By Caryl Phillips

As a boy growing up in England, I knew that the main factor preventing my full participation in British life was the color of my skin. If only they could somehow color me English – in other words, white – then nobody would know the difference. The truth is, I did not want to be white, I just wanted to fit in, and I believed that color was the issue. And then slowly things began to change. In November 1978, Viv Anderson, the Nottingham Forest fullback, became the first black footballer to play for England. Within a few years there were black players on most of the first-division football teams, and then there were other black faces in the English national team; soon after there were many black athletes on the Olympic track and field team, and black people on television reading the news. We were coloring England, and although problems remained one sensed gates being unlocked, rusty bolts being drawn back, and barriers being frequently crossed. However, the shock that most people felt on the morning of 7 July 2005, when it became clear that four non-white Britons had killed themselves and others, was a timely reminder that it is foolhardy to think that race by itself is a barometer of either human disaffection or social progress. It is a factor, but equity of opportunity, especially in housing, education and employment, is determined by race and class and gender; and then there is something else.

This is what my young Muslim ‘friend’ Ali knew when we stood outside the school office. I had escorted him there in some kind of gesture of racial– outsider–solidarity, but he was culturally an outsider in a way that I never could be. Back then, I thought that Britain was narrating a harsh tale to me about who I was; however, I had no idea how caustic the narrative was that Ali was being forced to listen to. I was constantly being told, ‘Go back to where you come from’, but in reality I had nowhere to go back to. Some among my generation did grow dread locks and try to retreat into a strangely essential black identity, and they began to speak of Africa as ‘home’, but I knew that we were not going anywhere and that we would have to wrestle with Britain to make their story fit our lives. That’s what all migrants do, as their plural selves develop and concessions are made to the new nation while they decide, as time moves on, which of their cultural traditions to hold onto and which they can discard without brutalizing who they are. In other words, immigrants decide how, and at what pace, they will adapt.

As England was coloring itself, Ali and his family were obviously hearing the same instructions that I was subjected to regarding England’s desire that we should all go back to where we came from, but Ali did have some essential place of identity to which he could, should he wish to, turn as an alternative to the perceived hostility of British life. On that July morning in 2005, four young British men felt it necessary to reach out and embrace an alternative place by seizing up on an extreme form of Islamic political identity and demonstrating its potency with tragic consequences. In order to prevent this happening again it is absolutely crucial that we think long and hard about what is happening in Europe. The coloring of Britain, and Europe, suggests a radical and permanent change in the appearance of the European continent that is as dramatic as the changes that came with the post-Columbian settlement of the Americas, or the European settlement of Australasia. To imagine that one can successfully legislate the pace of this change is to fundamentally misunderstand the human desire to belong, and to dangerously misjudge the human capacity to feel slighted. There are those who are willing to pay the highest price imaginable to resist people who would police their identities. And there are those who will pay the highest price imaginable to secure an identity. The European response needs to be significantly more sophisticated than merely telling people that their traditions are barbaric and that they must dress differently.

European borders are porous. European nations have been built, have grown, and have been developed by countless waves of people entering countries and slowly learning the language, adapting to the customs, and enriching the national life by eventually beginning to consider themselves English, or Dutch, or French, or Belgian. In recent years, this process has been complicated and made more difficult by issues of race. How does one have a black face and be European? This has been one of the great essay questions of my life, and it continues to be a vexing issue at the heart of Europe, but I am an optimist. Despite the statement by Georges Frêche – a French socialist politician who recently claimed that he is ashamed because, according to him, the French football team does not represent France because there are too many black faces – I remain convinced that this coloring of Europe, so that one can be both black and European, is not something that might happen; it has already happened. However, what if your blackness or brownness comes with a different set of cultural traditions? This is where we now seem to be, and on both sides of the fence the stand-off is filled with violence and distrust. Does it make sense to single out one group and berate them with scant regard for any nuances of difference among them, and then panic in to legislating against them? Is this going to help smooth the transition in Europe? I think the so-called radicalizing of the man who killed Theo van Gogh, and the radicalizing of the suicide bombers on 7 July in London gives us some part of the answer. Of course, vigorously rooting out those who seek to commit random acts of violence against innocent people going about their daily business is part of our social contract. In Britain, we learned just how deadly and destructive this violence can be during the IRA bombing campaign in the 1970’s and ‘80s. But we also learned that being dogmatic, and passing restrictive legislation, and not understanding our own history, only slows down the movement towards peace and our ability to both tolerate, and cherish, diversity in all its manifestations.

On the morning of 7 July 2005 when I realized that three of the four suicide bombers were from Leeds my heart sank. They were people with Yorkshire accents, exactly like the people I had grown up with. Just what had gone wrong with these young British lives? And, of course, I thought of Ali. I thought of his face as his colleagues threw his books out of the bus window; I thought of his silent, dignified hurt. I felt guilty that, over the years, I had made little effort to try to imagine how it felt to be both British and a Muslim, and I had never stopped to consider how it felt to be called a ‘Paki’ every day. I was safe in my world where I could wait for colored footballers, and musicians, and newscasters to emerge and ease my passage in to the outer circle of belonging in a still defensive and racist Britain. However, at least for me, the journey was beginning. I was being colored English, as opposed to my thirteen-year-old classmate, Ali.

The truth is, Ali’s journey had begun from afar more peripheral place than mine, and clearly the pace of his journey would be glacial compared with my own meanderings. In the years that have passed, both of us have witnessed significant changes in English life; for instance, legislation has been put in to place which outlaws the use of racist language in public discourse, but those on the right have simply replaced their ‘Paki-bashing’ discourse with an anti-Muslim rhetoric delivered with a wink and a nudge for they know full well that they are still targeting non-white people. Nominally, at least, I am not affected by such anti-Muslim rhetoric, but Ali and his family remain in the frontline of attack, and this being the case I am not sure how much real progress has been made. I often wonder what happened to Ali, and if he ever did complete the journey or if, like the three young Muslims from Leeds, the effort of trying to belong, and the pain of moving slowly into England, caused him to suffer from some sort of assimilation fatigue that eventually led him to simply abandon the whole enterprise. Did Ali get fed up with being called ‘Paki’, and with being told that he and his family must dress like English people, not speak their own language, knock it off with that mosque prayer stuff, and stop cooking their smelly food? Back then, as a thirteen-year-old, I instinctively knew that some part of me was Ali; I knew that in a time of crisis there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’, there is only ‘we’, and all of us must obey the moral directive to communicate with each other.

I hope that Ali, unlike the three Leeds Muslims who died on 7 July, has not given up on Britain. I hope that over the years he has learned to cultivate a temporary deafness to the knee-jerk proclamations of various politicians and the bitter hostility of thugs who understand neither what is, nor what is inevitable. Successful integration does mean that immigrants adapt to the new country, but it also means that the new country adapts to them. It demands that the residents cultivate the capacity – and courage – to change their ideas about who they are. For this to work it is not just those who go to the mosque and wear head scarves who have to look at themselves. Those who eat fish and chips and drink beer or wear clogs or berets have to look at themselves too, they have to look in to a mirror and realize that they live in a continent that is in the midst of radical change, and no amount of violence from right-wing racists, or fundamentalists of any stripe, or rhetoric from politicians, or canting from the media is going to halt this change. This transition is as inevitable as the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening; the only question is, what kind of day are we going to have?

Europe is no longer white and never will be again. And Europe is no longer Judaeo-Christian and never will be again. There are already fifteen million Muslims in the European Union, and the figures will grow. All of us are faced with a stark choice: we can rail against European evolution, or we can help to smooth its process. And, if we choose the latter, the first thing we must remind ourselves of is the lesson that great fiction teaches us as we sink in to character and plot and suspend our disbelief: for a moment, ‘they’ are ‘us’. I believe passionately in the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with a world that is clumsily transforming itself, a world that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our daily lives. As long as we have literature as a bulwark against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance. Europe needs writers to explicate this transition, for literature is plurality in action; it embraces and celebrates a place of not truths, it relishes ambiguity, and it deeply respects the place where everybody has the right to be understood, both the thirteen-year-old boy whose books are thrown out of a bus window, and the boys who are throwing the books, and it judges neither party in the hope that by some often painfully slow process of imaginative osmosis one might finally recognize what passed before one’s eyes today, what occurred yesterday, and what will happen tomorrow, and it implores us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our fellow human beings, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, brown or white. This truly is my hope for Europe, and I know that the writer has a crucial part to play in this. I believe this. And this only.