WHEN I was five, I believed that my father possessed the most beautiful singing voice in the world. It therefore made perfect sense for me to try to mimic it in 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 adulthood. The hymn was “Stand up, clap hands, shout ‘Thank you, Lord’,” and it was seeing the joy that my classmate Rory was emanating which encouraged me to join in.
When our teacher called me over, I realised that something had gone wrong. A minute later, tears brimmed as I sang this joyous song alone at the front of the hall. I didn’t understand why I was being punished; so I sang it the same way as I had done before, in a Bangladeshi accent that seemed to belong in the body of someone 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 brazenly 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 keep singing like that, you will go a long way.”
I NEVER sang like that again. I became sensitive to how I presented myself in different spaces. I wanted to be taken seriously, and, more desperately, wanted to belong. While my father had come to Britain as a refugee during the 1971 Pakistani civil war, my mother was born in Britain to parents from Lucknow. I asked her whether she, like me, felt neither British nor Asian.
I found it hard asking her emotionally intimate questions; so I would do so when she was preoccupied with another task, such as 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 happen on the TV. These bald men hate each other 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 when I was learning so much about “Amen” and “Our Father” at school. I knew they worried that I would mispronounce one of these important Islamic words; so I would tense up, self-conscious at the possibility of “performing” religion wrongly.
Although my parents had wanted me to go to the best school in 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 believe that the Angel Slices artfully placed on our best silverware were made by her hands rather than by a machine at a Mr Kipling factory).
Over the years, our shared love of classical Bollywood films, South Asian music, and desi food drew us closer, but not close enough to bridge the distance caused by my shift away from Islam.
I CONVERTED to Christianity in my twenties, having experienced a sense of homecoming in both the scripture and the community. As I read the Gospels, I was drawn to Luke’s positioning of God alongside the outsider, and the beautiful wording in Luke 19.10: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Having felt a sense of disorientation because my spiritual views did not align with my parents’, I was comforted to know that, disconnected as I was from my family, God was with the lost.
But I retained my self-consciousness when it came to demonstrating my faith publicly. My “outsider” identity had been so internalised that I felt ill-equipped to pray as it ought to 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 would have benefited from hearing Justin Welby’s call to prioritise our relationships with God over how we participate in prayer: “God’s not giving you 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, this is going to be a good day.’ It doesn’t work like that: it’s relationship.”
THESE words resonated because they spoke to my fear of not being good enough for God, which extended 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 though there was a causal link missing between book, eyes, and mouth.
That causal link manifested itself in the form of a small boy. During one evensong, he tugged on my ear and toothlessly gnawed on one of my cheeks. When he pulled away, I raised my shoulder to my cheek to dab at the wetness with my jumper. When he returned to the cheek, however, he was clearly upset that it was no longer as he had left it. The wailing was instantaneous, acute, and heartbreaking. My first desperate instinct to raise my shoulder once more to my cheek to try to restore some of the lost moisture that my son mourned gave way to a far stronger impulse — to sing.
I hadn’t heard Charles Wesley’s “Love Divine” before, and certainly sang it in a way that would 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 as it suits us and God calls us to.” In that moment, I felt both the ground and the sky calling me to sing to my son.
ROWAN WILLIAMS has spoken of our innate capacity to communicate best with language through song, and of how music — through singing — enables us to express 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 more than any other use of the voice.” As I sang simultaneously to my son and to my God, I was using muscles that had gone ignored for the past 25 years. Afterwards, I felt exerted, but at peace.
Perhaps my contentment was because I was holding in my arms a sleepy child who no longer wanted to attach himself to my face; or maybe it was because years of tension, wrought by self-consciousness in practising faith, had given way to the realisation that the solidarity that I was now feeling had always been there.
Whether in mime or in song, the act of being alongside my Christian brothers and sisters as we give thanks to God generates a sense of unity which is miraculous, wonderful, and humbling. Years later (though he is unaware of this), I continue 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.
