I was recently visiting the Balearic Islands in the Med to meet up with family and friends as part of some ongoing celebrations. Having been to Spain in the past as a seafarer, my memories were very pleasant, of laid back people who didn’t really care about colour or ethnicity of visitors. Unlike certain other countries in Europe around the same time.
Episode going back to the ‘70s – we were in a rough bar, and got into a scrap with some random white trash type tourists or sailors, it wasn’t clear. They called us Pakis, we responded with John Bull, and very soon we were at the receiving end of a losing fight. Till suddenly, out of the blue, some really huge, big, tall coloured men stepped in and took our side.
Things evened out after that, we licked clean our wounds, and started talking with them. Surprise – they had American accents! How come, we asked, and they told us about how their previous generation had started the trend of staying back in Spain after World War II and how they had done the same after their tours of duty in Vietnam.
“Nobody gives a s__t about the colour of the person you go to bed with here” described everything in one short sentence. I remembered that for a very long time, more recently when seeing this movie.
And also this Spanish film, which gives a much wider picture of what Spain is, and also its relationships with its erstwhile African colonies – and the relationship between people of different colours –
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Four decades later, Spain was as good as it was, and I had no issues being brown and bearded – except being given a bit of a once over at the airport by another person who was brown and bearded. Otherwise, the only racial crap one encountered was from the beer swilling sausage eating lower end tourists at the cheap end of the beach – there also, at a tapas and fish restaurant, the owner chased the scum away by saying “this is a family restaurant”.
The one huge line that hit me, repeatedly, was – “be careful what you look for, you might find it”. In Spain, I found a reason to believe that the world was or could be a good place, despite violent colonial histories. Wadi Moosa became Valle de Moosa, that was about it, and there was a Jumeirah in Mallorca too, while the old name for Mallorca was Mayurqa Medina. And yes, right behind the famous cathedral, in the old city with its sun washed twisting narrow lanes, I also visited the Arab Baths known as “Bany Arab”.
(“Bany” in India, in and around Rajasthan, also means shallow well. Thus, Bandikui Junction, Indian Railways.)
But the real experience I sort of felt and then re-confirmed was the way boat people refugees from North Africa were kind of using the Spanish islands as an easy transit point to head deeper into Europe. A lawyer sitting next to me on the trip into Mallorca told me some stuff. But that was not enough. Ground level?
Sitting on the beach early one morning, sharing time with a local who had finished his night shift somewhere and was getting some sea time, I got my answer – “why should Europe care only for refugees from Ukraine?”
“The Africans who come here, they almost all speak either Portuguese or Spanish, and almost all of them have the same family ethos as us. Family first, family honour first, they will do anything and everything to survive, they bring up their own babies, but you know why they will never trouble the local women? Because if they do, the elderly women in their own tribe or family groups will beat them up and fix them good.”
“Also, we need good, new, young blood, strong people. We get many from Punjab, they come here, they work hard, and these people from North Africa are the same. Our population is growing old, people do not make babies like before, look at me, I am over 65, and doing night shifts!”
“So why is the world talking only about Ukrainian refugees?”
That really stumped me. In my time, we had picked up boat people from Vietnam, and seen how they had been denied entry at port after port. The US builds these huge walls in the desert for refugees from Mexico. There are wars all over the world, what makes the Ukrainian refugee special? Colour?
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Do we, in a supposedly equal world, treat refugees differently – by their colour?
It took me 2-3 days to get my Spanish visa. It is almost 2 months, and my British visa is still delayed, apparently because of the huge rush of Ukrainian refugees.
That’s my answer, right there.
( Veeresh Malik was a seafarer. And a lot more besides. A decade in facial biometrics, which took him into the world of finance, gaming, preventive defence and money laundering before the subliminal mind management technology blew his brains out. His romance with the media endures since 1994, duly responded by Outlook, among others.)
