I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I want to know exactly how your body moves when you are turned on—to know for myself why he cancelled fucking me to fuck you.

oh okay

He says the sex is too intense between us which is why we don’t do it anymore.

oof

I know he has to leave because he has to be home with his wife before dinner.

WHAT

He tells me he fucked the woman I am obsessed with incessantly at the height of their obsession with one another, they just couldn’t stop.

abs yet he refuses to fuck you... hmmm... interesting

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, we’re doing everyone else a massive favour?

I am shocked to learn she can speak three languages, none of which she has a genetic affiliation to, it was something her father wanted her to be able to do. My mother speaks a colonial French called Creole, but I can’t because my parents deliberately did not speak their languages to me so I would not be put at a disadvantage.

and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

We talk and i say to her, why do you hate all the women he’s been with, why don’t you hate him, he’s the one who’s done this to you, it’s not us and she doesn’t have an answer.

It takes me a long time to realise that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.

I think it is on me to keep the momentum going but really it is the way he wriggles out of responsibility for how hurt you will eventually be—because you kept arranging to meet, you were never forced, you initiated all the contact.

Her lack of awareness of being a white woman borne of a white man in a country baked in the violence of European colonialism, dictating values that were and are already being practiced by Indigenous people before they were forcibly disinherited, is the way in which liberalism separates itself from the systems of racism and genocide and from the structures that organise the way the world benefits particular groups over others.

It is the ripping of the Indigenous people from the land and the land being continually pillaged for neo-colonial profit which has the climate spiralling into catastrophe.