A FLY Girl's Guide to University

Being a Woman of Colour At Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism

Lola Olufemi, Odelia Younge, Waithera Sebatindira, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912565764
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

'Toni Morrison once said, "If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

In 2016 four friends wrote the book they wish they'd had as 18 year-old women of colour going to study in the elite academic institution of Cambridge University. And what a book! Wonderful, fiery, radical and brave – it uses multiple voices and forms such as memoir, polemic, poetry, critical approaches – to document their experiences as women of colour in an institution that they had each discovered failed to validate or even acknowledge their heritage, their gender, their right to see themselves in their place of study. As a narrative and a testament, this patchwork book has been sewn together with extreme skill and moves through time as it moves through the different threads of its subject, addressing the curriculum, ways of teaching, visiting authors, student society and activism, with anger and energy and incredible readability. This book, its pace, its outrage, tells its truth in a way that is pretty much unputdownable. The experiences in this book rarely get to be heard and as a result they are rarely accepted as real. The book articulates both the feeling and the struggle to articulate the feeling of being in spaces built for others. As such, it is the book that many many more than it's four authors will want to read, a book that needed to be written and also needed to be published.

PART ONE:

Revelations

and how strange too, that I speak in a language my

grandparents will never understand. that my accent is

unrecognizable, that I am white but for my name and colour.

that I use the same words they used so long ago to pacify

the natives, that I live in the shadow of a peace that did nothing

but burn; the beginning of history in its wake.

-Jun Pang

The Breaking and the Making: Becoming Brown

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

It was 8am on A-level results day when my offer to study History at The University of Cambridge was accepted. Almost nineteen, still in my pyjamas, and very much in shock, I could hardly conceive at that time how monumental a change this would be for my life. Not just in all the ways it was supposed to be – not just because it was Cambridge, and not even just because it was university – but more significantly, because Cambridge was the first place I began to think of myself as ‘brown’.

Coming from a mixed comprehensive state school in cosmopolitan Leeds, I had rarely experienced being the only brown or Muslim person in a room. Yes, I was aware of being brown; aware of the in-group and the out-group, the difficulties my Pakistani grandparents faced in migrating and the difficulties my parents faced in remaining. I was aware of racist rhetoric, of racism, and the tokenism that followed my successes (often viewed as successes because I was brown and a Muslim). But on the whole, I had a comfortable ride. On the whole, my brownness, and, overlapping with that, my being Muslim, were just parts of who I was. I did Urdu GCSE, I wore a hijab, I used spare classrooms to pray at lunchtimes, and I made jokes about how similar we looked when my white friends came back tanned from holidays. Brownness and Islam were just aspects of my being; just asides to the main spectacle: me.

What changed at Cambridge was that for the first time they weren’t just asides, they were the main spectacle. I wasn’t just me anymore. First and foremost I was a brown Muslim woman. Arriving there was, as another woman of colour once phrased it, ‘like being dropped into a sea of mayonnaise’. Once surrounded and engulfed by whiteness, I not only realised my brownness, I was consumed by it.

I say all this in hindsight. I don’t think it hit me immediately. In fact, it took weeks of social anxiety to wonder why people interacted differently with me than they did with others. It took weeks and even months to understand that whilst I was not yet used to having to remember my brownness – to explain and justify it – it was what was first and most apparent to these new strangers.

When people were confronted with me they didn’t see the person I knew me to be. What they saw were two things: my hijab and my skin colour. I wouldn’t say that every single person treated me as such, but for the many who had clearly never interacted with people who were not white before (or who weren’t from private or grammar schools), or those who had gained their only knowledge of Islam and Muslim women from mainstream media, the feeling that I had first to prove my individuality and thus ‘humanity’ to people, was overwhelming.

It was overwhelming when I was simultaneously battling the fact that student ‘normality’ was not my normality. Drinking, clubbing, and hoping to ‘get with’ anyone were not high, or even on, my agenda. Indeed, being a Muslim before Cambridge had often distanced me from ‘normality’, but the student-stereotype was even further from what I wanted to do or be. How could I prove my humanity when I fell outside the norm of who was ‘human’ in that space? My abnormality made me Other. I was abnormal every time I asked for the soft drink option instead of ‘down[ing] it Fresher!’ Every time I went to bed early with time to pray rather than trying to soberly socialise with drunken peers in darkened clubs. Within days I felt ostracised and that I had made no friends.

Of course, this is to some extent, a common feeling for many new university students (had I only known it then). But added to the general experience was the fact I, as a Muslim woman of colour, was specifically excluded from being ‘one of the girls’. Though I laugh it off now, it will always perturb me that I was never added to the Facebook chat group set up for ‘all’ the girls in my college year. Of course there’s the petty side of it, but the point I’ve never managed to articulate to close friends was that for some reason, something prevented me – good or bad – from being included in the bracket, ‘the girls’. I was always seen primarily as “Muslim”, or ‘not white’, rather than ‘woman’ - because ‘woman’, in that space, was singularly perceived as white. The fact I was a woman who was brown and Muslim destabilised my identity. I existed in a space where I was invisible and confusing because I did not fit the tropes of white femininity. In simply being myself I became an anomaly.

Contrastingly, I felt strangely comfortable around many of the white men in my college. Surprisingly, I even felt at ease, like I was almost ‘one of the boys’. In many ways this is a credit to the men I befriended, however, it is certainly not a case of me arguing a misogynistic logic of women being more difficult to befriend. No. Instead I believe that my inability to fit conceptions of white femininity also played into this strange outcome. Under white supremacist patriarchy, white women are the only women deemed ‘women’, but are also subsequently sexualised for it. My being overlooked as ‘woman’ seemed to exclude me from the category of ‘potential heterosexual partner’ in these homogeneously white spaces then. Moreover the legacies of colonialism, orientalism and Islamophobia meant my racialised and hijab-wearing self was excluded from mainstream patriarchal perceptions of beauty, now, sexuality and femininity. In this troubling and convoluted way I found my invisibility as a ‘woman’ in masculine spaces was what made it possible for me to be disproportionately comfortable around white men; however, that same invisibility felt like uncomfortable hypervisibility in feminine spaces. Therefore, the often intangible forces which so shaped my first-year friendships and socialising were deeply informed by the fact I was not white.

Of course, these theoretical elements of my experience at Cambridge cannot explain everything, and in many ways they are things I have only considered in hindsight. However, what I was aware of at at the time was that the safest I felt in those first few weeks at Cambridge was when I was most able to blend in. This meant that for a long time I hid myself, to protect myself. I internalised the notion that what made me different was also what barred me from ‘fitting in’. I internalised the message that I inferred from my surroundings: that I had made it to Cambridge despite being a brown Muslim woman.

I became accustomed to being the only person who looked like me in my lectures, at formal meals and in the college bar. I tried to ignore that I was, and I tried to downplay it as much as possible. I handed in every essay on time, stayed very hush-hush about running off to pray throughout the day, always ordered ‘vegetarian’ rather than the more problematic ‘halal’. The safety that came with doing those things – with neutralising what made me stand out – made me believe that others had come to think of me as ‘one of them’ too. Except they hadn’t.

I never became ‘one of the girls’. I continued to feel I had to explain myself to porters when entering a college that wasn’t mine. I still had to have the extended ‘where are you from’ conversation: ‘Well, I’m from Leeds and my parents are British but my grandparents are from Pakistan, yeah.’ I still couldn’t really share stories with the same confidence that others could knowing they would be met with nods and agreement. My family, the norms I had never previously thought of as odd, my religion, food, and school all made me feel different. So I hid, as best as possible, many of these things.

In these ways, what I had perceived as safety was actually a loss. A loss because in quieting myself I accommodated prejudice rather than disrupting it and tried to blend in instead of asking people to confront their conceptions of gender, race, Islam or anything else. I allowed people to make me the exception. They made me the one who slipped through the stereotype net. I was likely perceived as the coconut or the not-really-Asian ‘Asian’6. Therefore, rather than asking for the people and institution around me to change their workings, the change I made was wholly to myself. I completely internalised what ‘fitting in’ looked like.

I never considered that success was not the colour of snow and that perhaps I could be my own version. Instead, I swallowed the idea that being a student, doing well in Tripos7 and rowing down the River Cam were all ‘white’ things and that in enjoying them I had become less ‘authentically’ brown. I swallowed the idea that ‘cultures’ were static, unchangeable realities and that certain traits and behaviours did belong to certain skin-tones. I myself began to believe I was the racial exception. In trying to fit in as a result of the alienation caused by my own identity, I hid my identity. I sold myself short. I ignored my reality rather than claiming it, and the people around me followed suit.

It wasn’t until a few months had passed that I began to realise the injustice of all this. Slowly I got tired of pretending and ‘fitting in’. I realised that no matter how hard I tried to be Cambridge, Cambridge wouldn’t let me be. I could sit in that boat at 6:00am but still feel unseen by the other women. I could be ‘taught’ to debate at the Cambridge Union but still make my opposition feel confident simply by virtue of not looking like them.8 I could go to a feminist talk on the harms of pornography but still feel directly othered by an audience member’s remark about it being more pertinent to liberate Muslim women who covered their bodies.

It all came to a head. I wasn’t fitting in. I couldn’t fit in. I couldn’t fit in because ‘in’ was external to me.

So instead I began to ask why so few people at the University of Cambridge looked like me. The wider system of education and social fabric of the country accrued the majority of the blame, but the work Cambridge was doing simply did not feel enough. I became the Access Officer at my college after realising the mass fallacy about ‘state school’ intake at Cambridge (that the majority of ‘state schools’ that got pupils into Cambridge were majority-white and middle-class biased grammar schools rather than mixed comprehensives like my own as I’d assumed). But my year in the post was difficult and disillusioning. ‘Access’ itself felt limited in scope. We emailed many schools but only those responded that already felt Cambridge was achievable. Only those responded whose pupils could easily consider leaving home for University and whose teachers needed no introduction to the ‘college system’. This was access, but access to the most accessible. Access to those whose accents would blend in here and whose skin tones would not show up. It was cyclic.

I felt helpless and naive. My mental health deteriorated, my belief in myself dwindled, my self-esteem was a far cry from where it had been in high school, and the fact nobody around me seemed to share in, understand or empathise with my experiences just added to the alienation. I had supposedly ‘made it’ to the ‘height’ of academic success, but at what cost to myself? Would I erase myself for a Cambridge education? Would I silence myself and learn to hate my own anger just to defend my own suffering? Yes, things were changing – almost any time I voiced my concerns I was met with ‘things are much better than they were a few years ago.’ But just because they’re better doesn’t mean they’re good. And just because they’re wider doesn’t mean they’re open.

For me it was no longer fulfilling or right to exist passively at Cambridge. No longer fair that my peers and teachers could be ‘blind’ to my colour – that I should hide from them stories of racism (and how their own reproductions of it hurt me), and institutional prejudices when my very getting here was against the institutionally-racist-odds. In fact, to be anywhere in a system not built for you is radical and painful. In hindsight I credit myself with this, for even whilst I was not loud about my existence I still existed. And often I was quiet about it because I was afraid and in pain. Not acknowledging that pain was itself an acknowledgement of how deep it was.

But soon enough, the time came when being quiet was not enough. That was how I had slipped under the radar; how I had allowed the institution to pat its own back. While it was not and never will be my sole ‘responsibility’ to make people change their stereotypes, worldviews or institutionally oppressive behaviours and processes, being loud about being othered became a right I had been denying my own soul.

I realised being quiet had allowed people to assume the reason I was one of the few brown or Muslim women here was because I was more like them than I was brown or Muslim. For as long as I did not shout about being brown, as long as I did not make people uncomfortable by excusing myself to go pray salah, as long as I hid the fact I was ‘other’ and believed myself to be less brown because I was successful, I did a disservice to myself. I let people pretend to forget I was brown and Muslim, let them forget there are systems of inequality, and that injustice is embedded in the fabric of British society. I let them forget I am ‘Other’. And I forgot too.

It was in the white spaces of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Authors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Note from the Editor
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Dear FLY Girl,
• PART ONE: Revelations
• PART TWO: How We Speak and Who We Speak For
• PART THREE: Radical Self-Love
• PART FOUR: Creating and Speaking Our Own
• PART FIVE: Becoming Individuals within the Collective
• PART SIX: Intersectionality
• PART SEVEN: Breaking the Silence of Oppression
• PART EIGHT: Reflections
• Reflections Upon Three Years
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• About Verve Poetry Press