The Glamour of Trauma
Afua Hirsch, quite unintentionally, has provided us with a searing insight into the 21st-century politics of identity. Her narcissistic study of her personal identity – Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging – is intended to be a memoir-cum-treatise on what it’s like to be black and of African origin in Britain in the early part of the millennium. But it works far better as a glimpse, an often terrifying glimpse, into the myopia and backwardness and insatiable appetite for victim status that motors the identitarianism that is now the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie. This book documenting a well-educated woman’s descent into the self-obsessive and self-victimising cult of identitarian thinking should serve as a warning to everyone to reject this politics.
I’m struggling to remember the last time I cringed so often while reading a book. Brit(ish) is in essence the story of a spectacularly privileged young woman trying to convince herself, and us, that she’s a victim of oppression. It’s the Four Yorkshiremen dialled up to 11. Ms Hirsch is a writer for the Guardian and frequently appears on broadcast media. She grew up in Wimbledon, possibly the leafiest of England’s leafy suburbs. I go there once a year – for the tennis tournament – and the London-Irish chip on my shoulder always throbs at the sight of the place. Hirsch’s childhood was one of ‘botanical English seasons’, ‘berry-stained rambles on Wimbledon Common’, and ‘walking holidays in the Alps’. She was privately educated, went to Oxford and then swanned into cushy jobs in the media. Lives don’t come more charmed or easy than this. But Hirsch sees it differently. She thinks she’s a victim. She is convinced that both horrible history and horrible people – you and me, that is – are conspiring to make her feel like an ‘other’. Because we’re racist. Everyone’s racist.
I do not believe someone who mixes in middle-class media circles is repeatedly asked: ‘Where are you from?’ Her interlocutors probably mean, ‘What broadsheet are you from?’
Hirsch’s attempts to show that behind the facade of her comfortable, berry-stained life there lurks a struggle against oppression are telling, and embarrassing. She argues that people who ask her ‘Where are you from?’ are acting a racist script that treats people like her as outsiders. That question, ‘The Question’, as she calls it, is a way for people ‘like me’ to be instructed that ‘they are different’. This, for real, is Exhibit A in her gauche effort to prove her life hasn’t been as plush as you think: a conversational question. She says she is asked this question ‘every single day, often multiple times’. Where is she hanging out? It is the ‘first thing’ she is asked in social encounters, and it is ‘often posed before a single word has been uttered’; it is a ‘daily ritual of unsettling’. I don’t believe this. Sorry. I do not believe that someone who mixes in middle-class media circles is cornered multiple times a day and asked, ‘WHERE ARE YOU FROM?’. Her interlocutors probably mean, ‘What broadsheet are you from?’. She should respond with ‘The Guardian’ rather than with the bizarre presumption that anyone who asks this question is fulfilling their duty as a white beneficiary of slavery and colonialism to remind people with dark skin that they are lesser people. Chill.
It gets worse. In her musings on ‘black bodies’, on the historic reduction of black people to slaves and the racist depiction of them as animals, she holds up her teenage diary as proof that she, too, feels the pain of the ‘black body’. ‘I have had enough of my figure, it is so disgusting. I WILL lose weight’, the 14-year-old Hirsch apparently wrote. A typical teen-girl worry, you might think. Oh no. Hirsch has now realised that her ‘self-hatred was centred on [my] sense of otherness’; her teenage ‘self-disgust’ was another thing inflicted upon her by a society seeped in racism towards ‘black bodies’. This is perverse. It would be like me holding up a teenage-diary entry about an acne breakout as proof that I was still in mental recovery from the fact that most of my family in the West of Ireland was wiped out in the Great Famine of the 1840s. I don’t think Hirsch realises how thoroughly she demeans the historical experiences of certain black communities when she compares her own pang of teenage distress as she looked in the mirror in her ‘lovely, spacious house’ with the obliteration of their autonomy that occurred during the slavery era or under colonialism. In the process of trying to imbue her own privileged life with the glamour of suffering, she belittles the profound suffering of earlier generations.
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