The Scottish Government announces provisional positive Covid-19 tests for the Christmas period. They are now over 10k a day. Omicron is surging. We are being urged to take care, to be cautious, to wear our masks, to wash our hands, not to mix with others unless we have to. New rules are in place in many public settings. One metre distancing, maximum of three households meeting together, and major Hogmanay events have been cancelled.
Scrolling through Twitter I see people I know testing positive. Christmas plans were upended, trains have been cancelled, and many of us who can are retreating to the safety of our homes.
This Christmas I wear Airpop masks. Last Chrismas I wore handmade cloth masks.
This Christmas I use surgical spirits to clean my masks. Last Christmas I used soap.
What is there to write about Covid-19 that hasn’t been written already, over and over? I have nothing of value to add.
I am reading Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies. I am puzzled by the novel, mainly because of the first-person point of view, and that the work is part fiction, part memoir, part historic account. Did the narrator’s father really treat Trump for an irregular heartbeat back in the day? Does it matter that he did or not? It shouldn’t, but I want to know. How much of the father son relationship reflects the author’s own experience? All of it? Just some of it? I comb the most engaging scenes for clues, but I am helpless. And anyway, this is a distraction. I tell myself off.
It is a testament to the writing that I don’t search the novel for adverbs and similes. I am gripped by the clear story-telling, the engaging anecdotes, and the ability to get up close to characters who have chosen or otherwise to live in foreign lands that are or become oppressive and discriminatory.
This notion of outsider insider has stalked me on and off much of my life. As a little girl I had the wrong accent having moved countries in primary school, the wrong glasses (why do fathers do that to their daughers?) and, in some family situations, the wrong amount of money (not enough). There was a pivotal incident involving an aunt and uncle, a grandparent, and the wrong kind of ice-cream. Granny had sent my brother and I round to the aunt and uncle with ice-cream that didn’t meet their exacting standards. I was shamed and ashamed. I was around nine years old. We laugh about it now. I wasn’t laughing then.
Being an outsider, not normal, different, not ‘like us’ emboldened bullies in our Scottish Highland village and further afield. The bullying was verbal and physical, and relentless. In my first week at high school, I was belted by Mr Buchanan, the chemistry teacher, for defending myself from two boy bullies on the school bus. I don’t recall whether I cried. I do recall the blistering pain. And the searing ignomy. Ten minutes after the assault I got lines from my French teacher for being late to her class. (I failed my French O Level the first time round. Make of that what you will.)
For the few years that this went on I was confused, angry and isolated. I developed coping mechanisms that would result in my own challenging behaviours as an adult. I became overly defensive, aggressive in new situations with new people, and ridiculously independent. I now see that these types of behaviour often become cyclical. New place, new start, aggressive behaviour, and the barriers to positive human relationships go up instead of down. It took me decades to recognise this, and I’m working hard to resist the urges to say no instead of yes, to frown instead of smile, to be mean instead of generous.
Homeland Elegies is about a Pakistani immigrant family’s experience of the American dream in the context of 9/11. My own small story is nothing like it. But in sitting down to write today’s diary I am struck by what immigration can do to us immigrants and how influential the receiving communities can be on the rest of our lives.
SANDERLINGS 