PAKI \ WRITER \ CRIPPLE

A hospital blog.

Frank Auerbach (1931-) Self-portrait, 1994-2001

Questions around identity have been among the most important and confusing of our day. Some are appalled that our society is being divided up into tiny tribes where people with a few common characteristics create identitarian units. Surely this isn’t strange, particularly in a culture as atomised and accelerated as ours. You like to be with people who are like you. It is defensive as well as reassuring.

The first time I was aware that I had an identity, and that it could be useful, was when I decided as a teenager that I wanted to be a writer. I started to call myself, in my mind, a writer. No one else knew that I was a writer because I hadn’t written much and they certainly hadn’t read it, thank God. But the notion that I could put this identity on like a new set of clothes, or a suit of armour, really helped me out. As a child and young man, I suffered racial abuse; I was at times, at school and on the street, known as ‘Paki’. Calling myself a writer was a self-designation which protected me. If I hadn’t yet become a writer, I would become one - it was an ambition, it made a future, and I wouldn’t be the first person to take on a moniker long before they were ready to inhabit it. So I can see the point and use of names.