Only a Child of Multiculturalism Can Fully Understand Multiculturalism
There are believers and there are non believers.
Believers are often well intentioned and pliable.
Non believers are often lacking in self-awareness and hypocritical.
Yet whichever camp you fall into, you can only understand multiculturalism by being made from it. There is an entire dimension to modern life which is simply missed and/or invisible to those who have not been.
Sometimes this dimension encompasses the simple things: the small menial details which usually go unrecorded.
As a young child I once saw some scribble on the inside wall of an elevator in an airport which read the following:
“All Pakis are hungry bastards”.
Someone else had seen this comment and written beneath it:
“Grow up. That is racist.”
Yet someone else again had seen this response and offered the following moral conundrum in reply:
“How iz dat racist to defend ur kultur [sic]???”
I have never forgotten that question and the somewhat distinctive manner in which it was spelt. Even at 8 years old it did make me wonder exactly what sort of culture it was the author was seeking to defend.
More recently a couple of years ago my ex girlfriend and I were staying in a hotel in Prague. A magnificent building elaborately and generously decorated with the touches and flourishes of a rich cultural history.
We were both all dressed up and ready to hit the (Old) Town. And whilst we waited downstairs in this magnificent building, dressed for a special occasion with my ex girlfriend looking radiant and beautiful – glowing in the light of romantic love – we were asked a question by a fellow guest.
“Oi. Scuse me mate. Do you know where the bridge is?”
The young lady asking the question was with her mother. She sounded as if she was from my very own my beloved birthplace (or possibly from Essex). She was also dressed quite elegantly and she sounded as if she really needed to get to that bridge.
Without thinking about it I volunteered a full and prompt response completed by hand gestures, flashing eyebrows and nods of encouragement. I did the best I could because I really wanted to get on with spending time with my girlfriend.
And yet to my disappointed surprise, she looked dumbstruck. She stared at me with an open mouthed confusion which set alarm bells ringing in my ears. She had heard my words but she had not comprehended them.
She was lost.
“Oh my Gooood. You said that with such an English accent! I really did not expect you to sound like that!”
I could sense that something had gone horribly wrong. The entire fabric of her existence had been ruptured. She had been shaken to her very core by a disjunction between what she could see and what she could hear (namely my oh so English accent – perhaps best described as a sort of crisp, sullen Upper Middle Class public school dirge: a bit like a Priest stood behind the pulpit trying to get through the funeral rites whilst attempting to shake his mind from the prospect of doom that threatens to engulf us all).
She was frozen – a Sleeping Beauty seemingly trapped in time and space – waiting against all odds for me to say something to awaken her.
I knew that this needed to be good.
My ex girlfriend had a beautiful dress on and I really wanted to resume our plans for the day so I needed some type of divine inspiration. I needed to say something which would bring Sleeping Beauty back to life, get her to that bridge she had heard all about from her friend on that Hen Party and release my ex girlfriend and I from this unbearable dramatic tension.
“Um, yes. I was born in London.”
I really should give this story a happier ending.
Yet multicultural life (and the experience of life by the products of it) is not one big happy ending.
No, my readers. It is a series of small momentarily pleasurable happy endings punctuated by the jerks and tugs that make the experience such an emotionally complicated one.
So much of this journey is missed by the non-believers. So much is glossed over.
For example, no single figure of speech in the modern world evidences both how much is missed and why it is missed as the saying: “If a dog is born in a stable it does not become a horse.”
Over-used, ill-conceived and spoken by the type of men who imagine typing infantile, barely intelligible, grammatically illiterate comments on YouTube behind closed doors to be the carefully crafted sublime composition of a Renaissance painter, this saying unfortunately reveals more about those who say it than they intend it to.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, the last time I checked, human beings are not horses.
A horse does not grow up in 90s London listening to Pulp, Oasis and Blur and playing bad covers of David Bowie songs.
A horse does not educate another horse on the correct way to use its own horse (mother) tongue.
A horse does not spend an hour explaining the origin of the Gothic novel to another horse and that it has nothing to do with Marilyn Manson.
Perhaps in the end, Depeche Mode said it best when they said that “People are People”.
(And by the way, Dave Gahan is half Indo-Malaysian. Wikipedia it. Did you not notice that he is slightly tanned? And Martin Gore is half African-American. I know, right?? Have you ever seen a dog that looked that much like a horse?) And if Depeche Mode are (rightfully) considered to be a product of a multicultural world, perhaps multiculturalism is not such a bad thing.
Ladies and gentlemen, the saying “If a dog is born in a stable it does not become a horse.” is not an intelligent comment. It rests upon a faulty premise and is backwards looking.
What we call the human being is really just the physical embodiment of human experience. If that experience happens to be a multicultural one, in 2020 we need to accept it even if we cannot understand it because the phenomenon is part of everyday modern life and is here to stay.
And my advice to other multicultural kids like myself? Next time someone says “If a dog is born in a stable it does not become a horse.”, just do what I did – buy them some hay on Amazon and tell them to enjoy their meal. And then, Enjoy the Silence.