English | Egyptian
In collaboration with Loughborough University
After remarriage, my mother kept my biological paternal identity from me until I was 16. Two white parents deceived their brown ward from understanding his own colour. I learned it instead from the normal race hatred of 1970's England. The physical violence was a daily given; the punch out of the blue in the stomach at school, the beatings in the park at night, the gang attacks on street corners waiting for me near my house. Isolation, fear, and loneliness; but above all, what shaped my heart and mind and choked my emotional and psychological development for decades to come was the self-loathing they created in me. Children internalize their oppression.
England's hubris socially excluded and isolated me. In that vacuum I overcompensated, trying to be more British than the Brits. I lauded British motorcycles, even though the new Japanese imports were infinitely superior. I cheered the British Tommy and bowed in his remembrance at the Cenotaph every freezing November. I even tried to join the British National Party, but a kindly teacher steered me away; he'd been a Commando in the Second World War. I felt seen, by an old white guy who'd taken a metaphorical and real pick-axe handle to racism, under the flag of his own racist country. Thank you. Mr. Berry.
Denied a national identity, I learned I had others, like being a (Japanese) biker, a guardian of vulnerable animals, a photographer, a researcher, a teacher. I came to understand that the passport, that formal document which legally affirms an identity, is good primarily for leaving a place to go to other places, ironically. So I did. I went to Indochina, where my brownness was familiar and normal, and settled in a Phnom Penh still literally and metaphorically at war with the racist demons of the Khmer Rouge. When I joined the UN peacekeeping force, my UK passport suddenly made me white and I had endless privileges that Cambodians didn't. I was kept safe from military violence by virtue, for the first time in my life, of being British.
Now, I feel fortunate not to be encumbered with the jingoism some of the white peers of my childhood have carried into their retirement years on Facebook, and re-spawned it in their progeny. But bizarrely, it was in the racially-violent 1970's we had earlier shared, that I had found, in a conservative, white youth group, a place of safety, acceptance and exhilaration. As an Air Cadet, I was taught to fly every weekend by some of the men who had brought Nazism to its knees. The only place in my formative years where there was never once a racist word was in a 40 year old military aircraft flown by a geriatric Spitfire pilot over the freezing North Sea. That's where my identity was never an issue, in a violently racialized childhood. Thank you, Royal Air Force. So now I'm British by way of memories like that and a passport that still calls forth Little England; and half-Egyptian by unclaimed genes; intrigued by both, beholden to neither.
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