One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

by Scaachi Koul

Plenty of people take a gap year between high school and university to travel, or spend a summer back-packing through Europe to “find” themselves. (A bullshit statement if ever there was one. Where do you think you’ll be? No one finds anything in France except bread and pretension, and frankly, both of those are in my lap right now.)

Mom doesn’t like it when I fly or take the subway or cross busy intersections. She suggests I avoid eating new things or talking to strangers or getting the flu, because who knows what could kill me? She sends panicked texts when she hears it’ll snow in my city, checking in to make sure that I have “enough food and socks.” She calls when there’s a power outage in a neighbouring town.

So much of immigration is about loss. First you lose bodies: people who die, people whose deaths you missed. Then you lose history: no one speaks the language anymore, and successive generations grow more and more westernized. Then you lose memory:

When I’ve interacted with these men—and again, they are, by and large, all men, very angry men—they all betray some information about their trauma.

It is taxing to consider the circumstances that can take an unmarked human canvas and make it rage-filled and petty and lost. It’s not fun to have sympathy for the people who are trying to hurt you. But their actions can sometimes make sense: what’s easier than trying to get better is trying to break something else down.

It changes you, when you see someone similar to you, doing the thing you might want to do yourself. That kind of writing—writing by people who aren’t in the majority—its sheer visibility on your bookshelf or your television or your internet, is sometimes received similarly to my call for more of that work. It’s responded to with racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia.

We either sat in the back of the class and sneered at everyone else, because we were effortlessly smart so we didn’t have to listen, or sat in the front of the class, to prove we knew everything already.