The Line

My English Traits - Author's Note, 6th March 2022

“…it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.”

• William James, The Consciousness of Self, 1890

I’m writing this as Kyiv waits in terror. I thought I would put off posting more of these chapters until peace returned. If it returns. What’s the point of writing a memoir about a distant time in a faraway place when the immediacy of these horrors is unfolding four international borders away from our London home? Yes, only four—UK/France; France/Germany; Germany/Poland; Poland/Ukraine. It’s just twelve hours by train. It's right here, not somewhere over there.

I’ve decided to keep publishing them because I believe my story matters. It matters because identity matters. The way we conceive our identities. And conceive of them.

We do what we think we should do because we think we are what we inherited. We are proud to be black, white, brown, Brazilian, Japanese, British or South African; to be Irish or American, or Ukrainian or Russian. We are so proud of our identities we’ll defend them to the death. If necessary, we’ll learn to kill for them. Why? Because we were born there? Because we speak the language, live the culture, love the geography? Yes, of course. But why the pride?

Because we think we were destined to be born where we were born. It’s hard to think otherwise. It’s hard to accept that we were born where we were born by accident. By accident alone. We need to believe it was for a reason. It appears self-evident as soon as we’re old enough to think it. We had to be who we are because we are what we are.

Very soon we come to believe that we deserve what we were given - our skin colour, our nationality, our physical attributes, our moral superiority. Then the line between what we are and what we have becomes impossible to draw. So we explain the accident of our birth away by calling it destiny. Destiny justifies our pride. The idea of destiny.

Accidents justify nothing. There can be no pride in accidents.

The idea of destiny, like the idea of love, can be used to justify anything and everything.

Where’s the pride in being born accidentally in this country or that country? Into penury or privilege? In being born accidentally with a white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair into a family that happened to speak English? In South Africa when your identity determined where you could live, who you could love, how you could work and whether you could eat.

Our families, our communities and our cultures tell us to be proud of who we are because their families, communities and cultures told them to be proud to be who they were. We see pride reflected back at us in the eyes of our mothers and fathers. Our names are given to us to consecrate their pride in us. To make us remember it. And cherish it. When we are only accidents of accidents.

Only orphans, foundlings and the fatherless have to discover pride for themselves. In themselves. And love.

We are witnessing a tragedy of horrific proportion and unimaginable consequence. It’s happening because we’ve forgotten where to draw the line between what we have and what we are. Between our different identities and our common humanity.

There but for fortune.

This story matters because history apparently doesn’t. And because I made the same mistake. My accidental whiteness obliged me to carry a gun for the apartheid state. My pride in my accidental Englishness convinced me I had nothing to do with it.

Which was me and which was mine?

It took me a lifetime to draw the line.