There is a word the whole of Europe uses like a blessing, and I have come to hear it as a threat. The word is integration. Or more exactly one-way integration, because that is the only kind anybody is ever actually offered.
Integrate, they say. Fit in. Adopt our ways. Become one of us. For years I nodded, because it is said so kindly, with such an assumption that it is obviously good and obviously what any sensible newcomer would want, that to question it feels like ingratitude.
I have questioned it. Here is where I have landed, and I will say it plainly.
I am not going to integrate. I am not flour 00, the fine soft flour you can wet and knead and press into any shape you like. I am not pasta. You do not get to make me into your dish.
One-way integration: ask why the demand only runs one way
Why must I look like you, eat like you, smile like you, love like you, sleep and wake and joke like you?
And could you do the reverse? Could you integrate into my culture, learn my language, lower your voice before my elders, eat only what is set in front of you in the bowl? Could you be me?
You could not, and you would not, and nobody would ever ask you to. That asymmetry is one-way integration, and it is the whole lie of the word.
Watch how the same act gets two verdicts. When the Italian opens a restaurant in Germany he is bringing culture, and everyone finds it charming. When I keep mine, I am failing to integrate. I have eaten at an Italian restaurant in Worms, in Germany, because the Italians are everywhere, they got there before me and they will be there after me. Nobody has ever asked that man to stop being Italian in order to deserve his licence.
What one-way integration does to the man who accepts it
This is the part that frightens me more than racism does, because racism at least comes from outside.
I have met the over-integrated man in the good coat, quoting the people who despise him, laughing a beat too eagerly at the joke that is at his expense. A people-pleaser. Unable to take the small daily abuse and the humour at his expense without a raw and grateful smile. And I have seen the price of it on his face.
To be integrated in that way is to run two operating systems at once, in every moment, translating yourself to yourself. It wears the machine out early.
And there is an older reason to be careful, which is that the most integrated are so often the instrument used against the least. The oldest trick in the long book of our subjugation is to take the few who integrated most completely and hold them up to the rest of us as the good kind. See, this one made it. This one is safe. Be like this one.
Kunta Kinteh was captured for a white man by a black man.
A different word: upgrade, or downgrade
So I offer a different word to any brother reading this. Not integration.
Upgrade, or downgrade.
Take what is useful from this place, its punctuality, its coffee, its terrifying standard, and upgrade yourself with it. Leave what is useless or poisonous, and downgrade it out of your life.
That is something a free man can do, and keep his origin whole while he does it. The origin is not the negotiable part.
Because when the day and the night try to become one, you do not get a richer day. You get an eclipse, and the sun loses its power and the moon its face, and for a few strange minutes neither one rules anything.
Let each shine in its own time and the day is glorious and the night adorable.
So I will be the African sun in the African hours, and I will borrow the electric light in yours, and I will not apologise and I will not bleach.
What I am not saying
I am not saying do not learn the language. I learned Italian over a steel counter in a camp kitchen from two cooks who spoke no English and would not speak English to me, and it is the most valuable thing anybody has ever given me for free. Learn the language. Learn it properly.
I am not saying do not respect the country. Keep its laws, do the work well, be on time, be somebody the neighbours are glad to have.
I am saying that none of that requires you to hand over what you are. Those are two separate transactions, and one-way integration is the habit Europe has got into of billing them as one.
I expect some argument about this one, and I would rather have the argument than the polite silence. If you disagree, say so in the comments and say why. I will be there.
This is a chapter from my book, Between Immigrants and Italians, out now in Kindle and paperback. Read more about the book and get your copy here. If you read it, tell me honestly what you think of it.
