I was at a birthday party the other evening - a jolly do for a friend from my high school days. As with anyone you’ve known for that long, her party was a mix of people from various stages of her life who had all clustered on a cold October evening in a warm little bar in Brooklyn. The place was packed and loud, but I knew a few people and was having a good time. Not wanting to be a rude, I forayed into a conversation with her work colleagues and a few drinks later, found myself kneeling down to chat to a short woman with blond dreadlocks, who had just asked me something.
“Can you repeat that?” I said above the roars of laughter and singing around us. “I really can’t here you!”
“I said,” she shouted, “you speak English so well! How come?” and then sat back, smiling. Sometimes compliments can be the worst insults. This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this question, obviously. The implication of that question is not to marvel at your command of a language or turn of phrase. No, the implication of that question is an assumption that you shouldn’t be able to speak English well because it isn’t your language and now you have to justify what alien planet you just flew in from. Like many backhanded compliments, it reveals more about the questioner than anything else. In this case: a woman with blond dreadlocks who wanted me to justify the authenticity of my claim to English. I now think I could have said something much snarkier, but what I did say was: “Because white people colonised my homeland centuries ago, systematically ravaged its resources and cultures for their own industrial revolutions, and institutionalized the schooling system to mirror their own for easy access to future generations. And you, where did you pick up the language?”
She looked at me wide-eyed and maybe the reply was admittedly a tad cruel (though still deeply satisfying) but I really hate that question. Everyone I know from Pakistan who visits or lives abroad has been asked the same thing at some point. Most of the time I just let it slide, telling them I learned it at school or similar. Of course I don’t expect them to think that everyone in Pakistan (or even India) speaks English, which they don’t, obviously. But I speak English better than I do any other language, and questions like these make it seem that something I find deeply familiar, I shouldn’t. And that pisses me off. (Then again, that we spoke English at home was considered a targetable offence at school for the longest time until college applications rolled around, but that’s a whole other column.)
Learning opportunities for the English language remain highly skewed along class lines in Pakistan
Because white people colonised my homeland centuries ago, systematically ravaged its resources and cultures for their own industrial revolutions and institutionalized the schooling system
It ultimately comes down to that tawdry question of authenticity. Are you desi enough if you speak English? I find it similarly offensive when people say to me “Oh, but you don’t look Pakistani” when what they really mean is “you’re not very dark-skinned, are you?” If you have black hair and you’ve been in the States these last ten years, you too have probably been called “Middle Eastern” at some point, as I have been countless times. Tell them you’re South Asian and many of them will ask, genuinely surprised, “What’s the difference?”
“Only a tectonic plate and a few thousand years but whatever type scene” I mutter under by breath because it’s exhausting having to give a history lesson every time. The reason this girl angered me is because she knew Pakistanis, all of whom were fluent in English and two of whom worked across the desk from her every single day. On the subway ride back home, I tried to rationalise why it was disturbing me so much. I think the answer is because stereotyping is offensive, full stop. She was from L.A and I imagine would have experienced the same anger that I felt, had I said “Oh, I thought you were from Nerbaska. What’s the difference?”
But there is a difference. English is now a lingua franca of the world. We watch movies in it, read books in it: it is the closest thing to a universal language the world has (mainly because the Brits never stopped invading places). So white native speakers assume you should know everything about their world; that Nebraska is different from L.A. and that America is different from Canada, and that Surrey and Wales aren’t close (not true, everything on that frozen island is close). They, conversely, shouldn’t be expected to know that North and South India speak different langauges, or that Pakistanis can speak English or that India and Pakistan are neighbours. When I told someone last month where I was from, they looked at me with a sympathetic tilt and said, “It must be so difficult living next to Israel. Is your family still there?” Not kidding.
British colonial linguistic policy in India is often popularly attributed to Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay
After 9/11, the geographic location of Pakistan in the imagination of most white Americans shifted from dark-skinned Asia to somewhere between Egypt and Iran, which is, ironically, where Israel is.
This is not a unique problem. Most people from post-colonial cultures face the dilemma in some form or another. Indeed, Jhumpa Lahiri recently wrote an excellent book on the subject of her relationship to Italian (in Italian), and codified the many ways that her dominant language (English) meets with her mother tongue (Bengali) and her chosen language (Italian) to form a kind of tense personal triangle. Most people from Africa, especially the Nigerians and Ugandans who I have met, have similar gripes - since many of them grew up speaking English and consider the language their own as much as the others they speak. Truthfully it is theirs. As it is ours. I’m just tired of having to justify it to people who seem intent on knowing nothing about the world outside of their own little corner of it.
