I recently told a fellow migrant friend that crossing the UK Border was always a frightening, stressful experience and they asked, well-meaningly, what I even had to fear considering I have nothing to hide and most things in my favour? She was right in a sense — though both non-White and migrant, I have the ‘right’ accent, the ‘right’ education, fit into the ‘right’ visas and tax brackets, the ‘right’ degrees of familial proximity to English-ness. I tick most palatable boxes so well that generally speaking, I hold a relatively privileged position when it comes to the machinations of the British state. Then what do I have to fear at the UK Border?
It’s simple: I fear my name.
Or perhaps it isn’t that simple. It isn’t just my name I fear. It’s my address, my phone number, my course title, my job description, those I’m related to, the classifications of my degrees. Things that come easy to most people, things that one won’t even need to think about, let alone painstakingly plan on counting out syllable by syllable, breath by breath. But when you have a stammer, counting syllables and line lengths come far more naturally than breathing.
When most people think of a stammer, for better or worse, they think of King George VI, former monarch and the enduring protagonist of The King’s Speech. But I am not King George VI, because George, whom I am certain struggled and faced harsh scrutiny, never stood at the border between a country holding all he knows and loves, and a country he has never lived in but theoretically belonged to, and pray to anything that will listen that he will say his name right this time. Because if he doesn’t, he’ll be detained, or perhaps even turned away and told to return to a place he has never known.
When I speak, I stop at consonants that open words: words like my name, or my age, or my gender. I have to think about it, restart the sentence, wind my way around these unavoidable words. At times, they refuse to come at all. In daily life, it doesn’t really bother me very much, especially not these days. The EDI doctrines are right in this case: I am my stammer but I am more than it too. I can swap words if I want or I can stammer away and not care what someone else thinks about it. I’ve spoken at countless rallies, I’ve delivered dozens of workshops, sat on panel after panel, I’ve speechified and taught and performed on stage, both stammering and not.
In those worlds, I am me, talking about anything from decolonisation to decarbonisation, I am the role I play or the class I teach. At the Border, I am three things: my name, my date of birth, and the reason I am entering a country that isn’t mine. At the Border, when I halt at and repeat the uncomfortable angles of my name, I am a suspicious character, because why would someone ever stumble on something as familiar as a name?
The Equality Act forbids discrimination across a litany of categories, but also makes room for a clear-cut, purpose-built loophole: “some public authorities, like immigration officers are allowed to discriminate against you when they make certain immigration decisions – for example, decisions about your right to come and live in the UK.” In these situations, public officials are allowed to discriminate against you due to your disability, ethnic and national origins, and religion.
There are further caveats as well. That officials at the physical Border are allowed to discriminate against your race and nationality and religion, but not your disability. But how do I extricate a disability from race and nationality and religion?
The United Kingdom’s EDI industrial complex runs on a certain definition of the term ‘intersectionality’, yet does not let the term permeate state machinery. To put it simply: when I stammer on my name I am stammering on a foreign name, when I stammer on my place of birth it is a place far away and frowned upon. The guidance given to border staff is, of course, completely confidential. How am I to know where my stammer sits on their list, or what they are told to think when I ostensibly seem to forget what I’m studying or where I live?
Yes, not all crossings are hard. Sometimes the officers joke around with me – see the palatable boxes, the clear assimilation, they like the way I look and sound, they like what I’m studying and who I’m seeing. Sometimes they tell me how wonderful I sound, how easy I am to let through, how nice my hair looks. And sometimes I stand there for fifteen minutes stumbling over word after word trying to tell a scowling woman what my dissertation was about, even though I knew each word of it inside and out.
It is difficult to permeate state machinery with equality legislation simply because the state in question is set up to discriminate against difference in itself.
And it is not just the Border – the Border is where it starts but not where it ends. The intersection of disability, racialisation, and migration heightens the stakes involved in most aspects of your life, it is unavoidable in most official processes. For instance, losing your job or failing an exam due to a lack of reasonable adjustments is not only losing your job or failing an exam, it is the distinct possibility of being thrown out of the country you have built a life in and paid thousands of pounds in taxes to.
Many children stammer, and most either learn to manage it or ‘grow out of it’, so to speak. Once your stammer carries into adulthood, there is no Cure. And that has never bothered me at all. Most days, you couldn’t pay me to be ‘Cured’.
I do not fear disability. I am proud, I am more than however many times I stumble over first syllables and trail off into seeming confusion. Do I wish I was fluent? God, no! Just look at me – a case study of hard-won confidence, a stammerer that never seems to shut up. Do I want fluency? Not any longer, not at all. Fluency is failure! Cure narratives are tedious! I am a firm adherent of the social model and nothing can take away how much I love the way I speak. I love what it does to me, I love my proclivity for relentless repetition, my uncontrollably messy sentences, my meaningful incoherence.
But at least once every year, I stand at the UK Border after a fourteen hour flight. There is someone in uniform glaring down at me, and the two of us know full well that if I stumble on my name, I stand to lose everything. And at that moment, when I feel the smallest I have ever felt, if someone taps me on the shoulder and offers me a cure — I’d take it. I’d take it in a heartbeat.
By Neha