Room Tone and Narration Sample - The Good Immigrant
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
British (England - East Midlands, Leicester) British (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
on going home care and Yates. I'm looking out of the window midway through the eight hour journey back to my homeland and thinking of the countless diaspora tales of going home I've read over the years. I consider how the sea has inspired 1000 cliches about never feeling quite whole, of experiencing an identity cut into neat, disembodied pieces staring out. It suddenly become so clear why we contribute our experiences to a cannon saturated with tales of diaspora drama, from Rushdie's imaginary homeland to Knight Ball's sugar cane and sugar cane to each reference of a billowing sorry in the wind. It's ironic how fraught literature has bean with Kipling esque throwback exotics ism. But for any writer, the poetry of crossing oceans to rediscover our home is irresistible on perhaps for many of those writers who were rarely given opportunities to champion their homes, it was too tempting to draw from the multicoloured utopian visions of lush green jungles and air centred with milk and honey as a fragmented world allows for more nuanced. Now, it's obvious that in reality it's the details of these experiences, not the grand cliches that really reveal the most about ourselves and our journeys. It's been eight years since I've returned to Punjab. Last time I was a student, which enabled me to swerve questions about marriage and career. But now I am officially an adult. Everything will be up for scrutiny. I'm making mental notes about how best to sidestep the lines of questioning in the courtrooms of family, living rooms and kitchens. As we pass over Turkey, I see the mountains below And think about when my grandad made this journey over 40 years ago in the opposite direction on a Boeing 747 to London Heathrow. The Britain that accepted him, the place I call home is now experiencing a period of rejection. The last year has seen a depressing attack on many immigrant communities as the aggressive rhetoric of a daring to British values has catapulted itself into political and social policy. Cameron specifically targets Muslim women for their poor language skills, the tabloid media, Demonises refugees on a daily basis and the rhetoric encouraging us to prove our allegiance to the country's best interests makes the place I call home feel less safe for people who largely look like me. As the Tannoy announces in both Hindi and English that we can unfasten your seatbelts. I consider how the demonising of language is a depressingly familiar narrative, these new plans that actually pop up every few years proposing the enforcement of English lessons as a way of promoting integration under the guise of celebrating British values. In reality, proposals like this create even more forensic side eyes that you notice when you're speaking your mother tongue on the train to King's Cross or forget yourself in a quiet cafe and then finding yourself speaking Punjabi too loudly on the phone to your cousin. I know that language can be painful, and so to do a generation of immigrants who have arrived here through different pathways. For them, language is the great battle to fight, and for many it's a war. You always feel like you're losing