Coconut

Noun, Co·co·nut. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive- a person with a dark skin-tone who is thought to have adopted attitudes and values inconsistent with their own, non-white, heritage and characteristic of middle-class white society. Based on the tropical palm tree seed which is brown externally and has a white interior.

I first realised my difference from the crowd when one of my friends described me as dark chocolate. That of course made her and almost everyone else in the school, white chocolate. I thought it was pretty funny. Back then, and for a long while after, I was of the age where my attitude was a product of my environment. I needn’t say that the attitude stuck. And now, ten years later, my attitude produces my environment and structures my personality. I have certain things that I like to do… music I like to listen to… clothes I like to wear. But other people with similar interests generally didn’t look like me. It wasn’t a problem until people started taking the children’s chocolate analogy too seriously.

I was one of seven black people in my entire year at secondary school. It didn’t matter to me. We were all just different kids at school who happened to be black. We didn’t need to find commonalities that ran deeper than our skin colour. Sure, we all knew who we were, and I was closer friends with a couple of them. But that was it. We were just ‘cool’ with each other. It wasn’t often on my mind but I was probably the only black person in the room for most classes. When I experienced something that I thought was racism, I didn’t have a conference with the seven black people in my year. I just spoke to Winston, my half-white-half-Asian best friend. Self-professed ‘Wasian’.

“Did you get those books and comics you were talking about?” he asked me one day after school.

“Yeah, I did. But I think the shop attendant thought I was trying to steal something.”

“What happened?”

“I was in the comics section and she asked if I needed any help. I said ‘no’, but she stuck around pretending to be busy.”

“Maybe she really was busy.”

“Busy doing what? Making sure all the comics were still comics?”

Winston took a moment to regard my experience. The school grounds were quiet by now and we were two of the last students waiting to be picked up.

“Yeah you’re right.” He said. “She probably thought you were trying to steal something unfortunately.”

“But why would I steal a book?”

“I don’t know. You’re black. Black people steal stuff.” Winston said facetiously.

“Man, Black people don’t steal stuff.”

“You know what I mean, Jordan- I mean stereotypically. Obviously you’re not the stereotypical black guy but she doesn’t know that.”

“But nobody’s the stereotypical black guy.”

“There definitely is a stereotypical black guy out there. It’s just not you. You already know everyone says you’re pretty much white except for your skin-”

“You say that like there’s something wrong with being white. Don’t you like the white part of you? Aren’t you proud to be white?”

Winston knew it was a trap… or an attempt at one.

“Aren’t you proud to be black?” he snapped back.

“Yeah.” I said.

“Why? You don’t act like it. You’re very different from all the other black guys in our year. So why do you say you’re proud to be black?”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d proudly say that my skin colour was one of the first things that people noticed about me, but it’s one of the first things people could notice about anyone. I said I was proud to be black, but I’d said it blindly. I’d been attacked with the question before and I handled it the same way. Winston made me realise that I didn’t even know what the question really meant to me. I thought about things I could’ve said afterwards that might’ve been argument-winners. That’s how arguments usually went for me. Winston could run me over in a debate but when I replayed the scene in my mind, I had witty replies that could render him speechless for a moment.

My mum arrived to drive me home before I could answer, but even in my mind I couldn’t answer Winston’s second question. It bothered me for a long while. I said I was proud to be black as a reflex reaction. I wasn’t proud to be black, not really. I just didn’t want to be stripped of my identity. Just like Winston wasn’t proud to be white (or white-passing) or proud to be Asian, I wasn’t proud to be black. I thought about why that was, why I would say that I was proud of my heritage when I didn’t flaunt it… and even altered it.

I discovered the taste of mixing my mum’s traditional Nigerian jollof rice with peanut butter on the day that my dad finished the plantain before I got a chance to eat. He thought I already had my share and chose to indulge himself without asking. I didn’t want to eat the jollof rice plain for two days in a row, so I decided to try something new. Jollof rice and a little bit of peanut butter. I was lucky it worked out the first time; a good brand of crunchy peanut butter with some freshly heated jollof rice. It was a surprisingly good dinner. Mum thought it was an abomination. I did it again when I was thinking about Winston’s question later that night.

“I should’ve never let you go to that school.” Mum said.

‘That’ school being my eighty-two percent white grammar school. My choice of culinary experimentation with food, especially African food, usually resulted in undesirable reactions from family. There was one time I put sugar in a yam dish and my aunt almost slapped me. Winston was right. I didn’t show any pride in my African heritage. My mum used to try to curb my habit but when she saw me add cheese to noodles, she lost all hope. She could only give me free lectures that zoned me out until I had to reply to questions about my future.

“Look at Obi. Maybe you should be hanging out with him and his friends.” I zoned back in here.

“I have friends.”

“Obi is your age-mate now. Both of you will be getting married around the same time. Think about all the people that will be at your wedding. Will all of your friends wear the traditional Nigerian garm at the engagement?”

Obi was my cousin on my dad’s side. Or at least I thought he was my cousin. My dad said that he and Obi’s dad were both from the same village and so were probably related. That was validation enough.

“Who says I’m having a traditional wedding?” I said.

My mum clutched her chest to like I shot her with disappointment.

“Obi is going to come on Saturday. Ask him if you can meet with all of his friends. He might even know a nice girl for you.”

“Yeah he knows one nice girl that sells Coke. I’ll ask him about her.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

We both laughed but I knew there was seriousness in my mum’s words. Obi and I grew up being the only two kids at family functions so everyone thought we would end up like twins. But I was me and Obi was Obi. We still got along well though. When he came over for my mum’s birthday that weekend, we were the only semi-adults there: too young to enjoy talking about the politics of the motherland and old to run around with the bright-eyed hellions.

“Jay Jay! What you sayin’ cuz?” He greeted cheerily.

“Hey Obi!”

“Your mum said you have no friends. What’s that about?”

“I have friends, don’t mind her.”

“Sure.” Obi laughed before following me back up to my room.

“Do you wanna play Playstation?” I asked.

“Yeah but if we do, the kids’ll wanna play too. We won’t be able to enjoy it.”

“Okay. How about the new season of ‘The Promised Neverland’?”

The Promised Neverland was an anime that blew my mind. I got Obi to watch the first season with me just a couple of years ago. He wasn’t much of an anime fan so that was an achievement. Not wanting to wait for the rest of the story after watching that first season, I read the manga. That was something Obi wouldn’t do. I was excited to see the animation so, now that the second season was finally out, it was an easy choice for what to watch. And with a storyline where children were getting eaten by demons left, right and centre, we were sure we’d have a break from the child invasion outside my room. I can’t remember if Obi knew at that point that I’d already read the manga, but there were some points in the third episode where he noticed I was paying more attention to my phone.

“Why’d you say you want subbed if you’re not going to read the subtitles?” He said, pausing the episode.

“I understood that.”

“You did not understand that.”

“Yeah…” After taking a glance at the screen, I gave a rough description of what was going on with a guess of what had been said. Of course, it was right.

“You speak Japanese now, yeah?”

“I took a short course.”

“Why?” Obi asked. He knew I watched anime at least once a week, so why he didn’t expect me to learn some of the language I couldn’t understand.

“Learning languages builds up your brain.”

“Alright, that’s cool. But I’m not watching anime with you after this one.”

“Why not?”

“You always want subbed and I prefer dubbed. I don’t want to be reading subtitles while I’m trying to watch something.”

“The original voice actors are so much better than the English voice dubbing though, trust me. I’m culturing you.”

“Culturing me? You’re the coconut, you know?”

“Huh?”

“Black on the outside, white on the inside.”

“I know what it means- I’m not white on the inside.”

“You act white.”

“I don’t act white. I act how I act.”

“You act white.”

“Man, I beg you stop talking. You’re running your mouth.”

“Where’d that come from? That’s not how you talk!”

“I listen to Drill sometimes-”

“Don’t lie. You listen to Kpop.”

That was true. He had me there. But I liked lots of music; pop, hip-hop, rock, indie. And my fondness of those genres weren’t limited to Korean music.

“I listen to loads of genres, not just Kpop. I listen to Drill too. I just don’t act like I identify with it, talking like that all the time… because I was raised in a suburb, not on endz- you were raised in a suburb too.”

“I just talk like that with my mates, you don’t have to be from ‘endz’.” Obi laughed.

“Okay then. Well your friends and my friends are different so…”

“Yeah, you don’t have any black friends.”

“Oh my God!”

First of all, that wasn’t fair to say. The secondary schools my cousin and I went to were completely different. He says his class alone was around sixty-five percent black. I didn’t have many black friends because I wasn’t around many black people and the few black people I knew weren’t interested in the same things that I was. My decision to be closer with friends that I shared interests with over friends that I shared skin colour with didn’t make me any less black. Saying I wanted to culture Obi was just a joke, but I guess it made me sound obnoxious. I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sure he thought calling me a coconut was a joke too. But I took that personally. I used the slang I’d learnt from Drill against him.

“If I tried to have more black friends than I already do, they would consider me a ‘begfriend’.”

“That’s because you don’t act tough.”

“Act tough for what? Neither of us has ever had to live that life. You’ve never ‘wet man’s chest’ so why do you talk like that with your friends who’ve also never lived that life?”

“Actually, we’re embracing black culture.”

“Stabbing people isn’t black culture…”

“No, making art out of a violent environment. Drill takes more kids off the streets than it does to cause the stabbings you know? You say you like art, but you don’t take the time to deeply appreciate it-”

“Children, come and eat o.” called one of the aunties from downstairs.

I wasn’t sure if my eye was twitching because I’d squinted for so long or because I was realising Obi had a point. I thought about it on our way down to the kitchen. I appreciated the evolution of language that was made obvious in music like Grime and Drill. But I hadn’t appreciated how much the music had done as an art form of the black community. I wondered if that lack of appreciation for the deeper levels of ‘black culture’ was what earned me the title of ‘coconut’.

“Are you proud to be black?” Obi asked.

“I don’t act like it, right? So I guess I’m not. But I’m not ashamed to be black either…” I pointed out. “You can be proud to be black, I just… For me, I can only be proud of something I’ve worked for and earned. There might be something I’m missing. But if it makes me ‘coconut’, then there’s something you’re missing too. I don’t need to earn my skin colour. I’m already black, inside and out, and I’m not trying to change that. What I am proud of is that I still like what I like whilst being black… despite some people believing that I can’t do both. I can like reading, I can like being quiet, I can like foreign music… it doesn’t change me.”

Obi plated jollof rice for both of us and added a bit of fried rice for himself. My cousin knew I didn’t like mixing the rice dishes on the plate so he didn’t need to ask me. He slapped some of the side dishes on each plate too. We both liked the same ones. I went to the pantry in the kitchen and produced a tub of peanut butter. Obi furrowed his brow slightly but didn’t say anything. I spooned out a wad and dolloped it on my pile of jollof rice. Spooning out another small wad, I held the chunky peanut butter over Obi’s jollof rice and smirked with the knowledge of a wise sage.

“I’m about to put you on to something right now. Trust me.”

Obi shook his head, not believing what he was agreeing to.

“I’m proud of this too-” I added, mixing my concoction.

“This is why your mum doesn’t love you.”

We burst out laughing.

I didn’t need to hear my cousin’s affirmations. It was enough that he never again called me a coconut and agreed to try my jollof rice avec peanut butter crunch. Once I could see it, Obi understood too. I was proud that I’d maintained my individual identity… and one aspect of that identity including me being black. I might not have been ‘proud to be black’ as I understood the question, but I was proud of my blackness. In understanding that, I also realised that Winston didn’t ask me his question to catch me out. He once told me he used to have trouble fitting into both British and Chinese societies after he was called a banana by another Chinese guy at school. Winston already knew that his individuality didn’t detract from his own personality. Now it was my turn to learn.

What even was ‘black’? I was Nigerian but all the other black guys in my year who ‘acted black’ had their own ethnicities: Jamaican; Ghanaian; Somalian… Even Australian Aborigines call themselves Black. ‘Black’ didn’t exist in reality, so why were we all expected to act a certain way? I’d spent so much time consuming the ideology of the media and the people around me that I thought there was something wrong with me. I was the one being consumed. I answered Winston’s question with a reflex reaction to prove I wasn’t ashamed of my skin colour. I shouldn’t have felt the need to do that. I didn’t have to fit the mould of ‘blackness’ set for me. Sure, I tried weird things with my food, but I was allowed to. Just like any other human. That’s how we got cheeseburgers.

Man, I was always coming up with the best things to say after the discussion.