Know your history: Matters of truth and (mis)understanding

As I sit to meditate in the morning as I wake in my childhood bedroom, my gaze lands on the red brick wall of the house opposite my parents’ home. My peripheral view takes in the birds’ nest on the house in front of me through the curtains that I have kept partially open to allow the scant breeze through on this hot late summer’s day.

Observing my thoughts, aware of my family in the house around me, I notice that my body and mind are at ease here, in this moment, in this room which has in the 30 or so years since I moved out, been emptied of the things that made it mine, but where I nonetheless feel the comforting embrace of familiarity.

What’s gone is the tightness around experiences that have faded to memories, of the joyful times I had being safe in my solitary space, as well as the sorrowful times of loneliness when I retreated from the experiences that left me questioning who I was and what I was doing here.

Still, this is home. And I’m here to be present with my family. But the questions of belonging, of not fitting in, still arise, because the external world always muscles its way in, as do the residues of past experiences that get agitated to the surface as a result.

Matters of truth and (mis)understanding

The question of home, of belonging, of where I and my story began, has long fascinated me. I don’t live here anymore but it’s the home I was raised and I’m grateful for it as the home that was made for me, the place that held me thanks to the parents who made me much of what I am, and what they lived through and did to make a home from the homes they were forced to leave. 

But I couldn’t wait to leave, not home itself, but the geographical location, with its homogenous socio-demographic at the time, and the experiences of racism, loneliness and hostility that meant I didn’t feel I belonged nor wished to stay.

‘Who Are We - and Should It Matter in the 21st Century?’ is the question the journalist Gary Younge asks in his book of the same title, in which he says:

“Everybody has a story. Not, for most of us, a grand overarching narrative that draws together the various strands of our life into one neat, consistent thread but a collection of unique, discrete and occasionally contradictory chapters that come together only in the telling. Few of these belong to us entirely. We arrive in the middle of a random variety of stories and then set about weaving some together and discarding others in a bid to write our own.”

It’s a moving and illuminating read, one that caused me to ask more questions and accept the fact of there not being a satisfying or easy answer. Although the ruinous curse of colonialism on the planet & the world’s people does lie at the root of it.

Yes, it matters, I sometimes wish it didn’t, though sometimes I’m glad that it does, for who I am and knowing my history - in terms of where we come from, how we get here, how some (get to) assert their identity more than others, how some identities hold and wield power while others are made to suffer because of it. And how we don’t need to be defined by these labels, or at least how others view and erroneously impose or maliciously use them.

This question, the necessity in fact, of questioning the supposed truths of the narratives we’re told, is something that arises while I’m home, where I don’t want to read the news or watch the videos of the riots happening in the UK, an ignorant and calculated response by Far Right numbskulls and malicious politicians with a short-sighted Islamophobic agenda to capitalise on false claims of the identity of the perpetrator behind a recent series of murders. How these thugs and half-wits are using this awful suffering of a community and the families involved to fuel more hate.

And yet I can’t not. Because it’s triggering, sickening and frustrating to be reminded again of how much identity is made to matter and misused as a weapon by people who don’t know their history when they talk of wanting “their” country back, of “people coming and taking over” and of closing borders to "foreigners". How people fixate on and demonise certain identities while having the arrogance and caucacity to uphold their own as supreme, how this insane way of viewing the world is unnecessary but still prevails.

It makes me acutely aware and puts me back in the place of my young teenage self when I used to walk these streets of middle England and accompany my mother, always on the anticipatory defence of a scathing look or remark, or derogatory treatment and discrimination.

That child part of me always returns when I come home. I revert to the mindset of a suspicious and weary teenager when I walk with my mum through the local town and supermarket during these times. Someone not saying thank you or smiling in return as my mum makes a friendly remark, or as she rightfully asserts herself to reach for something that requires someone to move slightly out of the way. My mind’s instinct, conditioned by experience and fear, is to think an untoward or even neutral gesture on a stranger’s part is a sign of hostility, of considering themselves more worthy than us, of treating us unfairly.

A feckless teacher I had at secondary school, a maths teacher who I imagine likely didn’t know her/our history either and how it impacts the present, once admonished me saying, “why are you so angry all the time?”. It wasn’t so much anger as disappointment and loneliness due to the rejection and difference I unavoidably felt due to being the only Brown girl in a sea of white faces. But of course, she didn't care to understand that.

Lack of understanding, of caring to understand, is the root of so much discord and suffering. And it doesn’t have to be that way. And it isn’t entirely. But experiences, and triggers, no matter how relatively small, have a way of being amplified when viewed in and from a place of isolation.

Ignorance is no excuse

“A system built to impoverish and divide and destroy us cannot stand if we do. It’s basic mathematics; the more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we mobilise.” Jesse Williams, speaking on police brutality as he accepted the Humanitarian Award at the BETAwards in 2016

I’ve talked to my partner, a very self-aware and well-informed white male from a privileged South England background, about how it infuriates me that people don’t know the true history of England and what this colonial power was/is responsible for. How the people they ostracise and shun are the ancestors of the ones their own ancestors subjugated and displaced. I voice my complaint at the systems that fail to educate us about history, as I myself experienced it in the schools that white-washed Britain’s past while I was growing up, by way of a convenient lie that continues to purposely shield people from the reality of what "Great Britain" did and how it made itself on the backs of others' ruin.

In the words of a geography teacher that I had the misfortune to encounter (and who punished me when I experienced racism at school rather than the perpetrator, because of course the angry Brown girl was to blame and of course the little crying white boy dramatised his pain after I had enough of being taunted and fought back), “we” – the English – conquered the world. That’s the half-story of victorious endeavour we were told (and are predominantly told still), as he excitedly drew a map of this small island called the UK on the chalk board with arrows darting off to every other corner of the globe.

My partner says that most people don’t care about history, if they were told the full story, they wouldn’t be interested. That’s partly true, and it maddens me. He gets it, and he also know that he doesn’t know how it feels.

I don’t want to say or think in agreement with my partner that people are people and it has always been thus – the division of us and them, power over and people deemed beneath – but it’s a disappointing truth. The dissatisfactory nature of this world that is the samsaric realm, which is to say, the human realm of suffering caused my misunderstanding, ego-fixation, greed, desire, attachment and small mindedness.

I counter that at least if they were told, if we were taught the truth, we’d have less excuse and maybe less reason to react based on ignorance and lies. More honest narratives are now increasingly out there, so is there really an excuse anymore?

Everything changes in the end

The shopping expedition occurs without any difficulty. I am relieved to realise that my mum carries on regardless and it’s only in my mind (fuelled by the hate-filled news) that the fear of confrontation persists. As both my parents tell me on occasion, they have seen and lived through so much, they are barely fazed, albeit irked, every time prejudice and anti-Muslim sentiment is riled up. And still, I counter in my mind if not out loud that they, we all, have a right to feel at home and safe.

All these stories we tell ourselves, that the mind conjures up, that people pedal, are just stories of course, but they are stories rooted in history, personal history and the history of White supremacy that created these divisions that place us at superficial odds. More often than not, the strangers are friendly, return my mum’s kindness. She and my dad have lived in this town for 52 years and they are no longer the only Brown family around. The stories are changing, the people are different, this isn’t the place that it was when I was growing up. I can and do let this shit go.

And still, there is the tightness that even though it’s tug on my heart and mind is fading, like a thread that disintegrates over time, its remnants remain in the ether.

Change is inevitable, and it takes time. But it’s happening, inside me and around me. Not always in the most skilful direction, but still. I'm glad to see the news reporting a balanced perspective in the midst of talk of more hate-filled riots (and the police being urged to stop them), and reading about ordinary citizens, politicians and communities standing up for the truth and defending the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, Muslims, to be here, where they do in fact belong.

I am always glad for the truth of impermanence, for the fact of things never remaining the same, and for the fact that there is a skilful response to suffering that means dissolving and countering ignorance and confusion with honesty and courage. As another cherished writer, Joy Harjo, says in her memoir Poet Warrior, one of my favourite books of all time:

“At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge.”