Reflection on masses as an emigrant
by Aanisa Jama
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I'd say my awareness of group identity began in childhood, at first shaped by my gradual awareness that we were perceived as ‘other,’ of course we were, as newcomers to the U.K.
I grew to learn and became acutely conscious of how people perceived our background as a homogenised category, a 'group' defined by reductive stereotypes.
This awareness bred resistance, the more I was lumped into collective labels, the more I recoiled from them.
Over time, you develop a hypersensitivity to all sorts of group dynamics, it solidified my insistence on being seen as an individual first. I should add, I felt this most incessant whilst living in Germany.
Just to touch on the word 'individuality' or the idea of it. I don't think I'd have been as viscerally aware or consumed by it otherwise, my only relation to that word is my experience with it in the context of external group assignment.
This resistance lingered into adulthood, manifesting in both subtle and overt ways. Even in seemingly neutral group affiliations such as being labeled a 'student,'
A vivid memory I recall, standing atop a hill at a crowded festival, I gazed down at a large mass of people below and felt a visceral unease. The crowd’s sheer size, its reduction of individuals to a faceless collective, mirrored the erasure I’d spent years rejecting. A moment prior, I was amongst it. Such moments back then, however minut, crystallised my hyper awareness of how group settings can suffocate individuality, a theme of course echoed in sociological theory.
Albeit many from the position on the hilltop …observers from a distance.
Just to give a comparative example of writers, Edward Said often addressed it from a first hand internal experience.
Gustave Le Bon and Gordon Allport on the other hand, theorise from an observatory position, as opposed to an internal point and feeling. Both angles, equally effective of course in understanding group identity and the single unit in a mass setting.
In Le Bon’s 'crowd theory,' masses, he argues, dissolve individuality, reducing people to primal, stereotyped units. My experiences aligns with his observation, the festival crowd (albeit a fleeting moment) became a metaphor for the broader societal tendency to categorise then dehumanise.
That unease took me back to my early feeling, awareness, then aversion to being assigned into a collective. It has been many years since, something I am no longer conscious of or dwell on.
based around a thought that resurfaced recently, mainly during a conversation with Ella (due to the current heightened climate)
Aanisa Jama
