June: Nigeria, Wales and Russia

Read: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (Nigeria), I Bought a Mountain by Thomas Firbank (Wales), The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

On May, 25th 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin. George was an African-American 46 year-old man. He’d suffered doubly at the hands of the Coronavirus, first contracting it before recovering, but also losing his job as a security guard. He was a father of five and grandfather of two. These are simple details that tell very little of the story of the man who breathed his last gasped breath under the crushing weight of Derek Chauvin’s knee. I forced myself to sit and watch the footage of his death. It was something I didn’t want to see, but did want to face the reality of. We must face this reality.

George Floyd’s death is not the first racist murder committed by a white policeman. I have heard of others, but like many people, this incident has made me stop and think for longer and my white privilege is at the heart of why I haven’t taken more notice or more action and that is wrong. This time, I don’t want to care in a silent and ineffectual way, but want to respond, but before I respond, I want to listen. 

At the time of George Floyd’s murder, I was reading Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. She is a Nigerian-American writer whose novel tells the story of the oppression of people with magical abilities - the maji - by the ruling class, Kosidans. The maji are attacked, dehumanised, enslaved. It’s blunt and brutal stuff with one of the most disturbing images being when the protagonist Zelie has the word ‘maggot’ carved into her back. At the end of the book, there is an author’s note, part of which reads, “If you cried for Zulaikha and Salim, cry for innocent children like Jordan Edwards, Tamir Rice, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones. They were fifteen, twelve, and seven when they were shot and killed by police. If your heart broke with grief for Zelie’s grief over the death of her mother, then let it break for all the survivors of police brutality who’ve had to witness their loved ones taken firsthand.” The whole story is a metaphor for the violence, injustice and ugliness of racism.

I said that I was going to listen and that’s what I’ve attempted to do. The first person I listened to was my friend Russ. We walked the mile circuit of the local park a couple of times before the subject of race came up. It’s something we’ve chatted about before, but never in much depth. In the past, he’d told me about incidents of racism he’d faced and they were shocking, but I’m not sure we’d delved below the incidents to a place where we really discussed the pain these moments had caused him and how they had affected his psyche and way of navigating the world.

Russ’ parents came to England from Trinidad and Tobago before Russ was born and in an era when racism in England was overt and accepted by many and Russ encountered this obvious and unashamed racism when at school. He told me a story of a teacher at his school who got him to stand up after he’d answered a question correctly and told the other students to take a look at him. The teacher told the rest of the class that people “just off the boat” were going to take over if the other students didn’t buck their ideas up. He repeated his disdain for a brown child showing more dedication to his work than the rest of the class when Russ was one of the only students in the class to put effort into his story-writing homework project. What should have been moments of positivity and encouragement for Russ as a student were turned into moments where the message he was given was that he was a usurper, come to take from the white kids and as Russ received that message, so did the rest of the class. They were told to fear Russ and anyone that looked like him. 

Russ described a hardness and a bitterness that grew out of this treatment. As a child, your psyche is vulnerable and unconsciously and physiologically, you decide how to react and his reaction, in part, was to fight the treatment he received. When the aggressor represents education, the enemy you are fighting against is meant to be something that gives you a future and if you’re fighting it, you’re fighting yourself as well. Essentially, the potential for Russ to succeed in this environment was hugely limited by the fact that his successes were met with a response that suggested he had stolen them from his classmates.

In his adult life, Russ told me how, as a young man, he had frequently and for no reason, been stopped by the police. My only interactions with the police have been times when there was an obvious reason for the police to intervene, but this has not been the case for Russ. I’d often seen this issue discussed in the news, but somehow, I had assumed that my friend would not have experienced this. Studies suggest that people of colour are forty times more likely to be stopped by the police, but somehow I’d equated that fact to people of colour that I didn’t know and not to my friends. How had I been so naive? It bothers me that I’ve known Russ for seventeen years and not known that he has faced this. 

In his early twenties, Russ refused to let his negative experiences on the street affect the way he lived his life. He was still in fight mode, but he told me that now, choices he makes about what he does are affected by what he fears he may face and he would no longer go out into town late in the evening. 

In her paper, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,’ Peggy McIntosh lists fifty daily effects of white privilege (https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf). It suggests that as a white person, I barely have to consider my race in my daily interactions. Russ, on the other hand, is acutely aware of his race in many contexts. Not only do his experiences affect the social choices he makes, but he also feels that if he were to make a mistake that the mistake would be seen as a representation of his race rather than simply as an individual. In many ways, Russ attacks this challenge, wanting to thrive against the odds, but of course, the fact that life doesn’t give him a level playing field to compete on is why we can’t just let this lie. 

Russ also talked about how the experience of racism firsthand can be very different depending on your context. Russ has run a construction business for the last eleven years and this type of work is dominated by white men whereas if Russ had gone into a health occupation as one of his brothers has, his experiences would be very different. When buying resources, Russ told me of one place he went to where the alpha male of that environment would mutter racist comments when any person of colour entered the warehouse. The result of this was a hostile atmosphere not just from the overtly racist individual, but from other workers there. Russ felt that this didn’t only make for an unpleasant experience, but that from a business perspective, he had to fight to get a good deal for himself against surly and incommunicative salesmen. The argument that people of colour have to work harder to get the same deal as white people is certainly true in this instance. 

There is much that I haven’t said about our conversation. The rain had started falling and we’d found shelter underneath a tree to conclude. “This is the first time I’ve really spoken about this,” Russ said as we came to a conclusion. I felt honoured to have been able to listen to him speak so honestly about his experiences. Social distancing because of the Coronavirus pandemic was still a thing and as we parted without a handshake or hug, I commented on how the lingering anxiety to remain two metres apart was such a frustration and that although a measure of socialising had returned, it still wasn’t the same and Russ said that it was a good metaphor for what it is like to live as a person of colour in an unequal world, that you do the same things as other people: visit coffee shops, relax at the beach, stroll in the park, but that your race is always something that is a lingering anxiety, causing you to second-guess interactions with strangers and be wary of potential threats. 

The following evening, my friends Kunle and Yemi came round for a barbecue. I’m used to seeing this couple every Sunday at church and I sit next to Kunle at every Brighton and Hove Albion home game. We met about ten years ago when they first came to England from Nigeria and we’ve been great friends ever since. It was so good to see them after ten weeks of lockdown and with restrictions easing, gathering in the garden was now allowed. Fortunately, we’d properly filled our bellies before the rain came down to interrupt our game of Molkky: a Swedish garden game that is mixture of ten-pin bowling and boules.

When I’d asked Yemi for a recommendation of a Nigerian book, she had kindly bought me a copy of Children of Blood and Bone and once the meat had been cooked, we sat and chatted about the book. In the opening chapter, a character called Yemi is a fearsome warrior and the Yemi I know, who is not really fierce and scary, liked the sound of that. We moved quickly on to what the book represented and its message and their own experiences of racism. It was very different to the conversation with Russ. Kunle could certainly recognise moments when his race had been used against him since living in England, but talked about how not experiencing prejudice until he was an adult was perhaps very different to growing up with it. Your formative years have a huge effect on forming your identity and Kunle’s approach seemed to be to laugh off and brush off situations, feeling a sense of ridicule for the aggressor. Russ, Kunle and Yemi are only speaking about their own experiences and the eyes you see through and experiences you have are only ever going to be your own. 

I started to consider my role as teacher. Two of the fifty privileges white people benefit from that relate to education, included in Peggy McIntosh’s paper are: “I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race” and “I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.” I’ve been a teacher for twelve years now and I can only really speak from the perspective of my subject, English, but it seems true that the curriculum is getting whiter. Once you get to texts prescribed by exam boards, the choice of texts written by black authors and including black characters feels like it’s narrowing. It’s complicated to make this accusation though. In 2015, texts that weren’t written by British authors couldn’t be taught as part of the GCSE curriculum any more, so two popular texts that examine and explore race, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee were gone. They are still commonly taught but to younger year groups. I used to teach a collection of poems entitled ‘Poems from Different Cultures’ as part of the GCSE course. They are some of my favourite ever poems and explored issues such as slavery, the destruction of Vietnamese culture, apartheid in South Africa, the experience of being a immigrant in London and the chasm between the rich and the poor in America. That’s gone too and has been replaced by English poems and while I teach a poem by John Agard (‘Checking Out Me History’) that attacks the suppression of black history from education, the irony is that the GCSE curriculum I teach delivers less black history than it used to. There are some options out there though: Meera Syal’s Anita and Me, a fantastic novel about an Indian girl growing up in the Midlands and grappling with all sorts of issues including the racism of the society she is living in is an option; Stephen Kelman’s novel Pigeon English, a novel told from the perspective of an eleven-year old Ghanaian immigrant living on a council estate in London is also on offer.  However, my perception is that these books are very rarely chosen by schools. I remember sitting at a Parents’ Evening and discussing this issue with some parents who pointed out the texts studied didn’t show their black daughter anyone that looked like her, any characters that she could cling to and I had to accept that what she was saying was true. At the time, I encouraged them to take action, to write a letter articulating their view. I now wonder whether that was passing the buck. I don’t want to pass the buck any longer, but take action when I see something that should be acted on.

My next conversation was with Lance, a friend who used to play for the same football team as me. Lance had been vocal on social media since the death of George Floyd and his thoughtful and heartfelt posts had been met with a mixture of responses: many empathetic and sympathetic, but some telling him that he’d lost his sense of humour, that racism was a thing of he past in England or with crass racist memes. Lance’s consistent challenging of these responses interested and inspired me and reminded me of Russ’ point about your experiences of racism being very different depending on the context you’re in. In some contexts, casual racism is still accepted and the threads of conversation on some of Lance’s posts surprised me to a degree, but also didn’t surprise me. I’d heard similar comments, mainly in a football context - playing in a local Saturday league team or watching Brighton matches.

When I contacted Lance, he was quick to respond with a desire to discuss racism and his own experiences. Repeatedly, he emphasised the importance of communication - this stuff has got to be talked about however tempting it is to shovel it under the carpet. He shared one particularly painful experience with me. The words that were used against him were racist in an obvious way, but the thing that caused the most pain was how close the person was to him. In a moment of high-emotion, words that can’t be unsaid once they’ve spilled from your mouth came forth and while Lance was quick to defend the person’s heart, the words had shaken him. The human race bumble about, interacting with each other in increasingly complex and technological ways and quick harsh words that wound and crush are far too common. 

I hope I’ve reflected what people said to me thoughtfully. I confess that I feel scared about dipping my toe into this conversation. I’m no expert. I’ve got things wrong, but I recognise that much is unequal in this world and I want to be one small voice for change and more importantly, one person who acts for what is right. 

To jump to another book and another subject matter feels like a massive lurch, from the serious and vital issue of racism to sheep-farming in Wales ninety years ago, but that is where my reading took me. My mother-in-law is half-Welsh, growing up in Rhyl in North Wales and on my birthday, my gift from her was I Bought a Mountain by Thomas Firbank. Firbank was actually a Canadian man who purchased a farm for £5,000 in Snowdonia in 1931. I’ve visited the area of Snowdonia a number of times. Until recently, it was the area where my wife’s grandmother lived and on our visits there, we often venture into the hills and mountains described in Firbank’s autobiographical tale. I’ve climbed Snowdon, the tallest mountain in Wales standing at 1,085 metres, twice: once with my wife, Helen, and then again a few years later when our children, Ned and Jarvis, were ready to bound up the mountain with bewildering ease. On the way down, I stepped on a trickle of water that was making its way down the mountain. It was like stepping on ice and my feet went from under me and I fell and bounced a good few feet, bashing my back and smashing my glasses on the journey down. I lay dazed and feeling like I wanted to vomit on some scree. A passing vet checked my back, but admitted that I didn’t really fit into her area of expertise and after a short time in which the remainders of my glasses were located, I managed to get back to my feet and resume my descent. It was slightly dramatic and a story to tell and thankfully, no damage was done. 

There is something very different about reading a book when you are very familiar with the setting. You feel like you inhabit the book in a different way; books like this find their way more easily into my dreams as I imagine myself living the lives that are described. 

I wondered as I started this book how much I would enjoy it. The relatively slow-paced purchase of the farm in the opening chapter hadn’t set my pulse racing, but the blurb promised a “spellbinding story of life on a  sheep farm” and as Firbank got into the day-to-day running of the farm, it got increasingly interesting. I did a lot of running this month, clocking up more than one-hundred miles and often I’ve found myself alone with a bunch of sheep for company and this book has made me see them differently. Firbank describes how in the middle of a blizzard, many sheep found themselves completely immersed in snow and I would have imagined that a sheep would not survive for long in this perilous position, but many lasted days, drinking the melting snow and chewing their wool to feed themselves on the grease it contained. One sheep lived twenty-one days submerged in snow, coming out bald, but quickly tottering about happily - incredible resilience from the sheep. As they stumbled away from me as I ran past them, I viewed them with a new reverential respect.

Running increasingly large distances over the course of the month has also given me an appetite for giving crazy physical challenges a go. The one I currently have in mind is the Snowdon Marathon - a twenty-six mile course which takes you up and down the mountain (if I end up doing it, I’ll be more careful with my footing). The physical challenge that Firbank took up is called the 3,000s. It is a race to stand on the summit of the fourteen mountains over 3,000 feet in Wales. After extensive training, Firbank and his friends smashed the record by over two hours, standing atop all fourteen in eight hours and twenty-five minutes. The effort involved seemed monumental and I wondered what the record now stood at. After a quick Google search I found out that last year, a bloke called Finlay Wild covered the up-down-up-down twenty-five mile terrain in four hours, eleven minutes: incredible.

The last book of the month was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a book I’d read before about ten years ago. I’d got lost though as I’d read it the first time around, confused by the abundance of characters, disorientated in the maze of the plot. I’d ploughed on regardless, not liking the idea of leaving something unfinished and whilst a vague semblance of what had happened was with me, my memory of the events of the novel had almost all escaped my mind. I’d initially read it because Philip Yancey had said that it was the greatest novel ever written. Yancey is a Christian writer who writes informal musings on theology; I greatly appreciate his writing for scratching below the surface of issues. In his book, What’s so Amazing About Grace? he argues that Dostoevsky understood grace, got the preciousness of God’s grace for mankind and that this novel demonstrated this. In contrast, Yancey felt that Leo Tolstoy didn’t get grace in the same way, believing instead that you need to earn God’s acceptance through our actions. I was pleased that I had completed the novel the first time around, but hadn’t really understood Yancey’s point.

On New Year’s Eve 2019, I was chatting with my friend, Rob, about my international reading and he started talking about The Brothers Karamazov. Rob had recently taken his children out of school for a few months and gone travelling around Europe and in Italy, he’d met a Scottish chap called James. He’d told Rob that The Brothers Karamazov told you everything you needed to know about love, life and relationships. Like Yancey, James had felt that the book was hugely significant, but not from the same faith-based perspective. I decided to revisit the book and Rob said he might join me with my reading. Unfortunately, life had got in the way of Rob getting stuck into the Russian classic, but I ordered it on Audible and it has been accompanying me during driving, cooking and running over the last few months. 

There are three Karmazov brothers and each of them represent different world-views or ways of engaging with life. Dmitri, the oldest of the brothers, is described as a sensualist. Essentially, he is a hedonist who grabs at the pleasures life offer hungrily. He often gets himself into scrapes and his hedonistic pursuit of life is often deeply dissatisfying. The second brother is Ivan, an atheist who is a troubled by senseless suffering in the world. The third brother is Alexei, initially a monk in a Russian orthodox monastery. He is the brother most focused upon and I think part of my confusion in my first reading was that characters have so many names - Alexei is referred to in eight different ways throughout the novel and on my first reading, I lost track of these different names. This time around, I frequently visited Sparknotes to steer me back on track each time I got confused.

The three perspectives of the brothers - hedonism, atheism and theism - are perhaps the reason for this book’s wide-ranging appeal. Each brother is likeable and as their philosophical viewpoints are discussed, you get your own views challenged while also feeling that someone is coming at things from your perspective too. Most books lead you down one way of thinking and arguably, this one does as well eventually, but the three world-views are each given a lot of airtime. 

There’s so much in this book that it’s difficult to know which theme to pick out, but I’m going to go with one of them that resonated deeply with me. The brothers’ father is Fyodor Karamazov and he is, by anyone’s standard, a terrible father. Dmitri gets the worst of it. Fyodor and Dmitri both want to be with the same woman. The father decides to deny his eldest son his inheritance and use that money to entice the woman: what a lovely father-son interaction. That is only one of the terrible things he does, but the mess created by the father’s negligence is catastrophic for everyone including the father. The brothers need their father, need his care and his love, but instead, get his cruelty and betrayal. The failure of the father in this novel is something that is replicated time and again in society. The world needs fathers to show unwavering love for their children and when we fail, for I am a father capable of failure too, catastrophe ensues. Don’t get me wrong, the world needs mothers too, but I’m a father and it feels like fathers fail more often than mothers and we need to step up.