Diaspora
My brother and I, in the traditional outfit of our tribe.
“Wait, what’s Horrid Henry?”
Second generation immigrants and the struggle to belong
Watch any teen movie or coming of age story. The central conflict of every teenager is the displacement within oneself and with others, the struggle to belong. As a teenager having moved from Nigeria to the United Kingdom last year, I dealt with all the regular angst in addition to something new – attempting to connect two wholly contrasting lives and places together.
Now, before I get into too much detail, you might be wondering what my headline Diaspora means. According to the dictionary definition, it means the spread of people from their homeland. Personally, it has always meant attempting to create my home, perhaps in a foreign land far from my roots.
I had thought coming from a middle-class background would help me. I was not the starving African child smiling wide for a foreigner’s camera that I assumed everyone expected me to be.
My accent was not the heavily lilted native one that they could perk their eyebrows at and repeatedly question, ‘what did you say?’
That was indeed, the fate of my parents and aunts and uncles.
- They practised their so-called ‘white people voice‘ on the phone and in grocery stores, holding every word for ransom, stretching it out carefully as if to dry on a clothing line.
- “Which way is it to Wilko please?”
This is a phenomenon so common among people of colour that it has a name, ‘code switching’. Sitting at her dimly lit dinner table, my aunt had told us how it felt to struggle to discern various British accents, missing out on culturally western jokes when the interlocutor would just shake their head dismally at a plea to repeat and respond with “never mind”.
“They don’t know that I find it just as hard to understand them as they do me!” she had said, laughing.
“But I’m different”
But this I reasoned wasn’t my fate. I had grown up with the privilege of the internet and television. My parents had ensured I learnt English, good English. Good enough, so I could go to England and have the guilty pleasure of telling someone who ‘owned English’ and never had to prove that it was theirs, the difference between ‘your and you’re’, ‘infer and imply’.
I learned the difference between a 96 to Bluewater and a 96 to Woolwich, the hard way.
I learned how to use a self-checkout, the joy of public libraries, what ‘form time’ was and how Lidl had the best deals, with Waitrose dedicated to the ‘boujee’. Settling in was fine.
“Nigerian enough?”
For people in Diaspora, things are far from easy.
Leaving behind everyone and everything that you know, for somewhere that is unfamiliar is strange and isolating. You are not allowed to miss home lest you be told, “why don’t you just go back then?” Your only option is to settle. I met other Nigerians who had moved here and we told each other jokes that we had seen online. Jokes about our stereotypically crazy strict African parents, the corrupt government and how weird Nollywood movies are. We did the accents with each other, we shook our heads at the lack of spicy food, and the different music, at the way people acted. It was a club of outsiders, because the truth was, we were all disconnected from Nigeria. None of us could speak our language.
Schools across the country usually offer modern foreign languages such Latin, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German but not a single African language. None of us knew much about African history or politics. I wonder if any of the others went home like I did and asked themselves if they were Nigerian enough – or the caricature of what a Nigerian is supposed to be.
“Mind the gap between the train and the platform…“
But I thought that maybe it was worth it that I was a little less African to fit in. I changed the expressions I used because I felt the need to prove that I was educated, that I deserved to be there as much as the next person. I got used to being different versions of myself, and got good at it. I was proud of myself for fitting in and could almost forget where I was from.
On days when I had gotten used to hearing:
- “Mind the gap” and “you will shortly be arriving at… “
When I would leave my regular seat on the bus, remembering to call out:
- “Thank you” to the driver…
Something happens – we are discussing Horrid Henry. I do not know what that is.
I thought I knew the quintessential British information: that a rubber is an eraser, that I need to always have an umbrella, that a sandwich counts as lunch, but I didn’t know what Horrid Henry was. It is something trivial, not a big deal until someone tells me ‘every British kid grew up with it!’ and I remember.
I remember that sometimes I say something too Nigerian and nobody understands the reference. Sometimes, I fear that I am becoming that embarrassing immigrant, the one featured in viral videos, whose accent is so heavy that no one can understand them. And sometimes I don’t know what Horrid Henry is. I remember I am not Nigerian enough and I am not British enough.
I wrestled with talking about it. How can I bemoan to parents who left everything we know to come here that it is sometimes isolating to have not watched the same TV show or played some silly primary school game? How do I talk about how guilty it makes me feel to call somewhere else ‘home’?
Do I tell them about reading to find myself in literature? How much my feelings were recognised in Nikesh Shukla’s ‘The Good Immigrant’ – “To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t belong to either”, about how much I think about the word, Diaspora, holding its definition in my palm?
How do I tell them, my family who are so proud that I am settling in so well, that some days it is too painfully obvious what colour my passport is and that I am not one of them?
My experience is not unique. Everyone struggles to feel like they belong somewhere, or feels like an outsider sometimes. I realised that I am not from here, and that is not the bad thing I had thought it was. I am proud of where I come from, and I like where I am. I tell my friends my favourite Yoruba expressions, I practice new ones. I learn that it is okay sometimes to be a foreigner and have the privilege of discovery. Now, I actually quite like Horrid Henry, but I prefer Perfect Pete.
Cover image by © Tomi, Politics and Education Staff Writer