MIXED SIGNALS:
FIVE MOMENTS
OF UN-BELONGING

1.

One second, it’s possible for us to unfold; the next, that possibility is gone. I am at work, and at work I have a phone voice which is different from my normal voice; it’s even different from the voice I normally use at work. A warm thought, here, to anyone working in a call centre. I wasn’t working in a call centre but a bookshop. My colleagues spotted the phone voice when I’d just started and gave it a name: Jessicaaaah, it’s called. Jessicaaaah is her own template, complete with the long ‘aaah’ trailing off like a cape down the staircase my Swedish grandmother dreamed of, if ever one of her grandchildren married an English lord from one of those TV shows. Jessicaaaah is bubbly (why that word? People are not sodas) but also confident enough not to leave room for questions between any of her standard moves, no spaces in which to wonder about the gaps:

‘Is there anything else I can help with?’ she says, but this time the answer is too quick.

‘You’re not in your homeland,’ says the lady.

Her voice is polite, so presentable, that my hand goes straight up to my nose and wipes it, even though we’re on the phone. All I know about her is this voice, elevated to the rim of a fancy glass, and the five books she wants to send separately to different friends around the country, a few ‘in Europe’. Sometimes, the phone line goes into spasms, but we were getting along just fine. Everything was steady, clean, and intensely regular.

‘Well,’ I say and laugh into her ear. ‘I’m a British citizen now, so I guess I am.’

That’s Jessicaaaah, going with the flow until everything is nice again, until we are once again safe. There are five miniature staples in a mystifying pattern on the desk. Someone has been making shapes whilst on the phone, twirling metal between fingers (whose fingers? I’m imagining all my colleagues’ fingers), searching for the most efficient answer, perhaps sticking one end into a thumb. Whichever one of my colleagues made this mess, they were not asked if they were in their homeland. Jessicaaaah is not supposed to be asked. She laughs. I laugh.

‘Oh, I just meant originally,’ says the lady. ‘I’m very interested in accents, you see.’

If it weren’t for the ovulation pain, which kindles the same side of my body as her voice on the phone, or for how the question wasn’t a question, but a demand for confirmation of what she already thinks she knows (not ‘are you not in your homeland?’ but ‘you’re not in your homeland’); if it didn’t make me think of the HBO series, I would have asked her what she meant. Home-land as opposed to any other kind of land, as opposed to another’s homeland. You are not in your homeland but in mine. I could have asked.

‘------’

If not for our home, Adam’s and mine, and that it is on this land; if it weren’t for the sixty-four environmental defenders killed in Colombia last year, making one of my homelands amongst the most dangerous countries in the world in which to be an environmental activist; if it weren’t for how all this is my home, I could also have just told her, given her the full list:

‘------’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it!’ she says to the silence.

If it weren’t for all the other times that Jessicaaaah has been placed under the microscope and asked: what is this? How does it work? How does it use its hind legs — that accent? If it weren’t for how being mixed in language as well as colour means that people read you according to what they’re expecting to see — that you are made a chameleon at their disposal, and if I hadn’t just realised when, and with whom, Jessicaaaah comes out; if it weren’t for how obvious it now is that Jessicaaaah, in fact, sounds a lot like this lady — that she was modelled on her, even — I might have heard a poor choice of words in her question, instead of an interrogation. All she wanted was books for her friends.

‘Well, we’re all a bit of a mix, aren’t we?’, I say with Jessicaaaah’s tongue swishing more Jessicaaaah-like than ever, in the same tone of voice that I say ‘and the last three digits on the back of the card, please?’ If not for all this, I might have asked her a better question, something to keep us both there, in the gap, before I made myself what I thought she wanted.

2.

This person comes into the shop not wearing a mask. Where in the crisis are we, me and her? Possibly it’s July. Without a doubt, the shop where I work has survived thus far, and that’s also a location to exist from, a vantage point which was never a given. Perhaps, many of us are less scared than we were three months ago, but angrier, and for others it’s the other way around.

There’s no one else in the room, and she clocks me as I step behind the counter, nods but doesn’t say hello. I do, but behind the mask she might not be able to hear me. Bath is shaped like a bath, and although I like the idea of baths, I can’t stand them for longer than ten minutes — too much of a lizard kind of blood, which soaks up the heat too quickly but also can’t manage cold. One of my colleagues calls me ‘the worst Viking in history’, which makes me laugh, but also reminds me of watching Lord of the Rings and finding no brown girls in it, no way of dreaming myself into medieval versions of the North. What happens to our blood when it gets hotter?

She holds on to her bag, perhaps for purpose or because of feeling watched, the way I always do if I’m the only customer in a shop.

‘You all right, can I help at all?’ I say.

She snaps her head back toward me and then quickly looks away.

‘Please can you take off that mask?’ she says without looking at me.

‘Sorry?’

‘Please can you not wear that mask it’s really triggering. I was gagged and it’s triggering.’

She pulls up her hands, like blinds on each side of her face, in front of the graphic novel section.

‘---------’

‘It’s the government guidelines,’ I say instead.

She’s crying now, but she doesn’t leave. Instead, she flaps a picture book on the counter and begins to fumble in her bag. That automatic shop hand which belongs to me does what it knows how to do and scans the picture book, then types the amount into the card machine.

‘People don’t get it,’ she says. ‘It’s like when they made gay people wear pink stars in Germany. I have a note here, from my GP.’

‘What?’ I say. ‘Oh, no, there’s no need.’

‘I’ve been looking after this man on my street, shopping for people, I’ve been doing all of it.’

She wipes her eyes and looks at the counter. The transaction of money and goods takes place, through the little gap in the screen.

‘That’s really good of you,’ I say, and try to look her in the eyes.

She’s calmer now. She’s survived this too. I do not think I was of much help in her survival.

‘-------’

She leaves and I continue recommending stories that I think people might like, taking money for the books, thinking about how I did take my mask off when she asked me to, and that I’m not sure which way that plays, or who it helps in this economy.

3.

There’s a story my mother told me at some point during my teens. It happened when we were kids and visiting relatives in Norrland, literally ‘Northland’, the north of Sweden. The few times we went up there, throughout my childhood, my sister and I loved it. In the summer, we swam, found stray baby birds on the meadows, and went fishing; in the winter, we rode sledges. Maybe this was the summer we found all those bird nests, and tried to put the birds back up in the trees. It could have been the summer my uncle let me have a go on his drum kit out in the shed. All these details are merely there to hold the memory in place, as if it needed anchors, as if it were unrelated to all that we are and have become.

At one point, my mother was playing with a small boy, a friend of the family. Who knows what kind of game they were busy with (was he on her knees or sitting on the floor), who was playing what, or if it was more like singing than playing (itsy-bitsy spider? How old was this child?). The whole game might have lasted ten minutes. In any case, the boy held out his hand toward my mother in the middle of their game. Maybe she thought he wanted to take her hand. She may have assumed he was making up new parts of the game as they went along, his imagination unfurling before her eyes and dancing with hers on this yard, so far away from the place that she, herself, grew up in. Before she became an economist, my mother had wanted to be a doctor. Because of institutional sexism (the university told her father as much), she wasn’t accepted onto the course, so she studied speech therapy for a while and spent a few months working with children. Were they younger than this child? Did they have more or less of a language in common with her?

She held her hand out to him, but instead of taking it, he hovered above her skin. He touched a small index finger to the back of her hand, swept it carefully across that skin. Then, he held it up to his face, to see if something of her colour had come off.

‘---------’

I don’t know what my mother said.

‘---------’

I can’t remember what my response was when she told me.

Now that she’s no longer here, the way I held (or didn’t hold) that story is hooked like an extension cord into every experience she had of racism and xenophobia, that I don’t know about. It’s set alight every time I myself am un-belonged, made to feel free-floating without ramifications. It is what I have in place of every conversation we no longer can have about racism, and the different impacts it’s had in our stories. When I was growing up in Sweden, the language with which to describe skin colour, to invite it into the whole of you without making people feel uncomfortable (because people were, in fact, uncomfortable), wasn’t available. There were even fewer terms for our mixedness, or for simply being brown. At a pinch, you’d say mörkhyad, dark-skinned, but I suspect that, even then, this felt inadequate, like tiptoeing around a subject that needn’t be tiptoed about, where those affected don’t get to choose the steps. I had my body but no body politic in which to make sense of it. Neither, I think, did this boy.

I have to wonder if she laughed off the gesture or said something to the boy, if she (most certainly didn’t) tell his parents. In my skin, by way of my hands, I make informed guesses as to how she might have responded.

4.

How does my truth react with someone else’s to give us both severe headaches, make us both despicable people? The guy next to me on the DLR knows all about prams, but I’m the one pushing one.

‘What’s that about?’ he says.

I was expecting this, but I’m also tired and flustered. Along with Adam and three friends, I’ve been pushing my pram all day with an oil barrel inside it, the words WHERE MY BABY COULD BE sprayed on the side.

‘We’ve been to a protest,’ I say.

When I should have said ‘a performance’. That could have been the end of it.

‘What sort of protest?’ the man says.

‘To support young people on strike. They’re trying to get the government to act on climate collapse.’

‘No,’ he says, and shrugs like he’s remembered something awful that happened a while ago, ‘what’s that about?’ and he points at my barrel, which, for the day, I’ve named Meryl. He looks angry. The anger was there from the start, but I hadn’t noticed because I was focusing on manoeuvring the pram with the barrel.

‘It means,’ I say, ‘that the government is choosing oil and money over our children.’

He looks at the pram like it’s someone’s insides after a night out.

‘That’s wrong,’ he says, and shakes his head. ‘That’s not right. That’s ugly.’

Which, I think, is an interesting word to use. It points to aesthetics and taste. Art can be ugly and powerful. A good story, any story that says something worth remembering, always has ugly bits in it. Truth is so often ugly, and when it comes to climate collapse, which is supposed to be what this is all about, everything is hideous. It should make you want to throw up. But that’s not what he is referring to.

‘Are you familiar with the IPCC report?’ I say.

‘I don’t need that shit.’

‘Some of us are too afraid of what’s happening to have kids of our own.’

‘I know what’s going on in the world,’ he says. ‘I have four children.’

At this point, our encounter has become a spectacle to the commuters. Considering my get-up (a black dress, tears of black paint like drops of oil down my cheeks), they might assume that the entire conversation is scripted.

‘You’re pathetic,’ he says.

But it could also not be — it could also be a man (white) telling a woman (brown) that she’s pathetic, on public transport, with the woman looking very uncomfortable, and no one stepping in, no one asking if she’s okay. It could be the woman making the man supremely uncomfortable by pushing an oil barrel in a pram, dressed as if she’s in a circus. One context doesn’t negate the other, but the encounter is happening and this is how we respond.

‘---------’

By now, Adam has managed to squeeze past a knot of passengers to come closer.

‘Yes, pathetic,’ he says, leaning closer to the man, ‘as in worthy of pity.’

This doesn’t work as he intended it to.

‘You’re pathetic,’ says the guy again, ‘that’s why you don’t have any children.’

It’s a skill at the best of times, to talk to the general public during a protest, but this is no longer a protest — we are on our way home. He didn’t choose this, he didn’t ask for me to come into his commute, my anger, my grief, piled up in an intimate family accessory. If it weren’t for the pram, we might have been better off.

‘--------’

But am I not also a member of the public? Isn’t this crisis a public one?

‘--------’

If it weren’t for the pram, he might never have spoken to me. If it weren’t because I am myself terrified of not being equipped to be a parent, because his comment has triggered my own historic conflicts about sex, body, and birth, I would have told him to fuck off. If it weren’t for how personal it all was, I wouldn’t have taken it personally.

‘You know you’re being really mean?’ I say, like a child in the playground.

And then we stand there, in silence, for the remainder of a train ride.

5.

Crisis, I read, is a latinised version of the Greek ‘krisis’, meaning a turning point in a disease, recovery or death, but it also comes from ‘krinein’, meaning to separate or judge. When does this happen in a conversation — in any gap between humans — what is made possible and when is that possibility forever lost? Until what point are we both able to respond, and to respond to each other instead of echoes of ourselves? In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence repeatedly refers to orgasms as a ‘crisis’. It is hilarious to read this out loud, again and again. He never describes the recovery part.

One thing that seems to happen is this wanting to know, immediately — are you on my side? Please tell me that you’re on my side in this,

‘--------’

and if you’re not, you’re automatically on the other. The crisis is gone and we are back in the old order, the known, and failed, way to be. Between the two points lies the potential bridge. We have everything to lose in the encounter, but without encountering, we are trapped in sealed containers.

In April 2020, Arundhati Roy described the Covid-19 pandemic as ‘a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’. She was writing at a moment when something unimaginable was happening, and anything seemed possible as a result. When does that moment end; is this still it? Are we still in the portal or have we come out on the other side, into the same tired picture, with the same deadly motions at work, to bring on new crises?

The idea of a crisis as a moment of opportunity is a fraught one. The word ‘opportunity’ itself so steeped in individualism, and narratives of winners and losers: grab it, seize it, make something of it (which are other ways of saying, make sure it stays yours and not another’s). This isn’t the kind of opportunity Roy writes about. Her description of crisis is steeped in pain and suffering; it is avoidable tragedy that has become inevitable change, in which the uncertainty may just allow for power structures to shift, perhaps to crumble. It’s not an opportunity to be grabbed, but to be lived in, and shared, collectively survived.

Which pulls me back to the smallest crises, the minute, everyday separations when language and reciprocity breaks down, and where it continues to define our coexistence. These are moments when I change, or when small alterations might have happened, and didn’t. The possibility for change resides, always, between the self and other, across the chasm from another. We have never arrived there on equal terms. We are there with immense risk, frazzled and bare, with different levels of vulnerability, unequally armed or not armed at all; we have come flayed and bleeding. Often, I want out as soon as I possibly can. Often, I want to stay, to remain in the risk zone without burning up.