The grief felt by the people of this country at the passing of our Queen has been wholly spontaneous but also wholly dignified. Indeed, we feel the best way we can honor her memory is to pull together as a country and move forward in as dutiful and cheerful a manner as was her wont.
Sadly, the Guardian has decided to publish an opinion piece which seeks to divide us as a people and rake up old graves or even invent wounds to re-open.
This is a Britain that has lost its Queen – and the luxury of denial about its past
Afua Hirsch
Denial is not a luxury. Diamond tiaras are a luxury. On the other hand, telling nutters to fuck off is a duty- a pleasant one unless the police intervene- but we'd think the de luxe package was pretty shitty if all it entitled us to do was deny shite.
The truth about Britain's past is that this country decided to let in colored people precisely because there was so settled a prejudice against them that the risk of miscegenation or wage competition seemed minimal. Worse still, if history is any guide, this country- like other countries- may decide to chuck out minorities, or, if their economic contribution is too valuable, to treat them like shit.
There may have been a time when, in imitation of America, it was cool to bang on about injustices to darkies. But Europe isn't America. It is only relatively recently that it has had any sizable colored population. But Europe has a certain reputation when it comes to...how should I put this politely?... repurposing cattle trucks for the purposes of genocide.
What colored folk can't afford, if they live in Europe, is any illusions about what the future might hold. There was an Obama moment. But that moment is over. In Sweden, it appears that a party with 'White Nationalist' roots is on the brink of taking power. I imagine, we- in this country- are a bit to the right of the Scandinavians. This is no time to get complacent. If we bang on about how Europeans did nasty to things to our ancestors in our own countries, they might decide that it was precisely the 'multi-racial' aspect of the Empire or Commonwealth which must be reversed. Africa and Asia got rid of their Europeans. Europe might decide to return the favor.
So long as she reigned, the establishment was able to gloss over the horrors of empire.
The Brits were fighting pretty savage wars in Kenya and Malaya and Cyprus during the early years of the Queen's reign. It was in this country's interest to have a reputation for being able to inflict 'horrors'.
But that was also a period when there was plenty of official and unofficial racism against colored people in this country. Indeed, compulsory repatriation was never really off the table till Thatcher took power. Things might have got better for well educated people like Afua, but the deportation of 'Windrush immigrants' happened pretty recently. The scandal revealed a deep disconnect between affluent, young, 'woke' professionals and working class colored people of the older generation who had not known that they needed to register for British citizenship under a law introduced long after their arrival.
Now is a time for painful truths
The painful truth for black British people is that our parents or grandparents moved to this country not because they believed it wasn't racist, but because they were sure it was intensely so. Their own countries had tended to turn to shit because Whitey had left and taken his nasty Racist ways with him. Thus to have some slim chance of rising by hard work and enterprise, you had to go to where Racism was rife but Property was protected.
Afua's maternal grandfather was a Cambridge graduate and a high official in Ghana. He had to run away to England not because he was White but because he was Black.
This will be remembered as a watershed moment in British history for two reasons. First, for the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Second, for what happened next: the voices of those colonised in the name of the British crown being heard, not as a fringe, exceptional view, but as a clamouring chorus of global trauma.
The 'Windrush' deportees suffered trauma. The Grievance Studies nutters didn't give a shit about them. What got them worked up was some ugly statue of a guy who died centuries ago.
There really is no 'global trauma' here. There is merely a Munchausen by proxy syndrome. If people think their mummy or granny or whoever was wrong to settle in England- why not leave?
I had prepared for this moment as a time when I would not be free.
Why? Did this dim bint think Charles III would, as the first act of his reign, put manacles on her and send her to work on his cotton plantation? I'm not saying I didn't get an Email to that effect but it was because a wealthy friend of mine had registered me on a web-site of a peculiar type. Honestly, I'd have preferred a crate of bubbly. That's what most elderly Indian men mean when they say that, by way of a change, they'd like to enjoy a gay time for their sixtieth birthday.
I have no idea how I actually feel about the passing of Queen Elizabeth – the only British monarch I have known in my lifetime – because
you aint as old as shit. I, on the other hand, can remember Queen Victoria.
for all my life deference and admiration have been drilled into me as mandatory.
She used to work for the Guardian. Her employers forced her to sing 'God save the Queen' three times a day.
I had expected that those of us minoritised in Britain would understand this as a test of our loyalty, patriotism and Good Immigrant status.
The one good thing about this country is nobody gives a shit about what you do. Expressions of grief have been entirely voluntary. Adoration of Royals isn't really a mark of loyalty. The cannibals of the Channel Isles worship Prince Phillip but
We would therefore fall into two categories: those who sought to pass the test, by enthusiastically toeing the line of national mourning, and those too conscious of the harm Britain’s power has caused, who would stay silent.
The lady's father is White British. Her circumstances may be different from that of the vast majority of black British people who- speaking generally- are not considered easy to intimidate. Also, if the Brits have some super power to instill any attitude they like into immigrants- how come they didn't want to make me charming and funny rather than boring and belligerent? Why stop at getting us darkies to profess loyalty to the Queen? Why not turn us into Terence Taos capable of proving the Reimann hypothesis? The problem with paranoia is that if 'Society' really has magical powers, why aint it using them for some profitable purpose?
But it turns out that tone policing is no longer tenable.
Whereas previously tone policing was as easy as pie. That's how come everybody had nice voices and you never heard raucous laughter in movie theaters.
Social media have been saturated by the harrowing memories of a legacy the British establishment has refused to acknowledge.
In the same way that it has refused to acknowledge that Mrs Thatcher raped me with her eyes when I was 14
The plunder of land and diamonds in South Africa, crimes that adorned the Queen’s very crown.
British Crown still is famous/Coz koh-in-noor emerged from an Afghan's anus
The physical suffering that continues from violence inflicted by her government in Kenya,
not to mention the imaginary suffering of people who want a pay-out
even as her reign was celebrated for having begun there.
No. Nobody cared where it began. She climbed a tree one night and next morning when she climbed down, she was Queen. There is a story we were told in Nairobi of a District Commissioner who had prepared a throne for the Queen to sit on once she got down from the Tree-top hotel. Sadly he stored it in a grass hut which caught fire. The moral of the story is that people who live in grass houses should not stow thrones.
The scars of genocide in Nigeria, events that took place a decade into her rule.
The silly bint means the Biafra War which happened after Nigeria became independent. It began 15 years into her reign. Why draw attention to the fact that however shitty the Brits were, things got much much shittier after they left?
In Britain, minoritised people are remembering this Elizabethan era through the lens of the racism that was allowed to thrive during it.
Racism fell. Laws were passed against it. Black Britishers thrived as never before. Look at the Cabinet- lots of dark faces. Richie Rishi, however, can go non-dom himself.
Shooting the messenger – the radio host and former footballer Trevor Sinclair was quickly hung, drawn and quartered for voicing this perspective – has failed to quell the tide of global truth-telling.
Poor chap. He misjudged the moment. Still, he has apologized and is now invoking Mental Health Awareness or something of that sort.
The burdensome task of truth-telling – to a hostile Britain more used to hearing that its past is glorious – has always fallen unequally on the descendants of empire.
Only because donkeys are too smart to take the job.
Yet as I write, our stories are continuing to be erased.
Probably by the same invisible cunts what are darkening our skins while we be sleepy-bye-byes.
During her reign, the BBC tells us, colonies “gained independence”,
Which is why lots of people from those colonies suddenly decided to move to Britain.
but there’s no mention of those who were imprisoned, shot and killed in the struggles – from the Gold Coast to Cyprus, India and Malaya – that were required to win it.
There is plenty of mention of the very many more people from those countries who laid down their lives fighting for the Crown. By contrast, no war was fought to free any British colony since the American Revolution. Holland and France fought wars to keep colonies. The Brits were smarter than that.
This trauma is not recalled with a single voice.
It is wholly imaginary. Independence turned lots of people's lives to shit. There was a push-factor to emigration. When I was young, it was fashionable to pretend you had run away from your own country not because you hated being ruled by morons of your own color but because you were actually a Communist of some very radical type. The CIA were after you. That's why you were teaching History at a White Tile University or writing for the New Statesman.
One of the effects of the empire that Queen Elizabeth personified
not for those from the sub-continent. But then Nkurmah had become Prime Minister of Ghana in 1952. Kenya was a different story. There was some crazy notion of hanging on to 'the White Highlands' so as to have somewhere to send nymphomaniac debutantes and dipsomaniac Dukes. Cyprus had some strategic value but its crazy internal politics wasn't worth the life of a single National Serviceman. On the other hand, killing Commies in Malaya was commendable.
is that it is unevenly remembered within our communities. People who were enslaved
have the author's maternal ancestors to thank. Sadly, the Brits turned against this profitable branch of African commerce.
were taught that their assimilation into the culturally superior empire was a form of advancement.
Whereas selling your neighbors to Arabs or Europeans wasn't.
Families such as mine in Ghana experienced the violence of colonialism, and were then educated to believe it was justified.
Her Dad was British. Thankfully her Mum had been educated to believe British violence was justified. That's what makes for a harmonious domestic life.
I will never forget visiting Independence Arch in Ghana. This was the nation proud to have been the first black African people to successfully break free from empire, and here was the physical focal point of that freedom – an archway bearing a symbolic black star. When I looked inside, I found a reality check: a plaque dedicated this freedom to none other than Queen Elizabeth II.
Why did the Ghanaians not get rid of the plaque? They became a Republic in 1960.
I understood it as a lesson that even in our freedom, we are not free.
Others might understand it as a lesson that Ghanaians understand their own history better than silly peeps wot rite for the Guardian. It is quite true that Nkrumah, like Sukarno, Nehru etc, made some macro-economic mistakes but only hindsight is 20/20. Still, Ghana had a very smart and successful entrepreneurial class which, taking account of Nkrumah's charisma and sterling academic credentials, backed his political ambitions. They'd have been better off picking one of their own.
We are expected to be grateful for having been colonised.
This may be true of a well educated and beautiful person like Afua. Most people are grateful if I don't piss on their doorstep. Expectations work that way. Smart peeps are expected to be smart. There are Ghanaian and Indian and Chinese and other families which helped create and which profited by colonialism and some of those families decided to emigrate to the UK after their countries had become Independent. Such people might be grateful for colonialism but would be well advised not to mention the matter. They should pretend to be deeply obliged to people who urinate on their doorstep. It's nice to be appreciated- more especially if you have just the one talent.
We are racialised, and then expected to prove that racism exists.
Speak for yourself! I am being horcruxized by the neighbor's cat and when I complain to the Police I am expected to prove that horcruxes exist. It's like coppers have never heard of Harry Potter!
Even as black British people continue to die at the hands of
kids with knives?
the state, such as the unarmed Chris Kaba,
a drill rapper previously jailed for having an imitation firearm
news of the black community’s mourning is obscured by the more important story of royal mourning.
because the Queen, as Head of State, had a much longer criminal record of shooting or knifing bleck peeps- right? On the other hand, down my neck of the woods, the Krays were the true Royal Family.
To the extent that it’s ever acknowledged that black lives matter, now is certainly not the time.
Unless you want to look like a boring twat who is stuck in a time warp. Ukraine War? BLM. Pakistan floods? BLM. Queen dies. BLM. Universe is going to blow up in 24 hours? We need to talk about BLM. Again. No, I don't actually know anyone who was shot by cops but could we just talk about BLM anyway?
Yet I sympathise with those who feel the Queen’s loss.
More especially those whose loved ones laid down their lives serving the Queen. She was just old enough to join the Territorials in the last year of the big War. I suppose many a young man, from England or Australia or the mountains of Nepal, when to his death dreaming of a sweetheart who, to his eyes, was as kind and good.
Under her reign, many latched on to the stabilising sense of cultural continuity.
Did they though? To be frank, I can't see much 'cultural continuity' between the Fifties and now.
To lose that is to feel disrupted and uncertain. For me, it’s a familiar anxiety –
she was born in 1981 and went to a private school and then Oxford. Exam anxieties I can understand. But what 'disruption' and 'uncertainty' could this lady actually have faced?
Britain’s empire by definition redrew boundaries, and swept aside generations of tradition.
Which must have been shit if they got so easily swept aside.
Our parents and grandparents were recruited to Britain for its benefit,
Her grandfather chose to leave Ghana for England and considered himself a political exile. Why does this lady not express gratitude to the refuge this country has accorded many such regardless of color or creed?
the terms and conditions of which my generation are still trying to make sense. We know how it feels to lack cultural continuity.
Private School to Oxford. That's continuity in spades.
Others in Britain enjoyed it at our expense.
No. The working class in this country suffered so that horrible African and Arab and Asian potentates could stay rich even after they stopped selling their own people to the highest bidder.
If continuity is an abstract subject, the other trappings of royal symbolism are more concrete. There were pompous reflections last week with the idea expressed in the Economist’s obituary that the Queen “came from good Hanoverian blood”. If that sounds like a white supremacist idea, that’s because it is.
No it isn't. To say x is good is not to say x is the best. What the Economist wrote was- like monarchs before her back to medieval times, she had stripped to a shift behind screens and been anointed with holy oil: a sign that her election came not just from good Hanoverian blood, but from God. It was a reminder that kingship was a holy and permanent duty. And she never forgot it.
The fact of the matter is that the Protestant Succession and the Queen's role as Governor of the Church of England were very serious matters back then. The Queen had to refuse permission for her younger sister's marriage to a divorcee. This was also the issue which had brought her father to the throne. Times certainly have changed since then.
When I am attacked for applying reason
stupidity, yes. Reason- no.
to what is obviously an emotional situation, one of the allegations will be that I dare speak of race, when the real oppressor is class.
That's old hat! David Icke has supplanted Marx. The real oppressor is the Lizard People from Planet X.
And yet here we come to the other mainstay of royal ideology – the Queen was the class system personified.
Or the Race System personified. Or the Lizard People personified. The truth, of course, is that she was a WOMAN. Women iz ruling world innit? Who stole my yoghurt? It was WOMEN!
Her role, and that of the King who succeeds her, is to sit at the apex of a class system, in a hierarchy anointed by God.
Fuck you God! Why did you enable the stealing of my yoghurt by WOMEN!
In some cases, it’s hard to distinguish this from the idea that she was indeed a god herself –
for Afua, it must be very had to distinguish anything at all from anything it is wholly unlike
the British tabloids began seeing her omnipresence in rainbows and old-lady-with-a-hat-shaped clouds hovering benignly over the land.
reading tabloids makes you stoooooopid.
Change has come, but the systems of race and class that delineate our destinies have not.
Only if we choose to remain here. There are plenty of smart people who go to Ghana or Bangladesh or India and build up those countries in different ways. Some become billionaires. Others achieve goals yet more substantial.
The genius of our monarchy is that it transforms people who have the most to gain from dismantling those systems into passionate subjects of the Crown instead.
Which is how come Nkrumah and Nehru and so on were so charmed by meeting the Monarch that they refused to turn their countries into Republics.
If it were possible to set all of this to one side, maybe I would like to mourn the Queen, the hard-working old lady who has been the symbol of my country for my, even my parents’, entire lives. But I can’t separate her from a reign that refused to acknowledge this reality, let alone attempt to change it.
No doubt, Afua will also refuse to mourn her daddy or her mummy because they didn't acknowledge some other nonsense which infects her brain. That's cool provided they aint dead. Living peeps tend to dislike being mourned more particularly if you write 'having read your last book I see you are brain-dead and am writing to express my deep condolences you fat bastard'.
Nor do I get to opt out of the emotional labour of processing the memories that other British people refuse to acknowledge.
Yes dear- you just carry on with that labor. While you're at it, could you also process my traumatic memories of being raped by Queen Victoria on my fiftieth birthday.
Until now. Last week, Britain lost the luxury of long-lasting denial, at the same time as it lost its Queen.
No doubt Afua believes this is the real reason everybody looks so sad. I admire her. I too have similar delusions. Sadly, the Guardian won't let me share them with its readers not because they are obscene or pornographic but because they are a bit sad and borderline creepy.
Black Brits mourn the Queen because they are Brits. Some have served in the Armed Forces or have relatives or ancestors who did so. The Queen was our Commander in Chief. She was also the Governor of the Church of England and a lot of us are Anglican or participate in Anglican worship. But, I suspect, most of us mourn the Queen for the same reason we mourned Nelson Mandela or Mother Theresa or any other good person who, for whatever reason, somehow made us feel we were connected to them. In the case of the Head of the Commonwealth, perhaps this was something cultivated rather than natural. Or maybe it was a gift- I will not say a charismatic gift- but its secular equivalent. Or maybe we just liked her because she was nice. I don't know and that's fine, not because I iz bleck, but because I'm lazy and stupid rather than malicious or actively evil.
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