Have you ever wondered how you came to know yourself? I don’t mean in the Neo meets Morpheus sense of the words. I mean knowing the everyday things that make you who you are. Do you remember when you learnt which race you belonged to? Do you remember times feeling that you were intelligent or attractive? Can you recall the moment you thought, ‘I’m actually alright at this sex thing’?
For me a pivotal moment came when I realised I wasn’t destined for football greatness. I’d spent my entire school days believing I was the centre-forward Don, only to arrive at college and realise that in the grand scheme of things I was a poor man’s version of Emile Heskey.
The problem was my school was particularly small, and so entering a larger, more cosmopolitan space I was forced to reconsider my ranking, as well as my ego.
It’s happened to me time and time again; feeling certain in my convictions about who I am and what I know only for them to be shattered by new experience. And whilst this may be read as low self-esteem (this is certainly an angle one could take) there is also an aspect of reality to all of this.
The philosopher Alan Watts spoke at length about our connectivity as human beings and that what we believe we know about ourselves is always in relation to the other. For example, we can only know we are tall if we have some knowledge of the small.
I thought I was a great writer until reading Tolstoy. I thought I was the funniest guy until watching Eddie Murphy. And I thought I was intellectual before watching Noam Chomsky. It’s not that these things cannot be true, but they are only true in relation. And the truth is, I was a great footballer, in my school environment.
Identity strikes me as a mirror, only the reflection is not of ourselves but of the world and its inhabitants around us. And I’ve found that this extends beyond our personal concepts.
I think about the history of Russia, and how for the longest time they were sustained under the cultural tutelage of Western Europe. It wasn’t until war broke out with Napoleon’s France in 1812 that the desire for a unique sense of ‘Russainess’ was urgently felt by the population. From that moment forward, the country began to reject the cultural impositions of Europe and looked inwards to what they already possessed. The interesting facet of this history is that in order to identify themselves as ‘uniquely Russian’, to even have the desire, they needed Europe to serve as their antithesis.
The esteemed literary critic Edward Said spoke about this phenomenon in his books Orientalism, and Culture and Imperialism. In these books he shows how the West’s construction of the Orient (East) was used to demean and hold power over the region. The West were able to identify themselves as superior, noble and quintessential by degrading what they saw as the backwardness of the East. However, what the West continually seemed to overlook was the influence of the very culture they worked so hard to demean. Said shows in refined detail how the output of European music and literature was greatly influenced by their interaction with the East, and that the two ideologies (West and East) were inextricably bound.
James Baldwin once asked the question, ‘why was it necessary for white people to create the nigger’? What Baldwin knew was that to inhibit and sustain a feeling of superiority, someone or something has to made inhuman, uncivilized and rogue.
What I’ve learnt is that our identities, whether personal or national, are intertwined, and are not self-constructed. I suppose the danger in forgetting this is that we become prey to ego and nationalism. We begin to believe that we are self-made and that, for example, what is British is inherently British, as if no other contributions have been made.
The great legacy that Edward Said left behind was to show that the construction of national, cultural or individual identity is not done, indeed cannot be done in isolation. That, in a very critical way, the identities we create do not belong to us only.
Margin Page.
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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