The reasons given were practical. Too many people shared the same handful of saints’ names, tax records were confused, and the state could not reliably tell one person from another. In some provinces the catalogue was distributed so mechanically that whole towns were allocated surnames beginning with the same letter of the alphabet, which meant that a person’s name could tell an official where they lived before it told anyone who they were.

James C. Scott (American political scientist and anthropologist, 1936 to 2024) recounts this episode in Seeing Like a State (1998), and it is easy to read it as a curiosity of colonial bureaucracy. It is something more precise than that.

It shows a system deciding that people must be made readable before they can be governed, and then deciding what readable means.

The families who received those surnames did not become more knowable as people. They became easier to process, and from then on, being easy to process was what counted as being in order.

That is the shift this essay is about: the moment when legibility, being readable on a system’s terms, quietly becomes the condition of legitimacy, being treated as credible, trustworthy and properly belonging.

You do not need a colonial decree to feel this. You feel it in the forms whose boxes were designed for someone else’s name, in the request to spell it a second time, in the gentle suggestion that a shorter version would be easier for everyone. You feel it in the accent that is noticed before the argument is heard, in the career that crossed several countries and now appears on paper as a series of gaps, in the qualification that has to be translated, certified and then explained again. I was born in Bulgaria, spent two years of my childhood in Spain, grew up in France and lived for twenty years in Britain, and in each of those places I learned the same lesson in a different language: the more readable I made myself, the more seriously I was taken.

What Scott helps us see is that people do not simply submit to that pressure. They respond to it in two ways at once. They adapt, sometimes so thoroughly that the adaptation becomes who they are. And they keep something back, a part of themselves that never quite enters the grid, protected in places the system does not look. This essay follows both movements, and asks what it costs to live between them.

Who was James C. Scott?

Scott spent most of his career at Yale, and much of his early fieldwork in rural Southeast Asia, living among farming communities and paying close attention to something most political scientists overlooked: the many quiet ways in which people subject to a state manage not to be fully seen by it. He was less interested in revolutions than in everything that happens beneath them, the daily, unglamorous ways in which people get by under power they cannot openly challenge.

Three of his books matter here, and together they form an unusually complete account of the problem. Weapons of the Weak (1985) drew on two years in a village in Malaysia to document what he called everyday resistance, the foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, false compliance and quiet evasion through which poor farmers defended themselves without ever staging a rebellion. Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) generalised that insight into a distinction between the public transcript, what subordinate people say and do in front of power, and the hidden transcript, what they say and do when power is not watching. And Seeing Like a State (1998) turned the lens around, asking how states see the people they govern and why they insist on making them legible.

Read in that order, the three books describe a single relationship from both ends. A system standardises people so that it can read them. People adapt to that reading in public. And they keep, in private, whatever the reading cannot hold. Each of the sections that follow takes one of those movements in turn.

Standardisation: how readable becomes legitimate

Scott’s examples of standardisation are deliberately ordinary: permanent surnames, cadastral maps that fix who owns which field, uniform weights and measures, a single official language. None of them looks like domination. Each looks like administration, and many of them made certain things genuinely easier. That is precisely why his analysis is so useful, because it allows us to see three properties of legibility that tend to disappear behind its practical benefits.

The first is that legibility simplifies. A cadastral map does not record how a village actually uses its land, the shared grazing rights, the seasonal arrangements, the obligations between families. It records boundaries and owners, because those are what a tax office can read. The second is that the simplification serves the reader rather than the person being read, since the categories are designed by whoever needs to do the reading, for their own purposes. The third is the most consequential. The grid records what it was built to record, and whatever does not fit is not recorded as missing. It simply does not appear.

This is where legibility turns into legitimacy, and the mechanism deserves to be taken apart. A person who matches the standard is easy to read, and being easy to read makes them feel predictable, and feeling predictable is very easily mistaken for being trustworthy. Consider a word that does a great deal of this work: articulate. It sounds like a description of someone’s ability to express themselves, but it is often used with a faint note of surprise, which reveals what it is really measuring. It means that the person spoke in the register the listener expected, and that the listener did not have to do any work to understand them. The compliment rewards legibility and calls it competence.

The reverse follows with the same quiet logic. Whoever is harder to read, because of an accent, an unusual path, a name that requires effort or a way of speaking shaped by several languages, is not judged illegitimate outright. They are simply held at a slight distance, given a little less benefit of the doubt, asked to explain a little more. Nothing is refused. Recognition just arrives more slowly, and on condition.

Assimilation: becoming the standard

Faced with a grid that rewards readability, the most obvious response is to become readable.

This is assimilation, and it is worth being careful with the word, because it is often used as an accusation or as an ideal, when it is better understood as a strategy. People assimilate because it works.

The accent softens, the name shortens, the history is summarised in the terms the listener is most likely to recognise, and recognition, slowly, begins to arrive.

Erving Goffman (Canadian-American sociologist, 1922 to 1982) gives us a precise way of seeing how this happens. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) he described the front, the set of expressive equipment through which a person presents themselves in a given role, and he noticed that fronts are rarely invented. They are selected from among those that already exist, established and recognised by the audience before the performer arrives. Assimilation, in Goffman’s terms, is the work of fitting yourself into a front the room already knows how to read: the polished professional, the reassuring newcomer, the success story whose origin is an interesting detail and nothing more.

There is a compliment that tells you when the work has succeeded, and it repays close attention: you’d never know you weren’t from here. It is meant warmly, and it is usually received warmly, but look at what it measures. It does not praise anything you have added. It praises what can no longer be detected.

The highest recognition on offer is for the disappearance of the difference, which means that the standard has not stretched to include you. You have contracted to fit it.

In the Seven Portraits I describe two versions of this movement. The Translator, whose vow is I will explain myself, makes their life readable to others in advance. The Chameleon, whose vow is I will adapt myself, goes further and becomes the reading. Scott helps us see that neither vow is a personality trait. Each is a reasonable response to a structure in which legibility has become the price of legitimacy. But there is a quieter observation hidden in his work as well.

A system that wants everyone to be legible has, in a sense, found its ideal subject in the person who standardises themselves. The work the catalogue once did by decree is now done voluntarily, from the inside.

The hidden transcript: what stays offstage

If assimilation were the whole story, Scott would have had little to say. What made his work distinctive was his insistence that people who appear to comply are almost never only complying. In the Malaysian village he studied for Weapons of the Weak, the poorest farmers rarely protested openly against the landowners who were reshaping their lives.

Yet they were not passive.

They worked slowly when it suited them, pretended not to understand instructions, told stories about the wealthy that circulated only among themselves, and quietly took back small portions of what they felt was owed. None of this appeared in the official record, which is precisely why it worked.

In Domination and the Arts of Resistance Scott gave this a name. The public transcript is what is said and done in front of power, the deference, the agreement, the performance of the expected role. The hidden transcript is everything said and done offstage, among people who share the same position, where the performance can be dropped. Goffman had noticed something similar in his own terms, distinguishing the front region, where the performance is given, from the back region, where people step out of character, rehearse, complain and recover.

Anyone who has adapted to a grid knows their own hidden transcript, even if they have never called it that. It is the language spoken at home, which carries jokes, tenderness and precision that do not survive translation. It is the name your family uses, which is not the one on your badge. It is the conversation after the meeting with the one person who saw exactly what happened, the shorthand shared with people from a similar background, the knowledge of how things really work that is never said aloud in the rooms where it would matter.

Scott’s point is that the hidden transcript is not merely a release valve. It protects dignity, because it preserves a version of yourself that the public reading cannot reach. And it keeps alternative understanding alive, a shared account of what is actually going on that may one day be needed. He opens Domination and the Arts of Resistance with a scene from George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859), in which Mrs Poyser, a tenant farmer’s wife who has deferred to the squire for years, finally tells him to his face what she thinks of him. Scott dwells on the electricity of that moment, the first time a hidden transcript is spoken in public, and on how much it depends on everything that was said in private before.

This is related to, but distinct from, what Édouard Glissant (Martinican poet and philosopher, 1928 to 2011) called the right to opacity. Glissant claims opacity as a right. Scott documents it as a practice, everyday and often unspoken, kept up by people who could not afford to claim anything openly.

The cost of living between two transcripts

Put the two movements together and a pattern emerges that many people will recognise from their own lives: a public self that has been carefully standardised, and a hidden self that holds everything the standard could not. Each makes the other possible. The public self earns legitimacy, and the hidden self keeps the person whole. But living between them has costs that rarely get named.

The first is exhaustion. Moving between transcripts is work, and it is constant, the small recalibrations of tone, vocabulary and gesture that happen dozens of times a day and are invisible to everyone who does not have to make them. The second is distance. The further the public self travels from the hidden one, the wider the space between who you are and who you have learned to be in order to move through the world, a space often described as an identity gap. The third cost is the slowest and perhaps the most serious.

Hidden transcripts need people to keep them alive, and they can thin out over time.

A language spoken only at home becomes a language understood but no longer spoken by the next generation. A way of seeing that was shared in private, but never written down or said in public, can simply fade, until the standardised version is the only one left. The grid does not need to erase anything when people can be relied on to let it go quietly.

So what would a different arrangement look like? It is not full assimilation, which wins legitimacy at the price of disappearance. Nor is it permanent concealment, which protects the self but leaves the grid untouched and the hidden transcript vulnerable.

Scott’s own work points to a third possibility, the one captured in Mrs Poyser’s moment: hidden transcripts brought into the open, not as a single act of defiance, but gradually and collectively, until what was once said only offstage becomes part of what can be said in public.

That changes the question of legitimacy itself. If the standard is not a natural fact but a grid built by someone for their own purposes, then it can be widened. Legitimacy could be extended to more than one way of speaking, more than one shape of career, more than one kind of name, and the work of reading could be shared between the person being read and the person doing the reading, rather than placed entirely on one side. This does not happen by decree. It happens when enough hidden transcripts are spoken, written and heard that the grid can no longer pretend they are not there.

None of this is an argument against adaptation. Much of what we learned in order to be readable carried us a long way, and some of it was the wisest choice available. Nor is it an argument for abandoning the hidden transcript, which has protected more dignity than any policy ever has. It is an argument for noticing the arrangement we live inside, and for asking whether legitimacy should really depend on how easily we can be read.

So this week, I would invite you to notice your own two transcripts. Notice the moment you adjust your voice, shorten your name or summarise your history so that it will be easier to process. Notice, too, what you keep for the back region, the language, the jokes, the version of events you share only with people who already understand. And then ask, gently, which parts of that hidden transcript you would like to see spoken in public one day, and who you might begin with.

The families who received their surnames from a catalogue in 1849 could not refuse them. Most of us have more room than that. We may not be able to redraw the grid alone, but every hidden transcript spoken aloud makes it a little harder for the grid to pretend it has seen everything there is to see.

If this essay spoke to something in your own life, I would love for you to subscribe to The Modern Migrant on Substack, where I write about the narratives, norms and social structures that shape who we become and how we are recognised, and to share it with someone who has spent their life explaining themselves.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community to understand the stories that shaped you, recognise inherited patterns, find language for your complexity and reclaim your own narrative.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

References

Eliot, G. (1859). Adam Bede. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons.

Glissant, É. (1990). Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Betsy Wing as Poetics of Relation (1997). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor. First published 1956, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre.

Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

And yet, over the years, I learned it with a precision that still surprises me, picking it up from the meetings where my directness was received as something harsher than I intended, from the dinners where the question of where I was really from arrived just as I had started to relax, and from the small, almost invisible rewards that followed whenever I softened a view, smoothed over a disagreement or simply let something pass.

The role I was learning to play already has a name, borrowed from the title of Nikesh Shukla’s anthology: the good immigrant.

What I have come to notice about that phrase is how much weight rests on the word good, because a good immigrant can only exist in relation to a bad one, and so the script is never really about how to belong. It is about which side of that line you will be placed on, and what you are prepared to give up to stay there.

For me it was never one dramatic moment but an accumulation of small ones, each subtle enough to pass without comment and yet consistent enough that, looking back, I can see how thoroughly they shaped the way I showed up in the world.

I remember sharing a success with childhood friends, something I had worked hard for and was genuinely proud of, and feeling the conversation shift almost immediately away from the achievement itself and towards the need to explain it, as though it required a justification that would not have been asked of anyone else at the table. The explanation, when it came, was a sentence I have since heard in many different forms: “Eastern Europeans work harder.” It was offered as a compliment, and I think it was meant as one, but it took something I had done and quietly handed it back to my origin, so that the effort was acknowledged while the authorship was removed. My success became a trait of my group rather than something that belonged to me.

I have come to think this is how the script does most of its work, not through open rejection, which would at least be easy to name and to resist, but through a kind of positioning that arrives disguised as praise and leaves you unsure whether you have any right to object. So you adjust, gradually and mostly without deciding to. You become more measured and more careful, you over-perform but only up to a point, because standing out too much carries its own risks, and you learn to anticipate reactions before they happen. You do this because there is usually something real at stake, whether a job, a visa, a promotion or a sense of stability that you know, at some level, could be withdrawn.

For a long time I treated all of this as personal, a matter of temperament or circumstance, and it was only when I began reading other writers that I understood how structural it was.

In The Good Immigrant (2016), Nikesh Shukla (British novelist and editor of the anthology) gathered British writers of colour to document what it means to live in a place where your presence has to be justified, and the book itself grew out of exactly that doubt, the suggestion that writers like them had not really earned their place. What stays with me from it is the observation that acceptance tends to be extended most readily to the exceptional, to the athlete, the celebrated chef or the visible high achiever, while the more ordinary right to be unremarkable, to simply live a life without having to prove its value, is the thing that is quietly withheld.

Dina Nayeri (Iranian-born writer who fled Iran as a child and was later granted asylum in the United States) takes this somewhere sharper in The Ungrateful Refugee (2019). Her argument is not only that refugees are expected to perform gratitude, but that this gratitude serves the host more than it serves anyone else, allowing a country to tell a flattering story about its own generosity when asylum is a protection owed under international law rather than a gift. Once a right has been reframed as a favour, it becomes a debt, and a debt of that kind can never be fully repaid, which is why anger, criticism or even ordinary complexity can so easily be read as ingratitude, and ingratitude as a reason to question whether you deserved to stay at all.

Julia Kristeva (Bulgarian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst who built her life in France) describes what happens when all of this moves inside the person living it.

The foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity.

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (1988), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (1991)

She writes too about the foreigner who, having lost so much else, offers up work as the one possession that travels, the means of earning a place and justifying a presence, and about the bitterness that comes when even that sacrifice fails to secure solid ground. I was born in Bulgaria and raised in France as well, and perhaps this is why her writing has never felt abstract to me in the way theory sometimes can.

Reading these three together, I began to see them less as separate accounts and more as different stages of the same process. It begins with the external realisation that you are being measured and that ordinary presence will not be enough. It deepens when the expectation becomes moral, when being grateful, easy and acceptable stops feeling like a strategy and starts feeling like a duty, and therefore no longer optional.

And it settles when the expectation becomes internal, when you find yourself editing your gestures before anyone has reacted, rehearsing answers to questions that have not yet been asked, and carrying an audience with you even into rooms where you are alone.

Somewhere along the way adaptation becomes strategy, strategy becomes habit, and habit becomes something very difficult to distinguish from identity.

What makes this so hard to step away from is that the script genuinely works. Gratitude does reduce friction, usefulness does buy a measure of stability, and performance is rewarded often enough that you are not imagining the stakes; you have read them correctly. The cost, though, arrives slowly and tends to go unnoticed until it has accumulated, showing up in the hesitation before you speak, in the parts of yourself you soften without realising, and in the odd sense of being slightly out of place even in rooms you have fully earned your way into. Sometimes it shows up as the unsettling discovery that the more successfully you have played the role, the harder it becomes to tell where it ends and you begin.

That distance, between who you are and who you have learned to be in order to move through the world, is what I understand as the Identity Gap.

None of this is an argument against adaptation, because much of what we learned carried us forward, and some of it was the wisest choice available at the time. It is an argument for seeing it clearly enough to ask which parts of ourselves are expression and which are performance, what we chose and what we adapted for survival, and which of the strategies that once protected us still do, and which have simply hardened into habit.

So this week, I would invite you to notice it: the moment you adjust, the moment you hold something back, the compliment that quietly placed you somewhere you had not chosen to stand. There is no need to change anything yet. It is enough, for now, simply to see it, because once you can see the script, you can begin to question it.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

It is, at heart, an observation about who gets to be ordinary.

Photography from Mazda Mehrad decisive_arts

Consider a scene that circulates widely in diaspora accounts and in decades of research on working life, one that belongs to no single organisation and yet is recognisable in almost all of them. In a meeting room, or in a one-to-one booked with a slightly unusual degree of care, someone begins to talk about the organisation’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, the new employee network, the training to be completed before the end of the quarter, the commitment signed off at board level, and then turns to you, with an expression meant to be warm, and asks how they can make things better for you.

The question sounds generous, and it is often meant generously, but it repays being taken apart word by word, because almost every part of it carries an assumption. How can I places the agency with the person asking, who speaks as the organisation, neutral and benevolent. Make it better presumes that something in your situation is lacking, and frames that lack as yours to have rather than theirs to have caused. For you addresses you in the singular, as a particular case rather than a colleague, a difference to be accommodated rather than a perspective that might change how the organisation sees itself. Guillaumin would recognise the structure at once: the person asking speaks from the unmarked position and addresses you from the marked one, so that the kindness is real and so is the hierarchy it quietly confirms, in which one person does the including and the other is included. Having lived between Bulgaria, France and Britain, I know the strange sensation this produces, of being welcomed and explained at the same time, and this essay is an attempt to understand where that sensation comes from.

Who was Colette Guillaumin?

Guillaumin spent her career as a researcher at the French national research centre, the CNRS, and became one of the founding figures of what is known as French materialist feminism. Her first book, L’idéologie raciste: genèse et langage actuel (1972), set out to study racism not as a set of prejudiced opinions held by unpleasant people, but as an ideology woven into ordinary language and ordinary social relations. She went on to apply the same method to the domination of women, most influentially in her essay “Pratique du pouvoir et idée de Nature” (1978), and much of her work became available in English only in 1995, in the collection Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology.

Her central argument is that race is not a natural fact which domination then exploits, but an idea that domination produces. A visible trait, a skin colour, a name, an accent, becomes what she called a mark, a sign that is used to assign people to a place within a relationship of power and then to present that place as though it were simply their nature. Her work is far less widely read in the English-speaking world than it deserves to be, which is a loss, because few thinkers offer a sharper tool for understanding why the language of diversity so often reproduces the very hierarchy it claims to address.

The unmarked norm

The phrase we hear most often in workplace conversations about race is “ethnic minority”, and it carries an assumption so familiar that it rarely gets examined, namely that the word describes a number. Yet the people most often described as minorities in European organisations belong to the global majority, and even within a single city or a single company the arithmetic is frequently less clear than the label suggests. The word is doing something other than counting.

Guillaumin’s distinction between the majoritarian and the minoritarian position explains what it is doing. In her analysis, majority and minority are not quantities but positions within a relationship of power. The majority is the group that takes itself as the reference point, the general and unmarked case against which everyone else is measured, while the minority is defined, described and named in relation to that reference. One group simply exists; the other has to be specified. This is why the more precise word today is minoritised, because it describes something done to a group rather than something a group is, and because it keeps the act of minoritising, and whoever performs it, in view.

This reference point was not invented in the modern office. The habit of treating one way of speaking, dressing and carrying authority as universal, and every other way as a deviation from it, was formed over centuries of colonial rule, and it did not disappear when the empires that produced it did. It survives in quieter forms, in whose accent sounds educated, whose name is easy to say and whose voice sounds authoritative rather than like a perspective, which is what I mean when I speak of coloniality: not a period of history, but a pattern that outlived it.

So when an organisation speaks of minorities, the more useful questions are the ones the label conceals. Minority according to whose authority, inside which institution, and measured against which norm? Who decided what a professional looks like, sounds like and dresses like, and how they hold themselves in a room? And who benefits from that decision being treated as neutral rather than as a choice?

The double reading

Once the norm is understood as a position rather than a neutral fact, something else becomes visible, which is that the same behaviour does not mean the same thing when it comes from different people. It is read, and the reading depends on who is doing it and who is being read.

Nirmal Puwar (British sociologist, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place, 2004) gives this a precise form. She describes how certain bodies are treated as naturally belonging in positions of authority, so naturally that their presence never needs explaining, while others enter those spaces as visible exceptions whose competence must be accounted for. Those who arrive out of place, she argues, carry a burden of doubt and are watched more closely, so that their mistakes are magnified and their successes are treated as surprising.

The structure this produces deserves careful attention, because it amounts to far more than occasional unfairness. A colleague who fits the expected picture raises their voice in a meeting and is understood to be passionate or under pressure, while the same tone from someone who does not is described as aggressive and remembered long after the meeting has ended. One person’s directness reads as confidence and the other’s as arrogance. One is spoken of as having natural leadership potential, while another, with the same results, is told to work on their communication or develop their executive presence, feedback so vague that it can never quite be disproved. And when one person makes a mistake it remains their own, an individual error in an individual career, whereas when the other does, it quietly becomes evidence about everyone who shares their origin. This is Guillaumin’s mark at work: the marked person is never only themselves, while the unmarked person is never anything else.

What makes this structure so difficult to escape is that it closes in from both sides. If the marked person speaks forcefully, they confirm the reading of aggression, and if they hold back, they are judged to lack presence, visibility or ambition. If they challenge a decision they are difficult, and if they accept it they are not quite leadership material. There is no neutral way of behaving, because the problem was never located in the behaviour but in the reading, and the reading was largely settled before they entered the room.

None of this requires anyone to intend it. The double reading does not need a prejudiced individual in order to shape a performance review, a shortlist or a conversation about who is ready for the next role, because it is built into the ordinary way judgement is exercised, and because it feels like judgement rather than bias, it is very rarely questioned.

What the institution cannot see

The word most often used for these experiences is “microaggression”, and I have come to feel uneasy about it. The prefix micro measures the harm from the perspective of the person who does not feel it. To the one on the receiving end, what is described as small is often a direct act of discrimination, and its smallness is not a property of the act itself but of the system’s inability to register it.

Alan Freeman (American legal scholar, “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law”, 1978) offers a precise way of naming that inability. He distinguished between what he called the perpetrator perspective and the victim perspective. Anti-discrimination law, he argued, looks for an identifiable wrongdoer with an identifiable intention, and treats discrimination as an isolated act committed by a particular person rather than as the conditions people are actually living under. Institutions have inherited the same habit. They recognise discrimination most easily when there is a prejudiced individual to point to, and least easily when unequal outcomes emerge from ordinary routines carried out by people who would sincerely describe themselves as fair.

So much of what shapes a working life falls into exactly that gap. A joke that everyone else in the room laughs at, a euphemism that lets something be said without being said, a name left off an email or mispronounced for the third year running, a sentence interrupted and then repeated by someone else to approving nods, an informal invitation that never quite reaches you, a review full of praise that somehow never becomes a promotion. Each of these is difficult to prove on its own and easy to explain away, and yet as a pattern they decide who advances, who is trusted and who eventually leaves.

In an earlier essay I wrote about complaint, drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed (British-Australian scholar, Complaint!, 2021), and about how the person who names a problem so often comes to be treated as the problem, as the one who caused the difficulty or simply imagined it. That is the final layer of invisibility. When the system cannot see the harm, the person who insists on its existence becomes the only thing the system can see.

What inclusion policy has missed

This brings us back to the meeting room, and to the policy being described so warmly. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), Ahmed followed the people employed to carry out diversity work inside universities, and found that the documents, statements and commitments they produced could come to stand in for the change they described. Saying that an institution is committed to diversity can become a way of not having to do what the commitment would require, so that the policy ends up protecting the institution’s image of itself rather than transforming the experience of the people inside it. When someone challenges that image with their own experience, the policy can even be held up as proof that they must be mistaken, because how could an organisation with such a strategy be anything other than inclusive?

Guillaumin allows us to name what this kind of inclusion leaves untouched. It has largely been imagined as a matter of entry, of opening the door and inviting the marked in, while the unmarked norm, the reference point against which everyone is read, remains exactly where it was.

You are welcome to come in, provided you adapt to a standard you had no part in setting, and provided you accept being interpreted through it.

Inclusion of that kind cannot reach the double reading, the jokes, the omissions or the praise that never becomes promotion, because all of them live in the norm itself.

It is worth asking why policy so consistently misses this, and part of the answer lies in what policy is able to measure. Diversity strategies are built around what can be counted, representation targets, headcounts by level, the proportion of a shortlist or a leadership team that falls into each category, and those numbers matter. But counting quietly returns us to the idea of minority as a number, which is exactly the idea Guillaumin dismantled. The mark operates not in headcount but in interpretation, in the reading of a tone, the weighing of a mistake and the meaning attached to the same result, and interpretation leaves no trace on a dashboard. An organisation can therefore meet every target it sets itself while the double reading continues untouched, and can even point to its numbers as proof that nothing remains to be addressed.

Real inclusion would therefore require some form of redistribution, not only of positions and resources, although those matter enormously, but of the authority to interpret. It would mean asking who defines professionalism, who decides what leadership looks like, whose way of speaking counts as clear and whose as difficult, and who gets to say when someone belongs. It would mean an organisation being willing to mark itself, to see its own norm as one particular way of being among others, and to examine it with the same scrutiny it has so readily directed at the people it calls diverse.

None of this means that the people who speak about inclusion are insincere, and many of them are trying, sometimes against real resistance, to change the places they work.

But sincerity is not the measure. The measure is whether the norm is ever placed in question, or whether it is only ever those who differ from it who are asked to explain, adapt and be grateful. So the next time someone asks how they can make things better for you, it may be worth wondering what a different question would sound like: not how can we accommodate you, but what in the way we work makes accommodation necessary at all.

That is Guillaumin’s question, more than fifty years on, and most inclusion strategies have yet to ask it, which is not who is different, but who has been allowed to be ordinary.

References

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint! Durham: Duke University Press.

Freeman, A. D. (1978). “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine”. Minnesota Law Review, 62, 1049-1119.

Guillaumin, C. (1972). L’idéologie raciste: genèse et langage actuel. Paris and The Hague: Mouton.

Guillaumin, C. (1978). “Pratique du pouvoir et idée de Nature”. Questions féministes, 2 and 3.

Guillaumin, C. (1995). Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. London: Routledge.

Puwar, N. (2004). Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

Every complaint begins as a sentence about something that happened.

It might be a remark repeated often enough to stop sounding like an accident, a promotion that passed over the obvious person for reasons nobody quite wrote down, or a meeting in which one colleague is interrupted, corrected and asked to clarify with a regularity that everyone in the room has noticed and nobody has mentioned. You carry it for weeks before you say anything, rehearsing the conversation on the train and in the shower, choosing each word with the care of someone who already suspects that the words, rather than the thing they describe, are what will be examined. And then, eventually, you say it.

What follows is rarely what you prepared for, because almost nobody tells you it did not happen. Instead the conversation begins, very politely, to drift. Someone asks why you did not raise it sooner, someone wonders whether your email might have been phrased a little differently, someone observes, kindly, that you seemed quite emotional in the meeting, and someone proposes a facilitated conversation, as if what took place were a misunderstanding between two people standing on equal ground. The subject changes without anyone announcing it, which is part of how it works, and some weeks later you notice that you came in to talk about what happened and are now talking about how you raised it.

A little later still, you are talking about who you are.

Sara Ahmed, and a resignation that was also an argument

I want to stay with that drift, because one thinker has spent years mapping it with a patience that the institutions she studies rarely extend to the people who complain inside them.

Sara Ahmed (the British-Australian feminist scholar and independent writer, born in Salford in 1969 and raised in Adelaide, who resigned her professorship at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2016 in protest at the institution’s handling of sexual harassment complaints) published Complaint! with Duke University Press in 2021. The book is built from the testimony of students, academics and staff who made, or tried to make, or were gently talked out of making, complaints inside universities about harassment, bullying, racism, exclusion and the ordinary misuse of power. Its ambition is larger than its subject. Ahmed is not really writing about grievance procedures; she is using complaint as an instrument, a way of seeing how an institution actually works as distinct from how it describes itself in its mission statements, its induction slides and its annual reports.

Her starting point is deceptively simple. A complaint points towards something, a behaviour or a pattern or a structure that has been allowed to stand, and yet institutions possess a remarkable ability to look away from the thing being pointed at and towards the person doing the pointing. It is in that small turn of the head, so small that it rarely registers as a decision at all, that the whole story changes direction.

From event to character

If you read The Prospero Complex, you will recognise the shape of what comes next. Mannoni walked into a room arranged entirely by power, watched its occupants navigate the arrangement with great skill, and mistook their navigation for their character, and the workplace complaint performs a smaller version of the same error, with a policy document standing in for a colonial administration.

The question at the start of a complaint is what happened. The question the institution increasingly prefers is how you raised it, and once that second question takes over, a whole vocabulary arrives with it: tone, timing, attitude, professionalism, proper channels, whether you might have been a little sensitive and whether, when it comes down to it, you are really a team player. In Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017), Ahmed describes the figure of the feminist killjoy, the person who names a problem and is then treated as the source of the unhappiness the naming produces, so that the problem is quietly relocated from the room to the person who described the room.

This is the movement I want to name plainly, because it happens so smoothly that it rarely gets named at all: from event to character. She raised a problem becomes, over a few meetings and a few corridor conversations, she is a problem.

It is a form of narrative power, the conversion of an account of something that happened into an account of somebody who exists, and once the conversion is complete the new story does durable work, because every subsequent action is read through it.

A second complaint no longer looks like evidence of a recurring problem; it looks like evidence that the complainant has a pattern. The adjectives settle around her like weather, difficult, negative, emotional, disruptive, not collaborative, and you will notice that not one of them describes what happened, while every one of them describes her.

The wall you only find by walking into it

Ahmed returns again and again to the image of a wall. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012), the diversity practitioners she interviewed kept describing their work as banging their heads against a brick wall, and rather than treating this as a figure of speech she took it as data, as an accurate description of how institutions feel to the people whose job is to change them.

The thing about a wall of this kind is that you usually discover it only by walking into it. You try to move in a certain direction, to raise a certain matter or open a certain door, and something stops you. To everyone who has never tried to move that way there is no wall at all, only a building with corridors and offices and a perfectly reasonable way of doing things, which is why the person who reports the wall so often sounds, to those who have never touched it, as though she is describing something she imagined.

This is what makes the complainant more than a person with a grievance. She is a person with knowledge, the kind that can only be acquired through resistance: where the institution pushes back, which doors close, how quietly they close, and on whom. The people who move comfortably through the building do not possess this knowledge, and the reason is rarely that they are less perceptive; it is that they have never needed it.

Anyone who lives between cultures knows this way of learning a room. You learn its shape by bumping into its edges, through the accent that gets corrected, the name that gets shortened for convenience, the joke you are expected to laugh at, and you learn too that the people who were never stopped often cannot quite believe there was anything there to stop you.

The story an institution tells about itself

Every organisation tells a story about itself, and most of us could recite the opening lines from memory: we listen, we value difference, we are inclusive, our door is always open. In On Being Included, Ahmed calls statements like these non-performative, meaning that saying them does not bring into being the thing they name, and that the saying can come to stand in for the doing, so that a commitment, once written down and published, is treated as though it had already been kept.

A complaint is not only a report about an institution. It is a test of one.

Someone walks up to the open door in good faith and finds out whether it opens, and in that encounter the institution’s story about itself meets the lived experience of a person inside it. This is the gap at the centre of everything I write here, the distance between the story available to describe a life and the life itself, and complaint lives precisely in that distance, exposing the space between the values an organisation claims and the practices it is prepared to tolerate.

Which brings us to recognition, and to the question of whose version of events is treated as credible. A manager, an institution and an employee may each describe the same reality, and on paper these are simply three accounts, but in practice they never arrive carrying the same weight. The institution’s account is called a policy, the manager’s is called a perspective, and the employee’s is called a grievance, a word that already contains its own verdict, which is why it is so often the employee’s account that gets set aside, however accurate it may be, because of the position from which it is spoken.

In Who Gets the Benefit of the Doubt? I wrote about Miranda Fricker’s name for the first half of this, testimonial injustice, the credibility deficit a speaker receives because of prejudice in the hearer, which operates so far below deliberate thought that the hearer simply hears less. Complaint is where that deficit stops being a matter of being misheard in a meeting and becomes a matter of record, written into a file that will be read long after the meeting is forgotten.

The conditional seat

All of this becomes sharper for people whose belonging, or whose authority, was conditional to begin with: the first in their family to enter a profession, the only woman at a particular table, the migrant who was hired, in part and without anyone saying so, for being so easy to work with. If you secured your place by being agreeable, competent, useful and undemanding, complaint carries a particular kind of risk, because it threatens more than your standing on a single issue. It threatens the terms on which you were admitted.

Some readers will recognise the Grateful One here, whose unspoken vow is I will not complain about what I was given, or the Performer, who has learned to present the right self and knows almost to the decimal point what a complaint would cost that self, or simply the old reflex of making yourself smaller before anyone has to ask. These patterns are easily read as personality, as shyness or loyalty or a lack of confidence, but they are better understood as intelligent responses to the way recognition has actually been distributed, the same adaptation mistaken for essence that Fanon named more than seventy years ago.

Which leaves an uncomfortable question on the table. Is belonging, for some people, conditional on not disturbing the institution’s story about itself, so that you are welcome for exactly as long as your presence confirms that the organisation is as open as it says it is?

What the silence knows

Institutions tend to read the absence of complaint as the absence of problems: a quiet year, healthy engagement scores, nothing escalated to anyone senior. But silence is not empty, and very often it is a form of knowledge in its own right.

People learn the real rules of an institution less from its handbook than from watching what happens to those who challenge it. You see a colleague raise something, and then you see the meetings that follow, the way her name begins to be spoken in a slightly different tone, the projects that drift towards other desks, and finally the carefully worded farewell email thanking everyone for a wonderful few years. Nobody has to explain any of it to you. You have learned it thoroughly, and you will carry the lesson into every room you enter afterwards.

Perhaps this is why the most revealing complaints in any organisation are the ones that were never made. Each of them is a calculation someone performed in private, weighing what speaking would cost, who would believe them, and whether the story already circulating about the institution had any room left in it for theirs. Ahmed’s research is full of complaints that stalled, were withdrawn, or were absorbed into procedure until the person making them was simply too exhausted to continue, and it shows, again and again, how the procedure itself can become one more layer of the wall.

The room, and the right to question it

Underneath all of this sits a distinction that I think matters more than almost any other in institutional life. Being invited into the room is different from being permitted to question how the room works.

Many institutions have become genuinely skilled at the first. They recruit widely, photograph their diversity for the website, and offer people seats and titles and places on panels. The second is far harder, because it asks the institution to treat the person inside it as a source of knowledge about itself rather than as evidence of its own good intentions, and to hear a complaint as information rather than as ingratitude.

This is where power becomes visible in a form we do not always name. We tend to think of power as the capacity to make decisions, but it is also the capacity to describe reality and have that description recognised as true: to decide whether what happened was harassment or banter, exclusion or a misunderstanding, a pattern in the institution or a pattern in the person.

When an organisation converts an event into a character, it is exercising exactly that power, choosing which story will stand as the official record and which will be filed away as temperament.

So the most important thing a complaint does may not be to accuse at all, but to ask. It asks an institution to live by the values it already claims to hold, which is nothing new and nothing radical, only its own words handed back to it with a request that they be meant.

And this, finally, is why the complainant so often becomes the problem.

Not because she has misread the institution. But because she has read it too accurately, and said so out loud.

Which leaves the question I keep returning to, wherever you work and whatever room you have been invited into: what does an institution reveal about itself when somebody asks it to be what it already says it is?

When have you watched someone become the problem for naming one, and what did everyone else in the room learn from it? I would like to hear it in the comments.

Further reading: Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Duke University Press, 2021); On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012); Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017).

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

Two colleagues send almost exactly the same email on the same afternoon, short and unsoftened, pointing out that a deadline has been missed and asking what happens now, and by the following morning the two emails have become two quite different documents. One of them is described as clear, admirably direct, the kind of thing the team needs more of. The other is described, carefully and in a lowered voice, as a little abrupt, and somebody wonders aloud whether its author is under some pressure, and somebody else remembers that there was a similar tone in a meeting last month.

Nobody in that exchange is lying, and very few of them would recognise what they are doing as a judgement at all. They experience it as simply having read the emails correctly, which is precisely the difficulty, because the words on the screen were nearly identical and the readings were not. Something was added between the sending and the receiving, and it was not added by the people who wrote them.

We have a phrase for this, and it is not quite adequate to it. We call it a double standard, and we usually mean by that a straightforward unfairness: two sets of rules, one of them harsher, applied according to who you are. But the longer I have spent looking at how this works in the lives of people who belong to more than one place, the more convinced I have become that the rules are the smaller part of the story.

The double standard is not in the behaviour

The behaviour, in most of these cases, is the same. What differs is the interpretation that attaches itself to the behaviour on its way into the room, and interpretation is a far more intimate and far more powerful thing than a rule, because a rule can be read, appealed and eventually changed, whereas an interpretation arrives already feeling like perception.

A double standard is not only two sets of rules. It is two systems of interpretation.

Watch the pairs form once you know to look for them. One person’s directness is heard as confidence and another’s as aggression. One person’s accent is interesting and cosmopolitan and another’s is quietly taken as evidence of reduced competence. One person who speaks about their heritage is connected to their roots, and another who does the same is failing to integrate, while a third who says nothing about it at all is judged, depending on the room, either as simply being themselves or as having abandoned where they came from. One person who challenges a decision is assertive, and another is ungrateful. One person who succeeds is talented, and another is an exception, which is a word that sounds like praise and functions as a fence.

The behaviour does not change across any of those pairs. The system reading it does.

Interpretive privilege

What one side of each of those pairs is holding has rarely been given a name, and it is far easier to see where it is, and where it is not, once it has one. It is a kind of interpretive privilege: the freedom to be ambiguous, imperfect and occasionally contradictory, and to have that ambiguity resolved in your favour by default, without ever having asked for it.

It does not show itself when everything is going well, because when everything is going well there is nothing to interpret. It shows itself in ambiguity, in the moments where a behaviour could reasonably mean several things, and where somebody else’s mind has to decide quickly which of those things it means. A person with interpretive privilege is granted context without asking for it. Their bad day is understood as a bad day. Their mistake is an individual mistake, belonging to them alone and forgotten by Thursday.

And a person without it discovers that their mistake does not belong to them at all. It belongs, somehow, to everybody the room has filed them alongside, and it is quietly added to a record they did not know was being kept, as further evidence about people like them.

Miranda Fricker, and a woman in a film who was right

The philosopher who has done the most to make this visible is Miranda Fricker, whose book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing was published by Oxford University Press in 2007 and has reorganised a whole corner of philosophy since. Her term is testimonial injustice, and her definition is precise: a speaker suffers it when she receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer.

Notice where she locates the problem, because it is not in the speaker. It is in the hearer, and specifically in the hearer’s prejudice, which Fricker is careful to describe as something that operates below deliberate thought, in the speed of perception itself, so that the hearer does not experience deciding to disbelieve anybody. The hearer simply hears less.

One of her central examples is not drawn from a courtroom or a laboratory but from a film, Anthony Minghella’s 1999 screenplay of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, in which Marge Sherwood becomes convinced, correctly, that Tom Ripley has killed her fiancé, and tries to make his father, Herbert Greenleaf, see it. And Greenleaf sets her suspicion aside, gently and almost kindly, as the understandable product of a woman’s feelings rather than a reading of facts. Marge is right. She has the better account. It makes no difference, because the category she speaks from has been assigned a lower credibility before she opens her mouth, and her evidence is heard through it.

What makes the example so useful is that nobody in the scene is a villain in the ordinary sense, and nobody behaves with open contempt. The injustice is done by a reasonable-seeming man doing what he takes to be the sensible thing, which is how almost all of it is done.

W.E.B. Du Bois, and the question that arrives first

More than a century before Fricker, and in circumstances incomparably harsher, W.E.B. Du Bois described what it is to be interpreted before you have been encountered. Du Bois, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, the first Black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and later a founder of the NAACP, opened The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 with a passage that has never lost its force.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Co., 1903)

The question, he writes a few lines later, is how it feels to be a problem. And what he is describing is a person approached not as an individual but as the instance of a category the other already has an opinion about, the opinion arriving in the room before him and waiting there to receive him.

Du Bois was writing about the specific condition of Black Americans after emancipation, and it would be a kind of theft to fold his words into a general description of migration. But the mechanism he named travels, and anyone who has been introduced to a room by a summary of their origin will recognise its outline: the interpretation is not formed in the encounter. It precedes it, and the encounter is then read through it.

When the instructions contradict each other

There is a further layer, and it is the one I find most revealing about the lives of people between cultures, because it moves beyond unfairness into something closer to impossibility.

Sometimes there is no correct behaviour waiting to be discovered, because the expectations attached to you contradict one another. Integrate, but do not forget where you came from. Speak the language perfectly, but be ready to explain your accent. Be successful, but remain grateful. Belong here, while continuing to represent there. Be yourself, but stay recognisable to us.

Each of those instructions is reasonable on its own, and together they form what is better described as a double bind than a double standard, because satisfying one of them is exactly what causes you to violate another. Keep your pronunciation and you are refusing to integrate. Change it and you are trying too hard. There is no position on that line from which both judgements fall silent.

Sometimes the Identity Gap is created not because you failed to meet the expectation, but because the expectations were impossible to satisfy simultaneously.

That changes the meaning of the effort a great many people spend searching for the right way to be. They have assumed that the right way exists and that they have not yet found it. Very often it does not exist, and the search is the symptom.

Erving Goffman, and what it costs to manage the impression

The sociologist Erving Goffman, born in Alberta in 1922, wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959 that a person appearing before others has many motives for trying to control the impression they receive. He meant this as a description of everyone, and it is. But impression management is not distributed evenly, because its necessity depends on how much the impression is going to cost you if it goes wrong.

A person with interpretive privilege can afford to be careless with impressions. Their ambiguity will be resolved generously, so they can send the blunt email, make the ordinary mistake, change their mind in public. A person without it has to manage every one of those in advance, which means supplying the context the room will not supply for them, rehearsing the objection until it cannot be misheard, pre-empting the reading before it forms. That work is invisible, unpaid, and it consumes an enormous amount of the energy that other people get to spend on the work itself.

What can be extended

Fricker does not leave her argument at diagnosis. She argues that the corrective is a virtue on the hearer’s side, which she calls testimonial justice: a habit of noticing when your own credibility judgement might be bent by prejudice, and deliberately correcting for it before it settles into a conclusion.

That matters, because it means the benefit of the doubt is not a natural resource that some people simply have more of. It is something handed out, one interpretation at a time, by listeners who could hand it out differently. And almost every one of us is a listener in some room, holding a little interpretive privilege we have never noticed, because privilege of this kind never announces itself to the person holding it.

So the question is not only who gets the benefit of the doubt. It is also who you are currently withholding it from, in the rooms where it is yours to give.

When have you watched the same behaviour read two different ways, and which side of the reading were you on? I would like to hear it in the comments.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

You have just presented something you know extremely well, the kind of thing you have been living inside for months, a position you could defend from any angle and in any order, prepared to the point where a difficult question would have been a pleasure rather than a threat. And the first thing anybody says, warmly and with every appearance of goodwill, is that your English is very good.

Nothing has gone wrong, exactly, and that is precisely what makes it so hard to describe afterwards to anyone who was not there: nobody was rude, the room was pleasant, you were noticed and addressed by name and thanked for your time, and yet something happened in that exchange that you will still be turning over on the way home, hours later, long after everybody else present has forgotten it completely.

What happened is that the comment was not about your argument at all. It was about your access to the language the argument happened to be made in, and so, in a single sentence delivered as a kindness, the conversation moved from what you know to what you are. And you were the only person in that room for whom such a move was available.

Most of us file this somewhere under bad luck, or a clumsy individual, or a quiet private suspicion that we are oversensitive and ought to let it go, and then we do let it go, because it was a small thing and raising it would have cost more than it was worth. None of those explanations is right. What happened was not a failure of attention on anybody’s part, it was not really about that particular person at all, and it followed a structure so consistent that, had you known what to look for, you could have predicted it before you walked into the building.

Three things we have been using one word for

Everyday speech folds three quite separate operations into a single idea, and pulling them apart is the point at which all of this stops being a feeling and starts being something you can work with.

The first is visibility, which is purely perceptual and means only that you are in the room and people know it. The second is legibility, which asks whether the environment can read you at all, through whichever categories it happens to have lying around: can it parse your name, place your accent, situate your credential, hold in its head a combination of countries that does not resolve into one answer? And the third is recognition, which is what the environment then does with whatever it read, the value and the standing it assigns to what it has just successfully identified.

These three come apart from one another constantly, and the gap between the second and the third is where nearly all of the difficulty lives, because two people can be equally legible to the same room, read perfectly accurately by it, and receive entirely different recognition from it. That difference between them is not a fact about either of them. It is a fact about the hierarchy doing the reading.

Which quietly changes the question. It stops being how do I present myself better, which is the question we are all trained to ask and which keeps the whole burden on the person being read, and becomes something colder, more structural and considerably more useful.

What does this environment already know how to recognise, and what does it do with the people it cannot easily place?

Charles Taylor, and why none of this is oversensitivity

The person who first named this at the right scale was Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, born in Montreal in 1931 to an English-speaking father and a French-speaking mother, who stood four times for the Canadian parliament and spent several decades of his life inside the Quebec question rather than observing it from a distance. His essay The Politics of Recognition was published in 1992 and runs to about forty pages, and its central claim is one that most workplace conversations about belonging have still not caught up with.

Recognition, Taylor argues, is not a courtesy that we extend to people who are already whole and complete without it. It is a human need, and our identity is shaped in part by recognition, by its absence, and by the misrecognition of others, which means that a person can suffer real and lasting damage if the society around them holds up a confining or demeaning picture of who they are and reflects it back at them long enough.

Read that a second time, slowly, because it is a much stronger claim than it first appears to be. Misrecognition is not simply an insult delivered to a self that already exists, sitting there intact behind the insult, waiting patiently to be described accurately at some later date. It participates in the making of that self.

Which is why the advice to simply stop caring how other people perceive you, offered so often and so cheaply, has never once worked on anybody. It is not vanity that makes the compliment about your English land the way it does, and it is not fragility either. It is that recognition is part of the material a self is assembled from, and a false reflection does not obligingly bounce off.

Being seen more was never the remedy

Here is the correction I would most like to make to the way this subject usually gets discussed, because the standard remedy has the diagnosis backwards.

The opposite of invisibility is not recognition. It is hypervisibility. And a person can be extremely visible as the migrant, the diversity representative, the unusually successful outsider, the one with the interesting accent or the impressive story, while remaining entirely invisible as a specific and complicated individual who happens to have a considered view about next year’s budget.

You can be hypervisible in the corridor and invisible in the decision. Named in the public statement and absent from the meeting where the direction was actually set. Invited, warmly and repeatedly, to speak about diversity, and never once about strategy.

So more visibility is not the cure, and it frequently makes matters worse rather than better, because visibility without any change in how you are read does nothing except increase the volume of scrutiny arriving at an interpretation that has not moved.

Being seen more is not the same thing as being read differently.

Miranda Fricker, and the credibility you were assigned before you spoke

The sharpest instrument I know for this comes from the British philosopher Miranda Fricker, in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, published by Oxford University Press in 2007, a book whose subject is what she calls testimonial injustice: what happens when a speaker is granted less credibility than their account actually warrants, because of a prejudice attaching not to the account but to the person delivering it.

She calls that a credibility deficit, and you will recognise its symptoms immediately: evidence quietly discounted, certainty heard as overconfidence, an objection received as a complaint, the same sentence coming out of a different mouth and doing entirely different work in the room.

But there is a counterpart to it, the half that almost nobody discusses, which is a credibility surplus: more belief than an account warrants, assertions accepted without anybody asking for support, confidence heard as competence, an opinion offered well outside a person’s field and received as though it were informed.

And here is the asymmetry that makes these conversations so difficult to have, which is worth stating very plainly, because it explains almost every unsatisfying exchange you have ever had on the subject. A deficit is experienced as friction, which is to say you feel it happening, and you carry it home with you, and you turn it over at eleven at night. A surplus is experienced as its own absence, which is to say it does not feel like anything at all.

People who are believed easily do not feel themselves being believed easily. They feel that they were making sense.

Which is why one person arrives at that conversation carrying twenty years of accumulated data, and the other arrives carrying a lifetime of nothing whatsoever to notice, and the nothing is not a lie or an evasion. It is an entirely accurate report of a frictionless experience.

What actually gets read, and how quickly

None of this is deliberate, and very little of it happens at a level where anybody involved could give you an honest account of having done it.

Your name is processed for origin, for period, for class and for whether pronouncing it is going to require effort. Your accent is placed, and not merely which language it came from but which version of that language, which vocabulary, which degree of hedging. Your credential is checked not only for what it is but for where it is from, and for whether that where means anything at all in this particular room. And whether somebody introduced you, and who that somebody was, has already adjusted your standing before you have opened your mouth to say a word.

Every one of those is read against a standard, and the people who happen to meet that standard do not experience it as a standard at all. They experience it as the absence of one, as neutrality, as simply how things are.

Because a hierarchy operating at full strength never feels like a hierarchy to the people inside it. It feels like common sense: that this accent sounds more educated, that this manner is more professional, that this way of putting things is simply clearer than the alternative.

Five questions to ask while it is still happening

Five questions, all of them answerable from observation alone, designed to be run quietly during the meeting rather than reconstructed painfully afterwards.

Who is believed without evidence? Watch for an assertion made without any support at all that nobody in the room asks anybody to substantiate. That person is holding surplus here.

Who is asked to substantiate? And notice, carefully, whether the questioning is tracking the content of what was said or the identity of the person who said it.

Who interrupts, and who absorbs interruption? This is the most reliable indicator available in any meeting anywhere, and it requires no interpretation whatsoever, because you are not reading intentions. You are counting.

Who explains, and who is explained to? The direction in which explanation travels is the direction of the centre.

Whose contribution gets attributed? An idea that arrives credited to someone other than the person who said it has travelled through the hierarchy on its way, and the route it took is perfectly visible if you are watching for it.

Five answers will tell you what the room itself will never state out loud, which is what you are going to have to supply that other people in it will not.

And they will also tell you something rather less comfortable, which is where you yourself are holding surplus, because almost everybody is holding it somewhere. A person disadvantaged by their accent may be carrying a credential that lands automatically and without question. A person marked by origin may hold a class fluency that reads instantly as belonging. Reading only your own deficits is not reading the architecture at all. It is reading your own experience with a better vocabulary attached to it.

And surplus, unlike a great many things in this essay, is usable: credibility you hold in a room can be deliberately extended to somebody who does not hold it there, which is one of very few interventions genuinely available to any of us inside a structure we did not build and cannot dismantle from a meeting.

The part that closes the loop

There is one more turn to all of this, and it is the reason the problem cannot be solved by the obvious method of simply trying harder.

Misrecognition does not only misunderstand you. Given enough time, it begins to shape what you actually do. You over-prepare. You speak a little less, and later in the meeting. You adjust the accent without quite deciding to. You supply considerably more evidence than the situation strictly requires. You avoid expressing anger, and you perform a small and regular quantity of gratitude.

None of that is irrational, and I want to be clear about it: every single one of those adaptations is a reasonable response to an accurate reading of the room you are standing in.

But the adaptation then goes on to supply fresh evidence for the interpretation that produced it, which is the trap. The over-preparation is read as uncertainty. The reduced speech is read as having less to contribute. The objection you softened so that it would land is received, quite naturally, as agreement.

The adaptation becomes the evidence for the judgement that caused it.

What is actually available

So let me be honest about what changes here and what does not, because I think the honesty is worth more than the encouragement.

Understanding any of this will not improve the way a particular room reads you. Systems are entirely indifferent to being comprehended, and anybody promising you otherwise is selling something. What changes is narrower than that, and also more durable: how much authority you hand over to the interpretation while it is being made.

Stuart Hall, who was born in Kingston in 1932, arrived in England on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1951 and described himself late in life as a familiar stranger, argued in Cultural Identity and Diaspora in 1990 that identity is not an accomplished fact that a practice then represents, but a production, always in process, never complete, and constituted from within representation rather than sitting somewhere outside it, finished and intact, waiting to be perceived correctly at last.

Which means that whatever a given room assigns you is a positioning rather than a description. And a positioning is something that was produced, in encounters, by people, over time.

Things that were produced in encounters can be reworked in encounters. Not quickly, and not by you alone, and not in every room you will ever walk into. But the reading you are currently receiving is not a fact about you. It is a fact about an arrangement, and every arrangement has a history, which means it had a beginning, which means it is not the weather.

Where have you been perfectly legible and still not recognised? The room that reads you without any difficulty at all and then assigns what it read a lower value than you would. I would like to read those in the comments.

Recognition Patterns

Everything above is one distinction, taken out of the first chapter of a course.

Recognition Patterns is eight chapters long, and each one takes a single pattern apart and ends with something you can use inside a specific encounter rather than a realisation you can admire from a distance: the architecture of credibility, the Good Immigrant Script, the Borrowed Gaze, conditional belonging, self-silencing, how to tell a recognition pattern from an ordinary difficult interaction, and finally how to pursue recognition without paying for it in self-erasure.

It is not a promise that recognition improves. It is a way of reading an encounter while it is still happening, and of knowing what you are being asked to exchange before you agree to the trade.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

It becomes a collection of other people’s expectations. How you should sound. How you should behave. How much space you are allowed to take.

It tells you when to soften. When to explain yourself. When to hold back just enough to remain acceptable.

The unsettling part is that it does not feel imposed. It feels like you.

I call this the Borrowed Gaze.

It begins with a moment

There is always a first moment when you realise you are not simply living. You are being read.

Maybe for you it was school. Maybe work. A dinner table, a meeting room, an interview, a playground.

For me, these moments were rarely dramatic, and that is exactly what made them so difficult to name. A question asked too casually. A pause after I spoke. A look that made me suddenly aware of my own voice. Nothing openly hostile. Nothing obvious enough to protest. But enough to make me notice myself from the outside.

Enough to make me think: how am I being heard right now?

Once that question enters, it does not leave easily. You are no longer only present in the moment. You are monitoring yourself inside it. Listening to your own voice while speaking. Adjusting in real time. Trying to stay legible, acceptable, easy to place.

These moments matter not because they are dramatic, but because they train you. They teach you to become conscious of yourself in a way that feels small at first and becomes habitual later.

And once that shift happens, something changes permanently. You no longer simply exist in the world. You observe yourself inside it. You anticipate. You adjust. You edit, often before anything has happened.

For years I thought this was just adaptation. Social awareness. Part of learning how to move through the world.

I did not have language for it. I could feel the monitoring, but I did not understand what it was. Then I began meeting it in the work of writers who were not always writing about migration, but about something adjacent to it: what happens to a self that is formed under observation.

What struck me was this. What feels deeply personal is very often structural.

Du Bois: the split

One of the earliest and most precise articulations of this comes from W. E. B. Du Bois, the American sociologist and historian whose work centred on race, identity and inequality.

The context matters. This is 1903. Post-slavery America. A society that had legally abolished slavery without dismantling the hierarchy underneath it. Du Bois was not writing from a distance. He was writing from inside it, as a Black intellectual moving through institutions that positioned him as insider and outsider at the same time.

What he was trying to name was not inequality itself. It was the psychological experience of living inside it. The tension of being educated, capable, fully human, and still made constantly aware of how you are being perceived, categorised and limited.

From that reality he gives us double consciousness: the sense of always seeing yourself through two lenses at once, your own and the one society imposes on you.

Always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

When I first read that line, I stopped. It did not feel like theory. It felt like recognition.

Because what he describes is not simply identity. It is division inside the self. You are the one living your life, speaking and moving and existing. You are also the one watching, evaluating, registering how that life is being received.

And Du Bois understood that this was not a moment. It was a condition. Something continuous. A quiet doubling that follows you into every room.

He goes further and calls it a kind of two-ness. Two identities, two ways of seeing, two ways of being forced to exist at once, and the effort of trying to reconcile them. The work of trying to become whole in a world that keeps splitting your reflection.

For migrants this is immediately familiar, even where the context is entirely different. You are navigating not only who you are, but how that identity translates between environments. In one space you are fluent, confident, fully yourself. In another something shifts. You become slightly more aware. Slightly more careful. Slightly more edited.

Over time you hold both versions at once. The internal self and the perceived self.

This is where the Borrowed Gaze begins to form. Because what starts as awareness slowly becomes influence. You do not just notice how you are seen. You begin to adjust to it. Anticipate it. Work with it. Sometimes protect yourself from it.

The split does not stay as observation. It becomes regulation.

Fanon: the split enters the body

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and political philosopher, takes this further in Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952, translated by Charles Lam Markmann).

Again the context matters. Fanon trained in France and wrote from inside the machinery of colonialism, moving between Martinique, France and later Algeria. Educated, articulate, accomplished, and still reduced to something else on arrival. He was not observing this from outside.

What interested him was not inequality itself but what inequality does to the psyche. What happens when you are positioned as other not once, not occasionally, but systematically.

What he describes is the moment the difference stops being external. You begin to see yourself as you are seen. Not as an individual but as a category. Predefined before you speak.

And that rupture is not only cognitive. It is felt in the body. The body becomes exposed and self-conscious. Movement changes. Posture adjusts. You become aware of how you occupy space. The voice becomes more careful. Words are selected with precision, not only to express something but to manage how it will land.

This is why Fanon matters here. He shows that this is not social discomfort. It is psychological restructuring. It changes how you think, how you feel, and how you physically exist in a room.

Identity stops being stable and becomes negotiated. Adjusted in real time. Calibrated by context.

With Du Bois, you are aware of the split. With Fanon, the split enters the body. It becomes instinctive. You do not only notice how you are seen. You feel it, in your tone, in your hesitation, in the way you enter a room.

At that point the gaze is no longer something happening to you. It is something happening within you.

Foucault: the watcher becomes automatic

Which raises the next question. What happens when this way of watching yourself becomes so normal that you stop noticing you are doing it?

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, spent much of his work examining how power operates in modern societies. Not through law or force alone, but through observation, discipline and control. In Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir, 1975, translated by Alan Sheridan) he asks a very specific question: how do you get people to behave without constantly forcing them?

His answer is that you do not control people by watching them all the time. You build systems in which they feel they might be watched. Over time, the possibility is enough.

This is the panopticon, a prison design borrowed from Jeremy Bentham. A circular structure with a central tower where one guard can observe every prisoner, and no prisoner can tell when they are actually being observed.

The danger of the design is not the surveillance. It is what the surveillance produces. When you believe you might be observed at any moment, you begin to behave as though you always are. And then the observer becomes unnecessary. You internalise it. You monitor yourself. You correct yourself, often before anything has happened. You become both the subject and the authority watching the subject.

This is how modern power works, in Foucault’s account. Not loudly. Not violently. Through self-regulation, and through people learning to manage themselves in anticipation of judgement.

Which is precisely where the Borrowed Gaze becomes most powerful. At this point it no longer needs to come from outside. There is no specific person watching. The audience becomes abstract, diffuse, everywhere and nowhere, and still constantly present in your decisions, your tone, your hesitation.

The question is no longer how are they seeing me, because they are no longer clearly defined.

The question becomes how should I adjust.

Now the control is not imposed. It is self-generated. You anticipate judgement before it arrives. You adapt before you are asked. You edit before you are misunderstood. And in time this stops being a decision and becomes a habit of being.

The Borrowed Gaze reaches its most subtle form when it is no longer something you notice. It is something you live inside.

What it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday

Put the three of them side by side and a pattern emerges. This is not only about migration. It is about what happens to identity when it is shaped under observation. Migration does not create the process. It accelerates it, intensifies it, and makes it much harder to step outside of.

In everyday life it rarely announces itself. It appears in habits.

In the sentence you shorten before saying it. In the opinion you soften before offering it. In the joke you do not make because you are unsure how it will land. In the way you become more formal in some rooms and more invisible in others.

It shows up in over-explaining. In over-preparing. In wanting to be beyond criticism before you have even begun.

It shows up when you rehearse a simple interaction in your head. When you monitor your tone while speaking. When you leave a conversation and replay it, not because anything went wrong, but because something in you is still asking: did I sound right, did I say too much, did I take up too much space?

This is why it is so difficult to recognise. It does not feel like damage. It feels efficient. Mature. Socially aware. Professional. Adaptable.

But there is a difference between social intelligence and chronic self-editing.

There is a difference between sensitivity and self-erasure.

There is a difference between code-switching as a skill and code-switching as survival.

Many people live inside that difference for years without naming it. Because when you move across borders you are not only entering a new place. You are entering a new field of perception, with new expectations and new assumptions about who you are before you have spoken. So you learn very quickly to read the room, to adjust, to anticipate.

If you are reading this, you have probably felt it. The moment before you speak where you rehearse the sentence. The awareness of your accent, your tone, your wording. The decision to simplify, or soften, or explain more than you needed to. Not because anyone asked, but because somewhere along the way you learned that it made things easier.

Awareness. Internalisation. Automation.

The Borrowed Gaze is not one moment. It is a process, and it has three stages.

Awareness. You notice how you are seen.

Internalisation. You start to feel it, in your body, in your voice, in your presence.

Automation. You regulate yourself without thinking about it.

This is why naming matters. Anything unnamed begins to feel natural. Without language for the Borrowed Gaze you may mistake it for personality. You may believe you are simply cautious, or unusually self-aware, or naturally diplomatic. Some of that may be true. Some of it may also be the residue of years spent being watched, evaluated and questioned, and having to adjust in response.

Naming it does not remove it. It interrupts its invisibility, which is a different and more useful thing. It lets you ask a better question.

Not why am I like this, but what taught me to monitor myself this way.

Not why do I always edit myself, but where did I learn that editing myself was safer than being fully expressed.

Once you can see the mechanism, you are no longer entirely inside it.

The cost, which is cumulative

The difficulty is that by this point it does not feel external. It feels like personality. Like preference. Like who you are.

But often it is adaptation. You are not simply expressing yourself. You are managing how you are received. And that management has a cost, rarely visible and always cumulative.

It is the accumulation of small adjustments. Small hesitations. Small acts of self-containment. The effort of trying to be legible in rooms that were not built with you in mind.

Over time this produces a very specific fatigue. Not physical tiredness, but the tiredness of thinking constantly about how you are coming across while also trying to live your life.

Sometimes it means you speak less. Sometimes it means you become exceptionally polished. Sometimes it means you become agreeable, high-performing and easy to work with, not only because that is who you are, but because those traits reduce friction.

That is the difficult part. What gets rewarded in migrants is very often not authenticity but successful adaptation. And the more the adaptation is rewarded, the harder it becomes to ask where you end and the performance begins.

This is also how a fragmented identity forms. Not only because you belong to several places, but because you learn to present different versions of yourself depending on where you are standing.

None of this is exclusive to migration. It happens anywhere identity meets expectation: in workplaces, in social class, in gender roles, in any space where belonging feels conditional. Migration simply makes it visible, because you are moving between worlds and carrying the gaze of each one with you.

The work

The work is not to pretend the Borrowed Gaze never existed. For many of us it was protective. It helped us adapt. It helped us survive rooms we did not yet know how to enter.

The work is learning to notice when that borrowed voice has become louder than your own.

To notice when caution becomes self-erasure. When awareness becomes self-surveillance. When adaptation becomes distance from the self.

There is a difference between being thoughtful and being constrained, and part of this work is learning to hear it.

Which parts of me are actually mine?

Which parts were shaped by expectation, by pressure, by the need to belong?

And which voice, after all these years, do I want to live by?

The Borrowed Gaze begins with other people. The unlearning begins with us.

This essay is adapted from an episode of The Modern Migrant, The Borrowed Gaze What happens when other people’s expectations stop being external and start becoming your inner voice. Listen above.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

Every inherited story comes with a seating plan.

Nobody announces it, which is part of how it works. You are simply handed the tale, at school or at bedtime or somewhere in the canon, and folded inside the handover is an instruction you absorb long before you could name it: identify here, sympathise here, fear that one, laugh at this one. The story arrives pre-furnished, the way the houses of narrative inheritance always do, and by the time you are old enough to evaluate the furniture you have already spent years sitting in the chair it assigned you, facing the way it faces, cheering when it tells you to cheer.

I want to look at one story in particular, because for four centuries it has been quietly issuing seats to everyone who lives between worlds, and because what eventually happened to it is the most hopeful thing I know about inherited stories. But the hope comes at the end. First, the island.

The island

Shakespeare wrote The Tempest around 1611, just as European colonisation was gathering its terrible speed, and the plot is simple enough to hold in one hand. Prospero, a deposed duke, is shipwrecked on an island with his daughter and his books. The island is not empty, though the play would prefer you not to dwell on this. It belongs, by any ordinary reckoning of the word, to Caliban, who was there first, whose mother lived and died there, who knows its springs and berries and voices the way you know a childhood house in the dark. Prospero takes it anyway. He enslaves Caliban, rules the island through magic and constant surveillance, punishes him at intervals, and narrates all of it to us, persuasively, as order, education, civilisation.

At the centre of their relationship sits one transaction that the following centuries of empire would repeat on every continent. Prospero and his daughter teach Caliban their language, and the play frames the teaching as a gift, proof of their generosity and his savagery in the same breath, since what could he possibly have been before they gave him words? Caliban’s reply is the most quietly devastating line Shakespeare ever wrote:

“You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.” William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Read it slowly, because it is not the rejection of language it first appears to be. It is an audit of the gift. You gave me your words, Caliban is saying, and with them your world, your categories, your grammar of value, your name for me, and what I have gained from the whole transaction is the ability to describe my own dispossession fluently, in the dispossessor’s tongue.

Anyone who was ever educated into a language that carried a verdict about their origins knows exactly what he means, and knows too that both halves are true at once. The gift was real. So was the invoice.

The complex

Three centuries later a psychoanalyst read the play and believed he had found a diagnosis inside it.

Octave Mannoni (the French psychoanalyst and colonial official, who spent two decades working in Madagascar) published Psychologie de la colonisation in 1950, translated into English under the title Prospero and Caliban, and his lasting contribution was to turn the telescope around. Where Europe had spent lifetimes asking what was wrong with the colonised, Mannoni asked what was wrong with the coloniser, and the answer he arrived at he named the Prospero complex.

The men who sailed out to rule other people’s islands, he argued, were not the overflow of Europe’s confidence but of its anxieties. Look again at the play: Prospero is a man who failed in Milan, outmanoeuvred by his own brother, and it is only on the island, among beings he can rule absolutely, that he becomes a magician. The colony, in Mannoni’s reading, is a psychological arrangement before it is an economic one. It is the place where a man haunted by inferiority and rivalry at home can at last be obeyed without competition, loved without the demands of equality, and surrounded by people who can be blamed endlessly without ever answering back in a register that counts. The fantasy of the grateful native and the fantasy of the monstrous native turn out to be the same fantasy wearing different weather, because both of them keep the master at the centre of every story told on the island.

As a portrait of the coloniser this was piercing, and it has never really been surpassed. But Mannoni’s book had a second half, and the second half was a disaster whose shape we still live with.

Having diagnosed Prospero, he turned to Caliban and diagnosed him too. The colonised, he proposed, suffered from a dependency complex, a pre-existing psychological need for masters which colonisation had not created but merely answered, as if the Malagasy had in some obscure sense been waiting to be ruled.

The correction

The reply came within two years, from a psychiatrist in his twenties, and it became one of the hinges of modern thought.

Frantz Fanon (the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary thinker) devoted an entire chapter of Black Skin, White Masks to what he pointedly called the so-called dependency complex of colonised peoples, and Aimé Césaire, his teacher, delivered the same verdict in Discourse on Colonialism. Their correction is worth stating plainly, because it reaches far beyond 1950. What Mannoni had described as the native’s nature, Fanon showed to be the native’s situation. The deference Mannoni observed in Madagascar was not evidence of a psychology awaiting a master; it was the behaviour of people currently living under one, produced by conquest, maintained by force, and rehearsed daily because the alternative to rehearsing it was punishment. Mannoni had walked into a room arranged entirely by power, watched its occupants navigate the arrangement with great skill, and mistaken their navigation for their character.

Hold on to that error, because it is not a period piece; it is a template, and it is still being applied every day at every scale. The employee who over-explains is read as insecure, rather than as someone who has been misread often enough to start pre-empting it. The accented speaker who goes quiet in meetings is read as passive, rather than as someone who has learned precisely what speaking costs. The migrant community that keeps to itself is read as unwilling to integrate, rather than as conditionally admitted and behaving the way people on conditional terms sensibly behave. Again and again, adaptation gets diagnosed as essence, and the response to the room gets filed as the nature of the person standing in it.

Fanon’s correction, carried out of the colonies and into any building you like: before you diagnose the person, audit the room.

The story doing its work

There is a deeper layer still, and it is the one that concerns everything I write here.

The Tempest is not merely a story that depicts colonisation. It is an inherited story, one of the most widely inherited on earth, taught for centuries across every continent the empire reached, and it travelled with its seating plan intact. Which means that generations of schoolchildren, including generations of colonised schoolchildren, including children who had far more in common with the islander than with the duke, were seated year after year in Prospero’s chair, taught to read the island through his eyes, to hear his rule as order and his surveillance as care and his language lessons as generosity, and to receive Caliban’s rage as proof of exactly the monstrosity that justified his servitude.

That is what a story can do that no soldier can. It recruits the dispossessed into the audience of their own dispossession. It teaches you, gently, over years of Tuesday classrooms, to cheer from a chair built facing away from yourself.

Stories are not decoration. They are infrastructure. They decide who enters the tale as a subject and who enters as scenery, whose anger reads as tyranny and whose as temperament, which characters are given an inner life and which are given a function. And when the only stories on offer keep assigning you the monster’s seat, the assignment does not stay politely on the page. It follows you out, into classrooms and interviews and mirrors, an inheritance nobody ever asked whether you wanted.

Perhaps this is why the most consequential act in the whole four-century life of this play happened offstage, in the twentieth century, when the people who had been issued Caliban’s seat stopped reading and started writing.

Caliban takes the pen

In 1969 Aimé Césaire rewrote the play itself. His Une Tempête restages Shakespeare for what he called a Black theatre, and in it Caliban is no monster but a rebel who sees Prospero with total clarity, answers him in the vocabulary of liberation, and at one point refuses the very name Caliban, the name his master’s story assigned him, demanding to be called X instead, like a man whose true name has been stolen and who declines to decorate the theft. Two years later, in Cuba, Roberto Fernández Retamar published his essay Calibán, arguing that Latin America should stop flattering itself with the play’s delicate spirits and claim its real symbol: the islander who takes the imposed language and turns it into a weapon. Across the Caribbean and well beyond it, writer after writer made the same move, until Caliban had become something Shakespeare never wrote and could not have imagined: an author.

Notice what none of them did. They did not burn the play, and they did not stop speaking the language Prospero taught. Césaire wrote his rebellion in French; Retamar wrote his in the Spanish of the conquistadors. They took the inherited story and the inherited language together, the gift and the invoice in the same hands, and they re-authored the seat. The curse Caliban learned became, in their keeping, the poem.

That is the whole move, and it is available at every scale, not only to literatures but to ordinary lives. You cannot choose the stories you inherit, and you rarely get to refuse the language they arrive in. What you can do is what Césaire did. Refuse the seating plan. Read the old story again and notice, this time, who furnished it. Ask why the chair you were handed faces the way it faces, and who benefits from the view.

Because the Prospero complex was never only his. It is an entire architecture of narration, the arrangement by which one character gets to be the author of everyone else on the island. And its quiet cure has never been rage alone.

It is self- authorship.

Not because the inherited story can be unwritten. But because the pen was never part of the inheritance. It was always just sitting there, waiting to change hands.

Leave a comment

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

There is a half second that most people never experience, and that you have lived through thousands of times.

It is the pause before you say your own name, while you decide which version this particular room has earned: the full one, or the one that has been sanded at both ends so that it passes through an English sentence without catching on anything.

Watch what actually happens inside that half second, because you are not remembering your name. You are calculating an audience. How much explaining will this room tolerate, how much correcting do you have the energy for today, will this person attempt it or arrive within the minute at do you have a nickname?

By the time you speak, an assessment has been run, a verdict returned and the output adjusted accordingly.

And nobody in the room did any of that. You did all of it, in advance, on their behalf.

You already know this reflex

If you have lived across worlds, you will not need this explained, only named.

Think of the message rewritten four times, not for accuracy but for register, or the reference dropped mid-sentence because explaining it would have cost more than the sentence was worth. Think of the joke abandoned because it needed context, of the eight seconds of silence before you speak in a meeting, which reads to everyone else as caution and is in fact rendering time. Think of the phone voice, which almost everyone in the diaspora has, and which almost nobody has been told is a documented sociological phenomenon rather than a private embarrassment.

I call this the Self-Surveillance Reflex: the habit of running yourself through an imagined assessment before anybody has actually assessed you.

It is not vanity, because vanity wants to be admired and this wants only to be unremarkable. It is not anxiety either, although it borrows anxiety’s machinery, because anxiety anticipates a bad outcome whereas this anticipates a reading, and adjusts you in advance so that the reading comes out clean.

It is a rehearsal. And a rehearsal, by definition, is held for an audience.

The mirror that Cooley built

In 1902, Charles Horton Cooley (the American sociologist at the University of Michigan, one of the founders of what became social psychology) published Human Nature and the Social Order and gave us the image the field has been working with ever since. He called it the looking-glass self, and its claim is that we do not know ourselves directly at all; we know ourselves through an imagined reflection in another mind.

A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.

Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902)

Three elements, arriving in an order. You picture how you appear. You picture how that appearance is judged. Then a feeling arrives, pride or mortification, and settles into you as though it had come from inside.

Cooley was insistent about the second element, which he thought the comparison to a mirror obscured, because a mirror only reflects and does not judge. What moves us to pride or shame, he argued, is not the reflection but the imputed sentiment, the judgement we imagine the other mind delivering. And the force of that judgement depends entirely on the standing we have granted the mind delivering it. We are ashamed of seeming evasive in front of someone we consider straightforward, and entirely untroubled by the opinion of someone whose authority we never accepted in the first place.

Hold on to that. It is the door out of this essay, and I will come back to it.

Except that the order reverses

In Cooley’s sequence, the feeling arrives third. Something happens, you read the room, and then you feel something about what the room appeared to make of you.

That is not the order I know, and I suspect it is not the order you know either.

The mortification arrives first. Before the room has judged anything, before the sentence has left your mouth, before the message has been sent to someone who has loved you unconditionally for your entire life and has never once commented on your vowels. You are already editing against a verdict that has not been delivered, from a panel that has not convened, in a case that nobody has brought.

Ordinary social awareness responds to feedback. This runs pre-emptively, continuously, and without an off switch, because it is not waiting for a reaction. It has already predicted one.

The mirror is not in the room. The mirror is running whether or not anybody is standing in front of it.

And there is not one mirror. There are two.

Here is where the experience departs from the textbook entirely, because Cooley assumed a single mirror: one audience, one set of standards, one direction in which a person might adjust. Assimilate upward, or outward, or into whichever room you happen to be standing in.

If you have moved between worlds, you have two.

There is the mirror of the country you live in, which reads you for foreignness, and there is the mirror of the place you came from, which reads you for having gone. The second one is the one nobody warns you about.

You go back, and within a day you understand that you are being listened to. Not to what you are saying, but to how you are saying it. Someone repeats a word back to you with a very slight smile. An aunt observes, kindly, that you have started to talk like them. A cousin tells you that you sound successful, and means it as a compliment, and it is not entirely a compliment. Your mother’s neighbour asks whether your children speak it, and the pause before you answer is the whole conversation.

You are being measured for what the crossing did to your speaking.

And because the two mirrors face each other, the judgement runs in both directions at once, which is what makes it impossible to satisfy. Speak the way the host country taught you and you have confirmed a suspicion at home. Speak the way home taught you and you have failed at the very thing you left in order to do. There is no register that clears both panels, and no amount of skill will produce one, because the two standards were never designed to be compatible.

It is not that you are bad at belonging. It is that you are being asked to satisfy two contradictory standards simultaneously, and then quietly blamed for the strain of it.

Which is also why the reflex does not switch off when you land. It simply changes direction.

The standard was built by people with names

There is a detail worth knowing here, because the imagined judge tends to feel eternal, as though the correct way to sound had always existed and you had merely failed to reach it.

It did not always exist. It was assembled, relatively recently, in committee.

In 1926 the BBC established an Advisory Committee on Spoken English, founded by John Reith with the stated intention of maintaining a standard of educated Southern English. Its founding members were a poet, a literary scholar, a playwright, two phoneticians and an actor: Robert Bridges in the chair, alongside Logan Pearsall Smith, George Bernard Shaw, Daniel Jones, Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Arthur Lloyd James. The committee met a few times a year to settle general principles of pronunciation for announcers and to issue rulings on doubtful words, and it ran until 1939.

Sit with the ordinariness of that. A handful of men, meeting a few times a year, deciding what the nation would hear as correct, and then broadcasting it into every kitchen in the country until it sounded less like a preference and more like the weather.

The neutral accent is not neutral. It is a local accent that was given a microphone. Every empire has had one, and every empire exported it, which is why the standard you measure yourself against at three in the morning may well have a committee, a date, and a set of minutes.

Your imagined judge is not always a person. Very often it is a policy.

Where, exactly, is your backstage?

Erving Goffman (the Canadian-born sociologist whose work reframed everyday life as theatre) gave us the language of front stage and backstage in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), and his argument was not a cynical one. All social life is performance, he said, and performance is not fraud; it is competence. We manage impressions constantly, and doing it well is a social skill rather than a moral failure.

But his model rests on a quiet assumption that holds the whole structure up, which is that a front stage implies a backstage. Somewhere the costume comes off. Somewhere you stop.

So ask yourself where yours is.

Not the host country, which is a stage, and a demanding one. Not the country of birth either, because being born somewhere is not the same as being claimed by it, and plenty of people spend a lifetime performing in the place their documents call home. And not the country of heritage, if arriving there involves an examination that begins at passport control and continues at your aunt’s table. Not necessarily the diaspora community, which frequently runs the strictest audit of them all, because it knows exactly what you have lost and can price it to the decimal.

And if every room is front stage, the costume never comes off, which costs you far more than tiredness, although it certainly costs you that.

It costs you the joke you did not make. The idea you did not offer because you were still rendering. The version of you that is quick and warm and very funny in a language most of your colleagues have never heard you speak.

The recognition you eventually receive is real, and it is earned. But it is recognition of the edit. Somewhere in a drawer is the unedited file, and increasingly you are the only person who has heard it.

Who is actually on the panel

Now come back to Cooley’s second element, the one he called essential.

A judgement carries only the force of the standing you have granted the mind delivering it. Which means the question is not how do I stop doing this, because willpower does not reach a reflex, and treating it as a personal weakness is a category error in any case. The reflex is not a flaw in you. It is a rational adaptation to rooms that genuinely did assess you, at a time when the assessment genuinely had consequences.

The question is who is on the panel.

Sit with it, because the answers are rarely the ones you expect. A teacher who corrected your pronunciation in front of a class in 1998. A colleague who made you repeat yourself three times in a meeting, and then said it back to the room correctly, as a translation. An interviewer who told you warmly, almost as a compliment, that your accent was quite strong.

Some of these judges are dead. Some never held the authority you granted them. Some were entirely correct about one specific room in one specific year, a room that no longer exists and cannot be re-entered.

You are not rehearsing for the room in front of you.

You are rehearsing for a tribunal you inherited.

And a tribunal, unlike a personality trait, is a piece of architecture. Inherited, load-bearing, assembled by other people for their own reasons, and, unlike most of what shapes us, available for inspection.

Perhaps this is why

Perhaps this is why the question why do I do this has never gone anywhere useful. It assumes the rehearsal is a symptom of something wrong with the performer, when it is a rational response to a room, and the room is not always still there.

You cannot decide to stop the mirror. But you can walk around the room it hangs in and ask, judge by judge, whether this one still holds a seat. Some will. Some rooms are still live and still consequential, and the reflex is doing real protective work in them, which deserves respect rather than shame.

But many will not survive the question. And when a judge is dismissed, something small and specific becomes possible: the message goes out on the first attempt. The name arrives in the room at full length, in the half second that used to be a calculation.

Not perfect. Not neutral. Not universally legible.

Just yours.

Where did you first learn to pre-edit yourself, and whose voice is still on the panel? I would love to read your story in the comments.

Share The Modern Migrant

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

For long stretches that line stays dormant and almost invisible, but in seasons of fear or scarcity or political convenience it is asked to do heavier work, and the stranger who was until then merely unfamiliar becomes something more useful.

The Other becomes the enemy, the unknown becomes the threat, and a society that cannot quite explain its own anxieties goes looking for a face on which to hang them.

Edward Said understood all of this from the inside, not as a theory he arrived at but as a condition he lived, because he spent the better part of his life on the wrong side of that very line.

He was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and given, by a mother who admired the Prince of Wales, the conspicuously English name Edward, which sat oddly against his Arabic surname for the rest of his life, a first name and a last name that seemed to belong to two different people, neither of whom felt entirely like home. He grew up moving between Palestine and the British and American schoolrooms of Cairo before building his career, many years and one ocean later, in New York, and when he came to write his memoir he gave the whole condition its truest name by calling the book Out of Place.

Out of place was never a metaphor he reached for so much as the actual texture of his days, the persistent sense of never being wholly inside any of the worlds he passed through, of holding the wrong passport for every room he entered, of being fluent and foreign in the same breath.

He was, as he understood himself, too Western for the East and too Eastern for the West, legible almost everywhere and yet at home nowhere.

And it was from that unhoused vantage point, from the discomfort of belonging nowhere completely, that he came to notice what most people are never forced to see, which is how the Other is made.

In 1978 he gave that machinery both a name and a book. Orientalism, which would change the way a whole generation understood the relationship between knowledge and power, appeared on its surface to be a study of how the West had written about the East, yet underneath that scholarly subject it was concerned with something far more intimate, namely what happens to people whose story walks into the room a moment before they do.

A style of thought

Said’s central claim was deceptively simple, and all the more disquieting for it. The Orient, he argued, was not a place Europe had discovered out beyond its own borders but a place Europe had, over several centuries, effectively produced, assembling out of paintings and novels and travel writing and scholarship and colonial policy an entire East that could then be studied, managed, and ruled.

He defined it this way:

“Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’”

(Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978)

A style of thought: not quite a lie, and not merely a prejudice that a little more contact might cure, but something far more durable than either, a framework so widely shared and so deeply sedimented that it eventually stopped looking like a framework at all and began, to almost everyone inside it, to look simply like reality.

What made the idea so unsettling was its sheer scale, the way Said could show that poets and administrators, novelists and colonial officers, people who agreed with one another on almost nothing else, had nonetheless inherited the same basic division of the world into an “us” and a “them.” In that division the West appeared rational, modern, and complete, while the East appeared as its convenient opposite, sensuous and backward and perpetually in need of explanation and, as it happened, of governance. The distinction was never neutral; it was a relationship of power wearing the respectable clothes of a relationship of knowledge.

Imaginative geography

The concept I keep returning to is the one Said called imaginative geography, his name for the way we carve the world into the familiar and the foreign, our space and their space, along a line drawn far more by imagination and inherited feeling than by anything solid on the ground.

A society defines itself, in no small part, by what it decides it is not, and the foreigner becomes the surface onto which a culture projects everything it would rather not recognise in itself. Once that projection hardens into common sense, the actual person in front of you becomes almost beside the point, since they are read through the map long before they are ever encountered as themselves.

This is the part that migrants tend to know in their bodies long before they have any language for it, because you arrive somewhere new and discover that a version of you is already there waiting, a portrait assembled in your absence out of headlines and films and vague regional reputations and whatever impression was left behind by the last person who shared your accent, and you can spend years, sometimes decades, correcting a likeness you never sat for.

The question “where are you from?” is rarely cruel, and is often warm and curious and entirely well meant, yet it can also be the moment at which the map is consulted, the moment you feel yourself located inside a story that was written without you and that you are now, somehow, expected to inhabit.

Representation is not description

The deepest lesson of Orientalism is that representation is never quite innocent, that to describe someone is already to exercise a kind of authority over them, because whoever holds the pen gets to decide which details matter and which do not, which traits are charming and which are threatening, and which belong to a single individual and which will be taken as evidence about an entire people.

Said was careful here, and his care is part of what makes the argument so difficult to escape. He did not claim that everything written about the East was false; a great deal of it was accurate, some of it was sympathetic, and much of it was produced by people who loved the places they studied. His point was subtler than accusation: that even accurate description, when it flows in only one direction, becomes a form of control, because the observed so rarely get to observe back, and the described so rarely get to describe.

This is why so much of the migrant experience comes to feel like translation without end, a constant labour of rendering yourself legible to people under no corresponding obligation to render themselves legible to you. You learn their references and their humour, their unspoken rules and their version of history, and the exchange is almost never equal, since belonging here tends to be offered on the unspoken condition that you keep translating in one direction and never ask the room to translate itself back.

Perhaps this is why certain encounters leave behind a residue that is so difficult to name afterwards, because what they involve is not always exclusion in any obvious sense but something quieter and more disorienting, the experience of being included, warmly even, as a character in someone else’s story rather than being recognised as the author of your own.

The gaze that moves inward

Said showed, with great patience, how the Other is built from the outside, but it took another writer to describe what happens on the day that construction is finally swallowed whole.

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist whose Black Skin, White Masks appeared in 1952, spent his working life inside the minds of colonised people, and what he found waiting there was a particular and intimate kind of injury, not simply that the colonised were described from without, but that they gradually came to see themselves through the describer’s own eyes. The outside gaze, in other words, migrated inward and took up residence, until it became the very lens through which a person looked at their own face in the mirror.

Fanon called the result alienation, though he meant something far more exact than loneliness by the word; he meant an estrangement from oneself, a self split in two between the person underneath and the mask that person learns to wear in order to be acceptable, black skin beneath a white mask. Over enough time the mask stops feeling like a costume at all, you forget that you are performing anything, and you begin, most painfully of all, to distrust whatever remains in you that refuses to resemble the standard you were taught to admire.

This is the wound that sits underneath assimilation, and it is why the word “integration” can cost so much more than it appears to, because you can master the language and the manners and the references and still discover that such mastery carries a hidden price written into its very terms. To take on the coloniser’s tongue, Fanon observed, is also to take on the coloniser’s world and its measure of what counts as intelligent, cultured, and real, so that fluency itself can become a kind of unspoken consent to the very hierarchy that ranked you below to begin with.

Migrants tend to know this internal weather intimately, even the many who never find a name for it, whether it takes the form of the instinct to soften an accent in front of a certain kind of listener, or the reflex to pre-empt the judgement of a room by judging yourself first and more harshly than anyone else would dare, or the low and tiring vigilance of endlessly watching yourself being watched. It is the mind policing itself on behalf of an authority that no longer even needs to be in the room, because it has long since been installed within.

Fanon’s diagnosis is undeniably bleak, yet it clarifies something Said tends to leave implied, which is that the story entering the room ahead of us does its deepest and most lasting damage not in the moment when others tell it, but on the day we begin to tell it about ourselves.

The one who sees the frame

And yet Said’s own life suggests that this condition holds within it something other than injury, something that can even, in time, be turned to use.

He had, after all, described himself in the title of his memoir as out of place, a man born in Jerusalem, schooled in Cairo, and exiled into America, never fully at home in any single language or nation, and out of that biography he came to understand exile not merely as the loss of a territory but as a permanent and oddly productive doubling of vision.

The person condemned to live between worlds is also, by the same stroke, forced to see each of those worlds from the outside, and therefore to notice what its more settled inhabitants never can.

To describe this doubled way of perceiving he borrowed a word from music, contrapuntal, drawn from the art of counterpoint in which several independent melodies are sounded at once, each remaining distinct and yet together producing something richer than any single line could manage alone. Said believed that those who had lived across cultures could learn to hear existence in just this contrapuntal way, holding more than one story in the mind at once without feeling compelled to collapse them into a tidy single one.

This, I have come to think, is the hidden inheritance of fractured belonging, because once you have watched more than one society describe itself as natural and inevitable and complete, you slowly lose the ability to believe any of them entirely, and you begin instead to notice the frame around the picture. You come to see that national stories are assembled rather than given, that hierarchies are built and then carefully maintained, and that the categories so many people mistake for reality were manufactured, often quite recently, and often by someone who stood to benefit from their being believed.

None of this is only about the East and the West. The machinery Said described did not politely disappear when the empires formally ended; it survived, and survives still, inside the everyday assumptions we go on carrying about which countries are to be taken seriously, which accents sound intelligent, and which lives are permitted to count as modern. The map was first drawn across the long centuries of colonial rule, and we are, most of us, still living inside its borders, still inheriting its hierarchies as though they were facts of nature rather than decisions once made by particular people for particular reasons.

Which stories we are willing to keep

To read Said as a migrant is to receive a rather uncomfortable gift, because he takes the disorientation you have been carrying for years and shows you that it was never confusion at all but perception, and that the persistent sense of not quite fitting the story on offer was entirely accurate. You did not fit it for the simplest of reasons, which is that it was never built to hold you in the first place.

That recognition does not erase the difficulty; being described before you are ever met remains exhausting, and translating endlessly in one direction remains its own form of quiet, unpaid labour. But something shifts the moment you can see the frame for what it is, because you stop mistaking an inherited story for the plain truth about yourself, and you begin to understand that the real work of a life is not to discover which single story you were always meant to belong to, but to decide, slowly and deliberately, which of the many stories you have been handed you are willing to keep, which you are willing to revise, and which you are finally willing to set down for good.

The story still enters the room before we do, and Said never pretended otherwise, for it would be a kind of lie to end by suggesting the thing can simply be banished. What he offered instead was something slower and far more durable than escape, which was authorship, the patient and deliberate reclaiming of the pen.

Not because the story that arrived first was never powerful.

But because it was never the only one that could be told, and it was never truly ours to begin with.

Subscribe now

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

In this first episode of The Modern Migrant, I explore the experience of fragmented identity: the often invisible work of becoming different versions of yourself across cultures, contexts and expectations, and of being read differently in each of them.

From code-switching and adaptation to the quiet sense of never being fully recognised anywhere, this episode gives language to something many people live but rarely name.

Through reflection, cultural references and contemporary art, we explore:

• Why identity begins to feel divided when you live across worlds

• How adaptation shapes who you become, and who others assume you are

• Why fragmentation is not a failure, but evidence of a life lived across several realities at once

Featuring artists and films that capture the emotional and structural reality of living in-between.

This episode isn’t about fixing identity. It’s about seeing it more clearly, because sometimes the shift is simple: realising it was never just you.

Artists

• Aziza Kadyri, Play Nice (Somerset House Studios)

• Madeleina Kay, visual art and political identity work

Films

• Atlantics, directed by Mati Diop

• Minari, directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Conceptual framework

• Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture: the Third Space and in-betweenness

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.
Join The Stories We Inherit →
You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

It was submitted to Simon Fraser University in 2021 by Ljudmila Petrović (Serbian-born researcher in counselling psychology, raised in Vancouver), and it concerns women of what researchers call the 1.5 generation: born in the former Yugoslavia and raised somewhere else entirely, old enough to have been carried out of a war and young enough not to remember it properly. They are the children of the people the world wrote about at length in the 1990s, and almost nobody has written about them.

Petrović gives their condition a name, which is the first thing she does and possibly the most important. She calls it the balkanization of identity.

The word was originally geopolitical, describing the fracture of a state into smaller and mutually hostile pieces. What she does is turn it inward, using it to describe what happens inside a person when identity splits along the same lines the country did, through transgenerational trauma, through patriarchal violence, and through migration. The fracture that occurred at the level of the map is repeated, decades later and thousands of miles away, at the level of a single woman trying to explain where she is from.

This is a specific history and it is not mine, and I want to be careful about that. But the mechanism she describes is not confined to one region, and it is the precision of the mechanism that I have not been able to put down.

The silence had a shape

The finding that stopped me was about the things that were never said.

Research on intergenerational trauma has established that what passes from one generation to the next is not only what parents tell you, but also what they cannot bring themselves to tell you, and the gaps they leave behind do not stay empty for long. The child fills them, because a child will always fill them with something.

Marianne Hirsch (American literary scholar of memory) calls what the following generation carries postmemory, meaning a connection to events you did not live through that has been transmitted with such force that it can crowd out the memories you actually made yourself. Your own life, in other words, displaced by your parents’. Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török (Hungarian-French psychoanalysts) reached for something starker and called it the phantom: an unnamed and unseen presence that occupies a family, sitting in every room and never once described aloud.

You do not inherit a story so much as you inherit its outline, and then spend a good part of your life trying to work out what was supposed to go inside it.

There is a further detail in this literature that I keep returning to, which is that the silence is gendered. In research with Bosnian families, fathers tended to occupy the position of what one researcher calls the horror keeper, holding what they had seen on the understanding that it was not to be passed on, so that it surfaced sideways instead: in the body, in what the body could no longer do, in the particular register of war jokes that allows a man to gesture at an experience without ever entering it. Mothers, by contrast, were more likely to give their children something closer to an actual account.

The children of those households therefore received two transmissions of entirely different kinds, and one of them was mostly atmosphere.

Which griefs get written down

This is the point at which the thesis stops being psychological and becomes structural, because the silence was never simply the private failure of one father who could not find the words.

It had an architecture, and the architecture is very old.

When Vuk Karadžić (nineteenth-century Serbian linguist and folklorist) began setting Serbian oral tradition down in writing, he catalogued it by gender: epic poetry was heroic and belonged to men, while ballads, love songs and ritual poetry were classed as women’s. What became a book, therefore, was the men’s, and what stayed in the mouth and was very largely lost was the women’s. Men’s losses in war entered the historical record as heroism, while women’s entered it as sacrifice, told from grandmother to granddaughter and written down almost nowhere at all.

There is even a formal role attached to this. The narikače are women who perform the ritual lamentation for the dead, telling the story of the deceased in verse, which means that the culture formally appoints women as its carriers of grief and then declines to write down what they are carrying.

Perhaps this is why the silence in these families lands with the weight that it does. It was never one man’s inability to speak; it was the domestic expression of a much older system that had already decided, centuries before any of these women were born, which griefs enter the archive and which are only ever felt.

The women in Petrović’s study were not failing to inherit a story. They were inheriting precisely what the system had been designed to hand them.

Homesick for a tense

There is also the question of what these children are supposed to be longing for, which turns out to be considerably stranger than it first appears.

Yugonostalgia is the name given to the longing, in Yugoslavia’s successor states, for the country and the way of life that preceded the wars, and Mitja Velikonja (Slovenian cultural theorist) describes those narratives as being not only about how a people once were but about how they never were.

The object of the nostalgia is at least partly a construction, assembled after the fact out of what people wished had been true.

Now place a child inside that arrangement. She is asked to feel loss for a country that no longer exists, in a version of it that never quite did, often in a language she cannot read fluently, and every summer visit confirms the same quiet thing: she is a guest in the place she is supposed to be from.

She is not homesick for a place. She is homesick for a tense.

Petrović writes that these children come to feel they belong to somewhere they have never known and will never truly know, which leaves them physically distant from a homeland and temporally distant from it as well. There is no flight that closes the second gap.

The border is not always at the border

Identity in this research refuses to stay abstract, descending instead into the body and into gestures so small that you would never think to defend them.

Researchers working in postwar Sarajevo found participants describing a belief that people count kisses, because Serbians greet with three kisses on the cheek while other groups greet with two. So you learn to manage your own greeting, performing ambiguity in a movement you have made since childhood, in the half-second before you touch someone’s face.

The border, it turns out, is not always at the border. Sometimes it is in how many times you kiss someone hello, and in the fact that you have learned to count.

What survives migration in this literature is rarely the nation, because what survives is far more local than that. Researchers use the term trans-localism for it: a belonging that attaches itself to a dialect, a village, a region or a particular street rather than to anything as large as a flag. Petrović notices it in her own family and records it in a footnote, where lavender returns her father to his childhood on the island of Hvar and linden trees return her mother to the street she grew up on in Belgrade. Not a country, then, but a smell that puts a specific person back in a specific place at a specific time.

The children raised in diaspora frequently do not have that. What they have are the stories about it, which is a different substance entirely.

The method was the argument

I want to say something about how the thesis was built, because the method is doing as much work as anything it found.

Petrović did not survey these women; she sat with four of them, asked them to tell their own stories, and treated the telling itself as the repair. She used narrative inquiry, drawing on the tradition of narrative therapy, in which a person’s account of themselves becomes the site of the work rather than the raw material for somebody else’s analysis. She also placed her own narrative in the introduction, including the surname a great-grandfather chose as a business decision, the grandfather killed in the 1999 bombings, and the queerness that remains hidden from her extended family, all of which amounts to a refusal of the position of neutral observer.

She has good reason for that refusal. Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatian-Dutch novelist and essayist) had already described the foreign chroniclers who arrived to narrate that collapse as connoisseurs of other people’s misfortune, and the question of who holds the pen has never been separable from the question of what ends up recorded.

Which brings me to the part I believe is transferable.

You do not repair a fragmented identity by locating the missing pieces, because most of them are not recoverable: the people who held them are dead, or will not speak, or spoke in a language you half lost somewhere along the way. What changes is authorship. You stop being the place where an unexplained history is stored and become the person giving an account of it, and although the fragments themselves do not resolve, they are now being narrated by someone who was previously only carrying them.

The line I cannot stop thinking about

The thesis is dedicated to the forgotten generation that has never seen themselves represented, which is the entire condition compressed into a single line.

Not that the experience was absent, but that it had nowhere to be recognised, no vocabulary attached to it, and no category in which it counted as a real thing that had happened to someone.

The experience was real. The language was missing.

And then somebody gave it a name, and four women sat down and told it, and it became something a person could actually hold.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

There is a question that stalls me every time it is asked, and it is one of the smallest questions in the language: where is home?

Watch what happens when it is asked. Some people answer immediately. I begin negotiating. Home is where I live now, sort of. Home is where I grew up, partly. Home is a kitchen in one country, a language in another, a version of my mother in a third. The honest answer, the one that sounds evasive but is actually precise, is everywhere and nowhere.

For a long time, I thought this hesitation belonged only to migration, one of the quiet costs of living between countries. I no longer think that. Migration is one way of exposing something much larger: that identity is rarely singular. It is layered, adaptive and continuously negotiated, and some lives are simply required to notice this earlier than others.

This essay is about what happens when a life outgrows the stories available to explain it. And what becomes possible once you stop mistaking that complexity for a flaw.

Becoming many selves

If you have lived across worlds, you know the inventory without being told.

There is the you of your first language, who is funnier, quicker, somehow younger. Or, for some of us, the opposite: the you of the birth language is the halting one, reaching for words that never fully arrived, a stranger in the tongue that was supposed to be home. The you of your second language, more careful, more deliberate, built for accuracy rather than warmth. The workplace you, calibrated to the room’s idea of professionalism. The family you, fluent in an older set of expectations. And the you that returns the moment your mother calls, a self you thought you had outgrown, fitting instantly.

Code-switching is the technical name, but the term undersells the experience. This is not switching between codes. It is maintaining an entire repertoire of selves, each rehearsed, each context-specific, each genuinely yours, each answering to a different world.

Which leads, sooner or later, to the question underneath: if all of these versions are real, which one is actually me?

For a long time, the available answers all treated the multiplicity as the problem. Fragmentation was read as confusion. Hybridity as incompleteness. Living between cultures became an identity crisis, with the emphasis on crisis, something to be resolved by finally choosing: integrate or return, assimilate or preserve, pick a self and commit.

The multiplicity itself became the diagnosis.

What Pirandello understood

More than a century ago, the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello built an entire novel on this vertigo. In One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, his protagonist slowly discovers that he exists differently in every mind that encounters him. His wife knows one version of him, his creditors another, strangers a hundred more, and there is no single, stable self waiting underneath to arbitrate. He is one to himself, a hundred thousand to the world, and therefore, in any final sense, no one.

Pirandello staged this as an existential catastrophe, and his character never recovers from it.

For millions of people living across cultures, it is simply everyday life. What the novel treats as a crisis of philosophy, we experience as a Tuesday. The difference is that Pirandello’s man had no framework to catch him. He concluded that the multiplicity was the end of the self.

We get to conclude something else, because in the decades since, thinkers have built the frameworks he lacked.

Then Bhabha changed the question

Homi K. Bhabha (the Mumbai-born literary theorist, long at Harvard, one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies) published The Location of Culture in 1994, and its central move was to take everything the fragmented person experiences as failure and rename it as a site.

The mistake, Bhabha argued, is imagining cultures as sealed containers between which people travel, pure traditions that migrants shuttle across or awkwardly combine. Cultures are always meeting. And where they meet, something happens that is neither mixture nor compromise. He called the location of that happening the Third Space: the in-between territory where a person is no longer only what they came from and never simply what they arrived into, and where, crucially, something new gets made.

Hybridity, in his account, is not half this and half that, forever incomplete on both counts. It is a third thing, generated in the overlap, that neither origin could have produced alone. The in-between is not the absence of a position. It is a position, and Bhabha insisted it is the productive one: the vantage from which the rules of both sides become visible, precisely because you are standing where they fail to cover.

Read that against the inventory of selves above and the reframe lands. The many selves are no longer evidence of failure.

They are evidence of creation.

Kristeva goes one step deeper

If Bhabha explains where new identities are formed, Julia Kristeva explains why the formation feels so unsettling, and why it concerns everyone, not only those who moved.

Kristeva (the Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and philosopher, herself an emigrant who left Bulgaria for Paris in her twenties) published Strangers to Ourselves in 1988, and its argument begins where most writing about foreigners stops. The foreigner, she proposes, is never only the person outside us, the one at the border or the new desk or the end of the street. Foreignness also lives inside us:

“The foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity.” Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (1988)

Every psyche, in her account, contains its own stranger: the unfamiliar impulses, the unassimilated histories, the parts of ourselves we do not recognise and prefer to project outward onto people we can call foreign. Migration does not create this condition. It reveals it. The migrant simply discovers first, and more visibly, what is true of everyone: that identity was never as singular or stable as the settled are permitted to believe, that we are all composed of multiple histories, languages, memories and inheritances that never fully agree.

Some lives simply expose the complexity earlier than others. Which means the fragmented identity is not a deviation from the human condition.

It is the human condition, with the lights on.

The stories that failed us

So if the multiplicity is creative by Bhabha’s account and universal by Kristeva’s, why has it so often felt like damage?

Not because anything was broken. Because the stories we inherited only recognise two possibilities. Either you remain rooted, one self in one place, or you become lost. There is almost no language for the people who become something else entirely, the third thing, made in the overlap.

And when language is missing, experience becomes difficult to recognise, including to yourself. What should be understood as adaptation gets mistaken for confusion. What should be read as range gets labelled inconsistency. The exhaustion of maintaining many selves gets filed under anxiety, as if it were produced by your psyche rather than by the work.

The problem was never our identities. It was the poverty of the stories available to explain them.

Stories are not decoration. They are infrastructure. They decide which experiences are legible, which lives count as coherent, which kinds of person are recognised as whole. And when the infrastructure has no room for your experience, the experience does not stop being real. It goes unnamed, and unnamed experiences are almost always misdiagnosed as personal failings.

This is the space I write from: not the gap in you, but the gap between what you live and the language you were given to live it in.

Home everywhere and nowhere

Perhaps this is why “where is home?” has always been the question that stalls me. It assumes home is a point on a map, and we stopped being map-shaped some time ago.

Home, for the person of many selves, is not a location. It is something carried: between languages, between relationships, between memories and ways of seeing. Everywhere and nowhere was never the confession of homelessness it sounds like. Everywhere, because every place left something behind in you. Nowhere, because no single place can hold the whole archive.

The fragmented identity is not suspended between homes.

It is built from them.

The real question

So the question was never which of these selves is the real one.

Not because they are masks. And not because one of them will eventually win. But because identity was never the search for a single authentic self hiding beneath the versions. It has always been the practice of becoming, and the versions of you are not fragments of a broken original. They are the archive of every world you have learned to inhabit.

Pirandello’s man was undone because he thought discovering the hundred thousand meant losing the one. He had no Third Space, no stranger within, no story large enough to hold him.

You do. And so perhaps home was never going to be the place where all your selves finally become one.

Perhaps home is the place where they no longer have to.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

Listen. The Modern Migrant podcast explores identity, recognition and the stories we inherit, one conversation at a time.

Listen on Spotify →

Discover your portrait. Seven ways we learn to be read by others, and to read ourselves. Which one are you?

Find your portrait →

The loudspeakers played an old song, “Mirišu Ljiljani”, and tens of thousands of people stood up and sang it together, word for word, many of them in tears. To anyone outside the blue sections it was a pleasant folk tune. To anyone inside them it was almost unbearable.

Because nothing in that moment was only what it appeared to be. The song is by Halid Bešlić, one of the most beloved voices the Balkans ever produced, and he did not live to see a stadium in America sing it back. It dates from 1991, the edge of the war, and the lilies it mourns are not flowers. The golden lily was the symbol of wartime Bosnia, stitched onto the flag under which the country bled through siege and genocide, more than one hundred thousand dead, a nation scattered until one in three Bosnians now lives somewhere else. Even the team carries the flower: their nickname is Zlatni Ljiljani, the Golden Lilies.

So when that crowd sang about lilies, they were singing the war, the dead, the singer, the flag, the leaving, and the impossibility of return, folded into one melody, in a city eight thousand kilometres from Sarajevo.

I have never been to Bosnia. But I knew that sound instantly, because I grew up inside a version of it.

Homesick for a home I never had

I was born in Bulgaria and never lived there. My life happened elsewhere, but every summer we went back, and each return was an immersion so total it felt like changing bodies. The emotional register shifted the moment we arrived. People felt things at full volume. Grief was allowed to be grief. Joy was allowed to be loud.

There was the horo, the circle dance, hands linked with strangers who were somehow not strangers, the line curling around courtyards and wedding halls as if the dance itself were drawing the shape of belonging: a circle, closed, with you inside it. There was the old music, always the old music, songs everyone’s parents had loved, sung with an ache that seemed to predate the people singing them.

And I would feel it: a longing so specific it had texture. Except the thing I longed for had never been mine. I was nostalgic for a Bulgaria I had never lived in, for a time before my time, for a country that existed mostly in summers and songs. For years I thought this made my nostalgia fraudulent.

Then I learned that this is what nostalgia actually is.

The disease of the displaced

Nostalgia began its life not as a feeling but as a diagnosis.

The word was invented in 1688 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, who welded it together from Greek: nostos, the return home, and algos, pain. He coined it to describe a condition doctors were seeing in Swiss soldiers serving far from their mountains: a wasting sickness of longing, with physical symptoms, considered at the time potentially fatal. The prescription reveals the entire worldview: send the soldier home. Nostalgia was understood as a disease of geography, and geography could cure it.

The Balkans quietly knew better, and had encoded the knowledge in music. Bosnia’s great song tradition is the sevdalinka, the slow art-song of longing, and the word itself is a small history lesson: sevdah came through Turkish from the Arabic sawda, meaning black bile, the melancholic humour of old medicine. The region had folded the medical theory of sorrow directly into the name of its music. Longing, the songs understood, was not a malfunction to be cured. It was a register of the soul, something to be practised, sung, and even savoured, ideally at length, ideally after midnight.

Three centuries after Hofer, a scholar finally explained why his cure could never have worked. Svetlana Boym (the Russian-American scholar of comparative literature at Harvard, herself an emigrant from Leningrad) spent her career on the subject and produced the definition that everything since has orbited. Nostalgia, she wrote, is

“a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001)

Read it twice, because each half of that sentence holds a different people.

A home that no longer exists: that is the Bosnians in Los Angeles. Their displacement was not a career move. It came out of siege and slaughter, out of the worst atrocity Europe had seen since 1945, and the home they left did not stay behind to be visited. The prewar Bosnia of mixed neighbourhoods and unlocked doors was not merely changed by the war; for many, it was murdered by it. You can fly to Sarajevo tomorrow. You cannot fly to 1990. Their longing has no address a plane can reach, which is why it needed a song instead.

A home that has never existed: that is me at the edge of the horo, aching for a Bulgaria assembled from summers, other people’s memories, and music older than my mother. Svetlana Boym’s insight is that these two longings are the same emotion. Nostalgia was never really about a place. It is about a time, wearing a place’s clothes. And since time cannot be returned to, all nostalgia is, in the end, longing for something partly imagined, which does not make it false. It makes it human.

What the longing is for

Modern psychology has spent two decades rehabilitating what Hofer pathologised, and the findings would not surprise anyone raised on sevdah.

Researchers at the University of Southampton, led by Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, have shown across hundreds of studies that nostalgia mostly functions as a resource rather than a wound. Triggered by music more reliably than by almost anything else, it counteracts loneliness, strengthens the sense that life has meaning, and knits the self together across time, reminding a person that the one who left and the one who stayed and the one standing in a foreign stadium are the same continuous someone. Nostalgia, in this research, is not the opposite of coping. It is one of the ways coping is done.

Which reframes the Balkan relationship with longing entirely. A region repeatedly broken by empire, war, and exodus did not develop its vast repertoire of aching music because it was trapped in the past. It developed that repertoire as technology: a way of carrying the past that would otherwise be uncarryable. The sad songs are not the symptom. They are the treatment.

But the treatment has one requirement. It works best when it is not taken alone.

Why it had to be sung together

Here is what was happening, physiologically, in that Los Angeles stadium.

When people sing together, their bodies begin to cooperate beneath their awareness. Breathing aligns, because a song makes every chest obey the same phrasing. Researchers in Sweden monitoring choirs have watched singers’ heart rates fall into step with one another as they sing. Work by Robin Dunbar’s group at Oxford has found that group singing releases endorphins and bonds strangers faster than almost any other shared activity; they call it the ice-breaker effect. A crowd that sings together is, for the length of the song, one synchronised organism.

Sociology named the feeling a century before the labs measured it. Émile Durkheim called it collective effervescence: the electric sensation of a gathered group moving as one, which he considered the raw material of everything sacred. People experience it and reach for words like holy, he argued, because in that moment they are feeling something real: the force of the group itself, running through each body at once.

Now put the pieces together. Take a scattered people whose home no longer exists in the form they lost it. Take an emotion, nostalgia, that psychologists find is most powerfully triggered by music and most healing when shared. Take the one activity, collective song, that measurably merges separate bodies into one. And take a stadium, the last public architecture where thirty thousand people are permitted, even expected, to feel everything at maximum volume.

What happened before the Switzerland match was not a crowd warming up for football. It was a dispersed nation running its oldest repair ritual at industrial scale. For four minutes, the diaspora was not a statistic of departure. It was a single body, breathing in Bosnian.

The circle, closed

Bosnia’s World Cup ended the way underdog stories usually do, beaten in the knockout round, and it does not matter at all. Runs end. What the tournament actually delivered was that song, in that city, sung by the children of the displaced to a singer who did not live to hear it, about lilies that were never only flowers.

I think now of the horo of my childhood summers, the circle of hands that pulled me in before I could ask whether I had the right to join. I used to believe my longing was counterfeit because the home it pointed to was partly imagined. I had it exactly backwards. The circle was never asking where you had lived. It was asking whether you carried the ache, and the ache was the membership.

Nostalgia is not the failure to arrive in the present.

It is the evidence of how much we were built by somewhere else, and singing it together may be the closest a scattered people ever comes to going home.

Not because the song brings the country back. But because, for the length of it, the country is wherever they are standing.

Here is the link to the video of the stadium, for anyone who wants to hear what tens of thousands of people longing in unison sounds like.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast or discover your portrait, seven ways we learn to be read by others, and to read ourselves.

You can assemble it, chapter by chapter, from history, and the journalist gathers much of it in How to Kill a Language, her account of why languages disappear. Her central correction is the one that matters most: languages do not die. Dying is what organisms do, quietly, from the inside. Languages are killed. From the outside. By decisions.

I keep returning to that distinction because “language death” makes extinction sound like weather: regrettable, natural, nobody’s fault. But stand behind any “dying” language for long enough and you will find a policy, a school, a border, a pay gap, a raised eyebrow in a meeting.

A language does not die when its last speaker dies. It dies earlier than that, and more quietly: it dies when the second-to-last speaker decides there is no one left worth speaking it to.

The first method: force

The oldest chapter is the bluntest one. Colonial administrations understood, with remarkable clarity, that you hold territory with soldiers but you keep it with schools.

The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who died last year, still writing, still refusing, described his own childhood in exactly these terms. At home there was Gikuyu, the language of stories told around the fire, of riddles and proverbs, of his mother.

At school there was English: enforced, ranked, rewarded.

Children caught speaking Gikuyu on school grounds were punished, sometimes made to wear a sign around the neck declaring their own stupidity, and the lesson being taught was never really linguistic. The lesson was hierarchical: what you came from is beneath what you are being offered.

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ names the mechanism with a precision no one has improved on since: the bullet subjugates the body, but language subjugates the spirit. Conquest handles the territory. The classroom handles the imagination.

Which is why he insists, across the whole book, that a language is never just a tool for getting things said. It is a carrier of memory, of values, of a people’s accumulated way of seeing:

“Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)

Kill the language and you have not deleted words. You have wiped the memory bank, and left a people fluent only in someone else’s archive of themselves.

The second method: the flag

Empires are not the only killers. Nations do it too, and often to their own.

Nation-building has always had a sound: one flag, one people, one tongue. France pursuing Breton and Occitan out of its classrooms. Franco driving Catalan and Basque from public life. Turkey and Kurdish. The logic is presented as unity, and unity somehow always turns out to mean sameness, with the regional language recast as a threat to the modern state, or worse, an embarrassment to it.

Notice that the method softened over time but never actually changed. Force gave way to administration. You no longer punish the language; you simply decline to conduct life in it. No forms in it, no courts in it, no news in it, no jobs in it. The language is not banned.

It is merely made useless. Which is slower, and quieter, and works far better.

The third method: love

Then there is the chapter that is hardest to read, because no villain appears anywhere in it.

Migration kills languages through the people who love them most. A family arrives somewhere new. The parents run the calculation, and this is the terrible part, they run it correctly: their child’s future will be priced in the local language. So they speak it at home, even brokenly, even at the cost of their own eloquence, trading the language in which they are funny and precise and fully themselves for one in which they will be forever slightly reduced. And they make the trade for the child.

The child grows up able to understand the grandmother but not answer her. Able to receive the inheritance but not sign for it.

No decree did this. No soldier, no schoolmaster with a sign around a child’s neck. Just a series of reasonable decisions, each one made out of love, each one defensible on its own, adding up to a silence.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is what the statistics on “language shift” can never show you: that a language most often dies at a kitchen table, in the second a parent answers their child in the new language because it is easier, because it is safer, because it is better for them. And both things are true at once, the love and the loss, in the same sentence.

The fourth method: shame

But why does the calculation keep coming out that way? Why does the mother tongue lose the cost-benefit analysis every single time?

Because languages carry price tags, and the prices are rigged.

Bourdieu called it the linguistic market: every accent, every language, every register carries a value set not by clarity or beauty but by its distance from power. Some ways of speaking are heard as intelligence.

Others are heard as backwardness, and heard that way before a single idea has been expressed. The listener believes they are evaluating the speaker, when what they are actually doing is reading a price tag that history wrote.

This is where the killing becomes self-service. Once a language is associated with poverty, with the village, with the past, no state needs to suppress it any longer, because its own speakers will do the work: softening the accent, correcting the children, saving the mother tongue for jokes and scolding until it becomes a language in which nothing serious can be said, since nothing serious is ever said in it.

Perhaps this is why so many of us police our own mouths without ever having been told to. You hear yourself through the room’s ears before the room has heard you at all: flattening the vowel, swallowing the word your grandmother used, translating yourself in real time. And you call it professionalism, or fitting in, when it is the fourth method running quietly inside you, on your own electricity.

Ngũgĩ saw the end state of this coming. Domination triumphs finally, he wrote, when the dominated start singing its virtues. Applied to language, the triumph is complete on the day you stop mourning the tongue you lost, the day you agree it was a fair trade.

The fifth method is still being written

Smith Galer ends where we now live, with the question of whether technology becomes the killer’s final chapter or its first real obstacle.

The pessimistic reading writes itself. The internet speaks a handful of languages, and AI is trained overwhelmingly on them; a model that has read half the English ever digitised and almost no Wolof (a widely spoken West African language) does not treat the two neutrally, it industrialises the prestige gap. The linguistic market goes global, algorithmic, open twenty-four hours a day. Every autocorrect that “fixes” a name, every voice assistant that cannot hear an accent, is a small vote for the old hierarchy, cast millions of times a day by machines that have no idea they are voting.

But the optimistic reading is real too. The same machinery that concentrates language can archive it, teach it, keep it moving. A grandmother’s voice can now be recorded, transcribed, turned into lessons for a grandchild on another continent. Communities are building keyboards, digital archives and translation tools for languages that publishing houses never bothered with, which means that for the first time the means of linguistic production are not entirely in the hands of states and markets.

The technology has no opinion. It will amplify whichever force feeds it, which returns the question, as it always does, to us.

What survives

Ngũgĩ’s answer to all five methods was a single act: he stopped. In 1977 he was imprisoned without trial for a play performed in Gikuyu; notice that the offence was not the content but the language. In his cell he wrote his next novel on prison toilet paper, in Gikuyu, then announced he was done writing fiction in English. Critics told him he was shrinking his audience. He replied, in effect, that he was finally facing it.

Not everyone can make Ngũgĩ’s choice, and the diaspora rarely gets choices that clean. But the manual has one weakness running through every chapter, which is that every method requires the speaker’s cooperation. Force needs your fear. Shame needs your ear. Even love needs your calculation.

Every phrase taught to a child, every name pronounced in full, every song not translated for the room’s comfort, every sentence spoken in the “useless” language exactly where it is least useful: each one is a small withdrawal of that cooperation. Not nostalgia. Refusal.

Because a language is not preserved in dictionaries. It is preserved in the decision, made daily, that there is still someone worth speaking it to.

Not because the old words are sacred. But because they are the only ones that remember you.

Leave a comment

Which language is going quiet in your family, and who was the last person you heard speak it fully? I’d love to read about it in the comments.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast or discover your portrait, seven ways we learn to be read by others, and to read ourselves.

As captured in fan footage and widely reported afterwards, Carpenter leaned into the microphone and said, “I think I heard someone yodel. Is that what you’re doing? I don’t like it.” The fan called back that it was their culture, to which she replied, “That’s your culture… is yodeling?” and when they explained that it was a call, a celebration, she added, “Is this Burning Man? What’s going on? This is weird.”

The clip travelled the way clips do, and by the next day Carpenter had apologised on social media explaining that she hadn’t seen the person, couldn’t hear clearly, and that her reaction was “pure confusion, sarcasm and not ill intended.” She had since learned what a zaghrouta is, she said, and would “welcome all cheers and yodels from here on out.”

But notice something in its final line: even in the act of apologising, the zaghrouta was filed back under yodels, which means the correction happened inside the original misunderstanding. She had learned the word, but the category hadn’t moved.

And in the replies underneath, a second layer unfolded, some defending the fan, some defending the singer, and some doing something older and uglier, mocking the sound itself and the culture it came from, confirming in writing exactly what the moment on stage had only implied. One misheard trill, and suddenly an entire tradition was on trial for being weird.

This essay is not about Sabrina Carpenter, who was, at worst, unprepared. It is about the mechanism her unpreparedness exposed, because if you have ever lived between cultures, you recognised that mechanism instantly, and you have almost certainly been inside it.

Everyone has stood where that fan stood

Think of the lunchbox opened at school, when the smell of your grandmother’s cooking became a punchline before you’d taken a single bite, or the name your parents chose with care, mispronounced twice and then quietly abandoned in favour of the inevitable do you have a nickname? Think of the accent imitated in the meeting, affectionately, they’d insist, of the music turned down before colleagues arrive, of the celebration you find yourself explaining apologetically before it has even begun, pre-translating your own joy so that the room won’t flinch.

The setting changes; school, workplace, festival crowd but the sequence never does. Something arrives that the room has no category for, and instead of the room admitting that its repertoire is incomplete, you become the anomaly; the gap in their knowledge is quietly reassigned as a flaw in your presence.

Look again at what happened on that stage, because the sequence is forensically clean. A sound arrives that doesn’t fit the listener’s repertoire, and the first move is translation into the nearest available category, which in this case was yodelling. The second move is judgement ‘’I don’t like it ‘’ and only third, and only because someone insisted, with four seconds of courage shouted across a festival crowd, comes the possibility that the sound carried a meaning the listener couldn’t yet hear.

Categorise, judge, and then, maybe, understand.

That sequence is how misrecognition usually works, not as hostility, but as a failure of repertoire delivered with total confidence. “This is weird” sounds like a description of the thing itself, when it is actually a measurement of the distance between the thing and the listener, announced, every time, as though the deficiency belonged to the thing.

The sociologist Michèle Lamont, whose work on recognition I’ve written about before, argues that recognising an injury requires first recognising the dignity of those carrying it. What was caught on camera at Coachella is the inverse of that principle operating in real time: when dignity isn’t yet visible, the injury isn’t either, and the fan’s culture could be dismissed so casually precisely because, in that arena and in that moment, it hadn’t yet been seen.

So let us do the seeing. What was that sound?

The oldest sound of joy

A zaghrouta (Arabic: زغرودة; plural zaghareet) is a long, wavering, high-pitched trill, a cascade of rapid “li-li-li” oscillations, loud enough to fill a wedding hall and designed to do exactly that. English calls the broader family of such sounds ululation, a practice found in many forms across Africa, the Middle East and parts of South Asia, and the zaghrouta is its specifically Arab and North African form, with its own occasions, its own etiquette, and its own line of inheritance.

Even the word imitates the sound. It comes from the Arabic root z-gh-r-d (ز-غ-ر-د), from the verb zagharada, to trill, a root generally understood as onomatopoeic and here is a small marvel, because the English word took exactly the same path. Ululation descends from the Latin ululare, to howl or cry out, kin to ulula, the owl, which means that two languages, continents apart, both surrendered to the sound and simply spelled what they heard. The names vary by region, zaghrouta in the Levant and Gulf, zalghouta in parts of Lebanon and Egypt, youyou across the Maghreb but the trill is the same wherever you stand.

Its roots reach back before Islam, to pre-Islamic Arabia, where accounts describe women performing it collectively in ritual, in invocations for rain and mercy, and raising it on battlefields to stir courage, which settles two things at once. It is not “pagan” as an accusation, though it is older than the religions that later carried it, and it belongs to no single faith: you will hear zaghareet in Muslim, Christian, Druze and Jewish Arab communities alike, because the sound predates the borders people now use to file it.

And it has always been women’s sound. Traditionally the zaghrouta is the domain of women, girls learning it from mothers and aunties, older women commanding it with a virtuosity that carries real prestige and as one Lebanese writer put it, the zalghouta puts women at the forefront of an occasion and makes them the masters of its atmosphere. In cultures where women’s public voices have so often been policed, here is a sound that is theirs by right: the loudest thing in the room, unapologetic, and honoured for being so.

You have likely heard it without knowing. Egyptian cinema has recorded wedding zaghareet since the 1940s, and Palestinian wedding song cycles are threaded with them, while in Palestine the trill has also carried into protest, becoming a sound of collective defiance as much as of joy. Xena’s famous warrior cry from 1990s television was adapted from an Arabic ululation the actress heard performed at a funeral, and at the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, Shakira, whose father is Lebanese, turned to the camera mid-performance and let one fly in front of a hundred million people. Half the internet asked what the strange tongue thing was; the other half heard home.

For celebration and for mourning

Here is what almost every explainer published after Coachella got wrong or left out entirely: the zaghrouta is not simply the sound of happiness.

Yes, it announces the couple entering the wedding hall, where the moment they appear the ululating begins, often as a joyful contest between the two families. Yes, it greets a newborn, a graduate, pilgrims returning safely from Hajj to houses decorated with lights and palm leaves. And in the diaspora it does something more tender still, because it is the sound that turns a rented function room in London or Montreal, for one evening, into a Levantine wedding, an acoustic homeland, carried in the body, deployable anywhere.

But the zaghrouta also appears at funerals, where it is raised to honour the dead and in some communities, specifically at the funeral of someone who died young and unmarried, the women perform the zaghareet the deceased never received at a wedding.

Sit with that for a moment: the same sound for the wedding that was and the wedding that will never be. Here is a culture that looks at its cruelest grief and answers it with the sound of celebration, not to deny the loss but to insist that this life, too, deserved its trill of honour.

So the zaghrouta does not mean happiness, exactly. It means magnitude, this moment is too large for words, so the body will speak instead. That is what was in the air at Coachella when it was filed under “weird.”

What the sound does to the body

The zaghrouta is a genuine skill. The voice sustains a single loud, high note while the tongue flicks rapidly against the palate, chopping the sound into its shimmering trill, and the diaphragm drives breath against that resistance, which is why each burst lasts only seconds before the lungs demand more. It is learned the way all embodied inheritance is learned by watching, by trying, by being corrected at family gatherings until one day it comes out right and the aunties turn their heads and doing it well carries status. It is a lineage you carry in the muscles of your mouth.

And it does something to the people who make it. We know from the broader science of the voice that loud, sustained, communal vocalisation, singing, chanting, collective calls is associated with emotional release, with the easing of stress, and with the powerful sense of fusion that comes from many bodies producing one sound. The zaghrouta is this principle in its most concentrated form: a burst of pure voice with no lyrics to compose and no melody to rehearse, just breath and feeling converted directly into sound, flooding the moment and summoning every other woman in the room to answer, trill calling to trill, until the emotion belongs to everyone.

Which is precisely why it needs no translation to be felt.

The information was never missing from the sound. It was missing from the listener.

Four seconds of courage

Which brings us back to the fan in the crowd, who had no stage, no microphone and no time, only four seconds and the nerve to use them. It’s my culture. Strip away the festival lights and that sentence is something anyone who has lived between worlds will recognise: a bid for dignity, compressed to its minimum viable form, which is what explaining yourself sounds like when the room has already ruled and you are appealing the verdict in real time.

Most of these moments end differently than this one did. There is no viral clip of the lunchbox, no apology tweeted the morning after the meeting; the verdict simply stands, and you learn to pre-translate, to turn the music down, to bring a different lunch. The injury goes unrecognised, not because it isn’t real, but because, as I keep finding, the language and the recognition haven’t caught up with the experience.

Carpenter learned a word that weekend, and to her credit she said so. But learning the word is the smallest part. The deeper work for her, for the crowd that laughed, for all of us in rooms where someone else’s joy arrives unannounced is learning to hold the first “this is weird” in the mouth, unspoken, long enough to ask a better question: what am I not yet able to hear?

Because a sound doesn’t need to be understood to deserve to be recognised. The zaghrouta was never weird. It was simply louder, older, and surer of itself than the room that mistook it for a yodel.

Leave a comment

When was your joy, your food, your name, your music, your celebration, heard as 'weird'?

I'd love to read your story in the comments.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast or discover your portrait, seven ways we learn to be read by others, and to read ourselves.

At some point, the loudest voice in your head stops being your own.

What replaces it is a composite of everyone else’s expectations about how you should sound and how much room you are allowed to take up, and it speaks to you in the second person, telling you where to soften, when to explain yourself, how far to pull back to stay acceptable. The strange thing is that it never feels like an intrusion. It feels like you.

This is what I’ve come to call the Borrowed Gaze: the moment other people’s expectations stop being something outside you and become the voice you think with.

There is always a first moment when you realise you are not simply living, but being read.

Maybe yours was at school, or in a meeting room, an interview, a dinner table, a playground. Mine were never dramatic, which is exactly what made them so difficult to name, usually just something small, like a question asked a little too casually or a pause after I’d spoken or a look that made me suddenly conscious of my own voice. Nothing hostile, nothing I could have objected to without sounding strange, and yet enough to lift me out of the moment and set me beside it, watching, wondering how I was being heard.

That question, once it arrives, doesn’t leave. From then on you are never only in the room; you are also above it somewhere, listening to yourself speak and adjusting as you go, working to stay legible and easy to place.

For a long time I assumed this was just what adapting felt like, the ordinary cost of becoming socially fluent, of learning how to move through the world and it took me years to see that it was something more particular than that, and longer still to find any words for it. I could feel the thing clearly enough. I simply had no name to hang on it.

The name came sideways, through writers who weren’t describing migration at all but who were describing what happens to a self that is formed under watching. And this is where my own sense of the work shifted. I used to say I was interested in the psychology of migration, the private weather of moving between worlds, but that was never quite it.

What I am actually doing, what this whole project is, is taking social theory, the cool abstract machinery that sociologists and philosophers built to explain how power and perception work, and translating it back down into the temperature of a lived life.

The most personal thing you carry usually turns out to be structural. Seeing the structure is what lets you stop believing you were the flaw.

The Split

The earliest version of this I know comes from W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in 1903, in an America that had abolished slavery without touching the hierarchy underneath it. He wasn’t theorising from above. He was a Black intellectual making his way through institutions that held him as belonging and not-belonging in the same instant, and what he set out to describe was not the inequality itself but what it is like to live inside one, the doubling it forces on a person. He called it double consciousness: the condition of always seeing yourself through two sets of eyes at once, your own and the ones a society lends you whether you want them or not.

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

I had to put the book down when I first read that line. It didn’t land as an argument. It landed as recognition.

The division he names runs straight through the middle of a person. You are living your life, talking, moving, simply being there and at the same time you are off to the side appraising it, clocking how it is going over. It trails you into every room, this faint second self, and most of your quiet energy goes into trying to fold the two back into one.

Anyone who has moved countries knows the shape of this even when the particulars are nothing alike. Somewhere you are fluent and easy and entirely yourself, and then you cross into somewhere else and a dial turns, you grow more careful, more edited and after enough crossings you find you are carrying both selves around at once, the one you are and the one being received. That is where the Borrowed Gaze starts to set.

Awareness never just sits there as awareness; it tips over into influence. Noticing how you are seen slides into bracing for it, then into arranging yourself around it before anyone has looked.

The Split Enters The Body

Du Bois names the split. Frantz Fanon shows you the moment it stops being a thought and lodges in the body.

Fanon was a psychiatrist trained in France, writing in the wreckage of colonialism, living between Martinique and France and later Algeria, fluent and accomplished in every room he entered and still flattened into a type before he had said a word. His question was not whether inequality existed but what it does to a mind subjected to it, not once or now and then but as a steady condition. He describes the point at which you stop meeting difference as something out there and begin to wear it, to see yourself precisely as you are seen, and he is exact about where it happens: in the body. Your posture corrects itself. You become conscious of the space you fill. The voice goes careful, choosing words less to say a thing than to steer how the thing will be taken.

“I am overdetermined from without.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

That is what makes him so hard to shake. What looks from outside like a bit of social unease is, underneath, a rewiring, identity ceasing to be a fixed point and becoming something you negotiate moment to moment, tuned to whoever is in front of you.

Du Bois leaves you aware of the split; Fanon drives it below thought, until you don’t merely notice how you are seen but feel it land, in your tone, in the catch before you answer, in how you come through a door.

The Watcher You Carry

Which leaves the obvious next question. What happens when watching yourself becomes so routine that you no longer catch yourself at it?

This is where I think of Michel Foucault, who spent his career tracing how modern power works less by force than by being looked at. In Discipline and Punish he poses a plain question, how do you get people to behave without standing over them and his answer is that you don’t. You arrange things so they feel they could be watched at any moment, and you let that feeling do the labour. His emblem for it is the panopticon, a prison built so one guard in a central tower could see into every cell while no prisoner could ever tell when the eye was actually on them. What fascinated him wasn’t the surveillance but its by-product: convinced you might be seen at any second, you start conducting yourself as though you always are, and eventually the guard can go home, because by then you have taken the post yourself.

“He becomes the principle of his own subjection.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)

This is the Borrowed Gaze at full strength, because here it no longer requires anybody outside you. The watcher loses its face. The audience thins out into something general and unplaceable, nowhere in particular and therefore everywhere, threaded through your choices and your tone and the half-beat before you commit to a sentence. The question even changes its wording. It used to be how are they seeing me; now there is no they to point at, so it becomes how should I adjust and you find yourself bracing for a verdict before it comes, adapting before anyone asks, editing before there is anything to misread, until none of it is a decision anymore and all of it is simply how you are.

The Arc

Lay the three of them next to each other and a shape lifts off the page, and you see that this was never really a story about migration. It is a story about what observation does to a self, and migration only speeds the thing up and turns up its volume and makes it that much harder to get out from under.

So the Borrowed Gaze isn’t one moment but a slow progression. It opens as awareness, you clock how you come across. It settles into internalisation, you start to feel that appraisal in your body and your voice and your presence in a room. And it finishes as automation, the stage where you manage yourself without any thought at all, which is the dangerous part, because by then it has stopped feeling like a behaviour and started feeling like a personality.

How it actually shows up

It rarely declares itself. It lives in small habits instead: the sentence you trim before it leaves your mouth, the opinion you sand down before offering it, the joke you decide against because you can’t predict the landing, the formality you reach for in one room and the near-invisibility you settle into in another, the over-explaining, the over-preparing, the wish to be past all criticism before you have even started.

Perhaps this is why I used to run conversations back hours after they ended, never because something had gone wrong, only because some part of me was still asking whether I had sounded right, whether I had said too much, whether I had taken up more space than I was owed.

If you have crossed borders, you have almost certainly felt this, the held second before you speak while you test the sentence in your head, the sudden audibility of your own accent, the small choice to simplify or soften or over-explain, made not because anyone demanded it but because at some point you worked out it would smooth the way.

And that is what makes the thing so slippery to catch: it almost never feels like harm. It feels capable. Mature. The trouble is that social intelligence and chronic self-editing can look identical from the outside, and so can sensitivity and self-erasure, and so can code-switching you reach for by choice and code-switching you reach for to survive, and plenty of us live in that blur for years without ever naming which one we’re doing. To change countries is not only to arrive somewhere new but to step into a new field of perception, one that has already understood you before you open your mouth, so you learn fast to read the room and move ahead of it.

The cost

There is a price for all this managing, and though it rarely shows, it adds up, the steady silt of tiny corrections and held-back impulses and small refusals to take up room, the labour of staying legible in places that were never laid out with you in mind. What it leaves behind is a specific exhaustion, not the body’s kind but the kind that comes from tracking how you are coming across at the same time as trying to simply live.

For some people it means saying less. For others it means becoming unusually polished, or agreeable, or high-performing and easy to work with, partly because that is who they are, and partly because those qualities file down friction. Which is the uncomfortable truth underneath it: the thing migrants tend to get rewarded for is not their authenticity but the quality of their adaptation, and the more that adaptation pays, the harder it becomes to find the seam where you stop and the performance starts. You go smooth. Not because there’s nothing sharp in you. But because somewhere along the line you learned that smooth was the safer way to be.

The work

None of this belongs to migration alone. It turns up wherever a self runs into an expectation, at work, across class lines, inside the scripts of gender, anywhere at all that belonging comes with conditions and migration only drags it into the light, because you are forever moving between worlds and hauling each one’s gaze along behind you.

So maybe the task isn’t to wish the Borrowed Gaze away, since for a lot of us it once did real work; it got us through rooms we didn’t yet know how to stand in. The task is quieter and harder than that. It’s catching the moment the borrowed voice has gone louder than your own, the moment caution curdles into erasure, awareness into surveillance, adaptation into a slow drift away from yourself because being thoughtful and being constrained are not the same thing, even when they wear the same face, and learning to tell them apart may be most of what becoming a modern migrant actually means.

Which is finally where the whole thing has been heading, and what I keep circling back to in this work: theory can hand you the name of the structure, but only you can feel where it has settled in your own throat. Which parts of me are mine, and which got shaped by other people’s pressure and my own long hunger to belong, and after all these years, which voice do I actually want to keep living by?

The Borrowed Gaze begins with other people. The unlearning of it has to begin with us.

I first talked this idea through on the podcast back in April, a full episode where I braid my own experience of being watched with what Du Bois, Fanon and Foucault each saw in it. If the essay landed, the conversation goes further.

Listen to the episode → The Borrowed Gaze: When Other People’s Judgment Becomes Your Inner Voice

Share Themodernmigrant

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast or discover your portrait, seven ways we learn to be read by others, and to read ourselves.

Before reading it, I had assumed my experience was simply the ordinary cost of migration. You move countries, learn new languages, adapt to unfamiliar customs, collect qualifications, build a career, and slowly learn how to inhabit a place that was not originally yours. Over time, you become fluent not only in the language but also in the social codes, the references, the habits and expectations that signal belonging. Most of the time, it works well enough that you stop thinking about it.

Until a moment arrives that reminds you there is still a difference between being included and being seen as fully belonging.

Until someone hears you speaking your home language and tells you to go back where you came from. But if I’m honest, those moments were never the ones that stayed with me. What lingered were the subtler encounters: the patronising smile, the joke that wasn’t quite a joke, the assumption that I should feel lucky simply to be there. There was often an invisible script running underneath the interaction, one that seemed to say: work hard, be grateful, don’t be too ambitious. For years, I wasn’t sure which was worse, the bluntness of open xenophobia or the quieter form of exclusion that arrives dressed as courtesy and takes much longer to understand.

I was born in Bulgaria, spent my earliest years in Spain, grew up in France and moved to Britain after university.

By the time someone asks me where I’m from, I already know we are entering complicated territory.

The question itself is innocent enough.

“Where are you from?”

What follows usually requires a timeline rather than an answer. I was born there, then moved there, then grew up somewhere else, before eventually building a life somewhere entirely different. By the time I reach the end of the explanation, I can often sense a certain dissatisfaction, as though I have somehow failed to provide the information that was being requested. And then comes the follow-up question.

“No, but where were you born?”

At that moment, the conversation shifts. We are no longer talking about identity as something lived, accumulated or constructed over time. We are talking about origins.

The birth certificate has entered the conversation.

For many migrants, birthplace carries a peculiar authority. You can spend decades in a country, speak its language more fluently than your own, absorb its customs, build friendships, careers and families there, yet the place where you first entered the world often remains, in the eyes of others, the most important fact about you.

Try saying you are French.

Try saying you are British.

Sooner or later, the question returns.

“Yes, but where were you born?”

As though identity were less a biography than a point of departure.

For a long time, I found this frustrating. Now I find it revealing. The question is rarely about geography. More often, it is an attempt to locate someone within a story that feels familiar and legible. The difficulty is that some of us no longer fit neatly into a single one.

And perhaps that is the quiet burden of migration: not that you belong nowhere, but that your answer no longer fits the categories other people expect.

Sometimes it can feel like the birthplace becomes both the opening and closing line of the story, the beginning and the end. The birth and death sentence of the foreigner.

For a long time, I thought the answer lay somewhere in the Cold War.

How else do you explain the strange status of Eastern Europe within the European imagination? We grew up with a set of stories about the region, stories about communism, backwardness, instability and catching up with the West. Even after the political systems changed, the narratives seemed to linger, passed from one generation to the next almost unnoticed.

Reading Ivan Kalmar felt like discovering that the story was both larger and older than I had imagined.

His book, White But Not Quite, explores the peculiar position Eastern Europeans occupy within Europe itself. Not quite outsiders, yet rarely treated as insiders. European, but somehow with an asterisk attached. What fascinated me was the way he connected questions of identity to questions of power, showing how entire regions, much like individuals, become trapped inside stories they did not write.

One observation stayed with me more than any other:

People become more or less acceptable depending on where they sit within systems of prestige, power and historical status.

The more I sat with that idea, the more it seemed to explain not only geopolitics, but something much closer to home.

We tend to talk about belonging as though it were the natural reward for effort.

Learn the language, understand the culture, participate in society, contribute economically, follow the rules, and eventually the feeling of being an outsider will dissolve. ‘‘Integration’’ , in this version of the story, is presented almost like a contract: fulfil your obligations and belonging will follow.

Yet very few people experience belonging in such a straightforward way.

What Kalmar’s work reveals is that belonging is not simply a personal achievement; it is also shaped by history, power and collective imagination.

Some identities arrive carrying centuries of prestige behind them, reinforced by institutions, cultural narratives and assumptions so deeply embedded that they become almost invisible. Others arrive burdened by stories they did not create and may not even be aware of, stories about where they come from, what they represent and where they supposedly sit within an unspoken hierarchy of value.

The hierarchy is rarely visible to those who occupy its more comfortable positions. In fact, one of its defining features is how natural it appears from the inside. But spend enough time on its margins and you begin to notice the small ways in which recognition is distributed unevenly, the subtle distinctions between being welcomed and being respected, between being present and being perceived as fully belonging.

This is where Kalmar’s argument becomes particularly interesting.

One of his central claims is that Eastern Europe, as we understand it today, is not merely a geographical reality waiting to be discovered on a map, but also a cultural and political construction that has been repeatedly reinvented over time. The image of Eastern Europe as Europe’s backward cousin, perpetually catching up, less modern, less democratic and somehow less complete than the West, is often treated as though it were a timeless truth. Kalmar challenges that assumption, arguing that many of these characteristics are not ancient realities but relatively recent narratives that became solidified during the twentieth century, particularly during and after the Cold War.

What struck me was not simply the historical argument itself, although it is a compelling one.

It was the recognition that entire regions can become trapped inside stories in much the same way that individuals can.

A stereotype repeated often enough begins to feel like common sense. A narrative inherited across generations starts to resemble reality.

And perhaps that is what stayed with me most after reading the book.

Beneath the history, the politics and the shifting definitions of East and West lies something much more human: the experience of being seen through a story that you did not write, yet somehow find yourself expected to inhabit.

What stayed with me most after reading Kalmar was the recognition that beneath the history, the shifting borders and the political arguments lies a much older and more human story about recognition itself.

When communism collapsed, millions of people across Central and Eastern Europe believed they were not only entering a new economic system but also returning to a shared European home. The walls had fallen, borders were opening, democracies were emerging, and with them came the promise of something larger than prosperity. The expectation was that political inclusion would eventually translate into social equality; that participation would lead to recognition; that once the divide had disappeared on the map, it would gradually disappear in people’s minds.

Yet Kalmar’s work suggests that history rarely moves so neatly.

Many Eastern Europeans found themselves welcomed into the European project while continuing to occupy an ambiguous position within it, simultaneously inside and outside, included but not entirely embraced. They became part of the story, yet often in the role of the apprentice rather than the author, the student rather than the equal. The distinction may appear subtle from a distance, but anyone who has experienced it knows how consequential it can become.

Because recognition operates differently from citizenship, economics or law.

A passport can be issued overnight. Recognition often takes generations.

The longer I sat with Kalmar’s argument, the less it felt like a story about Eastern Europe and the more it felt like a story about migration itself. Many migrants know what it means to spend years constructing a life in a country, learning its language, absorbing its references, contributing to its economy, building friendships, careers and families, only to discover that belonging does not arrive as a reward for effort. Instead, it remains something negotiated, revised and occasionally withdrawn, shaped not only by what we do but by the stories others continue to tell about us.

What interests me, ultimately, is the psychological aftermath of this condition.

What happens when the identity you have spent decades building is recognised only partially by the world around you? What happens when you realise that acceptance and recognition are not synonyms, and that it is entirely possible to be included while still feeling somehow peripheral to the narrative? At what point does the tension between how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others become part of our identity in its own right?

Perhaps this is where much of the migrant experience becomes difficult to explain. It is not necessarily a story of exclusion. In many cases, the challenge is more subtle than that. It is the experience of existing in the space between acceptance and recognition, between participation and belonging, between being welcomed and being understood.

And yet, for all the confusion it can create, there is another side to living between worlds.

Moving between countries has made me attentive to the invisible systems that shape identity.

It has taught me that cultures are not natural, that national stories are not inevitable, and that many of the assumptions people inherit about themselves and others are far more fragile than they appear. Existing between worlds forces you to become an observer, not by choice but by necessity. You learn to notice what others overlook because you are constantly translating between different ways of seeing.

Perhaps that is the unexpected gift hidden inside fractured belonging.

When you never fit entirely within a single story, you begin to see that stories themselves are constructions: narratives assembled over time, repeated until they feel permanent, inherited until they resemble truth.

Kalmar’s book is, in many ways, about the stories Europe tells about itself. Reading it left me wondering about the stories we inherit about ourselves.

And whether the work of a life is not to find the story we belong to, but to decide which ones we are willing to keep.

Subscribe now

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

Racial Identity. National identity. Cultural identity. Personal identity. Professional identity.

The word appears everywhere, yet the more we try to define it, the more unstable it becomes.

Identity is one of those concepts that feels obvious until you begin examining it closely. Then suddenly, what seemed solid starts dissolving under inspection.

Even the etymology of the word reveals a contradiction at its core.

Identity refers to “the distinguishing character or personality of an individual,” the qualities that make someone unique. Yet the Latin word identitas means sameness.

This paradox sits at the centre of the human experience.

How can identity simultaneously mean:

• what makes you different,

• and what makes you the same?

How can it describe individuality while also referring to continuity and resemblance?

Perhaps because identity has never been entirely personal.

Human beings define themselves through relationship:
through culture,
through memory,
through geography,
through language,
through recognition from others.

We become ourselves partly through distinction, but also through belonging.

This is why identity often feels so psychologically fragile. We are constantly negotiating between the need to remain singular and the need to remain connected.

Too much individuality creates isolation.
Too much sameness erases the self.

Identity lives somewhere between the two.

The Self Was Always Partly Performed

The language surrounding identity has always carried something theatrical within it.

The word “character” comes from the Greek kharakter; an engraved mark or written sign. A theatrical character is not a person in the literal sense, but a construction made from gestures, dialogue, symbols, and interpretation.

And perhaps the same is true for all of us.

No identity exists in isolation.

A person only becomes socially “real” through interaction with others. Identity is shaped through the way we are perceived, mirrored, interpreted, and emotionally received.

Even the word “person” comes from the Latin persona, meaning mask.

Not because identity is fake, but because human beings have always existed through forms of embodiment and social performance. Different environments draw out different versions of the self. Different spaces require different expressions of identity.

The version of you that exists with family may not fully resemble the version that exists professionally. The person you become in one country may not survive intact in another. Different languages can even alter emotional expression itself.

Identity is therefore never fixed.

It is relational.

Fluid.

Contextual.

Migration Reveals What Identity Really Is

Migration exposes this instability with brutal clarity.

The migrant exists on the threshold between worlds, suspended between the society left behind and the one still trying to be inhabited.

This is why migration is never simply geographical relocation.

It is identity reorganisation.

The body moves physically, but the mind must renegotiate its entire relationship with space:
new sounds,
new smells,
new social codes,
new rhythms,
new meanings attached to the body itself.

Human beings do not only inhabit physical spaces. They also live inside emotional, cultural, and psychological spaces.

And when those spaces change, identity changes too.

This explains why displacement often produces something deeper than homesickness.

A sense of exile emerges when the mind can no longer reconcile itself with the surrounding world.

And exile is not limited to immigrants.

A person can feel exiled inside a profession that no longer reflects them.
Inside a relationship where they feel emotionally invisible.
Inside a city they once loved.
Inside a former version of themselves.

Exile begins when inner reality and external reality stop recognising each other.

Identity Requires Openness

The French poet René Char once wrote:

“Épouse et n’épouse pas ta maison.”
“Marry and do not marry your house.”

The line feels almost paradoxical, yet it captures something essential about identity.

The “house” can be understood as the psychological self; the mental structure that gives continuity and coherence to existence. Human beings need this internal home in order to feel stable.

But there is also danger in becoming trapped inside it.

Too much attachment to a fixed identity creates rigidity. It closes the self off from transformation, complexity, and encounter with others.

Identity requires a double movement:
the ability to remain connected to oneself,
and the willingness to leave space for the Other within oneself.

Without openness, identity hardens into something defensive.

Without continuity, identity fragments entirely.

A healthy identity is neither fixed nor dissolved. It remains permeable.

The “I” Is Never Entirely Singular

In theatre, every line spoken operates on two levels simultaneously. A character speaks to another character, but also to the audience witnessing the performance.

The result is that the pronoun “I” becomes unstable.

The “I” no longer belongs solely to the character. It becomes shared between author, actor, director, and spectator.

Perhaps identity works similarly in life.

The self we call “I” is never entirely self-created.

It contains fragments of:
family,
language,
culture,
memory,
history,
migration,
desire,
trauma,
love,
and every environment that has shaped perception.

Identity is therefore never singular.

It is layered.

A negotiation between internal and external worlds.

This is why modern identity often feels exhausting. Contemporary life forces people to navigate multiple selves simultaneously:
professional selves,
digital selves,
private selves,
cultural selves,
aspirational selves.

The old fantasy of one stable, permanent identity becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

Why Modern Life Makes Identity Feel Fragile

Globalisation has accelerated identity instability.

People move more. Reinvent themselves more. Change careers more. Cross social classes more frequently. Live between cultures, languages, and value systems.

Yet psychologically, many still expect identity to feel fixed.

So whenever transformation occurs, people panic.

They interpret evolution as inconsistency.

But perhaps identity was never meant to remain static.

Perhaps instability is not evidence of failure, but evidence that identity is alive.

Human beings are not monuments.

They are processes.

And maybe maturity is not becoming one fixed person forever.

Maybe maturity is developing the capacity to remain coherent while continuing to evolve.

To build a mental home without becoming imprisoned inside it.

To belong somewhere without needing to reject every other version of oneself.

Because identity is not a final answer to the question “Who am I?”

It is the ongoing negotiation between who we have been, who we are becoming, and the worlds through which we move.

Share Themodernmigrant

What version of yourself only exists in certain places? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Continue the conversation. Join The Stories We Inherit, a free community for exploring the stories that shaped you, recognising inherited patterns and finding language for your complexity.

Join The Stories We Inherit →

You can also listen to the podcast, or discover which of the seven portraits reflects how you learned to be read by others, and to read yourself.

Seeing Kimberlé Crenshaw and together, especially against the backdrop of everything unfolding globally right now, gave me something I have struggled to hold onto recently: hope.

Not naïve hope. Not the kind built on optimism alone. But the quieter kind that emerges when people continue to insist on clarity, truth, and humanity even when the world seems determined to move backwards.

Afua introduced Professor Crenshaw by saying she has produced “shared language for the complex world” and that even if you do not know her name, you are already participating in a world she helped shape.

That stayed with me.

Because some people do not simply contribute ideas. They alter the architecture of how society understands itself. They give language to experiences that previously existed only as tension, contradiction, or silent exhaustion inside people’s lives.

And once language exists, something shifts.

You can no longer pretend not to see.

Professor Crenshaw reflected on an earlier experience preparing and rehearsing for a new play, describing it as “the becoming of a narrative.” But following parental complaints, the production was cancelled, making way once again for the “dominant racial narrative.”

That phrase lingered heavily in the room.

The dominant narrative does not only erase stories. It exhausts people into constantly rationalising their own experiences. Crenshaw spoke about the “afterlife encounter” of these moments, the way society’s reactions become internal dialogue long after the original event has passed.

That felt painfully familiar.

How often do people from racialised, migrant or in-between identities spend years translating themselves back to themselves? Trying to determine whether what they experienced was real enough to deserve grief, anger, or acknowledgment?

One phrase in particular has not left me since:

“The loss of the loss.”

Not just losing progress itself, but losing the memory that progress ever existed. Watching rights, visibility, empathy, or representation quietly recede until people begin treating regression as normal. The deeper danger is not only the loss itself, but the domino effect it creates: how quickly diminished rights reshape expectations, narrow imagination, and make people forget what once felt possible.

There was also another truth she articulated with devastating precision:

“Deep connections are not protective against hatred.”

It challenged the comforting belief that proximity alone creates understanding. That simply knowing one another is enough to overcome systems, conditioning, or fear. History repeatedly shows otherwise.

And then perhaps the line that felt most urgent of all:

“We is less of a noun, but a verb.”

Not something stable. Not something guaranteed.

Something we must continuously practice.

Build.

Choose.

Protect.

Maybe that is what I carried home with me most strongly that evening: the reminder that language itself is an act of survival. That naming experiences creates possibility. And that in moments where the world feels increasingly fragmented, people like Crenshaw continue to give us frameworks not only to understand injustice, but to understand ourselves within it.

For those of us living between identities, cultures, histories, and expectations, that matters deeply.

Because sometimes the beginning of belonging is simply hearing someone articulate the thing you thought only existed inside you.

As for the atmosphere, gatherings like this are usually marked by silence. The kind where you can hear a pin drop because people are carefully absorbing every word.

But this felt different.

Every statement, every observation, every truth spoken by Crenshaw was followed by a collective murmur across the room. Nods. Soft laughter of recognition. A loud and instinctive “mhm,” the kind that really means: yes, exactly.

Not performance. Recognition.

It felt as though the audience was not simply listening, but locating themselves inside the conversation in real time.

For a moment, strangers became emotionally synchronized.

We were all in sync.

And maybe that was the most powerful part of the evening. Not just hearing language for complex experiences, but witnessing what happens when people realise they are not carrying those experiences alone.

Leave a comment

Were you there that evening? I would love to know what stayed with you most. Sometimes the most powerful part of these conversations is realising how differently and similarly we carry them afterwards.