http://www.academia.edu/1484786/Christopher_Kyriakides_-_In_Pursuit_of_Utopia_A_Pakistani_an_Arab_and_a_Scotsman_Return_to_Cyprus
Some choice quotes:
“My parents migrated to Scotland in 1955,” I explained. “I was bornin Glasgow in '71. For the first 15 years of my life, I was identified asPakistani, for the next 15 years I was identified as Arab, then, when I movedto Cyprus, I was identified for the first time as a Scotsman!” So, one could say that I am ‘all of the above’. Alternatively, one might say, ‘I am none of theabove’. I have an ‘identity of nothingness’. In 1970s Scotland, as in Britain,the word 'Paki' (short for Pakistani) was common currency among racists, ameans of designating anyone who was not white or black. The expletive wasan expression of the desire to keep 'us' out of history. We were not subjects who had the right to act effectively and decisively, to compete legitimately forresources - economic or cultural – deemed British.
My Greek-Cypriot migrant parents, like many of those Pakistani parents who settled in Glasgow after World War Two, arrived with hopes, fears andabove all the aspiration to build a life denied them, for their children. Beingimmigrants, and branded 'non-white', placed them in the precariousposition of having to work twice as hard as the then indigenous populationand in worse conditions (Smith, 1977). At least, that is how my parentsexperienced their situation. And work they did, ‘24/7’, until eventually likesome migrants they entered the British middle class (CMEB 2000). They faced discrimination and cruelty, but still made friends and became part of what they and other migrants had made – a new community, which wouldno longer accept Britishness as homogenously 'white' (see Gilroy, 1993).
In the absence of utopia, dystopic tendencies can arise. It is the personalizeddystopic contours of Greek-Cypriot self-identity which greet the migrantnewcomer. The solution should be the positing of a world beyond self-identity. However, it seems that the trajectory is in the opposite direction. A series of lifestyle choices is what remains, sold to us in an ethnically culturalised package of “authentic self-identities”. Next time you meet amigrant at IKEA or Molos keep in mind that it was the human pursuit of an improved life that brought them to Cyprus, and it is that pursuit whichprovides the spark of aspiration so necessary for the creation, based onvision, of a better place.
