“Tattling to Establishments” by Raad Rahman
During my third week towards a yearlong MA program in Budapest in 2011, I was attacked by three men in front of a popular bar. We had followed our cheetah-print wearing, fanny-pack clad, Oxford-alumni classmate, who seemed to know of all the parties. She was keen to patronize the establishment, but, unbeknownst to my friends and me, Morrison’s 2 has long been blacklisted by foreign consulates in Hungary.
When the British friend was returning to the dorms, I walked her to the bus stop—leaving my laptop and backpack with my friends inside the bar. When I attempted to reenter, though, the men told me, “no, you have to leave.” I looked past these white men, their hair close-shaved. Waving my hand, I hoped to catch my friends’ attention from the entryway. My phone was dead—calling them wasn’t an option.
The next thing I knew, one of the three men pushed me forward, pinned me face-down to the floor, walked over me, splashed me with water, and, in the havoc, a passerby attempted to steal my wallet.
My friends—hearing my shrieks—exited fast. One of them chased the thief. Another helped me up, called the police, an ambulance.
The attackers tore a ligament on my ring finger by yanking and twisting my blown glass-grape ring from Florence. They fractured my right thumb.
All the locals queued outside the restaurant watched; no one helped other than my friends.
Every winter in Brooklyn, my thumb still stiffens like an unwanted memory, under gloves intended to warm.
When I witness how non-whites are being denied exit from Ukrainian borders, and how visitors or even naturalized Ukrainian minorities are being pushed to the back of the lines at the borders of Poland and Hungary and Romania, my year-long experience claws, despite attempts to forget.
I was young before Budapest, despite living through cataclysmic cyclones and murders of a close friend and a family member. Until then, my encounters with perverse structural racism were sporadic, notably being sent to the back of the line thrice while buying chocolates in Frankfurt, where I was told that “in this country we have lines.” Or a college classmate in upstate New York rescinding a Christmas invitation, apparently to spare me from encountering their grandparents’ dehumanizing comments around people of color. My worst racist encounter before Budapest was in London, where I was called a “Paki.”
Such experiences felt physically unthreatening despite being emotionally draining. They were as ubiquitous as the Fair and Lovely advertisements splattered across billboards in South Asia, which project fairness as a prerequisite to finding a job, attempting to change melanin levels through hydrogen peroxide-heavy creams. The market for fairness creams extends to even armpit bleaching, despite the high risk of contracting melanoma. According to such advertisements, apparently a spouse, or worse, a loving family, are impossible without fair skin.
After the incident, despite some classmates saying I was tattling to the “establishment,” I informed the school authorities. After all, I needed help translating the necessary medical attention, and few classmates spoke Hungarian.
My educational program’s professors were empathetic and sympathetic, while the programmatic staff were subdued and furious. A Hungarian administrator accompanied me to the hospital to translate, and shared my anger about the doctor who said, “You should forget about it, it was probably because they mistook you for Roma.”
We sat for hours under the halogen lights in the hospital, waiting for x-rays. When I questioned why I was to wear a foot-long plaster cast for a sprain, the doctors changed my diagnosis from a sprain to a fracture. I reassured the administrator that none of this was her fault. But she mourned that my experience of Budapest had been ruined by racists, just three weeks into the start of the school year. That whatever else transpired, I would have this incident to contend with.
At the Dean’s office, the story was different. “How do you know they were racist?” they asked. “Did they mention the word race to you?”
Subtext, of course, is rarely articulated in hate crimes.
After the attack, I never traveled alone. Despite my education funded through prestigious merit-based scholarships, I was forced to contend with my race bypassing my education or any class privilege. That being brown should be insisted as the first point of understanding into my identity was one I didn’t consider before. That I should feel timid about my skin color remains infuriating. But my fury with the status quo was anything but tepid. As I am wont to do, I pressed for details whenever I discovered an offense.
My inquiries into the root cause of my attack were woven of revelations gathered from generations of older classmates. A student of color had been attacked in the subway the previous year, tripped at the top of the stairs leading out of the Ors Vezer Tere train station. Soon, five Nigerian students were refused entry into a bar stacked with gutted Volvos and old cinema seats for seating. Other friends reported how in the previous year, a gay student had been beaten up for putting up posters promoting a gay parade.
During my time in Hungary, like all clever politicians looking to create and sustain nationalistic sentiments, Viktor Orban emphasized the need to close borders and renounce foreignness. Orban often called the country’s citizens “victims” of western European expansion. In public speeches, Orban even villainized “foreigners” like the Romanichal. In doing so, he galvanized a sizable following. Our university was a favorite scapegoat.
We were mere years from Orban authorizing buses to plaster George Soros’ photograph on their floors for commuters to walk over. While I disagree with Soros’ handling of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, I despised this vilification of his efforts at correcting his legacy through generous stipends aimed to educate minorities.
Meanwhile, my high school alumni network informed me the foreign lead of the neo-Nazi Jobbik party attended our school. Our school actively distanced ourselves, and warned me against meeting with him. The irony doesn’t escape me: an international school that had produced the founder of Ted Talks, Chris Anderson, had also spawned this nincompoop Marton Gyongyosi, who spoke of the evils of foreignness—upholding xenophobia after having spent a childhood in the Indian Himalayas.
A few years later, the democratic experiment that was Central European University would be successfully forced into exile from Budapest, into Vienna.
What ashes remain? What dust falls into drinks, to make up for the glorification of those Molotov cocktails, rightfully termed “heroic” self-defense by Ukrainians? Even while Muslims in the Middle East fighting for democracy are called insurgents while drones fall? While Yemenis and Syrians are unwelcome refugees caged in camps, but lip service towards Ukrainian refugees has already established supposed exceptionalism? Why are those upset by such status quos ever perceived as retaliatory for stating the obvious—the overwhelming support towards one group of people shouldn’t negate caring for all groups of minorities?
My eyes widened in shock in a security sector reform class in Budapest, when I found out the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Nelson Mandela was once labeled a terrorist, during the years he was imprisoned for his work against the apartheid in South Africa. In the eyes of oppressors, anyone who doesn’t fit into a mold is labeled in deplorable, dehumanizing terms regardless of their proximity or distance to any form of extremism, just for wanting freedom. Even speech, especially speech to erase censure, tests rebellion first. Mandela as an insurgent is different from Mandela as a gunman or a terrorist or insurrectionist or a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The liberty of language, in always establishing brutality to control and parcel out oppression, and regiment narratives of possibility.
Even while Ukraine is undergoing a crisis, blacks, browns and Asians are speaking up about being treated as subhuman. Chineye Mbagwu, a Nigerian doctor living in Ukraine, told The New York Times, “The Ukrainian border guards were not letting us through. They were beating people up with sticks” and tearing off their jackets. “They would slap them, beat them and push them to the end of the queue. It was awful.”
This discriminatory behaviour also extends to news reportage. On the front page of the website and print issue of The New York Times, there was no mention of the recent attack of peaceful Muslims by extremists in a mosque in Pakistan, which killed sixty-one and injured others on March 5. By contrast, the word Ukraine appears twelve times on March 5, with eleven pieces on Ukraine in the front page. Celebrities, British royals, and media pundits insist on the fright of Ukraine being invaded. Countries across Latin America, Asia and Africa have long been targets of invasion, and been dismissed. Danger exists in perceiving a hierarchy, in which bodies can be mournable. Those of us who were naïve and trusted government and institutional apparatuses to protect us—welcome us into eastern Europe—have long been forced into reckoning with how our bodies are expendable and violated in such states, especially while protecting illusions of democracy. Our stories and bodies are quashed at checkpoints, whether entering or exiting the places that are meant to secure our livelihood.
At the end of the school year, I was asked to appear on the school brochure. I refused.
I received multiple emails from a school administrator insisting I partake in the opportunity, because I would “look great on the cover.”
As if. As if the optics of reverse positive race profiling is something I should feel excited about, even while dodging the cars that drove imperiously close to the curb each day, almost hitting me. I refused repeatedly. After the fifth email insisting I would look “good,” I complained to the sympathetic administrator who had accompanied me to the hospital.
We agreed the school was being impertinent in projecting their ideals of democracy, without providing adequate protection for minority students. I wasn’t willing to participate in swindling others into believing that Hungary was open to foreigners, but the school wasn’t willing to listen—until the administrator once again interceded on my behalf.
I found hope in how the administrator listened. When she died a few years ago, I was gutted to have encountered such a wonderful human in such a harrowing environment.
The coded roots of my experiences culminated in an unforgettable end-of-year confrontation, while my classmates and I attempted to find a venue for the after-afterparty to graduation. The British girl wished to revisit the cheap drinks at the bar where I was attacked. Though the school authorities had by now warned us all not to do this, like a family of termites, many followed.
The group split. Some remained by my side. Several apologized afterwards. Despite splits in democratic skies, blessings can flow, alongside a concert of exquisite voices who foil despicable intentions.
Among those who stood by me in the last night were two of the Ukrainian girls in my program, and a Canadian girl of Indian ethnicity.
“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there,” wrote J. A. Baker in The Peregrine (1967). Rushing through the year, doomed to erasure, my syntax grew sloppy, my drinking erratic. Feeling trapped, I took every opportunity to escape Budapest, despite looming student loans, but that’s another story.
Every season kills dreams. But when I see Ukraine, I range from experiencing anger, to grief for Ukrainian and Russian friends, to grieving those who have been bombed, shelled, and obliterated, or humanity denied at borders, and ongoing dehumanization because of melanin content.
Language is words until there’s none left. Only rhythms. Only hums. No clarinets, no Greensleeves, no Robindro Shongeets played on Youtube, or flushing flesh. No polluted skylines that incite guilt but whose colors inspire awe. Distractions say nothing of loyalty, nationalism, race, community and belonging. What snow angel imprints can the spring remember?
Foreignness tests everything.
Spending time decoding stormclouds, even those written in indecipherable cursive, is tricky at best. On the topic of refugees, I was unsurprised reading about the extremity of a Hungarian journalist kicking and tripping Osama Abdul Mohsen, while the Syrian refugee was carrying his seven-year-old boy through a Hungarian village in 2015. Typical, this extreme violence. Atypical, how Mohsen was able to relocate his family with the help of football star Cristiano Ronaldo.
Recently, I found a viral fake video of a Ukrainian child standing up to a Russian soldier, which garnered over 12.9 million views on TikTok. In reality, the child was Palestinian, the soldier was Israeli, and the video was shot in 2012. Vileness in suggesting one child’s safety is more important than another is politicization of the human body, and in order to understand how a body is deemed mournable, what is given empathetic coverage must not be contained in the bodies of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of any megalomaniac’s dreams.
In a country with growing xenophobia, I experienced myself as a third person. A vessel. Viewable only from a distance. What frightens me most is watching my experience unravel in real time for those non-white foreigners currently stuck in Europe.
When I received my passport back from the Embassy prior to the program starting, was this when I should have started to suspect what was going to happen? My dark brown eyes were turned a mysterious pale blue, by the Hungarian consulate’s visa printers. When I asked for a reprint, the embassy staff said this would take three weeks. Perhaps I shouldn’t look back at these fragmentations. But when I do, I realize I cannot hide in monochromatic dualisms or truths.
In Budapest, I felt a shame in my existence that was the direct result of being placed in such a racist context. For those who only want to notice the heroism of Ukrainians: don’t look away from what is being ignored. None of us should be forced into feeling the color of one’s eyes denotes exceptionalism.
Raad Rahman is a writer. She lives in Brooklyn and tweets @rad_rahman.
