i know this sounds harsh but if you’re a second-generation immigrant, your home was never India. it’s where you come from and what a huge part of your life and who you are has been shaped by, but the reality of it, the domestic every day stuff, that was never yours. and if you were born in the UK like me, or somewhere like the US, Canada, Australia, etc, at worst your romanticisation completely dismisses your own privilege and tbh, sounds and looks really similar the white gaze you’re so willing to rip to shreds when it comes from anyone else. and i get it, like, i get feeling like you don’t belong where you actually live, and thinking there’s something more to a place where everyone looks more like you, and the parts of your culture that get made fun of where you are, are welcomed or just the norm.Â
but it also feels like this weird inability those of us in diaspora have to see ourselves and our lives and experiences as whole. a few years ago, i fell hard for all that sad brown girl poetry, characterising all of us as missing pieces or being stuck between two places. i still feel it sometimes, sure. it’s a real thing, and i’m not gonna dispute that, but i’m so bored of giving credence to this idea that the second-generation immigrant experience (or third, or fourth, or whatever, even first when you’ve moved from your homeland at a young age and barely remember it) is inherently lesser and built on some vaguely mango-flavoured nothingness.Â
it just is what it is. i’m not some balancing act of missing pieces because my life doesn’t look wholly Indian or British - whatever those two admittedly grossly generalised identities are “supposed” to look like. being the only Indian person in my classes was real, ordering shitty Indian takeout in Essex when I missed my mum was real, finding the ras malai I like in Tesco was real lmao, talking to my cousin in Chandigarh’s husband two nights ago about hating the British museum and being told, “wow, I guess you do have an Indian side”…y’know? it’s kinda ugly and boring and uncertain, sure, but it’s still a life. and I find it bizarre that so many of us are willing to hold up a photo frame to some part of an ancestral homeland we have no personal connection to, and put it on a pedestal as if our lives would magically be any better there, or we’ve been floating in the ether since birth and only then would we be given some sort of substance.Â
like, you are what you are, you’re a brown fraction of a white population and that means something, your parents or grandparents or great-grandparents were able to leave that country and start a life for you in this one, that means something. i know the only vocabulary we’ve been given to talk about how we feel is 90% derivative prose about coconuts and samosas or some shit, but like…i’m so bored lmao. i’m so bored and tired and fed up of us feeling entitled to pretty jewellery and fabric, and making no effort to look at our ancestral homelands as real places with real people and real histories, and then piling on all this masturbatory angst about our own emptiness.Â
i don’t wanna preach about something as personal as people’s identities, but i know i became so much happier when i started looking at my own life and experiences as real and whole in their own right. when you don’t, you start searching for yourself in all these places you end up disrespecting by treating as emotional playgrounds for yourself. and your life honestly is real and whole in its own right; you were born into the circumstances you were, why would it look like anyone else’s?Â
seriously, you don’t need to justify or compare everything you do to resident Indians - so much of that clumsy, embarrassing process of ~finding yourself~ is about that sense of removal and being a minority, why do you expect someone who’s never been in that position to understand your choices better than yourself, or hold the key to your identity? you’ve lived different lives. yours doesn’t have to be some pulitzer-winning tale of ethnic nostalgia white liberals lap up on their commute to work either lmao.Â
you drink store-bought watery lychee juice from a carton watching bollywood movies you need the subtitles for. okay. it just is what it is.
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