My road to nowhere tv#

That was in 2014 - there are likely many more of us now floating about and likely many more to come. Why the constant silencing? The most recent statistics show that there were around 55 million immigrants in the EU, “including those born abroad and their immediate descendants”. There are a lot of us, but we don’t seem to be able to speak about our realities in fear of being too “political” or making everything “about race”. It seems bizarre to me that I’m still today discovering parts of my friends’ heritage that they were too uncomfortable sharing before the safe-spaces of the internet cropped up and welcomed them with open arms.

It might seem arbitrary to say, but immigrants aren’t all the same.

My road to nowhere tv#

When, for example, you chuck a token Asian into your TV show in order to shed light on immigrant realities, you end up giving the impression that every Asian in that country will have the very same experience (No hate on Gilmore Girls though). This empty space lends itself to festering inaccuracies about our lives and broad generalisations about our experiences. We rarely see ourselves reflected back in media and mainstream culture. Representation for the children of immigrants is not so common-place. The likes of Taiba Al-Nassar, creator of 3asal, Theo White, founder of Theo White Zine, and Tahmina Begum, founder of The Aram, made me realise that our stories were important enough to share. Cascading from my screen were Arab, Black, Brown and Asian creatives sharing their powerful work with the world. But it was hours of late-night scrolling on Instagram which acted as the ignition spark for The Road to Nowhere. Social media’s been getting a lot of stick recently. Words by Dalia Al-Dujaili, edited by Evar Hussayni