Look Up
A few months ago, I was walking down an alleyway, past a collage of Bristol graffiti, when I was struck by a stencil of Rishi Sunak. Underneath, in definitive Helvetica, it said ‘TWAT’, which made me smile, cos, well, he is a twat.
I stopped to take a photo to put in the group chat. It was only when I paused to angle my camera that I noticed someone had written ‘paki’ next to Rishi’s stupid grinning face. I had a visceral, horrified reaction. Rishi is a twat. But he’s no ‘paki’. Two things can be true at once. I guess it can be easiest described as the ‘I can cuss my mum but you can’t cuss my mum’ rule of kids’ snaps.
But also, it’s racist.
What shocked me was not the racism, nor the surrounding acronyms of far-right groups. It wasn’t the proximity to my home, or that no one had thought to daub out the slur. I was shocked the twats were still using such ye olde racist slurs. ‘Paki’? Mate. What is this? 1991? I mean, I’ve heard much more contemporary, up-to-date, millennial, gen z’icle slurs during my time as a minor public figure.
But that word, and the reason I’m liberally using the word, is because I was shocked this scrawler hadn’t moved on. Or that they were using retro words. Or, as I always suspected, that sentiment never ever fucking went away and I fucking told you this is what people thought and screw all those gaslighters who tried to convince that it was just a few idiots, just a thing of the past, things were better now, of which there are a bunch in my life. Because I warned you. I told you this was going to happen. So many of us told you.
Even when you were shocked at the race riots last year, we told you this was going to happen.
I just hadn’t been called that specific word in a while. And it stuck with me.
It was a real reminder for me to look up more in my city. I’ve lived in Bristol for fifteen years, I know it’s not that long, but my kids were born here, they identify as Bristolians, and this is their city as much as it’s my city as much as it’s yours. The city does not belong to the racists, the transphobes, the elites, the misogynists. The city belongs to the people.
It may be obvious for me to say this, especially in The Bristol Cable, but it’s worth repeating these things. It’s worth reevaluating our ownership of such feelings, because if we don’t, we can take it for granted.
I don’t want to take that feeling for granted. If anything, I want to constantly affirm it, recognise it, seek it and nurture it.
Which is why I’m so incredibly honoured to join The Bristol Cable team as a columnist. It’s a news source I’ve long admired, something that’s always raced to the top of my reading pile when it’s landed on my doorstep. I think its honesty, its seriousness, its ability to see the city not only for what it is but for what it could be, is to be lauded.
And that’s what I plan to bring to this column. I’ve written fiction and non-fiction, for a variety of audiences. I’ve written Spider-Man comics for Marvel, YA books that are studied in Bristol secondary schools, a collection of essays read the world over, and I even started a youth project at Watershed, called Rife Magazine, that helped to launch the careers of many writers and filmmakers. I’m so proud of all of these things.
But this column isn’t going to be about the past. I’m going to use this space to follow my curiosity. I want to move around the city and see the projects, the people, the movements that strive to ensure this city belongs to us. I want to interrogate what it is that brings us together. Because maybe by putting such things under the microscope, by shining a light, we can widen their reach. I don’t know.
I’m troubled, as so many of the Cable’s readers are, by the way things are heading. Whether we feel like we’re heading backwards, or sliding into something. Whether we feel like everything’s on fire and there’s nothing to look forward to, it’s worth looking up and seeing what is happening and asking who is making good work or doing good things or pushing back in a meaningful way against power structures.
As James Baldwin said in No Name In The Street: ‘Yet, hope—the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are—dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees.’
I’m excited to go on this journey with you, dear Cable readers. Let’s all look up together.
About the Author
Nikesh Shukla is a novelist and screenwriter, currently working on a Spider-Man India comic book miniseries for Marvel as well as numerous television projects. Most recently, he released his first children’s book, called The Council Of Good Friends. He is the author of Coconut Unlimited (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award), Meatspace and the critically acclaimed The One Who Wrote Destiny.
Nikesh is the editor of the bestselling essay collection,The Good Immigrant, which won the reader’s choice at the Books Are My Bag Awards. He co-edited The Good Immigrant USA with Chimene Suleyman. He is the author of three YA novels, Run, Riot (shortlisted for a National Book Award), The Boxer (long-listed for the Carnegie Medal) and Stand Up.
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This was an amazing read. I was almost distracted by the simultaneously crisp and expansive writing of Nikesh Shukla. An exciting piece that got me to crack open my tired copy of “The Good Immigrant,” just to read “Namaste” again, to bask in rhetorical coherence and, importantly, almost prophetically relevant soundness of the racial logic.
I’ll be here to next month’s.
Namaste!