The Go-Between
A memoir by Osman YousefzadaPublished by Cannongate
Jan 2022
‘Osman Yousefzada’s - The Go Between is a coming of age story set in the 80s & 90s, opening up a window into a closed migrant community.
The author Osman explores the clash of cultures; through a series of vignettes seen through his eyes as a child, universal stories unfold of the battle of genders, of female erasure, and of honour based violence in patriarchal communities. This is set against the background of a search for belonging whilst burdened with the baggage of race, class, community expectations and the legacy of colonialism and empire.
The stories from these parallel communities, all living cheek-by-jowl in a red-light district, takes you on a true but fantastical journey. They range from his encounters with prostitutes, the sermons of the local mosque, to his Jewish school teacher, to Thatcher and Reagan, to Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali, to the banks of the river Kabul and the river Indus, to the stirrings of Jihad and Salafism, to alternative masculinities, and the divide between the world of men and the world of women.
The author Osman explores the clash of cultures; through a series of vignettes seen through his eyes as a child, universal stories unfold of the battle of genders, of female erasure, and of honour based violence in patriarchal communities. This is set against the background of a search for belonging whilst burdened with the baggage of race, class, community expectations and the legacy of colonialism and empire.
The stories from these parallel communities, all living cheek-by-jowl in a red-light district, takes you on a true but fantastical journey. They range from his encounters with prostitutes, the sermons of the local mosque, to his Jewish school teacher, to Thatcher and Reagan, to Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali, to the banks of the river Kabul and the river Indus, to the stirrings of Jihad and Salafism, to alternative masculinities, and the divide between the world of men and the world of women.
Pre-order:
︎︎︎ Amazon UK
︎︎︎ Foyles
︎︎︎ Waterstones
Here to Stay
Here to SA Poem by Osman Yousefzada & Red Medusa
Look at ME
Get used to my face
My thick and slender frames
My weird and wild ways
Observe my displays of femininity
Get use to what you see
LISTEN
Whether you like it
Whether you do Not,
I am here to stay
My bhindis, locs and traditional frocks
More than a fashion statement,
More then appropriated symbols of identity
More than part-time adornments of the privileged
They are symbols of MY survival
You have a history of Theft
Taking from us, putting us on ships
Shackling our Hearts and Splendor
Enslaving us
Enslaving us for your profit
Except I am free
It makes me smile to see that in your ignorance
In the wearing of my culture,
My Heritage, My History
My colours and symbols,
My gifts and my curses
You are celebrating me
So copy, reinvent, try to obliterate who I am
But the truth is, and always will be that
I am here to stay
I have survived your long famine
And now fill my belly with love
I have survived your wars
And replaced them with my peace
I have survived your poverty
And am rich in spirit
I have survived your technologies
And transformed your weapons
From the Whip, to the Gun, and into the pen
Which joins these letters to write these words
With which I will change the world
Because I was taught that
You were better than me
That God is white, that God is male
That this God was chosen to rule over ME
Except I was born of a WOMAN
I grew in her womb
Nurtured by breasts
And it was SHE who gave me Breath
SEE
I am more than Kipling’s “white mans’ burden”
I am more than the sum of my Ancestors labour
I am my language,
I am my struggle
I am the glory of my heritage
Despite the crimes of colonialism
Capitalism and its father, neoliberalism
I am still the Perfume of Arabia
I am still the Silk of the Silk Route
I am still the Comfort of cotton
I am still the kohl Black that lines the eyes of MY beauty
I am the strength in the tin pots you mock
I am the pride of your Britain
I also built this place
And now you protect your statutes, your histories
Yet these are my histories, of how I got here
And here I will Stay
Occupying spaces you said I had no right to
I will fight despite your insults
And here I will Stay
And you will insist that I get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged!
I am Here to Stay
See my face
Remember my name
Because I have and always will
Be here to stay.
I’m Coming
by Osman Yousefzada
Bring the dark dust from my feet
I’m coming
Our footprints that intermingled in the past
I’m coming
To protrude forward and create our new cosmos
to heal, to muster up our amulets and potions
I’m coming
To flower and let them feed off me
I’m coming
To germinate and activate my metabolism
to rise each morning when the sun breaks it’s dawn
and each future is new
I’m coming
And when I’m gone... the animals trample over me
and the roots of the plants entangle and sustain off me
I’m coming
When I turn back to see its cycles... its haste
...its speed... its consumption... its harm... its humanity...
I’m coming...
I’m coming
Our footprints that intermingled in the past
I’m coming
To protrude forward and create our new cosmos
to heal, to muster up our amulets and potions
I’m coming
To flower and let them feed off me
I’m coming
To germinate and activate my metabolism
to rise each morning when the sun breaks it’s dawn
and each future is new
I’m coming
And when I’m gone... the animals trample over me
and the roots of the plants entangle and sustain off me
I’m coming
When I turn back to see its cycles... its haste
...its speed... its consumption... its harm... its humanity...
I’m coming...
Osman Yousefzada On How Coronavirus Has Devastated “Forgotten Voices” In The BAME Community
Photograph: Ophelia Wynne
In March 2017, a notification popped up on my WhatsApp feed: “Salam Bro, we are famous!... For the wrong reasons.” It was followed by a link to an article in the Daily Mail, with the headline “So How DID Birmingham Become The Jihadi Capital of Britain?”
The piece was referring to the working-class, inner-city area I grew up in: Balsall Heath, Birmingham, England. I prefer to think of it as similar in atmosphere to the Netflix TV show, Unorthodox – full of tight-knit, insular communities who migrate to a place and perhaps feel that they have to hold onto the values they arrived with, even if those values have since been fossilised.
At one time, Balsall Heath was one of the largest red-light districts in England. There were hundreds of women working here up to the mid-’90s, some of them doing business on the street where I lived. When the sun set, the streets would come alive with heels clicking, kerb crawlers, pimps. In the aftermath, we waded through the debris of used condoms and syringes to get to school in the morning.
Our community comes from the Afghan border region of Pakistan, sometimes called the frontier. It’s an ultra-conservative area which came under the Taliban influence for a while. It was a patriarchal system: the men came to England in the 1960s, invited to work as cheap labour in the foundries. They were a class of very low-skilled workers, most of whom couldn’t read or write. The women followed in the 1970s, and they gave birth to their children. But, by the time the 1980s came around, the deindustrialisation of the north had begun. A community who came to do manual jobs, which were fast disappearing, found they couldn’t retrain. Many of them didn’t speak English, and they were illiterate – they couldn’t exactly go and find work in a call centre. They wanted to work but the only alternative, when the factories closed down, was to live off benefits. The economic situation in general was quite desperate.
The community became more insular. These people feel British, and are happy to be here, but they have never really assimilated. Up to the late ’80s, you would regularly see neo-Nazi slogans spray-painted on walls and bridges: “Pakis, go home”. A distant relative, who lived across the street, was beaten up so badly by white supremacists on his way home from a nightshift that he never left his house again. Another uncle, my Dad’s friend (we call everyone uncles and aunts) used to tell me stories about how he was spat on, on his way to work. At the factory, he couldn’t use the main toilets in the building. They were only for the white employees. Instead, he had to go outside. Still, in 2017, a wall near our home had the words “No Pakis” spray-painted on it, accompanied by a swastika.
As the coronavirus has spread, I have seen Birmingham, and particularly the BAME communities where I grew up, become some of the hardest hit in the country. Four people have died on the street where my mum lives, and nearly 70 people have passed away within our close community. This week, a report by Public Health England confirmed what we have all known for weeks: that people from ethnic minorities are at a far higher risk of dying from coronavirus. The report says people of Bangladeshi ethnicity, for instance, have twice as high a risk of death than people of white ethnicity. There are many reasons for this, but fundamentally, it comes back to poverty. For families in my community, three generations all live under one roof because they have to – they’re all on Universal Credit. There was a shooting two weeks ago a few streets down – stuff like that just happens regularly, predominately over drug turf wars. Last week, the local chippie was robbed at gunpoint. Living there is not a choice.
I have seen the ravaging effects of the coronavirus first hand. My mother and my three sisters all became extremely ill in March. Mum got ill first. She had already been in and out of hospital for the last few months with a chest infection, and then again with low kidney function – the “underlying health issues” that plague BAME communities. Then, she had a fall in the kitchen, and developed breathing problems. I called for an ambulance and they took her in, but they wouldn’t let me go with her. By this point, all my sisters were unwell too, some more than others, coughing and spluttering. I sat down with the doctors in a cordoned area, post Mum’s admittance, and it felt like a TV programme, where they take you aside to tell you the bad news. They wouldn’t let me see her: it was the first day the hospital had gone into full lockdown mode. I sat opposite the doctor in her scrubs. Looking back on it now, consoling someone from two metres apart felt so unnatural, but it was soon going to be the new normal. She nodded, and tried to answer my long list of questions, with my sisters and brother on speaker phone. At the end, she concluded: “We will do our best, but we aren’t hopeful.”
Mum was pumped with antibiotics, and they moved her into a Covid ward where, slowly, she began to improve. I could only imagine the isolation that mum felt – she doesn’t speak any English, so had no way to communicate with the NHS staff who were looking after her. She can’t read or write, not even in her mother tongue, which is Pashto, (one of two official languages of Afghanistan, and also spoken in the Frontier region of Pakistan). I managed to get a smartphone to her. She couldn’t use it, but with the help of the nurses we could speak to her on FaceTime.
Just as we got Mum out and back home, our eldest sister got worse. This turned into days and weeks of real touch-and-go moments. The doctors couldn’t get her off the ventilator in the ICU. They kept trying, and her stats would drop. She got better; she got worse. Again, no one was allowed to visit. We tried to send recorded voice messages that her medical team could play to her: messages of strength, love, messages asking her to pull through. But the doctors said that she was too deeply sedated for these to have any effect. Once a day, we would get a call from a fourth-year medical student, giving us an update. “She’s still on active resuscitation.” Which meant that they hadn’t given up. Mum prayed, everyone prayed, and we were lucky: she has made a recovery, and is now at home.
What coronavirus has done is turned everything on its head. The nurses who are underpaid are life-saving heroes, the supermarket workers who stack shelves are key workers, the care workers are frontline defenders. Many are from BAME backgrounds. Forget the glitz and glamour of my world in London, of fashion. The dedication from these people has been amazing, and I am so grateful to the NHS staff for caring for my family.
The extraordinary number of deaths in Birmingham, too, has made me think again about my identity. I don’t always feel like I belong here; but I don’t necessarily belong where my parents came from, either. I was born and raised here, I am British, and I see England as my home; but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it sees itself as my home. This also applies to my work. When I started out, there weren’t really many designers from BAME backgrounds. The fashion industry was very much about presenting and being part of an elite and exclusive club, and I felt I had to downplay or hide my background in order to be accepted. I had to be one of those Asians who puts on his best accent and tries to learn the codes.
While I’ve been very lucky to have always sold my clothes, allowing me to gradually build my brand from one collection to another, my core approach of fusing western tailoring with Asian cuts and construction was never really of interest as a story. It was always different aspects of my work that were picked up by the fashion press. Thankfully today, the industry has really changed and there are a lot of new designers from a multiplicity of different backgrounds. Yet, the Asian narrative is still not strong. I’m hoping that in the near future we’ll finally see more designers emerging from British-Asian backgrounds.
I have been reconnecting with my roots over the course of the last year, going back to Birmingham from my home in London almost every other weekend since my father died last year. I am very close to my mum, and she lives alone, so I go back out of a sense of love and duty. Life revolves around the mosque, though it had been many years since I had attended – I left Birmingham when I was 18 to study at university in London. But, when Dad died, there was a huge outpouring. My dad was a carpenter (my mum is a dressmaker) and he was one of the people who built the local mosque: the ablution areas; the areas where you pray; the Mehrab, which he made of bathroom tiles, and which denotes the direction of Mecca. The community is simple, and apart from the reading of scriptures rarely does a sermon happen for anyone who dies. But they did a sermon for my dad. Three thousand people came to pay their respects. There was this strong sense of community that I realised I’d missed.
Every weekend, before lockdown, I visited an elder on behalf of my mum (she had to nag me a bit). Before, I used to hate the formalities of conversations with the elders, the ritual of saying a proper hello, asking after their health, how their family is, or how someone’s mother or father is keeping, and so on. But now, I kind of cherish it, these niceties that reveal a well-oiled machine of community. I have realised the importance of keeping those ties together, reflecting on the fact that these are the forgotten voices who came from the Empire to actually build this country – who took those jobs in the foundries that no-one else wanted. These people, too, are the salt of England – and they are the ones who have shouldered the burden of this pandemic more heavily than anyone.
Writer’s note: I am thankful to Vogue for giving me the opportunity to tell this story. When I began to write this piece, Covid-19 was the global issue on which the world was focussed. Due to the tragic death of George Floyd, and the crucial actions of protestors, the world is now finally waking up to the real and ubiquitous issue of racism. I would like to take the opportunity to say that I stand with the black community at this critical time and to repeat that Black Lives Matter.
Click here to view this article on the Vogue UK website.
The piece was referring to the working-class, inner-city area I grew up in: Balsall Heath, Birmingham, England. I prefer to think of it as similar in atmosphere to the Netflix TV show, Unorthodox – full of tight-knit, insular communities who migrate to a place and perhaps feel that they have to hold onto the values they arrived with, even if those values have since been fossilised.
At one time, Balsall Heath was one of the largest red-light districts in England. There were hundreds of women working here up to the mid-’90s, some of them doing business on the street where I lived. When the sun set, the streets would come alive with heels clicking, kerb crawlers, pimps. In the aftermath, we waded through the debris of used condoms and syringes to get to school in the morning.
Our community comes from the Afghan border region of Pakistan, sometimes called the frontier. It’s an ultra-conservative area which came under the Taliban influence for a while. It was a patriarchal system: the men came to England in the 1960s, invited to work as cheap labour in the foundries. They were a class of very low-skilled workers, most of whom couldn’t read or write. The women followed in the 1970s, and they gave birth to their children. But, by the time the 1980s came around, the deindustrialisation of the north had begun. A community who came to do manual jobs, which were fast disappearing, found they couldn’t retrain. Many of them didn’t speak English, and they were illiterate – they couldn’t exactly go and find work in a call centre. They wanted to work but the only alternative, when the factories closed down, was to live off benefits. The economic situation in general was quite desperate.
The community became more insular. These people feel British, and are happy to be here, but they have never really assimilated. Up to the late ’80s, you would regularly see neo-Nazi slogans spray-painted on walls and bridges: “Pakis, go home”. A distant relative, who lived across the street, was beaten up so badly by white supremacists on his way home from a nightshift that he never left his house again. Another uncle, my Dad’s friend (we call everyone uncles and aunts) used to tell me stories about how he was spat on, on his way to work. At the factory, he couldn’t use the main toilets in the building. They were only for the white employees. Instead, he had to go outside. Still, in 2017, a wall near our home had the words “No Pakis” spray-painted on it, accompanied by a swastika.
As the coronavirus has spread, I have seen Birmingham, and particularly the BAME communities where I grew up, become some of the hardest hit in the country. Four people have died on the street where my mum lives, and nearly 70 people have passed away within our close community. This week, a report by Public Health England confirmed what we have all known for weeks: that people from ethnic minorities are at a far higher risk of dying from coronavirus. The report says people of Bangladeshi ethnicity, for instance, have twice as high a risk of death than people of white ethnicity. There are many reasons for this, but fundamentally, it comes back to poverty. For families in my community, three generations all live under one roof because they have to – they’re all on Universal Credit. There was a shooting two weeks ago a few streets down – stuff like that just happens regularly, predominately over drug turf wars. Last week, the local chippie was robbed at gunpoint. Living there is not a choice.
I have seen the ravaging effects of the coronavirus first hand. My mother and my three sisters all became extremely ill in March. Mum got ill first. She had already been in and out of hospital for the last few months with a chest infection, and then again with low kidney function – the “underlying health issues” that plague BAME communities. Then, she had a fall in the kitchen, and developed breathing problems. I called for an ambulance and they took her in, but they wouldn’t let me go with her. By this point, all my sisters were unwell too, some more than others, coughing and spluttering. I sat down with the doctors in a cordoned area, post Mum’s admittance, and it felt like a TV programme, where they take you aside to tell you the bad news. They wouldn’t let me see her: it was the first day the hospital had gone into full lockdown mode. I sat opposite the doctor in her scrubs. Looking back on it now, consoling someone from two metres apart felt so unnatural, but it was soon going to be the new normal. She nodded, and tried to answer my long list of questions, with my sisters and brother on speaker phone. At the end, she concluded: “We will do our best, but we aren’t hopeful.”
Mum was pumped with antibiotics, and they moved her into a Covid ward where, slowly, she began to improve. I could only imagine the isolation that mum felt – she doesn’t speak any English, so had no way to communicate with the NHS staff who were looking after her. She can’t read or write, not even in her mother tongue, which is Pashto, (one of two official languages of Afghanistan, and also spoken in the Frontier region of Pakistan). I managed to get a smartphone to her. She couldn’t use it, but with the help of the nurses we could speak to her on FaceTime.
Just as we got Mum out and back home, our eldest sister got worse. This turned into days and weeks of real touch-and-go moments. The doctors couldn’t get her off the ventilator in the ICU. They kept trying, and her stats would drop. She got better; she got worse. Again, no one was allowed to visit. We tried to send recorded voice messages that her medical team could play to her: messages of strength, love, messages asking her to pull through. But the doctors said that she was too deeply sedated for these to have any effect. Once a day, we would get a call from a fourth-year medical student, giving us an update. “She’s still on active resuscitation.” Which meant that they hadn’t given up. Mum prayed, everyone prayed, and we were lucky: she has made a recovery, and is now at home.
What coronavirus has done is turned everything on its head. The nurses who are underpaid are life-saving heroes, the supermarket workers who stack shelves are key workers, the care workers are frontline defenders. Many are from BAME backgrounds. Forget the glitz and glamour of my world in London, of fashion. The dedication from these people has been amazing, and I am so grateful to the NHS staff for caring for my family.
The extraordinary number of deaths in Birmingham, too, has made me think again about my identity. I don’t always feel like I belong here; but I don’t necessarily belong where my parents came from, either. I was born and raised here, I am British, and I see England as my home; but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it sees itself as my home. This also applies to my work. When I started out, there weren’t really many designers from BAME backgrounds. The fashion industry was very much about presenting and being part of an elite and exclusive club, and I felt I had to downplay or hide my background in order to be accepted. I had to be one of those Asians who puts on his best accent and tries to learn the codes.
While I’ve been very lucky to have always sold my clothes, allowing me to gradually build my brand from one collection to another, my core approach of fusing western tailoring with Asian cuts and construction was never really of interest as a story. It was always different aspects of my work that were picked up by the fashion press. Thankfully today, the industry has really changed and there are a lot of new designers from a multiplicity of different backgrounds. Yet, the Asian narrative is still not strong. I’m hoping that in the near future we’ll finally see more designers emerging from British-Asian backgrounds.
I have been reconnecting with my roots over the course of the last year, going back to Birmingham from my home in London almost every other weekend since my father died last year. I am very close to my mum, and she lives alone, so I go back out of a sense of love and duty. Life revolves around the mosque, though it had been many years since I had attended – I left Birmingham when I was 18 to study at university in London. But, when Dad died, there was a huge outpouring. My dad was a carpenter (my mum is a dressmaker) and he was one of the people who built the local mosque: the ablution areas; the areas where you pray; the Mehrab, which he made of bathroom tiles, and which denotes the direction of Mecca. The community is simple, and apart from the reading of scriptures rarely does a sermon happen for anyone who dies. But they did a sermon for my dad. Three thousand people came to pay their respects. There was this strong sense of community that I realised I’d missed.
Every weekend, before lockdown, I visited an elder on behalf of my mum (she had to nag me a bit). Before, I used to hate the formalities of conversations with the elders, the ritual of saying a proper hello, asking after their health, how their family is, or how someone’s mother or father is keeping, and so on. But now, I kind of cherish it, these niceties that reveal a well-oiled machine of community. I have realised the importance of keeping those ties together, reflecting on the fact that these are the forgotten voices who came from the Empire to actually build this country – who took those jobs in the foundries that no-one else wanted. These people, too, are the salt of England – and they are the ones who have shouldered the burden of this pandemic more heavily than anyone.
Writer’s note: I am thankful to Vogue for giving me the opportunity to tell this story. When I began to write this piece, Covid-19 was the global issue on which the world was focussed. Due to the tragic death of George Floyd, and the crucial actions of protestors, the world is now finally waking up to the real and ubiquitous issue of racism. I would like to take the opportunity to say that I stand with the black community at this critical time and to repeat that Black Lives Matter.
Click here to view this article on the Vogue UK website.
Osman Yousefzada: 'Shades of Unity, In Hope of a new Brown Black Coalition'
Writer Osman Yousefzada in his London studio: ‘The colour of my skin and my Muslim name was used to assess the level of risk I posed to society.’
Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
Designer and writer Osman Yousefzada’s jumpsuit for Beyoncé shot him to instant fame. But it’s being the son of Pakistani-Afghan migrants that shaped him most. Here, he describes his personal and political struggle against racism, and why ethnic solidarity is paramount.
Don’t go to bed!” my PR messaged from LA. It was midnight in the UK and Beyoncé was about to step out wearing one of my designs at the 2013 Grammys. The image of Beyoncé in my jumpsuit was everywhere the next day. The phone calls and emails flooded in; there were interview requests and order inquiries. With just one appearance, Beyoncé had put my emerging fashion label on the map. My appointment book was filled back-to-back for the international buying season in Paris the following month. Armed with my latest collection in two gigantic wheelie suitcases, I passed through security screening for the Eurostar train. Snaking through the immigration queue, I stepped forward to the counter with my British Passport in hand…
Before I tell you any more, there are two things you need to know about me. The first is that I am the British-born son of Pakistani-Afghan immigrants who came to the UK seeking a better life for themselves and their children. The second is that my skin tone is brown – brown enough for people throughout the course of my life to hurl a variety of racial slurs at me.
The elder kids had taught us to run away from the police, but there was nowhere I could run at immigration. Yet today was going to be different. I remember the officer was wearing a green tie and a grey suit that shone, and I wondered if it was maybe the result of ironing directly on to the fabric. But his questions snapped me out of my musings. How much money do you have in your account? When was the last time you went to the mosque? Why did you go to Pakistan? Where exactly did you visit? What do your siblings do in Birmingham? Which mosque do you go to? What line of work are you in? What book did you last read?
Don’t go to bed!” my PR messaged from LA. It was midnight in the UK and Beyoncé was about to step out wearing one of my designs at the 2013 Grammys. The image of Beyoncé in my jumpsuit was everywhere the next day. The phone calls and emails flooded in; there were interview requests and order inquiries. With just one appearance, Beyoncé had put my emerging fashion label on the map. My appointment book was filled back-to-back for the international buying season in Paris the following month. Armed with my latest collection in two gigantic wheelie suitcases, I passed through security screening for the Eurostar train. Snaking through the immigration queue, I stepped forward to the counter with my British Passport in hand…
Before I tell you any more, there are two things you need to know about me. The first is that I am the British-born son of Pakistani-Afghan immigrants who came to the UK seeking a better life for themselves and their children. The second is that my skin tone is brown – brown enough for people throughout the course of my life to hurl a variety of racial slurs at me.
The elder kids had taught us to run away from the police, but there was nowhere I could run at immigration. Yet today was going to be different. I remember the officer was wearing a green tie and a grey suit that shone, and I wondered if it was maybe the result of ironing directly on to the fabric. But his questions snapped me out of my musings. How much money do you have in your account? When was the last time you went to the mosque? Why did you go to Pakistan? Where exactly did you visit? What do your siblings do in Birmingham? Which mosque do you go to? What line of work are you in? What book did you last read?
Golden moment: Beyoncé in her jumpsuit at the 55th annual Grammys in LA in 2013.
Photograph: Steve Granitz/WireImage
In my previous immigration interviews, the questions had been generic. I would be taken aside and I would give my responses, an officer would tap them into a computer, and eventually I would get back my passport. But this guy was different. He wanted to know my eating habits, my spending habits. I was perplexed. I asked: “Why have you detained me? It’s been nearly an hour now?” He replied that if I didn’t cooperate, he could lock me up at Paddington Green police station for 14 days under the Terrorism Act, without an arrest warrant.
I changed tack in the hope that the unlikeliness of a designer/terrorist crossover would ease suspicions. “Look at Google,” I said. “I make clothes. I just dressed Beyoncé for her win at the Grammys. And I’m going to Paris to sell my new collection.”
It didn’t work, the questions continued. He asked for my phone. I handed it over. Then he walked out of the room. Two hours passed. Had I done something wrong? Was there another Osman Yousefzada, one with unsavoury links? Without my phone, I reflected in flashbacks and memories on how I got there. This kind of experience had been reality for some of us since 9/11.
As a young child in the 1980s, I had been called a Paki, a Wog, a black bastard. In the New Labour dawn of the 90s, I was an acronym: BME, for Black Minority Ethnic. Then the Twin Towers were struck and I became the enemy within – the homegrown terrorist.
Three hours passed in the pokey grey immigration room. The person I was due to meet in Paris had probably left and there was no sign of my interrogator. The fourth hour came and I was still waiting to be released. Did I have to apologise on behalf of the nearly two billion Muslims out there for the tiny number of fundamentalists who have brought our faith into disrepute? Growing up, I wanted to be white for a while. White people were the norm. They didn’t have to apologise for their bad apples.
The immigration officer finally reappeared. My whole sales campaign and my livelihood for the following season were in jeopardy. I needed to get to Paris. Finally, after my lengthy protestations, the silence broke. “If you see anything, or if you go to your local mosque and meet anyone who may be doing something wrong, I want you to call us. I will give you a number.” I must have looked confused, the cogs turning in my head. Was he trying to recruit me? The romance of espionage flickered through my mind for a nano-second. I replied: “But I don’t really go. I haven’t been to the mosque for ages.” My phone was finally handed back, a new ticket issued and he escorted me through immigration.
Thinking back, this was a small, personal reminder of how the colour of my skin and my Muslim name was used to assess the level of risk I posed to society. Recently, on a much larger scale, it’s the same racial markers that sections of the media have instinctively applied to Black Lives Matter protesters, undermining the moral righteousness of their simple demand not to be killed with descriptions of the protests as “chaotic”, or focusing on “thuggery” and “looting” – two Hindustani words introduced into English by colonialists, connoisseurs in those same arts.
I changed tack in the hope that the unlikeliness of a designer/terrorist crossover would ease suspicions. “Look at Google,” I said. “I make clothes. I just dressed Beyoncé for her win at the Grammys. And I’m going to Paris to sell my new collection.”
It didn’t work, the questions continued. He asked for my phone. I handed it over. Then he walked out of the room. Two hours passed. Had I done something wrong? Was there another Osman Yousefzada, one with unsavoury links? Without my phone, I reflected in flashbacks and memories on how I got there. This kind of experience had been reality for some of us since 9/11.
As a young child in the 1980s, I had been called a Paki, a Wog, a black bastard. In the New Labour dawn of the 90s, I was an acronym: BME, for Black Minority Ethnic. Then the Twin Towers were struck and I became the enemy within – the homegrown terrorist.
Three hours passed in the pokey grey immigration room. The person I was due to meet in Paris had probably left and there was no sign of my interrogator. The fourth hour came and I was still waiting to be released. Did I have to apologise on behalf of the nearly two billion Muslims out there for the tiny number of fundamentalists who have brought our faith into disrepute? Growing up, I wanted to be white for a while. White people were the norm. They didn’t have to apologise for their bad apples.
The immigration officer finally reappeared. My whole sales campaign and my livelihood for the following season were in jeopardy. I needed to get to Paris. Finally, after my lengthy protestations, the silence broke. “If you see anything, or if you go to your local mosque and meet anyone who may be doing something wrong, I want you to call us. I will give you a number.” I must have looked confused, the cogs turning in my head. Was he trying to recruit me? The romance of espionage flickered through my mind for a nano-second. I replied: “But I don’t really go. I haven’t been to the mosque for ages.” My phone was finally handed back, a new ticket issued and he escorted me through immigration.
Thinking back, this was a small, personal reminder of how the colour of my skin and my Muslim name was used to assess the level of risk I posed to society. Recently, on a much larger scale, it’s the same racial markers that sections of the media have instinctively applied to Black Lives Matter protesters, undermining the moral righteousness of their simple demand not to be killed with descriptions of the protests as “chaotic”, or focusing on “thuggery” and “looting” – two Hindustani words introduced into English by colonialists, connoisseurs in those same arts.
United we stand: Malcolm X in Smethwick and Birmingham during a visit to the Midlands. He was assassinated nine days later on his return to the United States on 12 February 1965. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images
Growing up, my identity was shaped by a sense of the injustices of colonial rule, through tales I heard from my parents and elders in the community. The migration stories of those who arrived in the UK are all different. We come from different classes, different backgrounds, different privileges and had different skill-sets. In the United States, many South Asian migrants arrived with a university degree. In the UK, quite a few migrants from Pakistan came from the peasant classes, invited to do the jobs no one wanted in textile mills and foundries.
When they arrived in England, my parents couldn’t read or write. As illiterates, they felt unworthy, bowing their heads to others, hoping their children would be able to join letters to form words in order to better navigate the system and eventually overcome the barriers they had experienced. But for now their sweat, blood and hard work was met with insults, spit and beatings at the hands of racists.
But the stories of my elder siblings, cousins and younger uncles were different. They shed their fears and chose to stand up and fight. In 1965, when they were young, Malcolm X visited Birmingham to show solidarity, invited by the Indian Workers Organisation. (He had just visited Mecca on the hajj pilgrimage.) As he stepped out on to Marshall Street in Smethwick, he said: “I have come because I am disturbed by reports that coloured people in Smethwick are being treated badly. I have heard they are being treated as the Jews were under Hitler.” That evening he spoke at Birmingham University’s Islamic Society, followed by dinner at a Bangladeshi restaurant called Chamon. Nine days later he was assassinated.
Another of America’s greats, Muhammad Ali, visited the city numerous times, and the city named a community centre after him. This wasn’t Birmingham, Alabama, this was Birmingham, England! In its central mosque, different communities – West Indians, Africans, Bangladeshis – stood shoulder to shoulder with the greatest boxer the world had seen. Our visitors were some of the leaders of the civil rights struggles in America standing together with us. They did so much to highlight and fight against the injustices suffered by their communities – and in doing so inspired other marginalised communities around the world.
When they arrived in England, my parents couldn’t read or write. As illiterates, they felt unworthy, bowing their heads to others, hoping their children would be able to join letters to form words in order to better navigate the system and eventually overcome the barriers they had experienced. But for now their sweat, blood and hard work was met with insults, spit and beatings at the hands of racists.
But the stories of my elder siblings, cousins and younger uncles were different. They shed their fears and chose to stand up and fight. In 1965, when they were young, Malcolm X visited Birmingham to show solidarity, invited by the Indian Workers Organisation. (He had just visited Mecca on the hajj pilgrimage.) As he stepped out on to Marshall Street in Smethwick, he said: “I have come because I am disturbed by reports that coloured people in Smethwick are being treated badly. I have heard they are being treated as the Jews were under Hitler.” That evening he spoke at Birmingham University’s Islamic Society, followed by dinner at a Bangladeshi restaurant called Chamon. Nine days later he was assassinated.
Another of America’s greats, Muhammad Ali, visited the city numerous times, and the city named a community centre after him. This wasn’t Birmingham, Alabama, this was Birmingham, England! In its central mosque, different communities – West Indians, Africans, Bangladeshis – stood shoulder to shoulder with the greatest boxer the world had seen. Our visitors were some of the leaders of the civil rights struggles in America standing together with us. They did so much to highlight and fight against the injustices suffered by their communities – and in doing so inspired other marginalised communities around the world.
A familiar face among the faithful: Muhammad Ali sits among the congregation at Birmingham’s Central Mosque, after shunning a special seat placed for him to face his fans and fellow-worshippers on 7 August 1983.
Photograph: BPM Media
That included us in Britain – no less racist, no less tokenistic, no less cruel than the United States as an offshore centre for the profits earned from slavery and colonialism. What rose out of this was a comradeship across black and brown ethnic lines, solidarity across ethnic groups, a coalition of young men and women that fell under the umbrella of “political blackness”. This position was radically different from the positions of their parents, who mostly preferred to keep their heads down. These were young people inspired by Black Power and the freedom movements taking place around the colonised world. It didn’t matter if you were from the West Indies or Pakistan or Bangladesh. Political blackness was a united front against racism, an effort to protest the injustices being inflicted on all non-white groups. Political blackness was the colour of politics, not skin.
Recently, I asked my cousin, who was active in the Asian Youth Movements (AYM) in the north of England in the 1980s, if he still considered himself black. He replied, “We are still black.” I left wondering how a 60-year-old British Pakistani man, living a very simple, modest life in a deprived Asian, predominately Muslim part of Birmingham, considered himself to be black. He wasn’t saying it to appropriate another culture, to impress anyone, or to jump on a bandwagon. It was his personal interpretation of his own lived experience. For him, black simply meant non-white.
Along with Paki, he had been called black, or more accurately black bastard, as a term of abuse many times. He had arrived in the UK a few years before Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood address, a toxic, racist speech delivered a mile from our Birmingham house. Powell’s words – “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” – incited and gave strength to racism. White supremacists would come “Paki bashing” as a regular Sunday activity. My cousin once witnessed the aftermath of a terrible beating of one of our family members, an uncle who never left his home again. It was under the banner of blackness, the universal “other”, that marginalised communities got together to protect themselves and fight back. Political blackness was a vehicle of unity and change.
Language changes over the course of time and words take on new meanings. When Malcolm X said: “There is a new type of negro, who calls himself black,” he was noting a new insistence on self-definition, of taking control and being able to label yourself and your own struggle. Black was strong and proud.
Leila Hassan, an inner member of the British Black Panthers, told me that when the BBP was launched, in 1968, black was a political statement. There were five prominent south Asian members of the British black panthers: Mala Sen, Farrukh Dhondy, Sunit Chopra, Vivan Sundaram and also the artist Rasheed Araeen. It included everyone and all forms of struggle against oppression at that time: Palestinians, Asians, West Indians. “To be honest, I didn’t really comprehend the term until recently,” she told me, “but it appears that individuality is far more of an important factor today, or what they call sectionality. I am this or you’re that, rather than a collective common struggle against an oppressor.”
Recently, I asked my cousin, who was active in the Asian Youth Movements (AYM) in the north of England in the 1980s, if he still considered himself black. He replied, “We are still black.” I left wondering how a 60-year-old British Pakistani man, living a very simple, modest life in a deprived Asian, predominately Muslim part of Birmingham, considered himself to be black. He wasn’t saying it to appropriate another culture, to impress anyone, or to jump on a bandwagon. It was his personal interpretation of his own lived experience. For him, black simply meant non-white.
Along with Paki, he had been called black, or more accurately black bastard, as a term of abuse many times. He had arrived in the UK a few years before Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood address, a toxic, racist speech delivered a mile from our Birmingham house. Powell’s words – “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” – incited and gave strength to racism. White supremacists would come “Paki bashing” as a regular Sunday activity. My cousin once witnessed the aftermath of a terrible beating of one of our family members, an uncle who never left his home again. It was under the banner of blackness, the universal “other”, that marginalised communities got together to protect themselves and fight back. Political blackness was a vehicle of unity and change.
Language changes over the course of time and words take on new meanings. When Malcolm X said: “There is a new type of negro, who calls himself black,” he was noting a new insistence on self-definition, of taking control and being able to label yourself and your own struggle. Black was strong and proud.
Leila Hassan, an inner member of the British Black Panthers, told me that when the BBP was launched, in 1968, black was a political statement. There were five prominent south Asian members of the British black panthers: Mala Sen, Farrukh Dhondy, Sunit Chopra, Vivan Sundaram and also the artist Rasheed Araeen. It included everyone and all forms of struggle against oppression at that time: Palestinians, Asians, West Indians. “To be honest, I didn’t really comprehend the term until recently,” she told me, “but it appears that individuality is far more of an important factor today, or what they call sectionality. I am this or you’re that, rather than a collective common struggle against an oppressor.”
The good fight: Leila Hassan, a core member of the British Black Panthers. She went on to become one of the founders of the Race Collective.
Photograph: Neil Kenlock Archive
Perhaps she was referring to the fact that solidarity across ethnic lines soon began to crumble. I went to university during the 1990s, when Tony Blair’s New Labour party clinched a landslide victory and Cool Britannia was in full swing. This is when I started to see representations of myself on TV. Goodness Gracious Me challenged stereotypes about Asians being submissive. It was the decade that Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things won the Booker prize, Ayub Khan Din’s East is East won the Bafta for best film, and the indie song A Brimful of Asha made it to No 1. Bollywood culture entered the mainstream – henna tattoos, bindis and Hindu goddess T-shirts became available in upmarket designer stores. Yoga centres popped up everywhere as meccas for white, able-bodied, middle-class women. At that time it didn’t seem like appropriation – it seemed that we were being accepted and our culture was being embraced. We were sharing, we were assimilating, and we could just about get our foot through the door. We were having our moment. Suddenly, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis had become the largest minority group in the country and certain elements within the community, such as Asian businessmen and some community leaders, didn’t want to see themselves as being part of the black coalition any more. This is when the A in BME was added. BAME. Black Asian Minority Ethnic. For many, “political blackness” disappeared.
But the superficial romance of white acceptance of Asian culture proved to be short-lived. While some Asians straddled the ladder of model minority, others fell towards the bottom of the heap after 9/11.
I asked Leila: “If political blackness is dead, do we need another umbrella term to harness our unity today? To keep this momentum going? To learn from the past, when unity fragmented along identity lines and racialised communities found themselves competing against one another for government resources?” Like colonialism, the system had divided us again. Those who had fought against the system became part of it.
She said she thought it was up to the current activists to determine a term for a common struggle against oppression. So, can that term still be “politically black”? Some people think so. Writer Rahila Gupta, a member of the Southall Black Sisters, a regional collective established in 1979 to support African, Caribbean and Asian women who had experienced gender-based violence, still describes herself as a black feminist. It has been her identity since the late 1970s. To her, blackness is a politics of solidarity. The word black gave her and other activists an inclusive identity, and allowed for a powerful politics that is expansive. To introduce herself as black, allowed her to combat colourism, and any anti-black sentiments that she came across in her communities. She says it has never been about denying cultural differences between ethnicities, or erasing distinctiveness, or appropriating each other’s culture. It wasn’t a term to flatten our difference; it was a term that brought us together, allowing minorities to come together to fight racism.
But the superficial romance of white acceptance of Asian culture proved to be short-lived. While some Asians straddled the ladder of model minority, others fell towards the bottom of the heap after 9/11.
I asked Leila: “If political blackness is dead, do we need another umbrella term to harness our unity today? To keep this momentum going? To learn from the past, when unity fragmented along identity lines and racialised communities found themselves competing against one another for government resources?” Like colonialism, the system had divided us again. Those who had fought against the system became part of it.
She said she thought it was up to the current activists to determine a term for a common struggle against oppression. So, can that term still be “politically black”? Some people think so. Writer Rahila Gupta, a member of the Southall Black Sisters, a regional collective established in 1979 to support African, Caribbean and Asian women who had experienced gender-based violence, still describes herself as a black feminist. It has been her identity since the late 1970s. To her, blackness is a politics of solidarity. The word black gave her and other activists an inclusive identity, and allowed for a powerful politics that is expansive. To introduce herself as black, allowed her to combat colourism, and any anti-black sentiments that she came across in her communities. She says it has never been about denying cultural differences between ethnicities, or erasing distinctiveness, or appropriating each other’s culture. It wasn’t a term to flatten our difference; it was a term that brought us together, allowing minorities to come together to fight racism.
Minorities came together to fight racism: Southall Black Sisters marching in the 1980s in Southall. Photograph: Courtesy of Southall Black Sisters
Political blackness is a unique part of the British civil rights struggle and shows what diverse racialised groups were able to achieve together. There are still individuals and groups of people who identify themselves as politically black, and who have invested a lifetime of work into these politics. We still need to honour their struggles and the racism they faced, and fought against. It is also on their backs that the next generation stands. Perhaps there is something that can be salvaged from it, and the current conversation of its demise is an intergenerational struggle of semantics. I wondered where I stood in this conversation, for me the colour of my own politics is about solidarity, inclusion and a collective voice without the need to marginalise other voices. Joshua Virasami of BLM UK once told me for the downtrodden masses, solidarity is our superpower and we ignore it at our own risk. These words stuck with me.
If political blackness is dead, then maybe we need a new set of ideas with its own terminology, a language that allows us to come together to fight, especially as often our struggles have more in common than not. A term that doesn’t divide us or fragment us, that doesn’t pitch us against one another fighting for scraps of regenerational grants from an elitist system built on race and class privilege. Together, we are stronger!
Click here to view this article on the Guardian website.
If political blackness is dead, then maybe we need a new set of ideas with its own terminology, a language that allows us to come together to fight, especially as often our struggles have more in common than not. A term that doesn’t divide us or fragment us, that doesn’t pitch us against one another fighting for scraps of regenerational grants from an elitist system built on race and class privilege. Together, we are stronger!
Click here to view this article on the Guardian website.