Asked where home is, my daughter invariably replies, Goa. Pressed into examining why, given that she was born American and has spent her young life entirely in Britain, her explanation is simple: ‘I don’t why, but whenever I leave Goa, I feel sad inside’. What strange and secret selves we discover, when we first begin to search for a definition of that word ‘home’.
Juxtaposed against my daughter’s ambiguity, I’ve always stood on firmer ground. I was ‘born’ British. That is to say, I was born ideologically British. My earliest awakening was shaped by Britannia, breathing in the wonderful smell of newly arrived books from England with their lovely Smyth sewn binding and bleached white pages, at the start of each scholastic year.
My parents, in their wisdom, had chosen to send me to the very Catholic St. Mary’s High School affiliated to the University of London. There on the salt flats (sabkha) of the Arabian desert, where I schooled, surrounded by a few eucalyptus trees which the Italian parish priest Father Eusebius, had coaxed into existence, I was on first name basis with Charles Dickens, Robert Bolt (my senior year playwright) and the Bronte sisters. I learnt of English towns, villages and hamlets; of its rivers and estuaries. I even knew how to calculate gradient of mountains, I had never seen but only read about. And I will never forget, aged ten, cheering the victory of William the Bastard over Harold Godwinson as if I was on the shores of Hastings myself sounding the bugle. By the time my senior year rolled by, I had subconsciously acquired, much to the annoyance of my friends, what passed for a British accent, aided no doubt by a steady diet of British drama and pop music which Dubai’s television and radio insisted on feeding us. All around me was Britain in one guise or another, whether it was the teachers who taught me or the bosses, who in my young adulthood, held rein over my career.
My husband, daughter and I arrived in London in 2008. A few days later it snowed; what in Minnesota, our previous abode of seven years, we would have called light flurries, was declared a disruptive storm. The snow settled on the pyramid-shaped rooftops of red brick houses, and on neatly trimmed hedgerows and podium gardens. My Dickensian Christmas card picture of England was now complete. I felt perhaps what Goa’s major poet Armando Menezes felt on visiting Britain for the first time; that it was ‘all a sort of quiet homecoming.’
The reality however was quite unsettling. As I wrote in my first book ‘Into the Diaspora Wilderness’, ‘I was in a titty land of foul language and uncouth yobs. The image of Somerset Maugham’s England and the idea of the quintessential English gentleman formed by watching far too many episodes of Sir Nigel Hawthorne in ‘Yes Minister’ was crumbling before my very eyes.’
On one occasion I was called Mrs Patel. On another occasion I had a ball thrown at me. Everywhere a cold frigidity seemed to engulf the English. There was, evidently, what writer Hanif Kureishi aptly described as a ‘semi-violet English poverty’. Racist Britain was also disenfranchised Britain; those living on council estates caught in a cycle of domestic violence, poverty and desperation; those that couldn’t see a future for themselves or their kids; those whose fathers had turned to drink and drugs because the coal industry and the manufacturing sector had long bolted; those that were most likely to be sexually abused and prostituted; those that felt compelled to drop out of school just so they could spend the rest of their lives stacking shelves at a supermarket if they were lucky. It is this section of people who have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. Over the years, they have seen their wages compressed because of the unmitigated influx of immigration from Eastern Europe. When you have so little, you can quickly turn sour and inward-looking.
As the years rolled on, I realised my illusions of a noble Britain were not altogether to be shattered. Here was a country which had a deeply ingrained sense of justice. Honour, integrity, fair play, and a reverence for history and the arts, guided this nation. I could see what Rabindranath Tagore had seen when he wrote: ‘In Europe we have seen noble minds who have ever stood up for the rights of man irrespective of colour and creed; who have braved calumny and insult from their own people in fighting for humanity’s cause.’ Immigrants had as much a chance of living prosperous and fulfilling lives as anyone else, and given their propensity for hard work, were twice as likely to be successful as struggling indigenous populations. Within a generation, immigrant families had produced doctors, lawyers and politicians who now permeate the country’s hospitals, courts and political spheres. This is a land, you can be proud to call home.
It is saddening that Brexit has portrayed the British as ‘little islanders’ desperate to pull up the draw-bridge and isolate themselves from the world. But that is a mean-spirited caricature. Britain, like any country, is a complex organism sustained by disparate and divergent aspirations, each of which is as valid as the next. The challenge as always is to try and reconcile these aspirations. Among those with dreams of their own are thousands of Portuguese Goans, each of whom will be assimilated quietly and without a fuss into Britain’s unfolding narrative of multiculturalism.
Selma Carvalho is the author of A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865 “ 1980 and Baker Butcher Doctor Diplomat: Goan Pioneers of East Africa. Between 2011 - 2014, she headed the Oral Histories of British Goans project in London
