I am currently writing up transcript of an interview I did for a project on Whitechapel Road. Whilst doing the interview we went on many tangents, one of which I wanted to share below.
*Note the interview was conducted in Bengali and has been translated, it’s ‘oomph’ is definitely lost in translation*
“I have analysed this society greatly. I won’t mention names but there are people in society, white people, who employ us to keep us down, in order that we abide by their policies, when I was in Paris, I asked some people ‘so why do you give asylum?’ they told me ‘we need the people like this to work in this country, we need these people to clean the roads, the highways, the streets, the bins’ in Paris they wash the streets, with water, they bring people from their colonies in Africa. Similar to the Middle East how they bring people, so the policies are like that, these high policies, those of you that have studied in this country, the difference between you guys and us is that we did not study in this country, but we are educated, we had the same education but in our own way. Because, I, myself a LLM Law Graduate from Dhaka University, I learnt all the Laws belonging to the UK, I learnt English Law, so even if I didn’t come here I knew the English Law, what happened to me and him, we are colonial, our English is colonial English, not democratic English, if I write something like ‘I am working with you’ it is democratic, the people here are using this language, but we learnt ‘we are working under you’ the thing is, we were educated with the colonial mentality, so when we came here, if we were educated or not, it is our mentality that is the problem, we were made not to have that high mentality, an equal society structure was not in place.
So when we came, yes we thought we would go back, some did some politics, let’s say when your dad came here, your parents, when they would invite people over they would talk about ‘back home’ what’s going on, what’s happening on the streets, this is good, this is bad’ and so on, when you would walk passed them you maybe heard these things, you probably thought ‘oh Bangladesh sounds a bit dirty, not very developed’ your mentality of Bangladesh was probably already fixed quite negatively. So then, when you begin to think like that suddenly it’s like you’re from neither here nor there, where is home, you begin to question whether you are Bangladeshi or British. Because when you go to school, you do your school education, we also had the same education. We have the Colonial mentality which remained with us and the mentality of the generation after us is neither British nor Bangladeshi, this results in confusion and can result in misbehaviour at home and at school, you start to think about your future, finish your education follow your our path or the path of your parents, you go to school and might get bullied by the white kids, why? because your coat might smell of onions because of the food you eat, and then you might ask can I get a body spray and parents might reply that ‘you’re getting too smart’ they have the mentality of keeping down, there is a problem by the whole society.”
[photograph above taken by Derek Kendall]