Mangoes, Muslims and Meritocracy: A Whitewashed Diasporic Experience Or, The Coconut Paradox
In 2023, Pakistan exported 100,000 metric tons of mangoes. This amounts to only about 7% of Pakistan’s total mango production. Is it any wonder, then, that the symbol of the mango – ripe, yellow flesh, honey-sweet – has become an enduring symbol for the Pakistani diaspora? They are commonly referenced in poetry, artwork and novels, yet have become an almost cartoonish stereotype, with jokes circulating across social media websites of ‘mango diaspora’.
The exports make their way across Asia and Europe, ending up on Southall High Street, where my father cautiously opens and closes boxes emblazoned with Urdu characters I cannot decipher, and depictions of bright yellow mangoes. He lifts them to his nose to smell them, palpates them with accuracy, then shakes his head and replaces them in their boxes.
“Sindhi mangoes,” he says, disapproving. We are Punjabi, and, “Punjabi mangoes are the best of the best.”
World renowned, even, I remember my father saying once, as he held a mango in his hand and sliced around the pit with no fear, knife gliding seamlessly through flesh.
I was born in Pakistan and moved to the UK when I was one year old. I find the phrase ‘I moved’ funny, as it implies a sort of autonomy my infant self certainly did not possess. I knew nothing of Pakistan, and nothing of the first two houses we shuffled through as freshly initiated British residents.
In my home, my parents speak a mix of Urdu and Punjabi. My brothers sometimes respond to them in Urdu, but more often English. I always respond in English. I never learned how to speak Urdu, despite my fluency in translation. I’ve picked up and dropped language-learning apps like my dad shuffling through mango cartons – I understand enough to know the smell isn’t quite right – the grammar slightly off, too formal, not the dialect my parents speak – then I return it to the recesses of my mind. While my parents play up their disappointment in my monolingualism, they made little effort in my childhood to correct it. Or, perhaps, I was simply resistant to their efforts. Worse, oblivious.
Coming into adulthood, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to connect with my heritage. As I speak little Urdu and do not practise Islam I find myself disconnected from many of my peers. While they watched Bollywood classics and flicked through Atif Aslam’s discography, I was tottering around in my high-school years with a white girl, having my firsts and hiding from the creaking footsteps of my parents. While my Muslim friends observed Ramadan, I drank until I threw up, went to the club and had casual sex.
My older brothers who went to university before me found some of their best friends in the Islamic Society, while I found a gaggle of girls who I bonded with over take-out and relationship drama. My life has taken a different path than my parents are even aware of – a path that must stay hidden from the light, that excludes me from making many Pakistani friends. I identify more strongly with the label ‘Asian’ which takes on the construction of a race in the UK – it's easier than identifying with Pakistani, which comes along with a flag that’s stamped with a crescent moon.
My check-in luggage on my flight to the US was four kilograms too heavy – but when the Muslim clerk behind the counter saw my name and saw that I was studying religion, he marked it down as twenty-three kilograms instead of twenty-seven, and sent me on my way without a seventy pound fine. He even congratulated my studying religion, with a simple MashAllah sister. I wish I could’ve appreciated it, but I couldn’t help thinking about who he thought I was and who I actually am.
Wearing short skirts and dating girls drew no comment from my Western peers, but drinking too much coffee and studying Sociology attracted the attention of my extended family. I moved, or rather, I was moved, from Pakistan at the age of one – so I have very little connection to my thirty or so cousins who deign to have an opinion on my personal life. However, I can’t blame them for doing so – the idiom of “What will other people say?” is as common in Pakistani culture as “Curiosity killed the cat,” is to Brits.
There is a word for Pakistani girls who do not speak Urdu, do not dress modestly or practise Islam. My cousin once called me this to my face, citing my macchiato habit as something that made me a ‘coconut’ – brown on the outside, white on the inside.
This dichotomy is strange to me. My Westernisation as a child was seen as valuable and sought-after – my parents moved us to the UK in search of a better, broader life. Yet, a step too far in using the Western paradigms of individual freedom and secularism led me to the branding of ‘coconut’. I suppose it is true, in a sense, that the very things that make me a ‘coconut’ also disconnect me from my community – isolate me in a bubble of whiteness. My accent, which has been praised by my mother for being distinctly clear and British, assimilates me into middle-class white professional culture. My queerness widens the gap between me and my Muslim peers, even those who drink and have extramarital sex as I do. There is a line between brownness and whiteness, and if you step too far over you are labelled as ‘other’.
There is another essay to be written about those who remain steadfast in their own culture, to the detriment of their perception by the white professional class, but I cannot speak to that. I understand what I can speak about is an isolation that comes from the result of privilege – but it is an isolation nonetheless.
The privilege that comes with westernisation is tied to the capitalist understanding of a meritocracy. Westernisation is seen as the most valuable prize, the epitome of modernisation and embodiment of the neoliberal capitalist lifestyle. Wearing jeans in Pakistan, for example, is seen as a symbol of being upper-class. Speaking English is upper-class. When class status is tied to Anglicisation, and class status is so highly sought after, Pakistani emigrants are left with a disconnect to their communities when they are separated from their homeland. Yet, assimilation is too valuable an asset to discard. Therein lies the coconut paradox.
My cousin did not stop at calling me a coconut. He referred to my mother, too, who does not wear the hijab and prefers English tea over chai and dislikes going back to Pakistan because her stomach is easily irritated. My mother, who grew up in Pakistan, speaks Urdu, Punjabi and Saraiki, whose bloodline is wholly Pakistani, whose family has been Muslim since the conquest of Punjab in the 8th century. By what standard does someone become a ‘coconut’? What is whiteness? What is brownness? Does the disconnect from a community make someone a ‘coconut’ or does that come before? I don’t have an answer.
I know that Westernisation was a valuable enough prize for my parents to leave behind their families and make the move to the UK. I know it was valuable enough that they never forced me to speak to them in their native tongue. I know that this allowed me to socialise freely with my white peers, and distance myself from fellow Pakistanis. I know this makes me privileged.
Does it make me happy? I don’t know. Am I Pakistani in any way that matters, other than in the style of a coconut, with my brown skin and prickly exterior? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the coconut may be a more valuable motif to represent the Western Pakistani diaspora than a mango. A mango is soft, forgiving. It’s easily sliced through and dissected, sickly sweet on the tongue. A coconut has a prickly, ugly exterior – its features in poetry and novels come alongside the idea of smashing or breaking the exterior to get to the rich white fruit. This violence does not match with the aestheticization of the mango, of sticky fingers and homesickness. The hairy brown outside is no comparison to the royal red and gold of a mango, its shape like the body of some small animal.
A coconut is large, round, obtrusive, hard to break through. It is deemed unpleasant and unassuming. Yet, the brown exterior still shatters, and creatures feast on the fatty white insides. Perhaps this is what makes it the perfect metaphor to me.
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson
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