“So, what do your parents think?”
The question comes up without fail, from readers, from other Muslims and from other South Asian people, whenever I tell them about my career as an author.
The question is usually followed up by “are they proud of you?” – the subtext often being that an author is not really a career path many people from my background — Muslim, Bengali, and working class — fall into.
Growing up in the nineties, the prevailing attitude among parents like mine in East London was that the arts as a career was unbecoming and not respectable.
Remember Jess’ parents’ reaction to her wanting to become a footballer in Bend It Like Beckham? Well, swap footballer with writer and imagine the horror on the faces of one’s aunties, both blood and interfering neighbours.
Meanwhile careers like teaching, medicine, or law were considered prestigious — something that your mum could brag about on the phone to other relatives.
Likewise, getting married, and having children, were benchmarks of adulthood, a cause for celebration. Not a vocation like writing.
Whenever these questions come up, whether one-on-one, or on stage in front of an audience of book lovers, I tend to seize up. I never really know what to say. The truth is, I don’t know – and perhaps I never will.
Not following a “traditional” path, the one expected of me, has led to the occasional creeping feeling of guilt in the last decade of my working career as a journalist, and now as an author. Have I done the right thing? Am I a disappointment?
Until the last couple of years, writing and promoting my books, I’ve always been able to shake off the discomfort. Now, the more these questions crop up, I find myself forced to confront my guilt.
And I am not alone.
In Bend It, Jess feels guilt over letting down and embarrassing her parents by pursuing football, and even temporarily gives up the thing she loves to appease her parents.
Fictional characters aside, I’ve read numerous recollections from people in a similar boat that have given a name to this feeling: immigrant guilt, or migrant guilt. In short, it’s the guilt that children of first-generation immigrants carry — the feeling that we must impress, appease, or in some other way do our parents proud because of the sacrifices they have made for us by upending their lives in their homeland (my own parents left Bangladesh) and moving to another — usually Western — country (Britain, in my case) to give their children a better life.
Research shows that we children of migrants can tie ourselves up in knots because of this guilt. According to a 2020 study, children of migrants are nearly twice as likely to experience mental health issues as their parents.
It’s with all this in mind I felt compelled to explore the idea of migrant guilt in my second novel, Better Left Unsaid, and hopefully begin to let go of my own.
In Better Left Unsaid, three siblings — Imran, Sumaya, and Majid — experience differing degrees of guilt about how they are honouring their parents after their deaths. Imran feels the need to cling to what he perceives to be his parents’ cultural and religious ideals so rigidly that he is almost living in their shadow. Sumaya decides she must forge her own path, even though it’s not easy and puts her at odds with Imran. And the youngest sibling, Majid, is less hampered by the idea of migrant guilt than his siblings, in that wondrous way that Gen-Zers, at least to this millennial, seem so self-assured compared to the generation before them.
It isn’t easy living with migrant guilt. It’s uncomfortable living with the idea that my decisions, my choices in life, may be a disappointment to the people who gave me life — and who changed their own lives for me and my siblings.
But backing my characters into corners and forcing them to confront — and in some cases, defend — their own decisions gave me some clarity over my own guilt.
We are each individuals, and we’re not meant to be like one another. A carbon copy of what came before. Whether we realise it or not, we each make choices, both minuscule and substantial, that codify our characteristics and personalities – like little branches that extend away from the tree that is our parents.
If my parents moved to Britain to provide greater opportunities for me and my siblings, I now think, have I not grasped them? Yes, my choices may not be exactly what they wished for me, but I am living comfortably, if earnestly, making a living doing something I’m genuinely passionate about.
It’s this notion that has slowly ebbed away at my migrant guilt. That perhaps the best I can do to assuage it is to continue living a life that is fulfilling, and that doesn’t cause harm to others. Isn’t that the best we can hope for?
Tufayel Ahmed is an award-winning journalist, author and lecturer and has written for CNN, Newsweek, The Independent, The Big Issue and more. He is currently entertainment editor at Insider. Tufayel’s debut novel, This Way Out, was published in July 2022. His second novel, Better Left Unsaid will be released on 20 September 2023 and can be pre-ordered here.