6. IDENTITY CRISIS - On Immigration and Belonging
“If identity is always elusive, the issue for immigrants - and the choices required of them - are even more so” - Michael D. Higgins
It is only in the last few years that I began to realise how much I had been affected by being the child of an immigrant. Growing up, because my skin was white, the idea that I was a second-generation immigrant didn’t even cross my mind, although the fact of my status acted constantly in the shadows without my recognition, and I remained completely aware of my non-British heritage even in my ignorance of living its consequences. The thing was, in my schools, the word “immigrant” was only ever used as a derisive term reserved for the small minority of non-white families unfortunate enough to get a job, and thus live and work, in the racist parochial town in which I grew up.
Proudly - and I was conscious enough of this to be proud of it - I wasn’t one of these racists. I can hand-on-heart write this today knowing that I genuinely have never understood the prejudice of racism and cannot fathom why another person’s skin colour being different from your own is sufficient reason to hate that person or treat another person unfairly. However, I cannot deny the benefits of white privilege - both known and unknown to me - which my skin colour has afforded me throughout my existence, and one such privilege was the ability to grow up as an immigrant’s child freed of the racism my fellow second generation children (those with parents from parts of the world where the skin is darker) were burdened with. I was often considered “odd” by those I went to school with, but never as someone who didn’t belong.
However, belonging was exactly the feeling that I lacked. And it was my lack of understanding that I was just as much an immigrant’s child as any other which made that sensation all the more puzzling. It made me turn inward and assume my confusion as I navigated the strange and alienating norms of my peers was something to do with me. Like I had missed out on some crucial moment of socialisation everyone else had been privy to. Instead of what it actually was: that I genuinely had missed out on such socialisation because my parents did not have the necessary cultural capital to induct me.
I think part of what made me so unaware that my experience of my country - Great Britain - would be unlike those of my school-friends who had parents who had also been born and raised here was that my dad was always so very, very English. At least, he seemed that way to me. And of course, next to my American mother, he would seem that way. She, so very obviously, being not from the UK with her loud American accent and brash and bolshy New York sensibility. That our name was Irish - McKee - didn’t seem to mean anything particularly important. Our Irish heritage wasn’t much talked about, and granddad, who had come from Derry as a Methodist Minister all those years ago, seldom spoke about much to do with his past the few times a year we visited him. He had an accent, of course, but so did everyone up in Bury where he and my grandmother lived. My young ears couldn’t determine anything particularly different from granddad’s Northern Irish tone from that of my gran’s, almost Scottish, Cumberland lilt, or from the way dad suddenly said “ee that were grand!” in a broad Lancastrian voice he never used at home whenever we ate a meal with the two of them.
Grandad also had multiple sclerosis, which meant he wasn’t around a lot when we visited as he tried to rest, exercise, and avoid the accidental knocks and bumps that playful children might visit upon a body and that it would take him days to recover from. His appearances were usually brief and somewhat strained; trying to be as much a part of our lives as he could be whilst also keeping us at a safe arm’s length. The fact of his Irishness was similar to the fact of his Methodism - just an interesting feature of the man, no more or less important than the fact of his multiple sclerosis.
As dad was the “English” side of my heritage, and mom the “American”, I just assumed that all British people were a little bit Irish. But even my fathers Englishness failed to make me feel like I fit in with the people I grew up with. My parents marriage was an unhappy one, and at a certain point my father began to withdraw from the family, throwing himself into work, and extra-marital affairs, to avoid his problems at home. He was around, but not enough to really guide his children in life the way a father should. The main job of child-raising therefore fell to our mother, the American immigrant. Mom did her best, but obviously she did not really understand the more esoteric aspects of being a child in late twentieth century Britain. She had gone through a different school system herself back in the States, and didn’t know about any of the milestones and key events in British education, often leaving me often feeling caught out when friends at school began talking about some upcoming thing they assumed I knew the significance of but of which I had no clue. When teachers made references to old British TV shows or celebrities, my classmates rolled their eyes and groaned in a knowing way while I was left confused. (You have no idea how bewildering Bruce Forsyth was the first time I saw him host a gameshow when round at a friend’s house. This creepy old man pulling a weird pose which everyone (except me) suddenly cheered for before yelling out “nice to see you, to see you…” and everyone (except me) finishing his sentence with a collective roar of “nice!” A nonsense catchphrase into which I hadn’t been initiated.) Meanwhile my own diet of Americana - American TV shows, music, movies, and books were seen as curiosities which I had to explain patiently to my friends so they could understand what I was talking about.
Dad’s one big attempt at making me feel at one with the culture I was growing up in was trying to get me to like football. Unfortunately, being the child of an immigrant from a country where soccer had no appeal, no-one (including my dad) had ever thought to try and explain to me why I should like it. He, like so many other British fathers, just assumed some natural innate love of the “beautiful game” would kick in as soon as a ball was passed to me and that, when he took me to see the matches of his beloved Shakers live at Gigg Lane, I would somehow immediately understand what I was supposed to be looking for.
I didn’t.
And so, as the predominant playground pastime at school evolved from games of “tig” to kicking a tennis ball between coats laid out as goalposts, I began to feel even more alienated from my peers. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel a deeper kinship with America. We visited the country regularly and, there, I never felt like an outcast. In America, the things I enjoyed were actually mainstream. Films and television shows came out on the date they were supposed to, not years later. Food choices matched my palate instead of the stodgy bland food of my home country. Clothes looked right and the radio played songs I actually liked (many of them British, but no longer played in the UK). Even the sports, baseball and basketball, I would watch with an enthusiasm I couldn’t seem to muster for soccer, eventually becoming enamoured by the larger than life characters of professional wrestling - another American import back home, only available on expensive satellite television.
I began to identify the problem with myself was that I was clearly more American than I was British. Rather than figure out that I was just struggling as any child of an immigrant might at fitting into a new and alien world for which they have not been properly equipped with all the hidden customs and passwords, I assumed there was something inherently more American about me than there was something British. It was now that I began to invoke my grandfather’s Irishness - I was half American whereas clearly I was only a quarter English due to my father being half Irish. Therefore, of course, I was “more” American than I was a Brit! No wonder I was on the outside looking in.
Somehow, in all of this, I ignored the fact that on my mother’s side, her father’s family had come to America from France. I had no narrative for the French part of me - nor could I include it into the crude mathematical division of identity I had butchered into myself. All I knew was that I had two passports - British and American - and that I felt more strongly about my American citizenship than I did about my British one. I fantasised about a time when we would move back there and I would be able to attend a “proper” American high school, like in the show Boy Meets World, instead of the antiquated, uniform-obsessed British comprehensive I was currently suffering in.
That is, until I began to learn more about American politics.
As a teenager, punk rock catalysed a political awakening inside me and before I knew it my precious America was suddenly responsible for massacres in Vietnam, war crimes in Nicaragua, and an illegitimate invasion of Iraq I had hitherto been oblivious about. I began to see cracks in the American Dream as I learnt about their appalling healthcare system and lack of any meaningful social safety net. I realised that American Imperialism since the second world war was just as problematic as British colonialism had been before it. And as I began to reassess my American identity, so too I began to reassess my dismissal of my, now-familiar, British home.
It is probably not insignificant that around this time in my life, my dad started spending more time at home, and was available to have conversations with around a breakfast table.
My band were writing angry political punk songs, but we would see that some of the ideas and analysis we were getting from American bands and fanzines didn’t quite translate across the ocean. Corporate media, for example, and the sorry excuse for “news” in the States was somewhat mitigated in the UK by institutions like the BBC. Arts programmes like the National Theatre or, at the time, Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” initiative saw the UK embracing art and music at a time when America seemed to be entering a new age of censorship and private monopoly on ideas. The NHS did for free what so many Americans were going bankrupt trying to fund, and even our worst right-wing politicians seemed to at least agree that climate change was a real thing, abortion was a woman’s choice, and LGBT people needed the same rights as everybody else.
My original plan, dreamed of as a child, was to leave for America as soon as I turned eighteen. I would drift off to sleep at night imagining getting on the plane and starting my new life. But by the time I was eighteen I realised I wanted to stick around in the UK a little longer. America no longer looked so appealing. So to confuse things further, I went to University in Wales. A country in the UK that wasn’t England. Here, rugby, not football, was king. NHS prescriptions were still free for everybody. The looming wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fiercely opposed while the government in London marched us towards them. We were all outsiders at university, most of us coming from either English towns and experiencing Wales for the first time, or from the valleys around Cardiff, or the towns and cities of wider Wales, and experiencing the cosmopolitan capital for the first time. Equally lost and confused, together we defined our own Cardiff culture and felt immediately at home.
So now I was half American, a quarter Irish, a quarter English, and living in Wales. And at the end of my second year - my grandfather a year in the grave - I finally visited Ireland for the first time. Three days in Dublin with an ex-girlfriend and her friends. It should have been awkward, but it wasn’t. Instead it felt very much like coming home to something strangely familiar. Good music, fascinating people, the romance of the Liffey; I spent the whole time on a spiritual and creative high, coming home and writing several songs about my short time there and eager to return as soon as possible. Songs about lost love and haunting ghosts. Suddenly my Irish quarter no longer seemed like something watering down my father’s Englishness, but something inherent to it. I spoke to him about Ireland and he explained how much he loved Dublin himself. How even his frequent walks in the Lake District were, on some level, about Ireland. Hills and lakes. The North. It called to him. A Lancashire boy with a Cumbrian mother and an Irish father. I thought about the time we’d spent down in Glendalough while over in Ireland and I saw exactly what he meant.
By this time, mom and dad divorced, my mother had returned to America where she was spending half of each year with the man who would become my step-dad. They met in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, and so visits to the States, now that my American grandmother had also passed away, moved from New York to the state of Massachusetts where I began to explore Boston. As well as falling in love with the Red Sox (and as a life-long Stephen King fan, how could I not?) I began to wonder about the appeal of the city to me as someone with Irish roots. With such a strong Irish population in Boston, was there something about the place that just called to people like me? Was this very Irish city in New England the perfect place for this tri-citizen American to call home?
When my wife and I got married the date was July 4th and the theme was American to celebrate our unity on Independence Day. Stars and Stripes everywhere, and on our wedding cake sugar figures of us: she as Lady Liberty and me as Uncle Sam. We asked that people not give us gifts, only money to fund our imminent relocation to the United States.
The next day we flew to Italy to spend our first of two honeymoons in Europe. Our second would be in Scotland, at the Edinburgh fringe. In each place, from Florence, to Rome, to Edinburgh, we imagined what it would be to live in such a place instead.
Ten years later, we still haven’t moved to America. Initially it was the healthcare that stopped us. A dual-citizen friend in Texas had to move back to the UK simply because they couldn’t afford a small operation on their shoulder. Then my mom got sick with cancer. We saw directly how what she got for free when home in the Midlands would translate into tens of thousands of dollars in the States. The dialysis she needed every two days would have made her broke in a week had it not been paid for by the NHS. But then came Trump, and the divisive “red and blue” mentality which got him there. We still loved to visit the place, and may even have found some wiggle-room on the healthcare, but now it was America I was feeling alienated from when I visited. Somehow I had become too British to really fit in there anymore, even as I remained still not quite British enough to fit in here.
Because part of what I loved so much about Britain was its cosmopolitanism. I loved having Europe on our doorstep. From my house it takes less time to get to Amsterdam by plane than it does London by train. You could fly to Dublin and back without even needing a passport. We would find ourselves in France one minute, and then spend a few days by the sea in Italy before returning to France to fly home. We have friends who live in Sweden we see more of than friends who live at the other end of the motorway.
Brexit broke my heart. Just when I thought I was starting to understand this place, it turned out I didn’t know 52% of the population at all.
It was around that time that many people I knew with Irish surnames began talking about formalising their Irish citizenship. When the UK was part of Europe it didn’t much matter - the open borders meant we could come and go into the Republic as we pleased. But not only might Brexit mean the return of a damaging border between the north and the south of Ireland, but it would prevent the free movement we previously took for granted. Irish citizenship would ensure that not only could we return to Ireland without worry, but we would still remain part of Europe even if the rest of the UK turned its back on it.
This week I decided to do it myself. I’d been putting it off partly because of denial about Brexit (maybe it won’t really happen) but also partly because applying meant having to root through my sad files of the deceased to find the relevant birth and death certificates which show the lineage from my grandfather in Derry to me. But after a week with two family funerals I figured what better time was there to roam once more amongst the dead?
If I am successful in my application to register my Irish citizenship (and according to everything I have seen, I am definitely entitled to it) then it will be my third citizenship: British, American and Irish. I still have never quite felt comfortable here in the UK, and have grown increasingly uncomfortable in America, but even my worst trips to Ireland (last year we spent three foul rainy days suffering through Dublin storms) leave me sure there is something there which is unmistakably part of my soul. A connection that is perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle of me: the element which my family didn’t speak enough about and which I am growing weary of filling in for myself.
All of which is to say that the quote from Irish President, Michael D. Higgins at the start of this piece is true: “identity is elusive” and “even more so” for immigrants, and their children, as they find themselves navigating blindly through esoteric norms and systems which those with whom they wish to belong are already so comfortable. In my own short life I have identified as “British”, “American”, “Irish”, and even, to a certain extent “Welsh” when I lived there. I would call myself a “punk”, a “vegetarian”, an “anarchist”, “straight edge”, a “student”, a “teacher”, a “husband”, a “writer”, a “musician”, a “philosopher”…and that is without even mentioning that I am an “atheist” who is, by birth, also a “Jew” (and, through schooling, British norms and customs, and the presence of my Methodist minister grandfather, assumed I was, and identified as, a “Christian” for many of my early years). As Higgins also says, this time in a speech about Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, “the urge to belong is a feature of migratory transience. The migrant is attempting to enter a world that is not only strange to him or her, but in which the accommodation of the stranger is not guaranteed by any tradition of hospitality.”
I would go one further. The urge to belong is a universal feature of human existence. The migrant, or the child of a migrant, will have more obstacles before them than those who already feel that they belong, but everybody wants to belong to something and it is therefore our job as fellow human beings to ensure we recognise those trying to belong around us and do all that we can to rectify the lack of a tradition of hospitality by creating one. One which recognises the unique obstacles to belonging experienced by all living people, but especially those living far from a former place in which they once belonged, and the belonging of their children.
In my own case, of course, in applying for my third citizenship I think I have finally found my true belonging. Not in Ireland; that would be too easy. I am sure soon enough I will find myself as much disillusioned and alienated by Ireland as I have been the United States and United Kingdom. But for this anarchist, who despises nationalism and does not believe in borders, what more perfect sense of belonging can there be but as a man with three governments and therefore none, and three passports leaving nothing behind of these borders but dust?
AUTHOR: D.McKee