Zaiba Malik
>I couldn’t forget what I was, who I was
>
Zaiba Malik remembers the pleasures and conflicts of her childhood among the Pakistan immigrants in Bradford, England @ Granta
I was born in 1969, in a red-brick hospital just outside Bradford which has since been converted into a psychiatric unit. The very first words that I heard were uttered by my father. They were the Shahadah – the Islamic declaration of faith, whispered three times into my right ear. A couple of days later, my mother took me home to a tiny, overcrowded terraced house. I was her third child, born with Pakistani values and a Muslim soul.
I knew I was Pakistani long before I knew I was English, just as I knew I was Muslim long before I knew I was British. It’s hardly surprising. There was the blatant declaration my mother, Umejee, made me repeat from the age of about four:
‘We are Pakistani.
Pakistani children are good children.’And there was the way that she and Dad always referred to Pakistan and never England as home, so that I knew more about the imprisonment and execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto than I did about the Winter of Discontent; the way we only spoke Punjabi in the house; the way our food smelt and tasted so different to English people’s and how we used our hands, not knives and forks, to eat.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )On the odd occasion, my parents would surprise me with signs of assimilation. My mother was such a staunch supporter of the monarchy that she regularly made me write letters to Her Majesty, asking if she could go and work for her at Buckingham Palace. ‘I am a very clean lady,’ I wrote, as Mum dictated. ‘My own house in Bradford is very clean. You are very decent people. You are like my family. I will do what you need, cook, clean, iron.’
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