Some years ago a South Asian friend shared an interesting anecdote with me. When she landed her first job in the corporate banking sector in London, she bought herself a new wardrobe of business suits and dresses. She boldly announced to her mother: “No more saris. Now that I am part of London's financial world, I have decided to dress in western style. It will help me blend with colleagues at the workplace!” Giving her a long hard look, her mother replied: “Really? But what are you going to do about the brown shade of your skin?” At the time I thought it was a quaint and funny story. But I am gradually beginning to see the deeply embedded wisdom in my friend's mother's reaction.

The truth is that we immigrants will always remain the 'other' in western countries — no matter how hard we try to blend in by wearing the 'right' clothes and acquiring the 'right' accent! I became sharply conscious of this reality once again when I recently came across Zia Haider Rahman's article, “Oh, So Now I'm Bangladeshi?” (The New York Times, April 8, 2016). Zia Haider Rahman rose to fame when his debut novel In the Light of What We Know was critically acclaimed in literary circles. In the article Rahman notes that while he is British in all aspects, when he was selected as a panellist for the prestigious PEN Pinter Prize, the announcement described him as: “Born in rural Bangladesh, Zia Haider Rahman was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich and Yale Universities.” In fact, The Man Booker Prize administration went on to recognise him as “a Bangladeshi banker turnd novelist.” The author was riled by the fact that his ethnicity was singled out in the intro, whereas the same yardstick was not applied to other panellists.

Interestingly, Rahman has never lived in Bangladesh and speaks with a British accent that he claims he acquired from “imitating BBC News presenters on a cassette recorder.” It is ironic that despite his efforts to Anglicise, he could not shake off his hyphenated Bangladeshi identity. He suspects, “Keeping me Bangladeshi has the advantage of enabling some people to tell me to go back to my own country.” We could give the organisers of the PEN Pinter Prize the benefit of the doubt since casting Rahman as an English novelist of Bangladeshi origin could be a marketing gimmick to make him appear 'exotic'. However, the suspicion that this could be a precursor to something more ominous is not totally unfounded, given the prevalent hostile climate towards non-white immigrants in Europe and the United States. Women in hijab and men in turbans have been publicly harangued with shouts of “Go back to your country”. The current wave of attacks has particularly traumatised second-generation immigrants, since they have never known any other 'country'! Read More