Pornography/Censorship/Bacteria/Govt. Programmes Revitalising Death

It’s worse than pornography. Or—I can’t imagine anything more shameful than exposing a part of myself without my usual prerequisites: I don’t feel working-class, not like that, it’s not as if I grew up in a truly deprived area, why would you even think that? * might be a rough patch of skin but the outskirts are softer, less inflamed, easier to touch. When I was about twenty, I started regressing even further into my embarrassment and refused to even say the town I’m from—now I’ll get into geographical specifics nobody asked for just to avoid that word. It’s the epitome of everything I dislike about my background. Numbers start to take on religious significance: 1, 2, 3, so on and so forth. I might be from a working-class area, but you don’t understand. This is the sign of a spiritual sickness or the cryptic numerology of social isolation/proximity.

I embrace and reject a wide selection of cultural markers depending on how they make me feel. I won’t tell people where I worked. I move between worlds that I don’t belong to.

Why can’t I say these things? Because people will think I’m—what exactly? Does it matter what other people think? If my accent comes out too strong, nobody else cares. At home, over the holidays, my shiny polish gets all buffed out and I return to the flat sounds, the dialect, the squash of syllables.

My mum says, ‘Why don’t you write about your background?’ or ‘Try writing a few family stories here and there; I’ve got a good one.’ Naturally, I reject these suggestions. Isn’t it all so ugly and unglamorous? Couldn’t my ancestors be bothered to make anything of themselves? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Move away from Yorkshire? This is something I consider ‘aspirational’ in a bad sense—projecting my own latent desire to be ectopic from my culture onto other people and judging them for, in my view, not trying hard enough. They were hungry and proud and walked miles to the hospital and bought my mum a pregnant donkey instead of a horse to live on their farm. A distant aunt’s leg exploded and my uncle is barely coherent through layers of accent and alcohol. My middle name comes from another great aunt—my sister's middle name comes from both of our grandmas. My grandparents worked an eccentric selection of jobs: cleaner, usher, builder, dairy farmer. Wits’ end, collapsed veins, divine mercies, flesh under the tongue and wine over it, everything under the sun. 

Here’s the crux of it—I’m my own roadblock. Stubborn as anything. I spend my own money and walk around Le Marais and choose what to study at university; nobody can take this away from me. I get that all of this seems superficial and it is. I hate signifiers of identity over substance. (Identity is a part of substance, but the looking-glass is best avoided.) Part of my thorough self-censorship is removing class but also most everything else. If I can tick a ‘Prefer not to answer’ box, I will. This is a personal preference but also a stone digging into my heel, layers and layers of external prejudice forming a stabbing pressure that I would do pretty much anything to avoid. 

Like pornography, a lot of language about class has become taboo—the concept of ‘social mobility’ evokes a lot of scorn, which is fair enough considering its implications and exclusions. Not everyone gets the chance, it’s a recent phenomenon, it’s insulting to those who stick to blue collar work as if it never occurred to them to get a better paying, less demanding job. From here, it becomes an unsolvable problem of British society at large, so let’s scale it down a little. I had a manual job and liked it very much because I was good at it, the hours were good, and my coworkers treated me well. Am I casting all that aside?

This is what makes it difficult for me to align myself with accounts of working-class identity—people experience it through their parents, maybe a handful of siblings too, as an inheritance they carry. It’s fine and well, no questions asked, you’re 100% proper stuff, right to the bone, solid steel, I take you as you come, but in the end it’s more about shared genetics. I also don’t think working a manual job embellishes me with a unique ability to talk about the nebulous working-class soul—in fact, I think it stops me from being poetic at all.

Eventually everything gets said. I can’t earnestly endeavour to make some grand, sweeping statement on identity, so I never do. I dodge it—put it aside—in pretty much everything I write, tuck it away for later. Later, even later than now, I’ll reopen that page and give my final, unbiased thoughts on the matter. I never want to mythologise the working-class experience or belabour the idea of suffering, of not fitting in, of writing in an accent to prove something. Better writers have done it and other writers will continue to do so. We dismiss shows like Downton Abbey as pure fantasy, edited and autopsied and filtered to represent something that never really existed; the new wave of TV shows focusing on the working-class experience are exactly the same. The motif of a mother in her dressing gown counting pennies represents reality but perverts it for the viewer’s sake—pornography signed off by executives and replacing any earnest attempt to depict real life with signposts and poster boards. I accept all this if it’s entertaining—I’m not necessarily a discerning viewer—but otherwise I think it’s insulting to my intelligence. We consent to being insulted and belittled because it’s kind of sexy when you put it like that.

Lastly, the only time I felt a prang of so-called ‘working-class pride’ was when, at a party, I asked a friend lecturing us about social issues (the plight of the worker, the bourgeoisie, all that jazz, pretty vacant words) if he was working-class—if he knew any working-class people. His response, of course, was, ‘Why? They don’t go to this university.’

Righteous indignation aside, it irritated me and made me realise people who claim to be ‘conscious’ or to have the interests of the poor and huddled masses at heart are, in a word, liars—maybe not actively lying, but in a sense lying to themselves. As soon as the insular world of university ceases to exist, transient things and transient people will return to their natural state: the poor go with the poor, the rich go with the rich, the settling of sediment. Somebody vomited and nothing he said was of particular importance—I accepted that I was probably wrong, that he was probably right, and true working-class people didn’t go here. 

Therefore: I no longer exist. Therefore: I am not a person. Therefore: this affirmation confirms all my previous suspicions. Who would want to exist like that anyway? No fixed point, nothing clear, nothing that makes sense. People fight against the censorship of pornography but if all this went away—background pixelated, life blurred—I wouldn’t protest it. Let it happen. Let the facts and fictions and bright, erotic fantasies obfuscate themselves.