I still desired to know why I could not achieve what increasingly seemed impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had any of my dreams crushed by the word ‘impossible’.
When I was six, I once walked up to my parents and asked them – “Why am I not white?”
This was a defining moment of my childhood. The point where I just couldn’t stand being black. The point where I just wanted to be Caucasian and have silky soft hair, where I just wanted to be “normal”. This was my first major internal crisis, and mainly because I wanted to acquire the impossible.
So, I asked my parents the big question: “Why?”
During various summer camps (sports, music or some random place or adventure my parents wanted me to experience), I was usually the only black person. I often wondered why my skin would turn an ashy grey after a shower and others did not. Why my hair started breaking after a whole summer of daily washing while my mother asked me with wide eyes as she despairingly watched my luscious kinky curls break off after I got back from one summer camp, “Didn’t you explain to them that we don’t wash our hair every day?”
But I didn’t respond, I only wondered why I couldn’t achieve the seemingly impossible – silky, long, daily-washable locks. I didn’t necessarily want to be Caucasian, I just wanted the hair, and only for ease of maintenance. However, I couldn’t have the hair without being the person, and this seemed impossible barring a miracle or science. I simply couldn’t have something that would’ve simply made my life as easy as I desired.
As my African tongue rolled out French words, I immersed myself in the French culture of “je ne sais quoi” during my years at the French international school. I learned that the colour of one’s skin did not determine intelligence, but my question nagged. Our various ethnicities created a rainbow of heroic hearts struggling to navigate the perfect storm of confusing calculus and turbulent algebraic expressions, but I still desired to know why I could not achieve what increasingly seemed impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had any of my dreams crushed by the word ‘impossible’.
The more I sought to become my perception of “normal” the more my curiosity pushed me to better define and understand “normalcy”. This gave me the opportunity to explore inherent talents and to develop certain skills, allowing me to see myself in a new light, as a beautiful, strong woman of colour. I started loving myself more and finally realised that being normal is not conforming to a standard, it’s what you make it.
As I learn to love new cultures every day, I observe that deep seated love for my native, “puff puff” (deep-fried dough) and my West African spicy brilliant orange “jollof” rice cooked down to a bubbly glaze, that transcends both race and colour. As I share the joy of music through teaching piano and violin to children who do not have the opportunities I had, I’ve also found that music has no colour, only heart and soul.
I mingle with over 99 other nationalities in my current school, whose foundational values emphasize international and intercultural understanding as well as the celebration of difference. In so doing, I have discovered my passion for the wilderness, which has led me to meet others and explore the vivid layered rocks of the Grand Canyon, as well as the beautiful wildlife and snowy peaks of the Santa Fe National Park. Rugged natural beauty that underscores the foundational message of UWC: despite our distant origins, our diverse aspirations are complementary and inextricable.
I’ve realized that I have finally attained the love for my skin colour, my culture, and most importantly myself. For it is not colour that defines me, but my experiences and my aspirations, and with these tools I embrace the impossible.
Politicians and the media constantly promote the idea that immigrants are harming their host country simply by being there and the only that immigrants can counterbalance this harm is by giving back in an extraordinary and noticeable way.
I left Twitter for the calmer environs of Facebook so I could be less angry – less visibly angry anyway. I know that Facebook content tends to be more conservative and less socially aware so I had one simple rule – I’d unfollow anyone who tempted me to respond angrily. When I broke that rule, twice, on one topic, I decided that it was time for another blog post.
The background to this piece is the news that President’s Trump travel restrictions, the so-called travel ban, will, in February 2020, extend to Myanmar, Eritrea, Krygzstan, Sudan, Tanzania and to the shock of my fellow Nigerians, Nigeria. I can’t pretend I wasn’t a little surprised. I haven’t fully kept up to speed with Trump’s antics (atrocities?) and the last I heard, the travel ban was known as the Muslim ban. My first hastily drawn conclusion was that this had something to do with Nigeria’s large Muslim population, Boko Haram and Islamophobia.
The restriction will prevent citizens of the above countries from obtaining visas which would allow them to immigrate to the United States permanently but would still allow them temporary visas to visit, study or work temporarily. Despite it not being a literal ban on Nigerians entering the US, an American former class mate, in the context of choosing a location for our class re-union, has opined that it would be difficult for alumni with Nigerian passports to obtain a visa to travel to the US. This could be because there will be additional hurdles even for those seeking temporary visas to show that they have no intention of seeking permanent residency, have private means of support etc.
There are over 300,000 documented Nigerians in the US and probably many more American-born citizens with ties to Nigeria. Travel from Nigeria to the US from Nigerian citizens is already strictly controlled and full of stories about arbitrary decisions and disproportionate questioning. These new restrictions will have a significant impact on Nigerians, or people with Nigerian ties, on both sides of the travel divide.
Not knowing much about the travel ban, I expected to see debates from Nigerians about whether the concept of travel bans are just or a draconian limitation on freedom of movement and whether the US has grounds to do apply these restrictions to Nigeria. I no doubt expected questions as to why Nigeria was on this list. The White House’s official statements asserts that Nigeria is not complying with:
“the established identity-management and information sharing criteria assessed by performance metrics. Nigeria does not adequately share public-safety and terrorism-related information, which is necessary for the protection of the national security and public safety of the United States.” Therefore, “The entry into the United States of nationals of Nigeria,” with some exceptions, “is hereby suspended.”
Relevant questions have been asked of course but some people have chosen to lament Trump’s decision on the basis that Nigerians are ‘model immigrants’ – the kind that work hard, are disciplined and eat good (or something). This is hella wrong in a number of ways – hella delusional, hella generalising, hella offensive, hella right wing rhetoric and hella pointless. Let’s flesh these hellas out.
Hella…not really true: Nigerians are model immigrants, apparently. First of all:
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of things which are great about being Nigerian but I think if you conducted a survey among, say, a medium sized group of law enforcement professionals, only a minority would agree that Nigerians are ‘model immigrants’.
Or perhaps it’s a different Nigeria they are talking about – not the one which sits between Chad and Benin Republics (and Cameroon). Because it can’t be the same Nigeria whose citizens are constantly the butt of jokes about fraud, even in outer space (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfwf9B0jUwM). Not the same Nigerians in Peckham or any part of East London or London or any city in England or even Accra who other Africans complain are unbearably loud, rude, crass, pushy, arrogant (noooooo!) and dishonest. Again, not the same Nigeria that one of my best friends was talking about when she confessed to me that she was nervous of making friends with me because her mother, like the parents of many Africans at our university, warned her to ‘stay away from Nigerians’.
During the induction course at my new firm, the Finance Director trained us on anti-money laundering regulations and told us about the official list of high risk countries maintained by the EU. This Nigerian country, which produces ‘model immigrants’ can’t be the same country also named Nigeria which was not on the list of high risk countries but which my finance director felt compelled to mention.
“It may not be on the list now.” he said, in a tone that seemed to imply that it had very recently, in his view, temporarily been removed. “But you still have to be very careful of transactions involving Nigeria.” (causing me to take back my breath of relief when the list ended without Nigeria being on it. I and other Nigerians do this a lot by the way. When Kweku Adoboli was convicted in 2011 for one of the biggest stock trading frauds in recent history, my first thought was “Well at least he isn’t Nigerian.”)
I don’t think you can just unilaterally declare yourself to be a country full of “model immigrants”.
2. Hella generalising: Let’s face it, despite the above, I’d be just as critical of an article which suggested that Nigerians, as a whole are loud, uncouth criminals, perhaps even more so let’s analyse this claim a little further.
We all know that there are Nigerians and people of Nigerian origin, resident in the US and other parts of the world who have made extraordinary achievements in science, medicine, literature, computing, sports and mathematics, to name a few areas. However, let’s hope, for the sake of sanity, that the claims that Nigerians are model immigrants aren’t based on what can’t be more than a minute percentage of the Nigerian immigrant population. To do the maths , if say, 5 million Nigerians live outside Nigeria (and the Nigerian Guardian estimates this figure to be more like 17 million) even 50,000 outstanding Nigerians would make up only 1% of the Nigerian diaspora.
They probably mean Nigerians who, because of their ambitions to become middle class, contribute through working, owning businesses, buying nice things (consumerism), paying taxes, and perhaps the odd bit of mentoring as opposed to committing crimes, engaging in substance abuse, being unemployed and/or homeless and relying on state welfare. Even if these are markers of being a good immigrant, is there any evidence that the Nigerians who do this are in the majority as compared with all the Nigerians in the diaspora? And to put a slightly related question, even if the ‘bad’ Nigerians are in the minority, are they are in such a small minority that the deeds of the model Nigerian immigrants cancel out their impact on society?
Nigerians have a reputation of being hard-working and ambitious. Yet we hear overwhelmingly of Nigerians’ casual attitudes to integrity and dishonesty. What really is the truth?
And what of the people from whom these model immigrants are drawn – the vast majority of Nigerians back home? If their counter-parts in the diaspora are model immigrants, surely they should be model citizens. Not if you ask these snooty, middle-class diasporans. According to them, majority of Nigerians back home are a bunch of thieving, greedy, swindling, lazy, undisciplined lot and part of the reason the model immigrants left the country in the first place.
However an alternative narrative is that all a Nigerian needs to succeed and realise their true potential is to leave Nigeria. It’s the leaders that are bad! They are not Nigerian at all – they are from a planet called Planet Evil.
Nigeria is a difficult country and I am not denying that Nigerians are, by and large, used to working harder for the same or less gain. However, what the average middle class Nigerian is talking about when she calls Nigerians model immigrants are Nigerians from a relatively small and wealthy pool of people, who have sometimes imbibed the values of the very unfair society that Nigeria is, often with the means to pay for higher education, who are doing very well.
The fact that people like that are visible especially as black people in certain industries by no means prove that the rest of the Nigerian diaspora are model immigrants by even this standard. What middle class Nigerians (myself included!) are insulated from are the struggles of poorer Nigerians with less auspicious backgrounds, the things they have to do to survive, sometimes the crimes they commit and more than anything else they are shielded from the horrendous reputation that Nigerians as a whole have in many parts of the world.
3. Hella offensive: Before I go into what makes a good immigrant and how that fits into the right wing rhetoric, I have to say how offensive I find this statement to firstly to other African immigrants (and immigrants from other parts of the world in theory but I’m sure every region has that one country that fancies itself to produce ‘model immigrants’) and to black people, frequently non-Africans, who have paved the way for Nigerian immigrants and African Americans in particular.
Firsly, who says that Ghana, Kenya or Sierra Leone are producing less than their fair share of people contributing in terms of working, running businesses and paying taxes?
Kenyan man surprised and disappointed at his low ranking immigrant status. “I thought we had a shot.” he said mournfully
Why is the model immigrant assertion even an answer to the travel ban? Isn’t it a way of saying, ‘what of all these scummy other immigrants? why not shut them out? why us????’
Somali woman not at all surprised by her low ranking since she knows that us model immigrants have never forgiven her and her fellow Somalians from fleeing a civil war and coming to the West in numbers. Without their designer dregs.
Or is part of it that Nigerians are trying to communicate to the world how different they are to those lazy, unambitious African Americans or in the UK, Caribbeans?
If so, it is hella offensive, isn’t it? It also completely fails to acknowledge that Nigerians have been able to succeed because of the grounds laid for them by these people and the welcome hands that have been stretched out to Nigerians who are able to jump back and forth between utlising laws intended to uplift African Americans from the traumatising impacts of slavery and Jim Crow laws and claiming that they do not have the historic chip on their shoulders that African Americans carry and are therefore less problematic (not all Nigerians etc). Attitudes like this contribute to the backlash against Nigerians in certain African American communities.
It’s also offensive in a less dramatic way. People cannot help coming from poverty; from having to leave their country in circumstances here they have nothing; coming from a background where there are other virtues apart from education and succeeding financially in a ruthlessly capitalistic world. If Nigerians were naturally endowed with the hard work gene, I think it would have made itself evident in Nigeria as well. What Nigerians have in abundance is a disproportionate respect for wealth and status that pushes them into certain professions. A lot of their wealth and status in Nigeria is obtained at the expense of millions of other Nigerians. A cleaner, a shop assistance, hairdresser or a taxi driver is no less essential and no less ‘model’ than a bank manager or doctor .
4. Hella right wing rhetoric: So what makes a model immigrant and why do we care? I don’t believe the concept of immigration laws and border control is in itself wrong. However, immigration rhetoric, particularly those used in politics and in the media, is frequently flawed and bordering on fascist. The basis of a lot of it is that an immigrant is taking something from the real citizens or the natives. Therefore the reason why the topic of Nigerians being model immigrants in this context has even arisen is because of the belief that, every single immigrant is under a duty to show how they are personally giving back to their host countries.
In reality, inward migration brings with it new people to carry out jobs, form customer bases, pay taxes and open businesses. Even on a hard line capitalist assessment and discounting things like new cultures, attitudes and food, all of these create employment and refresh the economy. For example, if there were less people in the UK, housebuilders and retailers wouldn’t make as much money and various sectors wouldn’t have the skills they need.
Western governments know this which is why they have several programs encouraging immigration yet politicians and the media consistently tell us, in so many ways, that immigrants are harming their host countries simply by being there and some people have bought into the idea that the only way that immigrants can counterbalance this harm is by giving back in an extraordinary and noticeable way. In my view, justifying immigration of or opposing immigration controls on a particular group of people on the basis that they are good immigrants encourages, not only prejudice and division, but the kind of unjust generalisations that crudely lumps people into categories and values or persecutes them accordingly.
Basing this qualification solely in terms of being ‘intelligent’ (better educated because they had the means, however dodgily obtained, to escape an economical and education systems which are failing the majority of Nigerians), hard working and ambitious which loosely translates into the fact that there are more rich Nigerians is unbelievably exclusionary. It endorses an unequal system and doesn’t see the value in low paid jobs or people who are less able to perform traditional jobs and tasks, like disabled people.
By calling yourself or your group the good kind of immigrants, you are not dismantling an incredibly dishonest rhetoric that has added another layer of suffering and misery to immigrants struggling to cope even as they enable people from the host countries to be more prosperous. You are enabling and facilitating a cruel system
5. Hella pointless: And it’s pointless. The rage about immigration is not about good or bad immigrants, especially when it comes to people of colour (the only good immigrant is the white English speaking one, as the joke goes). They don’t care how good you are at your job and you can cure cancer from your own damn country. Your neighbourhood racist or xenophobic is not impressed by how many degrees you have. They resent you for it and want you to go away.
This is difficult to explain and even more difficult to accept but the sight of your African looking face, especially if combined with an African language. agitates these kinds of people. They have to take a breath, calm and rationalise with themselves when they come face to face with the internal disruption from seeing you and people like you round the school gates. They have been convinced, on some level, that immigrants are spoiling their country by default.
It’s depressing enough to have to convince them that immigration is generally beneficial (or that you are not, in fact, an immigrant but that is another blog post) but trying to distinguish yourselves from other groups of immigrants by telling them, don’t worry, we’re the good kind, the ‘model immigrants’ in fact? They’ll decide that for themselves, mate.
So that’s it in a ranty nutshell. I guess on a personal note, it is disappointing how quickly liberal Nigerians (and others ), without any apparent thought, revert to divisive right wing thinking as soon as they perceive any threat to their own interests.
But immigration is trauma. That may sound dramatic but it is very true in its own way
Immigration, it seems, is the new trauma, the new misery-art, featuring….Nigeria (lately). In the last couple of weeks I’ve watched Farmed, a harrowing tale of a Nigerian boy’s journey from relatively good-naturedly racist foster home to Nigeria back to foster home and then into the arms of the local skin-heads first as a pet then as a not quite fully fledged member (as he finds out) and The Last Tree, a less-but-still harrowing tale of a Nigerian boy’s journey from non-racist foster home to Inner City London to Nigeria.
Farmed
The context of both films is the practice of Nigerian parents of sending their children to foster homes while they continue their education, save money and/or look for jobs which will bring in enough money to take care of their families. Farmed, based on actor Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje’s experiences, takes place before parent-friendly education and work policies. In The Last Tree, I presume the mother just couldn’t afford to have a small child with her, regardless of any family friendly job opportunities which may have existed in the 1980s or 1990s when the film was set.
Actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Immigration stories have always been popular. I’ve recently re-read CNA’s Americanah, a tale of two immigrants and their separate traumas. In non-fiction or ‘real life’, we are not too far away from horror stories emanating from Theresa May’s hostile environment and Youtube clips of people telling us that they voted to leave the European Union to keep the Africans out. Both of these are, in my view, the result of decades of demonisation and criminalisation of immigrants combined with under-investment in public services, including immigration control, and a reliance on scaring the public out of their wits of a UK brimming with immigrants singularly focused on stealing their jobs and stripping their public services to the bone.
Former Prime Minister May – the ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants was formulated when she was Home Secretary
But immigration is trauma. That may sound dramatic but in its own way it is, even when that trauma is not anybody’s fault. Regardless of your race and colour, if you can see your parents whenever you want (in theory; they might be avoiding you) and grew up with your grandparents only a drive away in a house they have lived in for forty years and maybe even got a glimpse of your great-grandparents or just missed them because you were born 3 days too late, you will never completely understand the hopeful trauma that is immigration.
Immigration, in the time period in which Farmed was set, was entrusting your children to strangers while working hard to get them out of there as soon as possible. Yes, white was right but having experienced racism yourself, perhaps you knew that plonking black children in a world that was conditioned to believe that black was inferior and proximity to the West was always an improvement, might not be altogether a wholesome experience.
Immigration is being wrenched from the world you’ve always known to stressed-out parents who treat you like we all sometimes treat our kids – 15% treasure, 85% nuisance. It is relatives who expect you to suddenly understand their strange customs and parents who scream at you for embarrassing them by not greeting elders like you are supposed to. It is grandparents who are openly contemptuous because you don’t know to jump at their every command and you flinch at traditional customs and foods.
Immigration is not seeing your parents for decades and being unable to visit them when they are ill or even attend their funeral because of financial or immigration-related constraints. Immigration means being fearful, even when you are a citizen or have permanent leave to remain or whatever, of a journey that starts at border control on the way to your country of origin. A fear which has been justified by stories of British citizens of Caribbean origin being conned out of their status documentation and then barred from re-entry in the UK as a matter of government policy.
Immigration is 19-year old me attending a meeting with a head teacher because my 14-year old brother was acting up and my parents were not in this country. It is me carrying the guilt of my brother’s eventual criminality, breakdown and mental health issues because I didn’t know how to be selfless enough to be a proper parent to him.
Immigration may have a hand in why Priti Patel can’t just be a fascist in peace, she has to also be a ‘ third generation immigrant’ (as someone on Twitter put it – although she said she was a ‘daughter of immigrants’. Wouldn’t that make her a ‘second generation immigrant’ or, what’s the word for it again? Oh yes, British) It may be why British Asians have to loudly declare their love for Britain before being allowed to criticize anything about it. Or why Asian men still answer to names Bobby, Bob, Rob, Craig and Chuck, short for Aziz, Awra, Raja, Amar and Razik.
Immigration is me in 2017 trying to understand why my blind mother was being threatened with deportation by one department of the Home Office and sent her 1978 permanent leave to remain documents by another. Immigration is me dealing with this saga for 2 years and still feeling ashamed when I had to talk about it, even to my husband and mother in law.
For immigration is indeed about shame. Through a set of historical events and political and racial manipulation, Britain has drawn immigrants from all over the world, including the Commonwealth being the countries formerly colonised by Britain. In some of these countries, a lot of people are living in circumstances which most people would find intolerable, from wars and conflicts (contributed to by Britain’s meddling in some cases) to situations of such bleak economic outlook that there is very little hope of any meaningful future for them and their children.
The United Kingdom has a right to control her borders of course. But British people emigrate for far less (I don’t want to measure the weather). People who immigrate to the United Kingdom are doing what anyone else would do in their position. Allow them entry, let them stay or not but there is really no need to make them feel ashamed. So ashamed that some of the victims of the Windrush scandal were almost more nervous about publicising their newly uncertain immigration status than the precarious situation they had been placed in. Immigration is a practical, governance issue not a moral one.
The irony is that a lot of immigrants are still being invited here to fill in skills gap from the NHS to various skilled workers and migrants schemes. Farming Today recently reported that the agricultural industry needs 70,000 migrant workers to pick fruit which is rotting by the tonne in bushes, fields and trees. The current farm workers migrant worker scheme only allows for a fraction of the required numbers. In carefully managed ignorance of this kind of thing, a large number of the British public voted for Brexit.
Immigration is being relieved you are no longer in the ‘old country’ but feeling strangely defensive about any criticism of it, which pales in comparison to your previous criticisms but somehow seems hollow and dehumanising, lacking in context and complexity.
Immigration is the lack of logic in feeling ashamed of your accent and trying to change it as soon as possible. Your accent is a product of where you grew up. You grew up where you grew up. It is a fact and neither good nor bad. Even if you have no secrets about your life and a spanking new British passport and it is very obvious from your appearance that you are not the Queen’s cousin, eight times removed , you find yourself subconsciously hiding this part of yourself and your heritage from others.
Immigration is stumbling over the question ‘where are you from?’. If you never stumbled over that question, you do not know diluted joy of being an immigrant. Your mind races, in about three seconds, through a series of questions wondering what they are asking, what they really want to know and how you can reassure them, even you are not sure what you are supposed to be reassuring them of. You stumble through your well-rehearsed, but never well-delivered story, of how you were born in this country, went back to Nigeria because of whatever and came back whenever because of ‘instabilities’ until they kindly let you know that they were just asking what city you lived in.
Incidentally, I’m not sure what I think is going to happen if I don’t launch into a long explanation which ends in me firmly asserting my British citizenship. Do I think friends and acquaintances are going to ‘report me to immigration’? And so what if they do? I am a British citizen, aren’t I? The answer to that is that there is something negative about being from another country and living in the UK. You feel you have to explain why you are taking up their ___________
Immigration is coming to terms with all of the above only to relive the trauma when your children become of school age and you wonder whether it’s your kids that no one wants in their school because the more colour a school has the less likely it is to be ‘a good school apparently1‘ (I’m talking about regional England now not the liberal London Islington elite daring to express an opinion to the daughter of immigrants or whatever nonsense Priti Patel was spouting).
Immigration can of course be much worse. I’ve watched friends unable to work, having no future back in Nigeria and unsure of how much time to invest in the hope that they will become legal citizens. It can be living stripped of status, stateless in a hostile environment. It can be a state of being forced into criminality simply because there is no other way to survive. It can mean existing as an abused person, a slave or a victim of trafficking at the ‘mercy’ of hardened criminals simply because there is no where to go and no one to report anything to.
Immigration can be good trauma. Something that benefits in the future or knocks some sense into your head like finally catching your flaky boyfriend snogging another girl. But seriously, immigration frequently is positive beyond the opportunities available to you in their new country of residence and despite the questions and the negatives, the acceptance and politeness, especially in the UK.
Immigration can mean opening up to new cultures and new ways of life and ridding yourself of classism and other prejudices which was your way of life. For example, before the internet and its unreliable wokeness, many Nigerians were die-hard homophobes who had never met anyone who would admit to being gay and who have shed that prejudice as a result of their new country. Many of them lived in gated communities where they were taught not to think of working class or poor Nigerians as full humans like themselves and have found themselves, reluctantly or otherwise, interacting with Nigerians and people from all walks of life.
As in ‘The Last Tree’, many Nigerians grew up thinking that beating and physically punishing a child was the hallmark of good parenting, one that set them apart from these lax white people and useless ‘West Indians’, who let their children run riot, instead of the parental abuse which we now know that it is. That strategy has come home to roost, like the fabled chickens, as the news reports now feature violent West African young men who were probably brought up in that way. Not only ‘JAH-my-cans’ then. I found Femi’s mother’s behaviour appalling in those scenes , but also familiar, both from my childhood and as a parent and I am distressed by this.
One last word about the films. Femi and especially Enitan embodied the kind of surly, young, seemingly impenetrable older black teenage boy or young man that some people would cross the road to avoid, if only they could figure out how to do it in a way in which the person they are trying to avoid doesn’t notice. Faces that seem angry, invariably darker skinned, expressionless, hooded eyes, hoods (if worn) up, their walk a concentrated, forward-leaning, focused gait, their fists partly clenched. People are scared to look at them for too long or to get in their way in any other manner. They fear that once those boys get angry with you, no amount of reasoning would stop them from carrying out whatever course of action they think is justified. Dehumanising and reductive for starters and I dread to think how many black boys just walking around, thinking about their Tesco shop, are subjected to this kind of stereotyping. In the case of the films, the person doing the stereotyping would have been partially right, particularly in the case of Enitan.
What saves both boys and turns them into smiling, relatable human beings again is their association with Nigeria. In the first film, Enitan’s parents, now barristers in Nigeria, stump up the cash to send him to a special school which turns him from semi-illiterate skin-head to the holder of a masters degree in law and in the second, Femi’s trip back to Nigeria completes his healing.
What happens to the black boys for whom there is no deus ex machina from the motherland? But I digress. The one thing these films do well is show that immigration is a trauma. A necessary, unavoidable trauma, and not all bad, but it is something that, in your own small way, if you are immigrant, you are continually recovering from.
This essay contains parts of an essay which I have partially written called “The Windrush Scandal and A Very Big Problem Called Immigration” which I will hopefully complete and post some day.
1You can in theory spend your time looking for a good school or area before realising it is you, your child and others like is what some people think make a school or area ‘bad’.
Just to add to this, what *would* happen if a serious ‘socially conscious’ song was written about Nigerian politicians cavorting with runs girls? I think in light of what they are accused of including looting and mismanaging public funds, corruption and gross dereliction of duties, many people, including me, would question the need to address their private lives. This suggests to me the true importance of the runs girls/prostitution ‘epidemic’. People are quite content to turn a blind eye to it. The real reason for their outcry is that they are appalled that women would ‘debase’ themselves this way and that possibly a larger and larger group of women think that this is an acceptable pastime and way to make some cash.
They are worried that girls are getting ‘spoiled’ while boys will be boys, whether its younger men sowing their seeds or older men who pay girls for sex (or they just want to gleefully slut-shame).
I don’t think the runs is great ( although I can’t see how it’s any worse than casual sex, especially between strangers) or a complete solution to objectification of women especially in the era of so-called sexual liberation which men interpret as an aggressive right to casual sex (if you refuse, you are apparently trying to manipulate them into a relationship) or older, richer men feeling the need to check whether a young woman is available for sexual services before resuming the normal order of business.
However in Nigeria, casual sex often reduces the social capital of a woman. She’s called a prostitute or a slut anyway and too much promiscuity means that she is not a serious candidate for a serious relationship and a target for very aggressive overtures if not assault. In that case, it stands to reason she would want to gain something other than the sex. It’s not just ‘sex that we both enjoyed’ as men get away with their social capital unaffected while the woman has to sit there trying to find a way to reconfigure her body count….
Editor’s Note: Twitter outrage has become commonplace (while Facebook has become some form of family friendly place to air achievements, family portraits and unpopular opinions with relative safety). On the upside these ‘outrages’ have effected changes, as more and more people are using this platform as an avenue to hold governments to account and share histories that would have otherwise been lost in obscurity (particularly Black History).
Nigerian feminists have been using social media to educate Nigerians at large about social inequalities and highlight how cis-heterosexual men are at the top of the foodchain, how they use their privilege to keep women and sexual minorities oppressed.
The latest topic being discussed with a lot of passion is the rights of sex-workers/runs girls/side-chics (or the lack thereof). The trigger for this discussion is Falz, a Nigerian musician who embraces social consciousness, (wokeness) served with a side of misogyny.
Why do we spend so much time raging and plotting against mothers and daughters-in-law who we haven’t even met?
I wonder what I would do if I had one of those Nigerian mothers-in-law. You know, the ones who want their sons’ wives to kneel at every occasion of greeting, who think they have the right to scream at and even hit their daughters-in-law, who think their sons’ new wives are unpaid domestic help? How common are they anyway? Is this another narrative designed to portray Nigerian women as demons?
I’m hoping, at least, that the evil Nollywood mother-in-law is a caricature which has been exaggerated for entertainment (much like the evil Nollywood daughter-in-law who instead of saying “I don’t like the way that you are speaking to me”, snarls inexplicitly “If you mess with me again, I will kill you!”). One clip that recently1 made the rounds on Twitter is from a film featuring a younger Funke Akindele-Bello. Her character’s husband tastes a meal she has prepared, coughs dramatically and complains that it is too spicy.
“I’m sorry, honey. It was a mistake.” she says sadly, abandoning her comedy accent and emphasising first syllable of ‘mistake’, late nineties/early noughties Nollywood style (incidentally this was the second time I’d heard Akindele speak without her comedy accent. The first was at the 2016 AMVCA awards. Before then, I had, in a very patronising way, been congratulating Nollywood for promoting an actress with a strong regional accent contrary to their previous obsession with Western accents. Imagine my shock when she gave her thanks for the award and announced in a transatlantic accent “You guys rock!” The whole thing has gone full circle and posh young Nigerian entertainers, who were educated in foreign, elite and/or private institutions, are at pains to demonstrate with their accents how close they are to the average Nigerian. Ah…the joy of a completely unrelated rant!).
Anyway, back to the film. Seconds after Akindele delivered this line, her character’s freshly-faced mother-in-law burst forth from the kitchen, armed with a fully cooked alternative meal for her son and an arsenal of insults and aspersions about the wife’s upbringing.
What would I do in that kind of marriage? I doubt I would do the right thing which is either to get a divorce or politely refuse to respond to such treatment, enduring whatever physical or verbal abuse may come my way as a result. I think I’d either become a slave or a psycho. Either way, there’s a high chance it would end with murder and mayhem, after a few long years as slave-Tracy and very quickly as psycho-Tracy or maybe at the funeral of said mother-in-law when someone comments that I don’t look sad enough.
I think with the state and society sanctioned inferior status of women in Nigeria, it’s easy to think of reasons why a mother-in-law would wield her power over her son’s wife. It’s possible that, having had to put up with similar treatment as a daughter-in-law herself, she feels it is only fair to flex her muscles when someone is stupid enough to marry her son. Her time has come, as we used to say, but the serious point is that it is very common for an oppressed person to seek to emulate their oppressor when dealing with someone on an even lower rung than them.
Also, quite a lot of Nigerian women seem to find disrespect from their “fellow woman” very difficult to bear. Add to this a very strong culture of respect for elders and a lack of tolerance for disrespect, or even disagreement, from a younger person and the fact that a young person is supposed to treat their parents, their friend’s parents and therefore their spouse’s parent with the utmost respect, and one can easily see the potential for some serious abuse of power.
I’m not saying all Nigerian mothers-in-law behave badly towards their daughters-in-law but judging by some of the stories even positive behaviour can be benevolent rather than good. The stereotype goes something like this: the daughter-in-law is only rewarded if she is the epitome of respect and subservience and a potential source of unpaid labour at all times. She must always be delighted to see her mother in law. She must never forget to call her ‘mummy’. She is expected to anticipate that her mother-in-law can act irrationally at any time. She herself is never granted any leniency to have a bad day. She must communicate any complaint she has through her husband.
If, and this is a big if, any of this is true in a substantial number of marriages, I marvel at the things I get away with with my own mother-in-law. I also get very suspicious when a Nigerian woman starts praising her daughter-in-law (I’m mad, I know). What has she had to endure to merit such praise, I wonder? I’d almost be more comfortable if she said ‘Gosh, I love my daughter-in-law but she really can be a bitch sometimes’, I feel like at least that the daughter has been allowed to be human.
Now I’m a hundred percent sure that many Nigerian mothers-in-law are kind, gracious, respectful and loving and don’t only respond to extreme subservience. But if you are an African woman reading this, imagine this scenario. Your daughter-in-law has just had your new grandchild, is wretched with sleepless nights because of a colicky, constantly-feeding baby, raw bleeding nipples and the fact that she can feel her tummy dragging her C-section stitches every time she tries to get comfortable in bed. Now let’s say she responds with a bad-tempered ‘Not right now, mum!’ or ‘Can it!’ when you ask her ‘won’t you do your hair?’ (I’m not judging; stupid questions happen to all of us). Would you be more concerned that she is so overwhelmed by the experience that she has acted out of character or the massive disrespect that has come your way (apart from worrying, quite naturally, that this will become accepted behaviour on her part)?
In The UK
It’s easy to point to reasons why there’s this dysfunction in mother/daughter-in-law relationships in Nigeria but it also exists in the UK and presumably the rest of West. One reason is, despite my use of the word hangover, the misogynistic reasons that may apply in Nigeria were firmly entrenched in Britain not so long ago. Of course, a substantial part of Britain’s diverse population is made out of 1st and 2nd generation Africans (and Asians) and some of the more traditional attitudes regarding marriage and this particular relationship persist. But is the modern-day division just (or even) the result of misogyny or are there other psychological factors at play?
All I can say about my own mother-in-law, apart from the fact I love her dearly, is that she’s extremely generous, liberal and tolerant. I try to be courteous and loving but am allowed to have bad moments and days. Having said that, the relationship is not without its difficulties in communication. We’ve had different upbringing and life experiences that have made me more protective of the children than perhaps she would like. I’ve been told by other women that they found their relationship with their mother-in-law to be tricky. One day my mother-in-law surprised me by telling me she hated her own mother-in-law!
Complaints on Mumsnet (or Netmums) and blogs are more subtle than Nigerian examples – they are complaints of manipulation, power struggles especially regarding the kids, implicit undermining and of course criticism about how mum keeps the house and raises the children. Issues that have come up include whether mum should stay at home or work (subtle, very subtle “Oh I don’t blame you for not having time to do so and so. You career women are so busy. In my day, I just led a simple life and took care of my family. Simple old me!” and other declarations of war) or whether babies should be breastfed and for how long.
I read an article in which the author expressed her lack of comprehension at her own need to explain to her mother-in-law in explicit terms exactly why she disagreed with suggestions by the latter. I can relate. If a friend makes a suggestion that I don’t like, I can fob it off with an excuse without expressly disagreeing (while secretly thinking that she’s lost the plot). If my mother-in-law makes one, it seems absolutely compulsory to tell her expressly that I don’t agree and give a reason (or 300) why. Very odd. Perhaps I feel that if I don’t say something now, whatever she has suggested will become the absolute rule. An almost opposite problem is friends tell me that while you can tell your own mother to go away, you can’t do that with someone else’s, even your partner.
Modern Living
There are clearly other reasons here that have nothing to do with sexism. A lot of people point out that while you choose your partner, neither you or your mother-in-law (who I will call ‘MIL’ for the rest of the article) chose to be in each other’s lives. The portrayal in pop culture of mother and daughters-in-law at war may mean that there is among polite people, a determined effort to make the relationship work (not all English people. A work colleague told us that her mother-in-law tried to punch her at her wedding. I never got the full story but there was something about her playing the guitar and singing at her own wedding that appeared to tip MIL over the edge. What kind of resentment must have been building up in MIL for that to happen? And why wait until the wedding?). You have to act as if you are in love with each other from the day you meet and it can be a shocking realisation when the mask occasionally slips.
Another reason may be a tension between MIL’s and mum’s needs. In modern UK, mum is often juggling work and a number of hobbies or sidelines she may have as well trying to live up to high standards of motherhood in a society where people are very sensitive to criticism. What she may want (or thinks she wants) is support from MIL on her terms. MIL may be retired and may have less mandatory obligations. Yes, she wants to help but she also wants to feel that she matters. She wants a stake in her grand children’s upbringing (which may be interpreted by daughter as wanting to re-live her glory matriarchal days; children can of course bring out wide cracks in the pretend love affair that MIL and mum have been engaging in since husband introduced the woman he was going to marry) but she also wants a relationship with the family. Often times, what is seen as criticism is a desire to contribute more than anything else.
Gender Issues
However, I do think there are some gender issues (of course I do!). Someone on Netmums thought the difficulty that a poster had with her mother-in-law stemmed from the fact that her son defers to his wife in a way that he hasn’t done to his mother since reaching adolescence. This seems like a fairly plausible theory. But if this is the case, why doesn’t it happen more often with fathers and sons-in-law? That would make sense because people push around the theory that sons are more attached to their mothers and fathers to their daughters (snotty as I am about such gender-based generalisations, I must confess that when my daughter started talking she referred to my husband as ‘Daddy’ and to me as ‘Daddy Tracy’). Why aren’t fathers-in-law upset that their daughters now defer to their husbands? Is it because men are more likely to defer to women (and sneakily pass on all the labour) when it comes to household and baby matters, than the other way round? Or is there some discomfort, linked to the stereotype of the conniving, shrill, emasculating wife (every mother’s nightmare apparently ), that makes MIL uncomfortable about seeing her son ‘defer’ to his wife?
Digging deep, I also think there’s something in the re-living of the matriarchal days. This is probably dying out to some extent as people born in the 1970’s and later are becoming grandmothers, but it almost goes without saying that some of today’s mothers-in-law lived in different times. Their role was firmly centred around the family and the house and it created a definite sense of identity for women. Modern women want an identity outside the home but at the same time desperately don’t want to miss out on the ideals of motherhood even though in reality, we may be overwhelmed by work and our unfair share of domestic labour. MIL may, seeing us, miss the sense of identity that came with being the grand matriarch.I’m convinced that the above sometimes pits mothers-in-law and daughters against each other.
Bizarrely the resentment seems to start even before they meet. How many hours did my friends and I spend as young girls trying to figure out our reaction to terrible things that our mythical evil mothers-in-law would do to us? Oddly enough, being a mum, to a 6 year old son, I feel quite stressed out when I see the same thing on Twitter. Threads are written about how mothers should take responsibility (including and up to being imprisoned) for their sons’ bad behaviour and how it is the mother’s fault if the son is domestically useless. They may be right but why isn’t any blame being laid at the dad-in law’s feet? The risk is that these women, while being fully prepared to go to war with their partner’s mothers, will be kind and over-indulgent to their future father-in-law and so the circle of men avoiding responsibility begins again. Men are allowed to opt out of this seemingly petty conflict.
Stereotyping doesn’t help either, like the evil mother in law cliché (this is thankfully dying out too), as it also demonises and ridicules older women, who having exhausted their ‘sexual and beauty capital’ have nothing to offer society except for comedy fodder because of their apparently weird and irrational ways.
I hate that this division exists. I hate that I am more likely to challenge my mother-in-law than male relatives when they are being patronising to her. I must work on that. I’m not entirely sure that passing any difficulty through your husband helps. Not only does he sometimes definitely fail to communicate accurately and effectively; why do we have to participate in this childishness which seems a bit like the adult equivalent of passing notes in class? Why shouldn’t mothers and daughters-in-law be able to speak freely and respectfully to each other? It all adds to the pitting and dividing of mother against daughter-in-law, woman against woman.
As a single girl, if a man couldn’t show me his two penises, he was going to have to explain to me in words of two syllables or less why he needed two women. It was as simple as that – not about female solidarity or empowerment.
Beauty Privilege
I’m always tempted to dismiss pretentious-sounding phrases that I see on social media and don’t quite understand like ‘beauty privilege’ and ‘sexual capital’. However, attempting to write dismissive articles about said phrases has forced me to consider if I’m being 100% honest with myself.
Take beauty politics for instance; it’s okay to like being attractive. It’s equally okay not to care about being attractive. The value placed on women being attractive is ridiculous. It’s unfair and quite frankly, in some cases, plain racist that some groups of people are considered, by default, to be more attractive than others (God gave each race different physical virtues and humans, in their perversity, relegated those virtues to a league table). But if as feminists, we don’t care if we are considered attractive and fight for opportunities not to be dependent on our physical appearances, then beauty politics loses its power over us. Right? Wrong (apparently).
Why? Beauty privilege. Society doesn’t just label us attractive or not and leave us to nurse our smug/hurt feelings in peace. It rewards and punishes us accordingly. One big way is in the area of employment and therefore money. From people who want to pursue careers in show business to opportunities within more mundane career paths – attractive people and especially attractive women seemingly win.
I say seemingly win because they are made to pay a price for that victory. There is definitely some resentment and hostility towards attractive women as men and society in general exert themselves in the vital task of ensuring that pretty women don’t get too big for their boots and remain humble. As demonstrated by the Weinstein débâcle, sexually harassed attractive women seem to receive less sympathy from certain elements of society.
Another example is in the area of romantic love, partnership and marriage. Marriage is not an achievement in that lack of marriage is not a failure to achieve or be a complete woman. However, many people eventually hope to find that one person they can partner up with in life (and building a relationship can seem like hard work!). Women especially are simultaneously rejected for not being attractive enough to boost a man’s status or if they are attractive are made to prove that they have a brain (what living mammal doesn’t have a br..never mind) and are generally regarded with high suspicion.
Beauty privilege and, to some extent, sexual capital (not this nonsense about how ‘sex is power’ and how great it is to have a man brought to his knees by your sheer sexual force which is just regressive and a false victory) means that failing to be attractive, which you may not have a lot of control over, can have some influence over getting the basics in life.
Black women moan about white women’s beauty privilege causing me (along with our constant bothering of anyone who dares to write anything critical about Beyoncé) to despair a little. I would love for us to concentrate on what, to my mind, are the real issues and I hate the fact that we look so damn needy for validation. However, I can’t say that I don’t see their point. A white friend of mine eschews beauty politics. If you tell her that her young daughter is beautiful, she will give you a blank stare. If you try to talk to her about losing weight after a pregnancy, you will get the same reaction. She once blasted me on Facebook (the shame!) for praising Kim Kardashian for her post-pregnancy figure (North not Saint).
That is her absolute right and I would give anything to reach her level of nonchalance about beauty. The luxury of not despairing for at least 15 minutes ( to 15 hours) a day because I can’t shift that stone! However as a white woman in the UK, she already has a certain amount of beauty privilege that she is perhaps oblivious to. People see her as default femininity and whether she accepts it or not she gets whatever privilege (and disadvantages) that derive from that. In light of that, I’m a little kinder to my sisters who get hung up on beauty politics. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly), sex and beauty sells and not only has someone decided women have to be the ones to predominantly sell it; they’ve decided that a sizeable majority of black women can’t even have access to whatever financial or other advantages flow from this flawed system.
Feminism and Capitalism
Speaking of beauty and money, when people say we have to dismantle capitalism in order for feminism to be established what the *&^% are they on about? This came up in this segment (https://twitter.com/AJUpFront/status/923231917406687232) of an Al-Jazeera interview where Meghan Murphy and Jamia Wilson were asked whether they think Beyonce is a feminist icon.
Having read a lot of Murphy’s work, I starting feeling tense even before she opened her mouth as she had the twitchy, unsmiling demeanour of someone who was getting ready to announce that Beyonce’s brand of feminism was pure BS. However, she surprised me when she simply said, to summarise, that Beyonce’s feminism was suspect because it was entrenched in capitalism and that it was not possible to be a feminist and a capitalist at the same time. Wilson, a self-confessed Beyoncé fan, responded that she agrees with the need to dismantle capitalism.
If I actually stop to think about it, I can understand how capitalism props up sexism, in particular, and a lot of other inequalities. There’s money to be made in pressurising women to obsess about beauty, youth and sex appeal, getting people to think that men and women are so radically different that we need books, seminars and retreats to decipher each other, teaching women how to keep your man or on the darker side, the sex industry which is based on the idea that women can be bought, sold and consumed. In fact, if the choice, beauty obsessed, sex positive type of feminism is not an invention of capitalism, it definitely is a gold mine for consumerism as aspiring to look like your favourite pop/film/instagram star is now not only girly idolising but also apparently empowering. In parts of the world where capitalism results in abject poverty, it’s often the women who are the most vulnerable to the worst of the suffering.
So, I’m not confused when people link inequality to capitalism; I’m confused because despite this apparent need to ‘dismantle capitalism’ I can’t see any effort, which is sufficient to make the slightest dent in capitalism anywhere in the Western world (or does dismantle not mean what I think it does?) to do so. Sure, people like me would rather a more socialist form of capitalism but I haven’t really noticed people doing anything other than talking about how bad it is and attending the odd rally. Neither Murphy or Wilson looked entirely untouched by capitalism in that interview; if I may make a judgment based on their physical appearance.
Take me for example; I don’t consider myself to be a leader in the capitalist system. I don’t own my own business or any shares. I merrily collect a salary and continue to consume. Now that I have kids, the endless consumption doesn’t even seem that pleasurable. I may remember to question the ethical origins of the thing I’m consuming but that doesn’t happen very often. I don’t work as hard as some (take Kevin Hart for instance whose aggressively capitalised and comprehensive Twitter bio states “My name is Kevin Hart and I WORK HARD!!! That pretty much sums me up!!! Everybody Wants To Be Famous But Nobody Wants To Do The Work”) but I think I’m making a small contribution to society, through my employment.
I know lots of feminists. I haven’t seen any evidence that they are fighting capitalism in any kind of organised way that has any chance of succeeding. The most I can say is that some of them oppose (or mildly disapprove of) the worst excesses of capitalism. I don’t even really know of any truly non-capitalist country that has been a success story. I’ve always thought feminism is a doctrine that should be promoted in any context but perhaps naivete like mine has bred the kind of thinking that says the obtaining of money and power by a woman is in itself a feminist act, even if that money and power was obtained by sexist and patriarchal means. That would make the female owner of a brothel a feminist because she has found a way of making lots of money.
Watch this space. I’ve already started gathering intel on the issue.
Feminism and the Other Woman
One of the most fantastically stupid threads by a feminist I saw was in response to a nutter threatening to display a woman’s naked pictures on Twitter because the woman allegedly sent them to her husband. There is a significant risk that the first woman was unhinged as the second woman denied everything. The first woman’s account was eventually reported and shut down by Twitter and that was that. Storm in a tea-cup.
The thread contained such a perfect mixture of stupidity, feminist-speak and truth that as I stared at it blankly and blinking, the only response I could muster was not to press the like button. Imagine that. A few weeks later I’ve figured out what my response should have been and I live for the day when she retweets the thread.
Firstly, the thread. It regarded the situation – which would have been trying to instigate a sexual relationship with a married man by sending him naked photographs if the whole thing hadn’t been a figment of Woman 1’s over-fertile imagination – as an example of how married women expect society in general to take responsibility for and protect their marriages and labelled that expectation as entitlement. Basically expecting people not to try and sleep with your husband is patriarchal entitlement.
I did agree with the part that said the solution was to address your husband and not to attack the ‘other woman’ but apart from this the message in the thread is cobblers. It was a disgrace even to the flakiest choice feminist and essentially shores up the false idea that feminism means doing anything you want and the consequences are always someone else’s fault. It doesn’t fight patriarchy; it plays into the idea that women are illogical creatures incapable of taking responsibility for their actions.
It is not unreasonable for women to expect people to respect their relationships or marriages by not pursuing relationships with their other halves. The line comes when, if an affair happens, they go after the other women instead of addressing their husbands or partners, often under the guise that men can’t help themselves.
It is disrespectful to pursue a relationship with a ‘taken’ man but ultimately it is the man’s responsibility to reject the offer. I could imagine having a word (even jokingly) with both of them or finding another way to assert my presence if someone was openly flirting with my husband at a party but I would never take her aside and warn her not to mess with my man. That’s my husband’s job.
Sadly it is probably more common for married men to do the chasing. The narrative that has single women ‘stealing’ husbands, when not only do husbands allow themselves to be ‘stolen’ they are often the ones offering themselves up and attempting to break down the resistance of single women, is dishonest.
Another underlying issue is the divide between married and single woman in some cultures and societies. In these societies, the former automatically receive a higher status while the reaction to the latter ranges from pity to suspicion. Whether or not a woman wants to be single, there is pressure on her to feel like a failure when in reality finding a life partner is often just a matter of luck, especially with the high expectations that come with romantic relationships in terms of compatibility, overwhelming love, endless spells of uninterrupted happiness and fabulous social media photographs and updates.
In that situation, which can lead to bizarre behaviour like avoiding single friends once you get married, isn’t it incredibly naïve to expect loyalty from that single woman in the name of some contrived feminine solidarity which you yourself have failed to show to her? Wouldn’t, in fact, a more natural survivalist response of a single woman striving to meet society’s expectations be either to try and aspire to your marital status, by obtaining any man she can, including your husband (we’re still in the alternate universe where men are powerless in the face of even the slightest sexual advance) or the level the playing field by doing all she can to interfere in your relationship?
I think this is the frustration the author of the thread was projecting, rather than, as she implied, saving feminists from marriage which she described as the last tool in toolbox of oppression against women. Or perhaps she was angrily married and in love and frustrated that she was denied the opportunity to fight the good fight within what she thinks is the appropriate relationship status. I joke but I often torture myself with similar thoughts. Am I only a continuing to be a feminist because I’m happily married and ‘safe’? If, at 42, I wasn’t married, would I abandon all feminist ideals in my hunt to the death for someone who was willing to marry me?
Having said the above, if you are too evolved to accept that it’s immoral to sleep with a married man, then please understand that it is one of the least feminist things you can do. However woke your tweets are or sexually graphic your blog is, you are still operating on the basis that a man deserves the attention of two women – a modern day version of polygamy which includes dragging one man between two women and often fighting, resenting and hating the other woman simply because of a gutless codpiece that can’t make up his mind. And guess who is the beneficiary of all this moral mind-bending? Yup! You guessed it! The man again….
As a single girl, if a man couldn’t show me his two penises, he was going to have to explain to me in words of two syllables or less why he needed two women. It was as simple as that – not about female solidarity or empowerment. I was just too much of an angry, mouthy bitch to endure a man whining about how even though he was in a relationship with someone “he was weelly weelly unhappy because she didn’t understand him or tweat him wight”. In the interest of full and fair disclosure, it’s not like many married men approached me when I was single.
In part 2 of ‘Weird Feminism’: Tracy Treads Trepidatiously Into The Terrifying And Treacherous Terrain Between Terfs And Trans (If she dares. ONLY IF SHE DARES…..!). Before that, some comic relief (still on about feminism though) in ‘Simi vs Third Wave Feminism’.
…..like others before me, I would ask a question about fake tanning and then spend the next few moments concentrating on nodding vigorously to convey great understanding, instead of listening to the answer
I don’t understand why fair-skinned (white) people ask me about tanning, sun protection, sunblock, sunstroke, sunscreen etc. I know, I know, black people, even ones as dark as me, can get sunburned or sunstroke. I got burned myself once, long before I knew what sunscreen was. Nevertheless I’m frequently confused and uncomfortable during the questioning.
I’ll give you an example. My husband got sunburned on very recent holiday. How? He went swimming without a T-shirt (he’s very fair). While taking off his clothes in preparation for bed, he asked “What do you think?”. I confess, if he had been speaking, I wasn’t listening and I certainly hadn’t been watching him undress (the very thought!). “What do I think about what?”, I replied absent-mindedly, not turning from what I was doing.
“I think I’ve been burned” I looked at him and his torso was so red I thought he’d suddenly gotten very angry (but not in his face). “What’s that???” I yelped. “Ask your mum! She’ll know what to do! Should I call her now? Alison!…(we were vacationing with my mother in law)” “Nah. Don’t do that. She’ll get worried.” “What even happened?” “I forgot my t-shirt, didn’t I?” (“Yee-es?..” we heard Alison call faintly from the other room -we didn’t but it would have been so cool in a farcical type of way, no?) “Weren’t you wearing sunscreen?” “No”.
It’s usually at moments like this that I want to opt out of the sun conversation. Firstly, I’m scared of giving the wrong advice. I don’t know what to say! I don’t want to tell someone not to worry and have them wake up the next morning looking like bubble wrap or vomiting, fainting on the Tube or bowling over while singing in the church choir (all real examples) hours or even days after their encounter with the sun.
Also, I want to (or don’t want to, as it happens) ask, well, why didn’t you put sunscreen on? You are at risk of ending up with biblical scale blisters, your brain boiling away in your skull, raw peeling skin and utter misery and you couldn’t spare 3.4 minutes to apply sunscreen. You wouldn’t show me your arm, scraped to the bone, and say “Dude….if only I’d remembered to shut the door before the car starting moving…this really hurts”.
Bizarrely, when I was still studying, I heard of someone who was badly sunburned. He hadn’t used sunscreen of course but had taken the time to slather baby oil all over his body before hitting the beach which made the burns worse…. Stories like this make me afraid that when confronted by a sunburn victim, the first thing that will flow out of my mouth is a series of judgmental questions.
However, by far my worst fear is that the only real thing I feel like saying will emerge which is “I don’t know! I don’t know! Go and ask your fellow white (fair-skinned?) people!!” I frequently felt like this when I lived in a house share with a girl I’ll call ‘Emily’ (‘Emily’ and I fell out eventually but not over sun issues).
Emily was very fair. From time to time, she used to ask my opinion on her adventures with fake tanning lotions. I was not of course the only woman in the house. There were 2 other women. I was the only black woman. I may be off here but I think her logic in asking me was flawed.
Firstly, as far as I can remember, she never managed to achieve anything that I would call a tan. This may be a problem of perception for me. If I looked closely, I noticed some additional colour on her elbows and knees but I had to look for quite a long time. Having peered at her for an uncomfortably long period (I should have just lied once she started talking about tanning but again I was probably scared of telling the wrong lie as I really did not know what I was talking about), I felt I had to say something. That something had to be somewhere between my true opinion (too cruel) and what I thought she was expecting to hear (lacking in believability). I could never quite grasp the words I was looking for so ended up saying things like “Errrrr….well! You’ve clearly been done something there!” or the very daft “Did you do it for a long time?”
After a few back and forths, Emily would usually say something like “Don’t worry it will come out in a few days”, leaving me with questions. The first one, of course, is why ask me today then? The second – what do you mean it will ‘come out’ in a few days? Did you apply it to your skin or to your internal organs for it to slowly emerge during the course of a ‘few days’? I realised after a few of these Q&A sessions that fake tan is not like foundation. If it was, it would probably wash off. I still didn’t understand how it works though. Does it stain the skin? WHY DOESN’T IT SHOW ITSELF IMMEDIATELY? I suppose I could google it now if I wanted to.
Another housemate – we’ll call her ‘Kerry’ – once applied her fake tan too liberally in preparation for a sunny holiday. I wondered briefly why the real sun wasn’t good enough. I suppose even I could understand that she wanted to look tanned and sexy on arrival (she was quite sexy anyway) but she also told me that applying the fake tan would somehow enhance and speed up the tanning process for reasons which eluded me even as she was speaking. This may be partly because I was so scared of appearing ignorant that, like others before me, I would ask a question about fake tanning and then spend the next few moments concentrating on nodding vigorously to convey great understanding, instead of listening to the answer
Kerry already looked very tan on her way out. When she returned, a combination of the sun and her fake tanning cream had turned her luminously orange (how?) and apologetic. “Sorry” she said to no question (or perhaps to her mind, unasked questions) “I overdid it before the holidays. It will fade soon” ????????
I don’t understand why fair-skinned (white) people ask me about tanning, sun protection, sunblock, sunstroke, sunscreen etc. I know, I know, black people, even ones as dark as me, can get sunburned or sunstroke. I got burned myself once, long before I knew what sunscreen was. Nevertheless I’m frequently confused and uncomfortable during the questioning.
World Views and Current News 