Sunday, 14th August 2005
Blogging, Britain, a lack of the marvelousness and extra happiness
I’m still going through an anti-computer phase, so this is an apology to all those that I owe an email to (there are a lot of you), as well as a forced out blog about blogging, Britishness and other things.
When I received this domain name, back in 2000, I thought of it as a great way to keep in touch with people that I had left behind in the UK. I thought that all those people that had repeatedly said, “hey, don’t loose touch, let me know what you are doing” would actually then have their wishes fulfilled. Fact of the matter is that they never became readers and those that did were either Okayplayers or completely unconnected strangers. What I swiftly understood was that it didn’t matter who was reading, it mattered only that I wrote. (And I use that term loosely since most of what is on here is not writing.)
What fuelled me, I think, was both the fact that I was coming from a Women’s Studies perspective, which instilled in me the importance of chronicling minority voices, and that I was, essentially, on holiday. I may have worked the entire 5 and a half years I lived in the States, but when it came down to it, I was somewhere else, foreign, other. In France, of course, I was neither at work nor in my own country and it was double grand.
So I’m back in this country that belongs to me, but not I it. I’m back amidst people that are so dead to difference that I know the moment I let honesty out of my mouth is the moment I invoke mistrust, fear, disgust, or at best nervousness, from those around me. I’m back at the same place I was before I left, which is a general feeling of lack of respect, support and love for the person that I am, because the person that I am is nothing like everyone else and whilst that part is true for everyone, the part where I fail myself in a British context, is that I refuse to fence myself in to fake like I am.
Recently I was talking with a friend of BFB - he’s from Compton but has been living here since the mid-90’s. I said how even when I wanted to leave the States, I preferred there to here and remained there when I felt that my choices were limited to the US or the UK. I never wanted to come back here at all. I explained that here my sense of alienation is forced upon me but there it was a freedom I gave myself for the simple fact that I did not belong and did not have to. Even though he here is I there, he understood me and agreed that this is a stifling country. That in the States there is more freedom and opportunity to be yourself. Maybe it’s the simple fact that there is more space to go off and be yourself in, but for whatever reason, it’s true.
You know, maybe that is it - the space. Here Middle England is all around you and most, if not identifying with them politically, identify with them emotionally - they are all homogeneous. At least in the States you can get away from them in a personal sense, you don’t actually have to interact with Middle America in a day to day way. But here, on this overcrowded little island, they are slicked on my skin by the brains and hearts of people who don’t even realise how conservative they really are.
One of the things that drives me nuts about the British is how they point to America as being the epitome of racial disharmony. For instance, they talk of racial profiling as if it is some new phenomenon since the recent London bombings and not something people of colour had to endure before. It was an American problem before now, if indeed most of them are willing to accept it is happening now. Or say how, regarding the recent racially motivated murder of Anthony Walker in Liverpool, all the white residents in that neighbourhood talk of their shock, of how much of a melting pot it is there, but all the black residents talked of their frequent encounters with racism. But you can’t tell them, those white folks, because they’re not racist, so the racists must be few and far between, yet what they fail to grasp is that by failing to listen to the voices of people of colour, they are committing a racist act. Or, (because I’ve started so why stop?), how those three white policemen caught on camera kicking the shit out of a black man failed to get prosecuted for lack of evidence. And there is no institutionalised racism here? Get a fucking grip.
Everything is so sanitised and approved of here. It’s been cleansed, toned and moisturised so as not to offend. But you know what, it offends me! It offends me because it is so lifeless. Life stinks, has mud in it, on it, under it, holes in the elbows and knees, unbrushed hair and a wild look in it’s eye. Life doesn’t conform because it is untameable and the moment you pin it down and make lines around it’s edges is the moment you kill it and cut it off from the source. And that’s England for you - cut off from the source but with neat edges and a subtle perfume, but underneath the veneer is centuries worth of rot and all it takes is a moment’s pause and one simple question to see it for what it is.
But that was all a digression; I am trying to tell you why I don’t have anything to say and it’s not because British people are so boringly reserved and homogenised and that projectionism is so rife here, it’s because I am not on holiday anymore. Those seven years of being a tourist are over and I am back to this rigid normality.
In reality, my life isn’t a whole heap different from when I was in the States - just less live music, less stress and much, much less sunshine. I haven’t lost any of my curiosity and I am happier now than I have been in years, but what I have lost is my sense of the remarkable. I want to stress again, because this is a moany update, that I really am fantastically happy. I feel stronger, wiser, more beautiful, more brilliant and more certain than I ever have before. I have a sense of complete rightness in where I am, what I am doing and working towards and that is something that I have never had before. Yet what I no longer have, and desperately miss, is a sense of the unusual, the remarkable, the abnormal. I can see only commonplace people living commonplace lives and there is nothing to report in that. I can feel myself craving some strange, dramatic, (but non-destructive), creature to enter my life so as we can tilt the world together. Shake it up a bit, laugh and poke fun at the frigid British and their intact psychological hymens and plan an after school escape route to some other place where we can be foreigners and revel in the curiousness of doing such simple things in such strange ways…
epistemological dribbled:
Wonderful entry Tanky.
Hakeem dribbled:
oh i liked this one kunty.
Junior dribbled:
Ditto!!!
Mo dribbled:
I have neat things to send you. It’s just a matter of actually getting to the post office when it’s actually open.