fiscal perspective, this is where I come from. As far as people are concerned that is not the case. People in the UK classify in part through accents; I have an accent that is mostly from the US, so to them that is where I must be from, where my allegiances must lie, where I must call home. Accent, however is only part of what makes a person, and really points to how one learned to speak. In most cases it can be said that one learns to speak in their home country, taught by their parents who also came from that country, but therein lies a few glaring omissions. Firstly it assumes that one always learns to speak in their so called ‘native’ setting, and secondly it assumes that people in their latter years cannot teach themselves to speak differently.
To clarify, none of that is true for me. I was born in a country that neither of my parents had a connection to, to parents who were born and raised in different countries to each other. When I moved to Scotland I was 15 years old, and as the years passed people made few if any remarks concerning my background or my supposed foreignness. It was only in the years leading up to Brexit that suddenly I became foreign again, and not only foreign, but a recently arrived foreigner. People ranging from passersby to work colleagues have made assumptions and asked questions that belied the fact that they thought I had just come to Scotland, and were always surprised or shocked to discover I had been here for what is now close to two decades. “But culturally, you are still American.”, they’d say.
Having said all of this, I experience an interesting almost reversal when I travel back to the EU or to other parts of the world. Suddenly, my skin colour comes first and THEN my accent. People, including those in official positions, assume I come, very recently, from an African country related to that European country’s colonial history. When I begin to speak in English, sometimes I see a change in demeanour. It can be a relaxing of muscles, a change in tone, a look. Once it took the form of the person I was speaking to suddenly becoming friendlier. It is almost as if to say their relief is embedded in the fact that I am not a source of guilt or discomfort for them, but for someone else. In the Middle East it is much more direct; people do not believe people who are brown come from anywhere but the African continent (and according Channel 4, Richard Spencer of US alt-right fame agrees). This has been the topic of many a fight with taxi drivers, both for myself and other friends. In recent years people have come to acknowledge that brown people (I refer to myself as brown rather than black for a list of reasons that could make for another paper) can come from other countries, but they must still be ‘originally African’ (which I find fascinating given the existence of Papua New Guinea and Australia). This idea that people who look like me can only be African is spreading despite the fact that we all know by now that identity has never been straight forward (not to mention what history has to say about this).
Ok let’s move on to Foucault. Everyone loves that guy right? He basically uses truth and the act of confession to argue that understanding who you are is just the beginning of a process of bringing who you are under control. Once a person is understood they can be categorised, and once they are categorised they can be put to use by the state. This is the essence of Technologies of the Self (and many of his other works), and one can see it reflected back in such things as forms, identity cards, and the way people interact. Returning to what I had said, once people hear my accent they interact with me on the basis of what they know about the US and what ‘Americans’ are supposed to be like, or if I am in for example the Middle East, people treat me the way they would an African. I cease to be relatable in some ways, and become ‘one of them’, an ‘Other’. The category, as a function of control, also allows for the divisions of people who could very easily find common ground. Divisions reinforce conflict, and conflict perpetuates inequality. To break that down, people use information about themselves and others to break people down into rough categories associated with things like gender, religion, and association to parts of the world based on skin colour. More recently, this has been operationalised by governments to identify people who are likely to be terrorists or refugees for example. This works because differences are highlighted, and people begin to believe in the rhetoric. They tell themselves “Of course that person is a terrorist/refugee. They are not like us.” or “They can’t be from here, they are so different.”
This attitude has deep roots, and as a recent article in the Guardian has demonstrated, can be connected to the colonialist and imperialist history of the UK Europe and to some extent the US. Pankaj Mishra describes in the article ‘How Colonial Violence Came Home: The Ugly Truth of the First World War’ how engrained in the popular psyche the idea of colonised peoples as inferior was, and how this was directly tied to the idea of the survival and expansion of Western countries. This is an idea that was not dismantled with the empire (and many would argue the empire has not been dismantled), allowing for a resurgence in the ideas of the right parties of various EU countries. To be clear again, I am not attacking the feeling of national pride and identity associated with a geographical area and the customs that have arisen in that bounded space, but I take issue with the violent hate of the supposed ‘Other’ that accompanies it. This is especially important as the world has an extremely long history of travelling peoples, a history which is not taught, and is left to people such as Pankaj Mishra and Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft to remind us, often on painful terms. So my question to all of us is this: can we not be nationalistic without the negative aggression? Does the complexity of identity, even within a given country, not make it futile to construct who you are on the basis of who you are not?
Reading List
Mishra, Pankaj, 2017. ‘How Colonial Violence Came Home: The Ugly Truth of the First World War’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war?CMP=share_btn_fb
Aitken, R & Rosenhaft, 2014. ‘Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884 – 1960’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Al Jazeera, 2014. ‘Black France: A Three Part Series Looking at the History of France’s Black Community and their Long Struggle for Recognition’, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2013/08/201382894144265709.html