We were planning an anti-racist and anti-fascist march from Bradford to London. The march didn’t happen in the end, but we were planning one. We had a meeting with men and women in Bradford to discuss what we would do. We brought up the question of issues to do with gender, and that didn’t go down very well with a number of the men – not all of them, but with some of the people who were there. There were many reasons why the march didn’t happen, but some of the men tended to blame us for bringing up questions of patriarchal relations as the reason for why the march did not happen. So there was, at that level, the struggle with men on the left. There was, of course, struggle within our own communities themselves, where, as in Britain as a whole, living out patriarchal relations was an everyday experience for women.
We had to develop strategies, in a way, where we could work with people so they would listen to us and not just dismiss us as these difficult young women who were just coming up with these newfound ideas. That was quite difficult. For example, we once staged a feminist version of Ramlila, a play based on the Hindu epic of Ramayana. Some people might think, ‘Why do a religious thing?’ And some feminists I’m sure would say, ‘Why would you do that?’ But here we were in Southall, and we wanted to invite women and men, mostly women came actually, but we wanted to critique Sita’s position as a woman, and we used the figure of a ‘jester’, who provided a humorous though pointed commentary on the proceedings. Here was a feminist stance presented through an idiom that was culturally familiar to those present. We did that. It was quite a successful event. The women could identify, because they knew what it was like when you lived the life of an ‘obedient wife’. But then we were coming up with different ideas about possible alternatives. Together, we could make sense of it.
It’s even more difficult now, I’m sure, with all the Islamophobia. I think you have to be able to work with people in a way where you can facilitate the emergence of a shared common project. You have to address the contradictory ‘common sense’ that we all live with, that Gramsci speaks of.7 Unless you do that, then you’re not going to make much headway with constructing new political agendas. To do that, you have to begin with where people are at, but not stay there, and not get sucked into that. But rather, to jointly develop new discourses and practices for the creation of new political horizons, a new common sense. Those were rather difficult things to do in relation to our communities, but also in relation to ourselves. We were Asian women, we were women of African descent.
There was once a political meeting called – not by us, but by another anti-racist group in Southall – in a hall belonging to a temple. Just as a venue, not for religious reasons. I know that some SBS members didn’t want to go there because it was in a hall on the premises of a temple, a religious place, when we were secular. So there were difficult debates and issues like that. But this is what I mean. There isn’t a hard and fast rule for how you would actually go about this work; you have to do hard work at the ground level, if you’re an activist. It’s quite hard work. It takes its toll on you psychologically, as well.
BB/RZ We were also wondering how your own life experiences influence your theoretical and conceptual work around diaspora?
AB I was born in India, but I was five years old when I went to Africa. So I grew up in Uganda. I was in Uganda until I did my A levels. Then I went to America; I was in California, where I did my undergraduate degree, then Wisconsin, where I did my Master’s. This was about the time when Idi Amin was coming to power. I was in Britain, on my way back to Uganda, when the Idi Amin edict was issued8 – and even though I was a Ugandan citizen, I couldn’t go back. So I was stateless for about five years in Britain, until I became a citizen. (In those days, after five years you applied for naturalisation.) Hence, I’ve lived in all these different countries, and diaspora is very much part and parcel of my life experience. The things we’ve been talking about – SBS, other politics around racism, around class and so on – all those are very much part and parcel of my life.
My analysis has always been informed by my political activism, and vice versa. I think the two have gone together. So the concept of ‘diaspora space’, for example, emerged out of thinking through different life experiences and how to theorise about them, how to analyse them.
BB/RZ We wanted to follow up with the question of belonging and your work on belonging. The Indigenous Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson draws our attention to the fact that the conjoined twin of belonging is exclusion,9 which may sound obvious, but she points out how that often gets lost in the discourse on belonging. Lauren Berlant formulated this nicely: ‘Just because we are in the room together does not mean that we belong to the room or each other: belonging is a specific genre of affect, history, and political mediation that cannot be presumed and is, indeed, a relation whose evidence and terms are always being contested.’10 We were wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your understanding of the discourse of belonging and how that has been useful to your thinking on migration and diaspora?
AB I think, in fact, that what these two scholars say is very important. I do find the notion of belonging compelling, because without a sense of belonging, however contested and fractured it might be, you are vulnerable as an outsider – not just physically, but psychologically and psychically, as well. If we don’t feel any sense of belonging, we become quite dispersed, scattered beings. To have some sense of togetherness, of psychic coherence, means we have to have a sense of belonging – to our siblings, our families, our friends, our political allies, our ‘imagined communities’ as well as others that form our lifeworld. The point that Moreton-Robinson and Berlant are making is that the flip side of belonging is exclusion. Belonging only makes sense because there is exclusion. Histories of racism, class hierarchy and heteronormativity, for instance, tell us which groups, under what conditions, have belonged or been excluded.
Apart from being predicated against the socioeconomic, political and cultural landscape, belonging is also very much part of the affective domain. These different aspects need to be held together. But we always need to be aware – it’s like when Stuart Hall talks about the concept of ‘identity’, and he says that it’s a term without which he cannot do, but at the same time it’s a term that he’s continually interrogating. I think ‘belonging’ is such a term. You can’t do without it, but you have to always question how it is being evoked, always remain aware how it is being used and how a sense of belonging, or a sense of alienation, is being played out. Those two may go together. If you don’t feel a sense of belonging, you may become alienated. What kinds of social, political and cultural conditions favour alienation and anomie as opposed to a sense of belonging, a sense of well-being?
I would think of it that way, to be aware of those social issues alongside the sense that it gives you a feeling of being a part of something. A sense of affirmation.
BB/RZ I think you mentioned somewhere that a feeling of being at home is one way of describing what belonging is. Because for those of us who have moved around a lot or have come from families who were also immigrant families, migrant families, refugee families, it’s quite difficult to grasp what ‘belonging’ actually means. For many of us, the feeling of not belonging is what becomes familiar and even a primary psychic default position. What does belonging actually look like, and what does it mean?
AB It is a sense of feeling at home, isn’t it?
BB Yes, I think that’s