The Road to Nowhere: a zine chronicling second-generation immigrant experiences and cultural identities
The Road to Nowhere edited by Dalia Al-Dujaili
Words by Dalia Al-Dujaili, edited by Evar Hussayni
Social media’s been getting a lot of stick recently. But it was hours of late-night scrolling on Instagram which acted as the ignition spark for The Road to Nowhere. Cascading from my screen were Arab, Black, Brown and Asian creatives sharing their powerful work with the world. The likes of Taiba Al-Nassar, creator of 3asal, Theo White, founder of Theo White Zine, and Tahmina Begum, founder of The Aram, made me realise that our stories were important enough to share.
Representation for the children of immigrants is not so common-place. We rarely see ourselves reflected back in media and mainstream culture. This empty space lends itself to festering inaccuracies about our lives and broad generalisations about our experiences. When, for example, you chuck a token Asian into your TV show in order to shed light on immigrant realities, you end up giving the impression that every Asian in that country will have the very same experience (No hate on Gilmore Girls though). It might seem arbitrary to say, but immigrants aren’t all the same.
It seems bizarre to me that I’m still today discovering parts of my friends’ heritage that they were too uncomfortable sharing before the safe-spaces of the internet cropped up and welcomed them with open arms. There are a lot of us, but we don’t seem to be able to speak about our realities in fear of being too “political” or making everything “about race”. Why the constant silencing? The most recent statistics show that there were around 55 million immigrants in the EU, “including those born abroad and their immediate descendants”. That was in 2014 - there are likely many more of us now floating about and likely many more to come.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, ‘second-generation’ tends to refer to the children of immigrants, but it can refer to the grandchildren of immigrants. Every contributor is either an immigrant or the relative of one and it was important to me that their voices and their stories were being shared straight from their mouth instead of being usurped by a media format with ulterior motives. This is why I wanted to create the Instagram page, @the.roadtonowhere, which highlighted each contributor and their background. Giving each of the writers and photographers a space to share their in-between reality with full transparency felt necessary and I loved watching the contributors proudly and bravely share things with our readers that they mightn’t have even fully come to terms with themselves yet.
‘Global citizen’ seems to be the trendy word on everyone’s lips. I guess it puts a more palatable spin on ‘immigrant’. But in truth, it seems rather apt for a large subsection of people today. Mostly creatives; journalists, artists, photographers, designers; who get their work anywhere and any way they can. Their complex stories are fascinating to me because of their uniqueness. Take Adam Baidawi, editor of GQ Middle East, who’s an Iraqi-Australian with stories filed from North Korea, Iraq, Colombia, the US and the UK, and currently based in Dubai focusing on the best Middle Eastern talent. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t always about race and even I get a little annoyed when people consistently reduce my creative intent to, “And how are you inspired by your heritage?”. But of course, heritage and its role in my identity play a huge part in anything I create.
Artistic work from a child of immigrants is, almost always, political. Although I recognise the dangers of claiming that the writings and photography of ethnic minorities can never be viewed through an apolitical lens, I make the claim because it is inherent that we use our art to somewhat fight the prejudice and ignorance set against us. Whether purposely or subconsciously, when we set out to express ourselves, we let slip our frustrations and musings at a world that doesn’t quite understand us. That told us we had ugly, big noses, smelt of curry, asked if we rode camels to school and poked fun at our eyes by chanting “Chinese Japanese…” in the playground. The list could go on forever.
The need to create such content and share such resources is more than merely artistic expedition - although the need to create would have been sufficient reasoning, nonetheless, this was more a practical mission than meets the eye. The Migration Observatory at Oxford stated that “UK-born ethnic minorities are still disadvantaged with respect to UK-born whites in relevant outcomes such as unemployment or wages (Dustmann et al., 2011) and part of this disadvantage is likely to be caused by discrimination (Heath and Di Stasio, 2019).” In the UK, children of immigrants out-perform their native peers and yet remain under-achievers. In the US, second-generation immigrants are the fastest growing segment of the child population, with one in four children having immigrant parents - yet, according to multiple studies, we’re more depressed, anxious and psychologically distressed than our parents or peers.
As I’ve written previously, media representation really does matter. The pragmatists might like to argue that law and policy is a much more efficient way of affecting change, that the arts merely reflect or react to realities and dream up impossibilities. Whilst consequential change is the only way to affect systems of power and how they operate, art and literature challenge and shape our mindsets, attitudes and behaviours. Sure, weed is illegal, but does that stop us from smoking it? Hate speech is illegal, does that stop abuse being hurled at us on the street? Whilst quantitative work is vital at grassroots and leadership levels, laws and policies don’t always change how we view something and, thus, how we react to it. Our art is our humanity; the law is there to try to control the flaws in it.
After Riz Ahmed’s album from earlier this year became etched in my mind, and Golden-Globe winning Ramy had comfortably been playing on repeat, I had a really bugging itch that needed to be scratched. The zine was just that. Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye, released in March this year, was a devastatingly beautiful and sobering testament to life as a Pakistani Brit. Riz Ahmed warned us two years ago in the House of Commons that “If we don’t step up and tell a representative story … we are going to start losing British teenagers to the story that the next chapter in their lives is written with Isis in Syria.... we’ve been mis-sold a story that is so narrow about who we are and who we should be.” Riz spoke across diasporas and lit a flame within me, namely, to get off my ass and do something meaningful; representing immigrant communities in a way that would make us proud.
It’s been absolutely astonishing how gratuitous and thoughtful the response has been. But I should remind my readers that I’m merely the composer upstage, back turned and waving a stick manically at an incredibly talented orchestra. Each player was instrumental (pardon the pun) in this project and *cue my tears as I type* I’m so very grateful to have been given the honour of sharing their work with this little community of supporters. I’m sure each and every one of them will go on to feel bolder in their skin and shout from the rooftops.
Below you can listen to sound extracts of two artists reciting their work which can also be found in the zine:
To read more and support, visit @the.roadtonowhere and @dalia.aldu
To purchase, visit: theroadtonowhere.company.site