Cheers me dears
Thanks for all the amazing emails everyone - every time I feel like quitting I log in and someone else has left me an inspiring story, a message of support, some kind words... there's a lot of us out there, I guess, in the same situation worlds over, many far far worse off than I will ever be, just trying to make a living and getting our voices heard. I found myself two jobs yesterday - one is matching up nannies with celebrity clients. Fortunately, Americans are pretty dumb and you wave any kind of visa in their face and they stop asking questions, which shelved that problem. The other is watching prime-time TV for 14 bucks an hour and then writing about it for an online magazine. I can think of worse occupations. The man situation has not visibly improved. I am now being pursued by some lunatic who keeps calling at weird hours for no apparent reason. Fortunately, Carlos the Puerto-Rican-Cubano-American has so far revealed no hidden children, venereal diseases or hints of psychopathy, and has not yet accused me of credit card fraud or self-obsession, so at least I have one person I can call who is (so far) not off their fucking tits.
Someone asked me why I'm such a wanderer, why, after five years I suddenly decided to stop, and how the hell a black activist ended up inside a middle-class white chick's body.
Hmm. Here goes in answering that one...
Let's start by introducing you all to the Feo Family.
My dearest mother and father got hitched when my Mum was 17 and my Dad was 22. They spent their youth discovering the flaws in various methods of contraception and consequently churning out children. My Mother then hit on the pill, and took a ten year break. They then decided to go for one last brat, and got two instead, myself and Cinderella. The Feo family are that dying breed of huge mafia families with all the fighting and the stresses of seven very different people living in the same house. We squabbled, we squalled, we argued, we laughed, we got extremely drunk at Christmas time, and we got on with life in North Wales. Dearest Dad was always good for a laugh as a permanently stressed, misanthropic Scouse family doctor.
"So this fucking woman comes into the surgery and says 'Doctor, I don't know what to do Doctor, I think I have a gland problem. I just can't lose weight'."
He chortles and downs a glass of wine in one gulp.
"Sose I said to her, 'Look, they were no fat people in Auschwitz. Think about it'."
He goes off on a mad cackle, and my Mum joins in, two scousers united against an ugly world.
Growing up in Wales sucked. It was not multicultural. A few cows, some fat girls called Sharon and Angharad, and a lot of sheep. You have only two options. You get the fuck out, or you stay and marry a guy called Gareth and work down the local Lunn Poly and stress about your cellulite with Denise the Beauty Therapist over a cup of tea and a slice of Bara Brith. So I worked my ass off and got out, much to the shock of my dear family, who thought I was destined, like Sylvia Plath, for bad poetry and the gas oven.
Cambridge was cool. Everyone spoke posh though. And they all knew each other. And they all knew Hanif Kureishi. And everyone wanted to be actors and thought they were funny. I did too, and joined the Footlights, and pretended to be as posh as everyone else, and didn't go back to Wales very often. The incentive for returning, in the shape of a very nice house in the middle of the mountains, had disappeared as Daddy had hit on a little problem with the tax man, which I'm certain is why they're now happily settled far away from the Inland Revenue Service in rural Spain. So I did my Cambridge time, wrote a lot of articles, acted in a lot of bad plays, and discovered something called Postcolonial Literature, which was all written by brown people suffering oppression and trying to struggle free from the last vestiges of English colonial rule. My final year was shaped by amazing and inspiring tutors from Ghana and India and Canada and Nigeria. England seemed like a very small place. So I left, and went to live in Argentina.
Argentinians aren't South American. Argentinians hate brown people, and Indians, and short dark people, and tall dark people, and anyone who doesn't look or act like a European. It wasn't the best choice. So I went to India and worked with Buddhist monks. Then I went to Cambridge again and wrote about South-Asian immigrants in the US. And then I went to Nepal and studied with more Buddhist monks. And then Tibet. And then France, and Italy, and Spain, and across the sea to Trinidad, and Tobago, and Antigua, and Grenada, and St Maarten, and Anguilla, and Mustique, and St Barts, and Jamaica, and Haiti, and Costa Rica, and Guatemala, and the States.... it goes on. And the more I travelled, the more I couldn't bear the thought of returning to the island in the north, where my friends had settled into domestic London existences and took drugs to make the weekend bearable, and my family started to break apart and tear themselves and each other into pieces. And I had started to notice that what I'd read and studied in postcolonial literature was all true. People weren't treated the same. The West Indians were cussed at by rich white people. The Hispanics were seen as the rats of Florida. The Indians and Pakistanis I hung out with were suddenly dirty asylum seekers. All these people who I'd travelled with and had sketched in the empty canvas of my life - I was meant to be better than them?
Travelling is hard. It's addictive. You go to one place, make new friends, start learning a new language and culture, you thirst for more. You give up your friends and family and support system, and live on your wits alone. It's an adrenalin rush. You answer to nobody. You suffer the bliss of permanent nostalgia, memories and tinges of places you've been, places you've yet to go. You're constantly whispering both goodbye and hello in the same breath. I'd suffer two months working 16 hour days on a boat owned by rich assholes for the thrill of a big pay check and the knowledge that the day the boat docked in port, I could fly somewhere new. You survive inside yourself and learn to be hard, and suspicious, and inquisitive, and entirely self-sufficient. There were no guys in this time, noone I let in. Just nights here and there, a few farewells, only time for experiences and people. The people I've met just for one day are still around, still in my life. And the people I knew from my childhood somehow slipped silently away.
But travelling is all about deferral. You observe and store up what you need, but you know, always, that you're escaping something, postponing the inevitable. For me it was probably a fear of normality. Of turning into Glenda who works at Lunn Poly and has cellulite on her arms. Of living in London and taking the tube to work every day and coming home to a balding twenty-something asleep in the armchair with his hand still in his pants. Of opening the paper and reading about these far off countries and people. It was a fear of failing to be a writer. As long as I kept moving and writing my novel, I wouldn't have to deal with the fact noone actually liked it.
The funny thing is, I always said I'd stop moving when I came to New York. And the last year when the travelling didn't satiate me any more, and I wanted to see, tenuously, if I could make it as a writer, and start telling people about what I'd seen, and why the world really shouldn't be as fucked up as it is, that's when I knew it had come to an end. I will never stop loving travelling, but for some reason, this place feels more like home than any other, no matter how hard it is. In New York, you don't travel, the travelling comes to you in the huge breadth of people and cultures living on top of one another in uneasy co-existence. And it feels like somewhere I can say something in a more useful way than anywhere else. Things happen for a reason, I always think. And I'm here for a reason. And whatever happens, when my visa runs out on August 23rd, I won't be going anywhere. I'll still be mouthing off about immigration and racism and all that sucks about the world.
I'll just have a lot more words written.
And Mum and Dad are still happily living in Spain. Dad has taken up several new hobbies in retirement - shoot the feral creatures with an air pistol, and torment the senile German couple next door. They are content, away from their warring offspring.
Someone asked me why I'm such a wanderer, why, after five years I suddenly decided to stop, and how the hell a black activist ended up inside a middle-class white chick's body.
Hmm. Here goes in answering that one...
Let's start by introducing you all to the Feo Family.
My dearest mother and father got hitched when my Mum was 17 and my Dad was 22. They spent their youth discovering the flaws in various methods of contraception and consequently churning out children. My Mother then hit on the pill, and took a ten year break. They then decided to go for one last brat, and got two instead, myself and Cinderella. The Feo family are that dying breed of huge mafia families with all the fighting and the stresses of seven very different people living in the same house. We squabbled, we squalled, we argued, we laughed, we got extremely drunk at Christmas time, and we got on with life in North Wales. Dearest Dad was always good for a laugh as a permanently stressed, misanthropic Scouse family doctor.
"So this fucking woman comes into the surgery and says 'Doctor, I don't know what to do Doctor, I think I have a gland problem. I just can't lose weight'."
He chortles and downs a glass of wine in one gulp.
"Sose I said to her, 'Look, they were no fat people in Auschwitz. Think about it'."
He goes off on a mad cackle, and my Mum joins in, two scousers united against an ugly world.
Growing up in Wales sucked. It was not multicultural. A few cows, some fat girls called Sharon and Angharad, and a lot of sheep. You have only two options. You get the fuck out, or you stay and marry a guy called Gareth and work down the local Lunn Poly and stress about your cellulite with Denise the Beauty Therapist over a cup of tea and a slice of Bara Brith. So I worked my ass off and got out, much to the shock of my dear family, who thought I was destined, like Sylvia Plath, for bad poetry and the gas oven.
Cambridge was cool. Everyone spoke posh though. And they all knew each other. And they all knew Hanif Kureishi. And everyone wanted to be actors and thought they were funny. I did too, and joined the Footlights, and pretended to be as posh as everyone else, and didn't go back to Wales very often. The incentive for returning, in the shape of a very nice house in the middle of the mountains, had disappeared as Daddy had hit on a little problem with the tax man, which I'm certain is why they're now happily settled far away from the Inland Revenue Service in rural Spain. So I did my Cambridge time, wrote a lot of articles, acted in a lot of bad plays, and discovered something called Postcolonial Literature, which was all written by brown people suffering oppression and trying to struggle free from the last vestiges of English colonial rule. My final year was shaped by amazing and inspiring tutors from Ghana and India and Canada and Nigeria. England seemed like a very small place. So I left, and went to live in Argentina.
Argentinians aren't South American. Argentinians hate brown people, and Indians, and short dark people, and tall dark people, and anyone who doesn't look or act like a European. It wasn't the best choice. So I went to India and worked with Buddhist monks. Then I went to Cambridge again and wrote about South-Asian immigrants in the US. And then I went to Nepal and studied with more Buddhist monks. And then Tibet. And then France, and Italy, and Spain, and across the sea to Trinidad, and Tobago, and Antigua, and Grenada, and St Maarten, and Anguilla, and Mustique, and St Barts, and Jamaica, and Haiti, and Costa Rica, and Guatemala, and the States.... it goes on. And the more I travelled, the more I couldn't bear the thought of returning to the island in the north, where my friends had settled into domestic London existences and took drugs to make the weekend bearable, and my family started to break apart and tear themselves and each other into pieces. And I had started to notice that what I'd read and studied in postcolonial literature was all true. People weren't treated the same. The West Indians were cussed at by rich white people. The Hispanics were seen as the rats of Florida. The Indians and Pakistanis I hung out with were suddenly dirty asylum seekers. All these people who I'd travelled with and had sketched in the empty canvas of my life - I was meant to be better than them?
Travelling is hard. It's addictive. You go to one place, make new friends, start learning a new language and culture, you thirst for more. You give up your friends and family and support system, and live on your wits alone. It's an adrenalin rush. You answer to nobody. You suffer the bliss of permanent nostalgia, memories and tinges of places you've been, places you've yet to go. You're constantly whispering both goodbye and hello in the same breath. I'd suffer two months working 16 hour days on a boat owned by rich assholes for the thrill of a big pay check and the knowledge that the day the boat docked in port, I could fly somewhere new. You survive inside yourself and learn to be hard, and suspicious, and inquisitive, and entirely self-sufficient. There were no guys in this time, noone I let in. Just nights here and there, a few farewells, only time for experiences and people. The people I've met just for one day are still around, still in my life. And the people I knew from my childhood somehow slipped silently away.
But travelling is all about deferral. You observe and store up what you need, but you know, always, that you're escaping something, postponing the inevitable. For me it was probably a fear of normality. Of turning into Glenda who works at Lunn Poly and has cellulite on her arms. Of living in London and taking the tube to work every day and coming home to a balding twenty-something asleep in the armchair with his hand still in his pants. Of opening the paper and reading about these far off countries and people. It was a fear of failing to be a writer. As long as I kept moving and writing my novel, I wouldn't have to deal with the fact noone actually liked it.
The funny thing is, I always said I'd stop moving when I came to New York. And the last year when the travelling didn't satiate me any more, and I wanted to see, tenuously, if I could make it as a writer, and start telling people about what I'd seen, and why the world really shouldn't be as fucked up as it is, that's when I knew it had come to an end. I will never stop loving travelling, but for some reason, this place feels more like home than any other, no matter how hard it is. In New York, you don't travel, the travelling comes to you in the huge breadth of people and cultures living on top of one another in uneasy co-existence. And it feels like somewhere I can say something in a more useful way than anywhere else. Things happen for a reason, I always think. And I'm here for a reason. And whatever happens, when my visa runs out on August 23rd, I won't be going anywhere. I'll still be mouthing off about immigration and racism and all that sucks about the world.
I'll just have a lot more words written.
And Mum and Dad are still happily living in Spain. Dad has taken up several new hobbies in retirement - shoot the feral creatures with an air pistol, and torment the senile German couple next door. They are content, away from their warring offspring.
MIMI IN NY | 11:47 PM |
