WHEN I used to be five, I believed that my father possessed essentially the most beautiful singing voice on this planet. It subsequently made perfect sense for me to attempt to mimic it within the hymn in my first school assembly. My father was a 40-year-old man with a thick Bengali accent; he had emigrated to High Wycombe from Chittagong during early maturity. The hymn was “Stand up, clap hands, shout ‘Thank you, Lord’,” and it was seeing the enjoyment that my classmate Rory was emanating which encouraged me to hitch in.
When our teacher called me over, I realised that something had gone unsuitable. A minute later, tears brimmed as I sang this joyous song alone on the front of the hall. I didn’t understand why I used to be being punished; so I sang it the identical way as I had done before, in a Bangladeshi accent that looked as if it would belong within the body of somebody eight times my age.
My parents received a call from my teacher to warn them that, having been punished for singing in a silly accent during assembly, I had openly continued to sing in such a way. When my father asked me to sing to him as I’d sung that morning, he simply said, in his melodious Chittangongian tone, “Son, if you happen to keep singing like that, you’ll go a great distance.”
I NEVER sang like that again. I became sensitive to how I presented myself in several spaces. I desired to be taken seriously, and, more desperately, desired to belong. While my father had come to Britain as a refugee in the course of the 1971 Pakistani civil war, my mother was born in Britain to oldsters from Lucknow. I asked her whether she, like me, felt neither British nor Asian.
I discovered it hard asking her emotionally intimate questions; so I’d achieve this when she was preoccupied with one other task, akin to watching whether the Mitchell brothers would finally sort out their differences on EastEnders. This meant that the answers I received were often rushed and evasive: “Beta [son], something scary might occur on the TV. These bald men hate one another very much. Abhi soja [now go to bed]. It is past bedtime.”
I wondered why she and my dad made me recite “Assalamalaikum” (“Peace be upon you”), “Inshallah” (“God willing”), and “Mashallah” (“God has willed it”) to them in preparation for when my relatives visited, especially once I was learning a lot about “Amen” and “Our Father” in school. I knew they apprehensive that I’d mispronounce one among these essential Islamic words; so I’d tense up, self-conscious at the opportunity of “performing” religion wrongly.
Although my parents had wanted me to go to the most effective school within the village, which happened to be one with a Christian ethos, they were painfully self-conscious about their identities as Muslims, and about being culturally faithful to what they saw as their homelands (although my mother did allow herself some liberties, letting my great-uncle imagine that the Angel Slices artfully placed on our greatest silverware were made by her hands relatively than by a machine at a Mr Kipling factory).
Over the years, our shared love of classical Bollywood movies, South Asian music, and desi food drew us closer, but not close enough to bridge the space attributable to my shift away from Islam.
I CONVERTED to Christianity in my twenties, having experienced a way of homecoming in each the scripture and the community. As I read the Gospels, I used to be drawn to Luke’s positioning of God alongside the outsider, and the attractive wording in Luke 19.10: “For the Son of Man got here to hunt and to avoid wasting the lost.” Having felt a way of disorientation because my spiritual views didn’t align with my parents’, I used to be comforted to know that, disconnected as I used to be from my family, God was with the lost.
But I retained my self-consciousness when it got here to demonstrating my faith publicly. My “outsider” identity had been so internalised that I felt ill-equipped to hope because it must be done. This lack of participation felt like a failure in my attempts to praise God: wasn’t being self-conscious an act of ego that went against the teachings of the Bible?
I’d have benefited from hearing Justin Welby’s call to prioritise our relationships with God over how we take part in prayer: “God’s not supplying you with a pass or fail mark. He’s not going ‘So that was three out of ten in that prayer session, so none of those prayers are going to be answered’, or ‘That was nine out of ten, that is going to be a great day.’ It doesn’t work like that: it’s relationship.”
THESE words resonated because they spoke to my fear of not being adequate for God, which prolonged to an anxiety about how other churchgoers would feel on noticing my moving but silent mouth. Some would assume that I wasn’t singing because I couldn’t see the lyrics, and so would helpfully direct the words from the hymn sheet towards my eyes, as if there was a causal link missing between book, eyes, and mouth.
That causal link manifested itself in the shape of a small boy. During one evensong, he tugged on my ear and toothlessly gnawed on one among my cheeks. When he pulled away, I raised my shoulder to my cheek to dab on the wetness with my jumper. When he returned to the cheek, nevertheless, he was clearly upset that it was not as he had left it. The wailing was instantaneous, acute, and heartbreaking. My first desperate instinct to boost my shoulder over again to my cheek to try to revive among the lost moisture that my son mourned gave solution to a far stronger impulse — to sing.
I hadn’t heard Charles Wesley’s “Love Divine” before, and positively sang it in a way that will have offended the tastes of anyone but my son. The boy’s expression turned from anger to wonderment as song tumbled awkwardly from my mouth. In a video, “How do I pray?”, Bishop Welby says: “We pray because it suits us and God calls us to.” In that moment, I felt each the bottom and the sky calling me to sing to my son.
ROWAN WILLIAMS has spoken of our innate capability to speak best with language through song, and of how music — through singing — enables us to specific deep emotion, and to encourage deep emotions in those around us. He says: “The whole practice of singing is linked very strongly to the physicality of the body. Perhaps greater than some other use of the voice.” As I sang concurrently to my son and to my God, I used to be using muscles that had gone ignored for the past 25 years. Afterwards, I felt exerted, but at peace.
Perhaps my contentment was because I used to be holding in my arms a sleepy child who not wanted to connect himself to my face; or perhaps it was because years of tension, wrought by self-consciousness in practising faith, had given solution to the realisation that the solidarity that I used to be now feeling had all the time been there.
Whether in mime or in song, the act of being alongside my Christian brothers and sisters as we give because of God generates a way of unity which is miraculous, wonderful, and humbling. Years later (though he’s unaware of this), I proceed to sing to my son and my God, as my voice finds its place in my congregation’s chorus.
Dr Imran Boe Khan is a recipient of the Thomas Hardy Award and a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Bournemouth University.
