By Jove Book Club: The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla

Though I read this book much earlier this year (and indeed, it was released in 2016), it’s stuck with me over the last few months. I picked it up in my continuing search to broaden my knowledge of other people’s experiences, particularly people of colour; I was wary of being labelled a white feminist, and willing and hopeful to learn. Until that point, though, my learning (at least as it related to the area where I could do the most work, the UK) had been hampered by the continued ‘Americanisation’ of the world – that is, the tendency to see various issues, but in this case particularly the issue of race and racism, through the American lens. Though America’s race issues can be extrapolated across the West to some extent due to the ubiquity of colonialism and slavery, variations in those histories mean that the way racism works in the US is not necessarily the way it works in the UK.

If you’re also facing this point of discovery in your intersectional journey, The Good Immigrant is a great place to start. The volume, edited by Nikesh Shukla, collects 21 essays by black, Asian, and minority ethnic British writers and creatives, speaking to their experiences of what it means for them to live in Britain today as immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.  I’m ashamed to say that the only contributor with whose work I was familiar before reading the book was Riz Ahmed, the actor and rapper, but the eclectic range of perspectives was refreshing and exposed a wide range of experiences and specific injustices. I’ve since gone on to read other works by the contributors, so besides being an interesting and useful book in itself, it serves as an excellent jumping off point for discovering a wide range of great reading, listening, and watching material.

It’s hard to pick a favourite essay, but one stuck with me more than others: Kieran Yates’ ‘On Going Home’, which speaks of the experience of a young Indian British woman returning to visit family in Punjab. Yates is a freelance writer on Music and Politics for a number of high profile magazines including NME and Dazed and Confused. In her essay, she speaks of feeling uncomfortable in her ‘homeland’, and thinks of the new culture that she and others like her have developed, particularly in the large Indian community of Southall in London:

Though the messages are plural and greater, one thing I took from Yates’ essay is that home is what you make it and who you make it with.

Reading The Good Immigrant made me at once ashamed and proud of my country. Ashamed, of course, because of the way it too often treats immigrants and the descendants of immigrants as if they ‘don’t belong here’. Proud, though, because they do belong here: because the Britain I know and (try to) love is diverse, multi-ethnic, and rich in culture. The voices in The Good Immigrant give us an aspirational view of what being British can mean, while opening our eyes to injustice, and particularly highlighting areas where we can and should stand up for our fellow Brits, whether permanent or temporary, by birth or adoption, in order to use our privilege for good.