1 week ago
22
When I was 24, I visited Ireland for the first time. It was the autumn after I graduated from university, and a friend who had won an award for her dissertation used her prize money to rent a beach hut on Valentia Island, so that we could spend a week working on our novels.
The stone hut stood very close to the water’s edge on the western tip of Ireland, overlooking the expansive metal-blue of the Atlantic. The island possessed a rugged kind of beauty – cliff edges, a lush rainforest, cold frothing water. It astounded us. As did the tranquillity. It was what we had come in search of.
When we weren’t writing, my friend drove us around so that we could explore the island and the wider country, making our way through Killarney and down to Derrynane beach where we rode horses along the powdery golden coast. After a week of doing this, it dawned on me that we had yet to see a person of colour. We were so close to England that I had come expecting the diversity I was familiar with at home.
One afternoon, I stopped off at a convenience store. When the young woman behind the till looked up and saw me, the shock in her eyes gave me the impression that I was perhaps the first person of colour she had ever seen in person. I bought what I needed and left, but later I found myself thinking about that encounter. It was the first time in my life where I had felt as though I stood out.
I grew up in Leicester – one of the first “super diverse” cities in England where minorities make up the majority. My school photographs show a sea of brown faces, and for many years I believed Leicester to be a blueprint of England, perhaps even the wider world. My sense of self was, rightly or wrongly, strong. And yet my upbringing wasn’t truly diverse, either, since I was primarily surrounded by people who were from a similar background, racially and socioeconomically.
Back at the beach hut, I was forced to contemplate what it might have been like for somebody like my grandfather, who arrived in England from Africa in the 1950s. At that time, he would have been one of only a handful of non-white people living in Leicester. Or my mother, who arrived from India in the early 60s. In the decades that followed, a great many more Indians would arrive in the city and attempt to make it their home, drawn by the quickly expanding community. Had they felt invisible? Had they felt as though they stood out?
By comparison, the otherness I had encountered on my trip felt temporary. I returned home to the secure bubble of my former existence. Or so I thought.
In the years that followed, I began to conceive of people as balloons, their sense of self expanding or contracting depending on their circumstances and where they were in the world. I realised I had spent my formative years in the comfortable, empowering state of expansion, believing, somewhat naively, that I was a member of the majority. My experience on that holiday forced me to contract, and I suddenly felt alarm at my own insignificance – the way a king might feel upon discovering that his castle was merely a small room inside a much larger one.
I left Leicester to go to university in Hertfordshire, eventually moving to London. It was in these places that I found people from all over the world living and working side by side; there that, rather than expand or contract, I felt I could simply exist in the comfortable middle. Since then, I have travelled more widely – and discovered the world to be a throbbing landscape of people who are different to me in every aspect. But rather than feel daunted – as I did at 24 – I enter these worlds with pride and empathy.
After that trip, I was more able to look at things from different perspectives. In recent years especially, with the summer riots of 2024 as well as last year’s “unite the kingdom” rally led by Tommy Robinson, I came to see how a person’s sense of self might have contracted so greatly as to become destroyed. Beneath the chants and slogans and violence, I saw the fear, however misplaced, that seemed to motivate the hordes of people gathered – of losing their footing in the place they called home. I recognised that fear: it lives in the heart of every immigrant.
Being raised in Leicester gave me the strength to recognise my power and privilege and to fight for it, while that short trip in my 20s gave me a glimpse into my own insignificance. The older I get, the more I find that, in order to live a life of meaning, one needs to experience both.
