Shazia Mirza: 800 words on race

Written by: Shazia Mirza
Published: Wednesday 10th August 2022

I took part in Celebrity The Island With Bear Grylls a few years ago. He dropped us off on an island in Panama with no clothes, no shoes, no mobile phone, no bra and no mayonnaise. It was like a party at No. 10, except the cast was more diverse.

The main thing I learnt was that you can survive on your own for a very long time, but in the end, you always need other people. When you are lying face down in a ditch, being bitten to death by sand flies and mosquitoes, with your underpants round your head to keep you warm, you want someone to be with you, to endure and remind you of the horror of that situation.

My show is called Coconut. It is a racist term that only I can use. It is a term used by brown people, about other brown people, who are not seen to be helping the cause of brown people.

Our Government is full of them. The chief coconut resembles a Lodoicea Maldivica. Also known as a double coconut, one of the biggest in the world.

These are people who once they've made it, quickly pull up the ladder behind them to stop anyone that looks remotely like them from getting a step up.

It's my uncle who voted Brexit. When I asked him why? He said, "We are a vey small country and we are are full". Full? How would he have liked it, if they'd said that to you in the 60s, when you first came over here? You wouldn't have all those Toyota Corrollas parked on your driveway now, would you?

This is an immigrant mentality. A way of survival. Children of immigrant parents have certain try-hard traits; we are desperate to succeed, and will do anything to be bigger and better and more British than the British.

There has never been a need for white men to survive in the same way, especially in comedy. There has always been a space for all of them. There will always be room for the next batch of mediocrity, that men of privilege can achieve and still maintain their power.

When I started in comedy I was the first and only Muslim female stand up comedian in Britain for years till the next one came along. I was punished for invading their space. How dare I have the audacity to try to be a comedian. "Didn't you want to be a doctor?" asked one journalist. When I did a routine about shopping in Primark, a review said, "What a waste of a good Muslim. Of all the important issues she could be talking about, and she talks about shopping!"

At the height of the hysteria and negativity I had to go onstage with two armed police officers.

A lot of journalists had never known a Muslim woman in their life, they didn't know my voice, they didn't understand my world so the easiest thing for them to do was to criticise what they didn't understand. They dictated to me what they wanted me to talk about. Therefore always holding the power. People put their prejudices onto me. I was constantly being attacked by the press and I only realised it when white comedians would come up to me and say, "You are given a harder time than any of us, and it's not fair".

We need people who look like us, who are from our background and our experience to fight for us. If not then we have to depend on people who are not like us, and then we get annoyed. "Why are you fighting our battles for us?!"

In comedy, we like and laugh at the people who are like us, who represent us, who reflect us and who we want to be. We have an affinity to those people and want them to do well, we pull them up, let them through, give them chances and prizes.

If there is only one or a few of you, it's a struggle to be heard and seen.

Of course ultimately no one has to do anything for anyone. But then what is the point of our struggle? That would be like Nelson Mandela coming off Robben Island and setting up a chicken shop.

I survived Bear Grylls, and Coconut is a metaphor about all the things I saw and learnt from it. It's all true and all funny.

I must go now, before chief coconut books me onto the next plane to Rwanda.