I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I fit into spaces which already exist and contort myself to fit a shape which has been allocated for me. I don’t own anything.

rely on autobiographical detail, I masticate my life, spit it out and decorate it on the page.

We second generation immigrants have the privilege of self-actualisation. We make sculptures, direct films, write plays, novels, memoirs and poems about not having a home, of trying to find a home, of being between two types of home, what is home, of how we all feel ugly, of the mixed relationships we enter into with white people, losing our language from a culture we had a tenuous hold of in the first place, we tell the story of being acted upon, we speak from the position of the victim. For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes

us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness—by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen. If we remain part of the masses, we know we will suffer the double injustice of institutional neglect by the police or the justice system compounded by the original crime—like with our murder (Stephen Lawrence, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry but also too many others) or a history-making miscarriage of justice (the Post Office scandal and Grenfell), the threat of deportation from the Home Office (the Windrush scandal) or stripped citizenship (Shamima Begum) for making a terrible mistake when you were a child. Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neo-colonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching

ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being ‘in service’ to our ‘communities’ by ‘taking up space’ as if by being true to ourselves, w...

We seek to affect the cultural landscape. We take on our parents’ struggle as if it were our own while dismissively exploiting the privilege of self-actualisation. We are able to ask, who am I, a question our parents were never able to ask themselves—but have we ever stopped to ask, what exactly is it we want to gain access to?

At what point do I get a return on my investment? My people-pleasing, my co-dependency, my lack of boundaries, which on the surface looks so giving, nurturing and self-effacing is actually controlling, ego-driven and emotionally demanding.

Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even as their wealth has been drawn from global structures that decimate the cultures those objects are from?

I want a hungry press, hungry for me, rather than jumping for scraps of attention like some rabid dog scrabbling around in the pit of my stomach desperate for someone to listen to what I have to say.

I want it so no one else can have it. In the not having, it remains absolutely perfect, in my imagination it would fulfil all my needs, I would never need anyone again. I want it so that in the luxury of having it, I can ruin its perfection and then reject it when I am sure it means nothing. I want to succeed where all the other women failed, and it is not so much to win him as it is to defeat everyone else.

I do not want to be awake to my deadness. I want to remain asleep.

If I stay still then maybe I won’t disturb the sadness which lodges itself between my organs, thickens my blood and keeps me tripping downwards into circular, repetitive thoughts.

There is a dragon which consumes me, breathing fire, burning everything and all of him into a crisp. I am a pit of self-loathing. He plunges care and love into me but it only makes me hate him even more.

By the fact of your gender, you are fundamentally dismissed and because you are asking for his vulnerability, you become the enemy, you are treated as a hostile invader, with suspicion, surveyed as a constant high-level threat and you will be suppressed or defeated. You are judged by him as lesser for loving him. He projects his self-loathing on to you and you carry it thinking if you skim off the scum maybe something good will come eventually. He enforces an authoritarian top-down system, there is no collaboration, you will have no voice or power. When he is confronted, there is only his gaping silence and your pain.

The woman I am obsessed with says she is sad and worried about the state of America and I think, it’s a funny thing to feel sad—or feel anything about racism because what a luxury.