By Inigo Laguda
I was thirteen when I discovered Grime music. Piqued by its eclectic sound, I started to download every instrumental I could find. Soon after, the first 96 bars I ever wrote poured out of me.
Before then, my only means of self-expression were scribbling melodramatic poems in the back of my school books and reciting Hip-hop songs from MTV Base. It always felt like there was a looming, cultural barrier that stopped me from fully connecting to the spirit of Hip-Hop. But with Grime, I found the closeness of it consoling and the energy of it exhilarating.
Grime’s origins are not unlike other Black genres – it borrowed and reimagined things within its reach and alchemised them – creating something distinct and new. It’s typically a hyper-masculine genre that captures the personal experiences of working-class Black boys and men from London (and other UK major cities). Grime provides a space where they’re able to flaunt their lyrical prowess and speak on the physical and economic violence happening all around them.
I was soft and effeminate. A middle-class Black boy living in the English countryside of Hertfordshire. When I look back on that time, I see someone who believed that performing a facet of Blackness was the only way he was able to be authentically Black.
Black youth are often seen as resistors when they’re trying to make sense of a world that speaks in riddles, behaves in paradoxes and rejoices in quelling their spirits. I would stay out late to spit bars in playing fields. I’d get in trouble at school and steal money from my parents to buy New Era flat-peak hats with the tags left on.
After a series of heated conflicts between us, I overheard my parents discussing whether I would stay with my Auntie in Kaduna or with my Grandmother in Lagos. It was a conversation that terrified me.
Once I realized that the familiar threats of being sent to Nigeria were no longer empty, I knew what I had to do. I knuckled down in school. I wrote less lyrics. I quieted down.
Ultimately, I suppose those threats “worked”.
A decade later and my Mum sends me a video link entitled Shipped back: Tricked into going to Nigeria over WhatsApp. I felt the chill of a conquered fear reawaken in me. I told her that I’d seen the video circulating around social media and didn’t feel the need to watch it. I still haven’t.
The idle threat of being sent to Nigeria dangled over my head way before my rebellious phase. It was usually said in passing, with nonchalance and sometimes jest.
I was no older than eleven when my father told me how, after acting out at his Lagos boarding school, he was woken up at dawn and forced to cut grass with nothing but a pair of blunting scissors and a wooden ruler. It took him the entire Saturday to finish. All at once, his story felt too bizarre and difficult to be true and too oddly specific to be a lie. His jovial tone only added to my apprehension. I’d remember that story every time Nigeria was mentioned.
I also didn’t speak Yoruba. My mum understood it but wasn’t a confident orator and I lived solely with her until I was six. My father spoke Yoruba fluently but by the time we’d all moved in together, English had monopolised my language centre. Whenever my parents brought up “sending me back,” my kid brain would bombard itself with questions and assumptions.
If I did get sent back, how would I even speak to anyone? If my father was made to cut entire field for misbehaving then surely I’d be scolded for not understanding the language?
These threats came with an inadvertent price – a polluted perception towards my own mother-country.
When children are threatened with being sent back to their homeland they are infected with the idea that they should be scared of where they come from. Their motherland begins to bubble in their imagination as a carceral realm and their parents/caregivers naturally fall into the role of prison warden. A child then is forced to “watch themselves” around their parents and struggle to confide in them. This erodes the child’s trust in a way that is difficult to rebuild, even into their adulthood.
In the UK, most of our parents or grandparents chose to come from Africa or the Caribbean in search of a better life. That choice is not without complexity. Our home-countries are intentionally destabilized by colonialism and, on top of that, our cultures will often have their own indigenous histories of conflict separate from, but exacerbated by, whiteness.
I do not have a rose-tinted, naïve idea of what my motherland is like. But I do know that it is mine and I’d pick fearing it first-hand over the irrationality of a fear that has been spoon-fed to me from afar.
Black children from all across the diaspora are familiar with these parental adages:
“I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it.”
and
“I took you away from that place, I can send you back.”
When a child makes a scene in public, adults justify striking them into silence by claiming that it is “easier”. Empathizing with a child’s emotional state or reasoning with them does not take priority. It’s “easier” to psychologically terrorize child into eating their food by smacking a teddy-bear in front of them than it is to spend time cooking different things, and figuring out what healthy foods that child will enjoy eating.
Punitive measures are often more about what is “easier” for the parent than what is best for the child. These measures “work” by forcing psychological submission and disregarding autonomy and dominating the relationship with a government of fear. We need to have reflections and interventions about our investment in punishment.
The threat of sending me to Nigeria “worked” to quell my teenage misbehaviour but it didn’t help me identify or confront the source of it; my loneliness.
When my mum and I began to be more open with one another, we managed to delve into that source. My mum talked about the challenges she faced, from struggling to find balance in family life to being overworked and underappreciated in her professional life. We began to kindle a relationship where we could be vulnerable with each other. These conversations helped us to understand our past tensions and resolve our present ones.
It is never too late to replace threats with space to vent and it is never too late to replace isolation with communication.
Children are works in progress. They deserve exposure to their homelands in a way that honours and centres their heritage, not makes them fearful of it. Strengthening as a Diaspora requires cultivating a loving bond with the African continent, just as strengthening as people requires caregivers to cultivate a loving bond with their children. Let’s cultivate these bonds so that we can strengthen our land, our spirits, our memories and our babies.
Reading Suggestions:
Corporal Punishment in Black Communities: Not an Intrinsic Cultural Tradition but Racial Trauma, Stacey Patton, 2017.
Violence has Spiked in Africa since the Military founded AFRICOM, Nick Turse, 2019.
Dubplate Culture: An extract from DJ Target’s new book Grime Kids, Gabriela Helfet, 2018.
Inigo Laguda is an artist, storyteller, and musician currently residing in London, England. He is particularly interested in deconstructing the common conceptions of “normal”. His focus is centred on Blackness and mental wellness. His intimate thoughts can be found at @SaveInigo.
