A Haircut

You might have noticed I don’t write on this blog as much as I used to. I want to believe this is because I’ve only a limited amount of words in me and that I need to save them for paid/creative work. In reality it’s a fudge of garden-variety laziness and having projects that don’t allow me to really talk about writing process as much as I’d like to. (I intend to work around that in future).

But as I’m currently in a state where sleep-deprivation and sheer brute force of deadlines have combined to leave me crying whenever I listen to the Jurassic Park soundtrack (top writer tip: It is *the* soundtrack to write to) here’s a quick 7/7-related post. I’ve held off a for a few days because it’s quite a self-involved post about image and how it implants itself in the soul. I have no meaningful insight into domestic terrorism or the pain of those who died or were injured on the day itself – there are a lot of excellent reads on those topics out there that I can point you to if you want.

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On Tuesday I got my haircut. I got my haircut because after a month of trying to be a hero to my trade I was rocking quite a trampy look, which is generally fine by me except that my passport had just run out and I needed a new mugshot. A mugshot that would broadly hold true to my personality/look over the next ten years. That idea – of an official photo as statement of personality –  started as an idle thought and strayed into me thinking more seriously on my old passport photo which I had taken in June 2005, a month before the London bombings.

I’ve made a lot of jokes about that photo – the long hair, the beard, the slightly dead eyes. Lots of people look back at photos of themselves looking supposedly cool years later and ask “what was I thinking?”. It’s rarer to go from “You know what, I look bloody cool” to “You know what, I look like a bloody terrorist” in the space of a month and it’s, to put it mildly, a bit of head fuck.

The vaguely beardy, vaguely brown, dangerous young male has become one of the defining images of the last decade and it’s humbling to think how much such a thing can shape your life from the minutiae to the profound. The way others see you, the way you are expected to be seen, the way you see others. The stories you write and are expected to write. The injustices you connect to. The time you spend going through airport security. The guilt you feel as you’re questioned. The near constant wondering “what’s my face look like at the moment? Angry? I hope not angry?”. The smile you develop to thrown on at times of uncertainty. The insidious but pervasive thought at your bathroom mirror: “oh I’m starting to look a bit terroristy – maybe I had better shave.” (For me this perhaps explains my not joining whole-heartedly into the hipster beard revolution though I am clearly a prime candidate.) Reflecting on my naivety back then and how it contrasts to who I am today dragged up a well of feeling I’d forgotten existed in between those two states. I mean, I certainly remembered what it was like to be at a party amongst your intellectual peers (wanky but I was excited) and be told by someone that you should be stopped and searched at airports, white people shouldn’t, and that’s just the way it is. And no-one saying anything. I remember that. The stares, the comments in the streets, the suspicious parents, the headbutts, the cracked teeth, I remember all of it.

What I’d forgotten, perhaps repressed a little, was how fucking furious I felt. I wanted to hurt people, including myself. What a lie I’d sold myself that this place was where I belonged. The slightly paranoid, often xenophobic comments some of my family would spout were actually true. These people around me would never really be my friends. How could they be? They’d never understand. In fact, whilst I’m not proud to admit it, I was genuinely angry with my white friends for a while. I really hated them and felt increasingly distant. Forgetting that we all have our own troubles, I hated their easy access to society, I resented everything that I’d gladly done to appease. Every awkward joke made to basically go “look, it’s fine! I’m no threat!” Most of all, I hated that this was even a thing in my head and that it would never be in theirs.

I wanted to talk to someone about it, but didn’t really have an outlet (I didn’t have a huge amount of Asian friends at the time), so it ended up in my diaries, on this blog, in my creative work instead. Part of that anger dissipating over the years has led me from going: “I want to write brown stuff *as well as* “normal” things” to “I want to write as many, diverse, wonderful, terrible, powerful, angry, sexy, passionate, depressed, hopeful, scheming, anxious, brown folk as possible and for that to *be* normal and identifiable and everyman and everywoman and, fuck-it-why-not, popular if it’s possible.

I still wonder about the counter-factuals. If 7/7 had never happened, would I have been driven to write half the things I have? Maybe I’d have ended up doing a law conversion like every other person I know did. After all, I’m not a Muslim and for better or worse, people have gotten a bit more nuanced in their intolerance and the worst of it passes me by now. However, I never want to be grateful for that. I don’t want to co-opt a suffering, I just don’t want to make it easy for people to make others suffer, whether it be through direct action (abuse/violence) or my tacit acknowledgement or my actively distancing myself. I don’t want to let a man sitting next to me at the airport ask cautiously “You a Muslim?” and, when I reply in the negative, have him follow up with “oh you lot are all right, but those guys…”.  I don’t want to, as many a family member has suggested, shave because otherwise you’re “asking for it.”

And yet for that new passport photo I’ve short hair and I’m relatively clean shaven. I’d like to believe that’s a conscious choice, that I now think *that* looks cool, rather than trying to dodge airport inconvenience. I’ve got the two photos, the two mes (what *is* the plural of me?) sitting side-by-side on my desk: One, a 29-year-old, face grown fatter and a hairline grown thinner through alcohol and ageing. He seems a bit pissed off but can’t help that – the deep dark circles around the eyes aren’t going to become anything but deeper and darker soon. The other, a skinny 19-year-old who had been waiting 4 years to grow his hair out and thought he looked so awesome, so like Dave Grohl, that he wanted to make that his official face for a whole decade. You weren’t allowed to smile, even back then, but there’s a hint of it on his lips and why not. He was super enthusiastic, still a bit overwhelmed by university and saw little but possibility ahead. Well, possibility and Pot Noodles. Whilst life has settled into a place I’m broadly happy with, the outlook has diminished a little and criminally so has the diet, so I miss the 19-year-old quite a bit.

But I don’t envy him the years ahead.

“Shave Your Beard Off”

The Olympics kick off today. Also, I’m growing a beard.

That second part isn’t news for most people, except for perhaps my most ardent stalkers. I’ve only really grown one once before and it was around this time seven years ago so I figured it was time to go again.

Seven years ago, I was in Spain with Ben, a friend from school. We were taking three weeks off – me to write and seemingly cultivate said beard, him to get away from some personal stuff for a while. I think it’s fair to say that we weren’t the best of friends, but we ended up on this great trip together, in this one place for three weeks, which was both intense and unlike anything I’d ever done before. We drank a lot of absinthe to pass the time. Any excuse, we drank absinthe, magnitude was not a consideration. Scrambled eggs? Absinthe. Managed to not get washed out to sea while trying to row to Africa in our rubber dingy? Absinthe. Finished the absinthe? Absinthe.

But one thing happened that was definitely worth the absinthe, the black ninety percent stuff, and that was when we heard on the sixth of July that London had won the bid to host the Olympics. We were absolutely chuffed. Both of us love(d) the city to bits and being nineteen at the time, it seemed wrapped up in the glorious future ahead. The spectacle of a life time was coming to our home! And so, friends – absinthe.

The next morning, a beeping sound cut through my hangover. I reached over for my phone and found a message from my Dad. It simply said “shave your beard off”. This was pre-3G and all that, so I just thought he was being his usual forceful self. I staggered to the Internet café in the noon sun, intent on checking my emails, but once I hit the BBC front page that didn’t seem so urgent anymore. A few phone calls later and thankfully everyone I knew was fine, but I was anxious to get back, and it wasn’t too long after that we returned. I shaved my beard off before I got on the plane.

London was a moody place. In Plumstead, Sikh kids were getting the shit kicked out of them because they looked so obviously other. A Sikh friend of my Dad’s apparently screamed “But I’m not a Muslim!” as his head cracked the ground and he got a boot through his face. People would look at you funny when you stepped onto the Tube. They wouldn’t sit next to you. Hell, they’d move out of their seats. Sales of see through backpacks boomed. As someone who felt both angry and empathetic, I didn’t resent that, I understood and I internalised that feeling. I was more than eager to let my bag get searched. I wanted to scream “Look, not all brown people want to blow things up!” The beard stayed off. But, quite remarkably, for all the international fall out, London was back to her usual self within a couple of months. Sometimes brusque, but no longer so suspicious, and so she’s remained, the odd individual let down aside. No doubt that some anti-Islam sentiment remains, but it exists within an overwhelming sense, from all communities, that the events of 7/7 were the actions of maniacs, not martyrs. The man on the street be he bearded, turnbaned, cruxific bearing or yes, friends, even red trousered, is more likely to want to be your friend than your enemy.

So I’m taking the chance to grow a beard now, knowing that we’ve healed, celebrating that our distrust was short-lived and look forward to a wonderful two weeks of epic sporting ahead, mere metres from my front door. The forecast says rain. What could be more London than that?

I leave you with then Mayor Ken Livingstone’s speech from after the bombings, that talks of the hope of the seven years to come and the character of the London public, and also one from his successor that’s a bit jingo but hey, it’s pumping.