Book excerpt: The effect of everyday racism on a young black woman in Ireland
Author of This Hostel Life, Melatu Uche Okorie
In the college your mother enrolled you in to study travel and tourism, the girls wore a lot of make-up and looked so dark from their tanning, they confused you sometimes. They asked you where you learnt to speak English so well and if it were true Africans lived in trees and how they could never live in a hot country because they would melt. You muttered an empty response, desperate not to show your real emotions, but the sadness would still come when you got home and you would cry into your pillow.
But it was after you met Dermot that you started to write. He came to visit your mother four months after you arrived. He had been working in London for a few months, which was why you had never met him. Your mother introduced him as the nicest Irishman she had ever met.
He told you eagerly that he had worked with a lot of charities in Africa and also did some work with Aunty Muna’s organisation. He spoke about his experiences through his work with the openness your pen pal letters used to have, which made you like him even though he was old like your mother.
And your smile reached your eyes for the first time in a long while because his were not guarded. He told you he hoped to get funding to run a project, helping migrant children and teenagers to integrate through football and dance. When your mother asked him from the kitchen, where she was preparing jollof rice with prawns for him, if one could be taught to integrate, you had jumped in and said you thought it was a great idea.
He still responded to your mother’s question and said he didn’t think there were enough opportunities for people to integrate, to which your mother replied that the church, the school, the road, the shops and the playground should provide enough opportunities for people to integrate if they wanted to. Your mother glimpsed the look of impatience on your face and answered you back with silence.
You could tell him things you could not bring yourself to tell your mother, how you hurried with your shopping because the security men followed you around the shops blatantly and about the man who got on the same bus with you from school, and how he would wave and smile, and you would wave and smile back, until the day he told you he would give you €100 if you slept with him.
You had started with the small things first. And then you started telling him bigger things, about your father and how, in your head, you had blamed your mother for leaving. And how you had always struggled with the anger and guilt but couldn’t talk about it because the first time you tried to say something, your mother had stood up from the bed and said, ‘It always had to be about you,’ and walked out of the room.
You told him how for a long time you had felt as if all your family had died when your mother left you behind to travel with your siblings, both of whom were young enough to go with her on her passport. He had nodded his head repeatedly, as if he heard the things you were saying and the ones you left unsaid – that your mother leaving you behind was her way of punishing you.
He took you and your siblings to the cinema and you knew by people’s reactions to you that they found it strange, the way their eyes slid away when you caught them looking. The old white couple who mumbled and scowled at him; the black man who looked at you with contempt before turning his back on you, his arms folded across his chest; the young woman with two little children who smiled at you and said too brightly, ‘It’s lovely today, isn’t it?’ You wondered if he felt as uncomfortable as you, but you couldn’t read his expression. He started a conversation with the young woman but did not include you, so you walked away to look at the sweets until it was time to go in for the movie.
He got the funding for his project and you went with your mother and your nine-year-old sister to watch your eleven-year-old brother play on the migrants’ team. There were little groups formed around the pitch; the black group, two white couples that spoke to each other in a foreign language and a large Irish group.
Each group mostly ignored the other. When he came around later, he wanted to know if you thought the event was successful, but you dodged the question. You are yet to feel comfortable telling someone something was grand when you didn’t think it was. He told you his dream would be to run more integration football and to go to schools to give anti-racism talks.
You told him then about the little children down the street, of perhaps the ages of five and six, who persistently shouted ‘Blackie’ at you whenever they saw you walking alone and how their parents talked amongst themselves like they could not hear.
He told you not to bother about them. You also told him about the girls in your college who told each other to mind their bags or made so much about their purses being in their bags whenever they wanted to use the toilet. He told you he didn’t think the girls meant anything by it. And you wanted to tell him about the woman at church who told you that a Traveller woman had said that Travellers were no longer the lowest class since the arrival of Africans.
And you wanted to tell him about the bus driver who dropped you two bus stops away from your stop because there was nobody else apart from you still in the bus. And you wanted to tell him about the man who followed your mother to a supermarket car park and told her that he wanted a BJ, and how your mother told you she had felt bad she didn’t have what he wanted until she realised what he meant.
You wanted to tell him all these things but you didn’t. You cried for a long time on your bed after he left, confused at how alone you felt with so many people around you and the next day, you went into this same Spar shop and bought a diary.
‘Thank you,’ the leader said, nodding encouragingly when she got to the end. He sifted through the papers in front of him, rearranging them, again and again before glancing around the room. ‘So, what does everyone think of the work?’
A was the first to speak. ‘I am surprised you wrote in the second person.’
The girl gave A an impassive smile. She wanted to show she could take any criticism.
B tucked her hair behind her ear before speaking. ‘I think the story should have a bit of light and shade to it, so that it’s not all bleak and negative.’
C – ‘I’m not sure what it is, but there is something about writing in the second person that prevents me from caring about the character. I always know I’m reading a work of fiction.’
The leader – ‘Why don’t you think about breaking it up a little bit? Maybe give us a name somewhere.’
D – ‘Why don’t we ask her why she used the second person?’
She waited for someone to pose the question but all she saw were expectant eyes raised in her direction.
