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= The Good Immigrant = The Good Immigrant is a collection of twenty-one essays compiled by award-winning writer Nikesh Shukla and published by Unbound in 2016 after an extensive crowd-funding campaign endorsed by celebrities such as J.K. Rowling, David Nicholls, Jonathan Coe and Evie Wyld. Written by twenty British authors who identify as BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), Shukla’s book focusses on personal experiences of race, immigration, identity, ‘otherness’, to explore the social impact of immigrant and ethnic minority life in the United Kingdom. Featuring the voices of notable Britons such as Riz Ahmed (actor/comedian), Reni Eddo-Lodge (journalist), Nish Kumar (comedian) and Vinay Patel (playwright), this compilation of essays has been shortlisted for Book of the Year at the British Book Awards and has inspired the American sequel The Good Immigrant USA.

= Summary = The Good Immigrant is an edited book of essays compiled by writer Nikesh Shukla which aims to “document… what it means to be a person of colour now” in light of what Shukla notes in the book’s foreword “the backwards attitude to immigration and refugees [and] the systematic racism that runs through [Britain]”. Written by twenty one British authors of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, The Good Immigrant explores the personal and universal experiences of immigrant and ethnic minority life in the United Kingdom. Shukla’s book tells stories of “anger, displacement, defensiveness, curiosity, absurdity” as well as “death, class, microaggression, popular culture, access, free movement, stake in society, lingual fracas, masculinity, and more”.

= Crowdfunding = In an interview at the Edinburgh Festival, Shukla stressed that the inception of this book was borne from “gatekeeping” within the publishing industry and a desire to see diverse opinions on bookshelves rather than just diversity panels. To achieve this, Shukla worked with Unbound, a British publishing house which utilises crowdfunding to enable the publication of “books readers want”. In an interview with multi-national newspaper The Guardian, Unbound’s co-founder John Mitchinson stated that crowdfunding means that “the handwringing that usually surrounds this issue is replaced by positive action on the part of both contributors and potential readers.”

The Good Immigrant reached its funding target in just three days after receiving public support from the notable authors J.K. Rowling, David Nicholls, Jonathan Coe and Evie Wyld who were amongst the book’s 470 supporters. Rowling has received a dedication in the book, after her public support of The Good Immigrant with a tweet which stated that it was “an important, timely read”. Nicholls also publicly endorsed The Good Immigrant stating that “I did want to support the project because it’s an important subject, and not something I know enough about.”

= Summary of Key Texts =

Nikesh Shukla

Namaste

Shukla’s essay Namaste interrogates the importance of language, and his own personal experiences of  “cultural misappropriation” and the feeling that “when they know you’re half Indian, one person will try to impress their knowledge of your culture on you.” Beginning with a recount of a microaggression he experienced after trying to quiet a student party across his street, Shukla recounts his feelings in the wake of being verbally abused by the drunk students and his inability to “deal with this slight.” This event causes Shukla to consider the number of times in his life language and cultural misappropriation have wounded him, including his confusion of “hippies, wearing OM and Ganesha parachute pants, their hair in dreadlocks, bindis mark[ing] out the third eyes in their middle of their foreheads”, the misuse of the word 'namaste', and his disbelief at dining at an Indian restaurant “owned by a white guy” which served “Chicken Chuddi.” However, Shukla’s story also delves into the more existential, questioning the presence of his “three voices” “Guj-lish, [his] normal voice, and white literary party” and his sense that he has “splintered into three personas” and his experience of “shame” within the publishing industry.

Varaidzo

A Guide to Being Black

Varaidzo recounts “a few key lessons [she] learnt” from the “confusing” experience of growing up mixed-race in the U.K. in what she refers to as “the guide I needed when I was younger:… the official guide to being black.” In this essay, Varaidzo recounts her first experience of the ‘One Drop’ rule at the age of nine years old and her realisation that “as a term, mixed-race could never fully illustrate [her] experiences” and that “the world saw blackness in me before it saw anything else and operated around me with blackness in mind.” Varaidzo’s lessons in growing up mixed-race continues through her guide to “political follicles”, the journey towards understanding her hair, “the N word” where she explores the duality of her feelings about being “allowed” as a “birthright” and yet having “only ever learned the white rule for this word” and as a result feeling that “this is a word that should never be said.” The last lesson in this essay analyses the nature of ‘performative blackness’ and her struggle with the fact that “as long as black people have been visible to the Western eye, our collective role has been that of the entertainer” and that although “being black can have a shared experience, not all black experiences are the same.” Varaidzo concludes her guide with stating that “the truth is: there is no singular way to be black… our worst performance is entertaining the idea that there is.”

Chimene Suleyman

My Name is My Name

In this essay, Chimene Suleyman explores the nature of cultural integrity within Britain in relation to her name. Beginning with the observation that “standardisation is the backbone of the Empire,” Suleyman observes that “if cultures were to survive in England it would be on the shoulders of bastardisation” and relates this observation to the English phonetic spelling of ‘Chimene’ as ‘Shimen’ on her legal documents, as opposed to her family’s use of ‘Chimene’ “at home… [and] on birthday cakes and cards.” Through her continued interrogation of her experiences in the U.K., Suleyman recounts the experience of practising yoga in a gentrified studio and laughing at “how easy saying things came to them [white Britons] without understanding their essential nature… words, names, and their noises are careless in England” in comparison to her experience as a person of colour carrying her trauma “in every word.” This anecdote brings the author to question the cultural difference between Britain’s easy and “careless” adoption of other cultures, as opposed to the inescapability of tradition for “those who cannot rely on land or home for their identity” whose “parents, and their parents, and theirs before, have little more to leave us beyond their names, beyond their language.” Suleyman concludes the essay by stating “understand this — we do not carry our fathers’ names without bearing with them their suffering.”

Vera Chok

Yellow

In this essay, Vera Chok talks about the politics and institutional bias of being “a small, yellow-skinned female and one hundred per cent ethnically Chinese.” Chok questions the limiting definitions used to describe people like herself within the United Kingdom, with terms such as ‘East Asian’ broadly encapsulating China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Mongolia as well as Vietnam and Siberian or Manchurian Russian East Asian. Chok’s explains that when living in Malaysia, she thought of herself as Asian, and yet is confused by the U.K.’s use of Asian as a reference to Indian. This analysis of the etymology of racial identity, continues towards the conclusion that Chok is “reminded often: I am yellow.” From this conclusion, the essay begins to explore the fetishisation of “the Orient” within the mind of British people, questioning whether people associate her with “a flash of uneasiness” , “cruelty” , “an unblinking disregard for the environment” or as a woman with “sexual submissiveness, sexual voracity, and voicelessness.” This sense of fetishisation Chok believes is a key influence in the physical and sexual abuse towards Asian women, and the fact that “over 30,000 Asian women are trafficked into the States per year.”

Daniel York Loh

Kendo Nagasaki and Me

Daniel York Loh’s essay Kendo Nagasaki and Me retells the story of how “a lonely half-Chinese schoolboy in the West Country found a curious ‘hero’ in the inveterately cheating shape of what appeared to be a villainous Japanese wrestler called Kendo Nagasaki.” York Loh reminisces back to a time in his childhood when “there appeared to be very few ‘Orientals’ on TV” and he “seemed to cop racial abuse off the entire school all day every day.” York Loh admits to idolising Kendo Nagasaki as the antithesis of the ‘yellow face’ stereotypes which came up in British and American television. This masked wrestler “won all the fights” and was “sleek and quick, cunning and sly… revelling in the booing of the crowd.. in what seemed, to a racially abused schoolboy, the ultimate act of ethnic defiance.” This story ends however, in the unmasking of Kendo Nagasaki with the revelation that he was “a white man… and a half-Chinese boy turned off his TV in stunned silence.”

Himesh Patel

Window of Opportunity

In this essay, actor Himesh Patel recounts his late realisation of the effects of racial prejudice on his career. After growing up in a sheltered an welcoming community in Cambridgeshire, Patel’s experience of race in the U.K. was that his Indian cultural background “gradually became a very personal part of [his] life, rarely shares or spoken of with anyone else.” After gaining a role in EastEnders in the summer before starting his A-levels, his life stayed much the same as he continued to live in Cambridgeshire. Patel writes that it was only upon moving to London in 2012 that he “had [his] first brush with race on screen… and began to analyse the part [he’d] played in on-screen diversity.” His portrayal of Pakistani Muslim Tamwar Masood struck a chord with viewers in the wake of the Paris attacks “reminded [Patel] of how impactful our media can be.”

= Contributors =

Nikesh Shukla Namaste

Varaidzo A Guide to Being Black

Chimene Suleyman My Name is My Name

Vera Chok Yellow

Daniel York Loh Kendo Nagasaki and Me

Himesh Patel Window of Opportunity

Salena Gooden Shade

Bim Adewunmi What We Talk About When We Talk About Racism

Daniel York Loh Kendo Nagasaki and Me

Miss L The Wife of a Terrorist

Nish Kumar Is Nish Kumar a Confused Muslim?

Reni Eddo-Lodge Forming Blackness Through a Screen

Darren Chetty ''‘You Can’t Say That! Stories Have to Be About White People’''

Kieran Yates On Going Home

Coco Khan Flags

Inua Ellams Cutting Through (On Black Barbershops and Masculinity)

Sabrina Mahfouz Wearing Where You’re At: Immigrant and U.K. Fashion

Riz Ahmed Airports and Auditions

Sarah Sahim Perpetuating Casteism

Wei Ming Kam Beyond ‘Good’ Immigrants

Vinay Patel Death is a Many Headed Monster

Musa Okwonga The Ungrateful Country

= Reception =

The Good Immigrant received both critical and literary acclaim after its release in 2016 with many authors and newspapers praising both the books ethos and its contents. Notable Britons such as Zadie Smith, Anita Rani, Hari Kunzru, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Mishal Husain, DJ Nihal and Malorie Blackman have all offered their positive affirmations of the book to its cover deeming it “funny”, “phenomenal”, “original” and “a must-read”. David Barnett’s review in British newspaper The Independent openly praised the political nature of the book, saying:

“The stories are sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, always honest. If you find them shocking, it’s probably because you’re white, like me, and don't have to live with any of this every single day of the week. And for that reason, if I could, I’d push a copy of this through the letter box of every front door in Britain.”

Similarly, another review written by Sandeep Parmar for the multi-national newspaper The Guardian judged the book as “an unflinching dialogue about race and racism in the UK” continuing to say “We should recognise both the courage that has been shown in producing these essays and the contradictions that necessarily exist across them. While, inevitably, some are better crafted and more convincing than others, The Good Immigrant helps to open up a much-needed space of open and unflinching dialogue about race and racism in the UK.”

= Sequel (The Good Immigrant U.S.A.) =

Following the success of The Good Immigrant both in Britain and abroad, Nikesh Shukla has continued his work “document[ing] what it means to be a person of colour now” through his collaboration with writer Chimene Suleyman. After watching “a resurgence of far-right and white-supremacist rhetoric overtake the United States” Shukla and Suleyman contacted “some of [their] favourite writers, actors, comedians, directors, and artists based in America, all with experiences of being first- or second-generation immigrants” in order to “give them an opportunity to express their experiences”.

The Good Immigrant U.S.A. was published by Dialogue Books in 2019, and includes the contributions of twenty-six Americans of colour. The contributors include: Teju Cole, Chigozie Obioma, Chimene Suleyman, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Mona Chalabi, and Jenny Zhang.

= References =