Assembly

by Natasha Brown

It’s a story. There are challenges. There’s hard work, pulling up laces, rolling up shirtsleeves, and forcing yourself. Up. Overcoming, transcending, et cetera. You’ve heard it before.

Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much – for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story.

It was survival only in the sense that a meme survives. Generational persistence, without meaning or memory.

I’m unsure about this weekend. It seemed fine, even enjoyable, when proposed. Months away, abstract. But here it is, now, and here I am, too. And this train – very real, very concrete and travelling fast – is tearing us together.

I am not sure why I do anything, sometimes. Why do I inhale? Why do I apologize? Or say I’m fine, thanks. And you? Why do I stand back from the platform edge? These aren’t sophisticated or clever questions. But still, sometimes, I can’t answer. I can’t remember the right answer.

I feel. Of course I do. I have emotions. But I try to consider events as if they’re happening to someone else. Some other entity. There’s the thinking, rationalizing I (me). And the doing, the experiencing, her. I look at her kindly. From a distance. To protect myself, I detach.

Nothing is a choice.

Nothing is a choice. And I want it.

I am everything they told me to become. Not enough.

I pay my taxes, each year. Any money that was spent on me: education, healthcare, what – roads? I’ve paid it all back. And then some. Everything now is profit. I am what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit. A natural resource to exploit and exploit, denigrate, and exploit.

Transcends race, they say of exceptional, dead black people. As if that relentless overcoming, when taken to the limit, as time stretches on to infinity, itself overcomes even limits, even infinity, even this place.

But what it takes to get there isn’t what you need once you’ve arrived. A difficult realization, and a harder actualization.

I study this cultural capital. I learn what I’m meant to do. How I’m meant to live. What I’m supposed to enjoy. I watch, I emulate. It takes practice. And an understanding of what’s out of reach. What I can’t pull off.

Born here, parents born here, always lived here – still, never from here. Their culture becomes parody on my body.

Money is just belief, reality is perception, so why not? Stow some there, some everywhere. Be careful, though, and save you see others – Rach, Lou, they spend. They enjoy it. But is their current lifestyle peak truly a new floor? You don’t know. But you can weather an emergency, stress-test yourself, you will not be undone by a small thing. You hope. There’s only hope. Hope it’s enough to weather any bust until the swing back around when you can grab hold, pull up and start the climb again.

What is citizenship when you’ve watched screaming Go Home vans crawl your street?

I am as much an outsider as at the office. Neither man, nor wife. Unclassified.

He says he’s not opposed to diversity. He just wants fairness, okay? Okay? he says again. Okay? I am still a few sentences behind. But okay, okay, okay.

Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Don’t inconvenience. Exist in the negative only, the space around. Do not insert yourself into the main narrative. Go unnoticed. Become the air. Open your eyes.

His presence vouches for mine, assures them that I’m the right sort of diversity. In turn, I offer him a certain liberal credibility. Negate some of his old-money political baggage. Assure his position left of centre.

In his imagined autobiography, this relationship will ultimately reduce to a sentence – maybe two. Thin evidence of his open-mindedness, his knack for cultural bridge-building. Everything is a trade.

I understand the function I’m here to perform.

I will be watched, that’s the price of admission.

It’s a fictionalization of who I am, but my engagement transforms the fiction into truth. My thoughts, my ideas – even my identity – can only exist as a response to the partygoers’ words and actions. Articulated along the perimeter of their form. Reinforcing both their self-hood, and its centrality to mine. How else can they be certain of who they are, and what they aren’t? Delineation requires a sharp, black outline.

The answer: assimilation. Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate… Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate, they say it, encouraging. Then frowning. Then again and again. And always there, quiet, beneath the urging language of tolerance and cohesion – disappear!

have lived life by the principle that when I face a problem, I must work to find an action I can take to overcome it; or accommodate it; or forge a new path around it; excavate the ground beneath it, even. This is how I’ve been prepared. This is how we prepare ourselves, teach our children to approach this place of obstacle after obstacle. Work twice as hard. Be twice as good. And always, assimilate.

The erasure itself was erased.

How can we engage, discuss, even think through a post-colonial lens, when there’s no shared base of knowledge? When even the simplest accounting of events – as preserved in the country’s own archives – wobbles suspect as tin-foil-hat conspiracies in the minds of its educated citizens?

I’m not sure I understood that I could stop, before this. That there was any alternative to survivable.

But to carry on, now that I have a choice, is to choose complicity. Surviving makes me a participant in their narrative.