What it means to be British

Some words have become highly emotive for me in recent years. I cannot hear the words “Brexit” any longer without a sinking feeling, but now it has extended to include “British”, and “Britain”. The terms are chilling because the effect of Brexit, now it has happened, and perhaps unintended by the supporters of Brexit, has been to sharpen the distinction between Britain, and everything British, from the rest of the world. As Brexit inexorably takes place, something that seems to happen in slow motion (we are now years after the fateful referendum and the point of withdrawal has still not been reached) a kind of slow poisoning results from every mention of the word “Britain”. The Brexit mentality, the focus on myths from history that are brandished to demonstrate British uniqueness (such as “We stood alone” during World War Two, ignoring when it suited Churchill the contribution of all the peoples in the British Empire), seems to turn a screw in my brain with every mention of “Britain”.

So I can no longer ignore mentions of “British” sport, or books on “British” this or that, with a certain pang. I have now started to feel uncomfortable with any aspect of nationalism. So much so that only now, many years after the event, I begin to question the rather insidious propaganda aspect of having studied “English literature”. Why study a subject that threatens to produce a kind of jingoism by its very title? Is not the veneration of Shakespeare, unthinkingly labelled the world’s greatest playwright, a pawn used by many in the relentless emphasis on the superiority of things British? I dutifully read the rather small-scale body of medieval English literature, not questioning why it was seen in a completely detached fashion from medieval European literature, particularly French, which in many ways has a much more coherent corpus. I didn’t question why my degree ignored the vast body of Anglophone literature from the Caribbean, from India, from Africa – none of it mentioned in a three-year course on “English” literature. What was meant by “English” was, of course, the literature of Britain, not literature in the English language. A handful of English literature academics such as John Bayley would bravely write about Tolstoy, but such an attitude was becoming slowly squeezed out behind a mask of professionalism, of sticking to Eng Lit.

Having seen the unthinking populism that generated Brexit attitudes, I would seriously contemplate abolishing all national sport. Why drape a United Kingdom flag around athletes when they win an international event? Why even persist in the concept of a United Kingdom when it becomes increasingly apparent that the colonialism Britain imposed on India and African nations it controlled applied also to Ireland and to Scotland? That there never was a United Kingdom, just an efficient myth-making hegemony that included, I realise to my horror, university departments of English Literature? Just as a university department of theology is a crude attempt to hide religious propaganda behind the veneer of Enlightenment-inspired rational study, as if theology takes an equal place alongside chemistry and biology as an exercise of pure judgement? What am I doing in this island nation which appears determined to sever all ties with the European mainland and sail off incoherently in insignificant isolation?