Living in a hostile country: the ‘Migrant’ and ‘Unbelonging’ in contemporary Brexit literature

ABSTRACT

This article will assess the situation of migrant ‘others’ in Britain post-Brexit. It will develop my established research interests in the situation of EU citizens in the UK in a new direction by looking at the impact Brexit has had on non-EU citizens living in the UK. Utilising Rosa Mas Giralt's concept of unbelonging, it will offer a close-reading of Isabel Dupuy’s 2019 novel Living the Dream and argue that Brexit, generally considered a Britain and EU issue, has affected individual lives, problematised identities and destroyed family units beyond that usual demographic. This wider gaze will allow for a more rounded understanding of the impacts of Brexit.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexlit
• unbelonging
• othering
• Isabelle Dupuy

England has changed. These days it's difficult

to tell who's from around here and who's not.

Who belongs and who's a stranger.

(Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore, 3)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Brexit has not only severely affected the relations between Britain and mainland Europe but also impacted the lives of millions of EU citizens living and working in the UK. Formerly secure lives have been at best disrupted, at worst destroyed, as tens of thousands of EU citizens have made the decision to leave the UK after years or even decades of living and working there. The Migration Observatory shows that EU migration to the UK has fallen drastically since the Brexit Referendum in 2016 and that many EU nationals have left the UK for good over the past few years (https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/eu-migration-to-and-from-the-uk/). Additionally, the number of newly-incoming EU nationals to the UK has declined sharply; as Lisa O’Carrell outlines in The Guardian, this has ‘hit hospitality and support services hard’ (2022, n.p.). The effect of this ‘drain’ of EU workers on many different sectors in the UK, from hospitality, construction and agriculture to the care and medical sector, has been well-documented (see, for instance, Institute for Employment Studies, n.d.) and, as Richard Partington has reported, it has detrimentally impacted Britain's post-Covid economic recovery (2022, n.p.). What is far less well documented, however, is the personal effect on the individual lives of EU migrants in the UK. Literature can here fill a significant gap by focusing on EU characters and thus providing very different and diverse perspectives on the real-life effects of Brexit. Kristian Shaw, in his seminal monograph on Brexlit, points out that ‘literature, as a medium of empathetic identification, translation and relational understanding, is a key site for the discussion and evaluation of immigration, cultural difference and ethnonationalism’ (Shaw, 2021, 145). By engaging creatively and imaginatively with underrepresented lives, literature can increase knowledge of so-called ‘others’ and create empathy with them. Using Shaw's early definition of ‘BrexLit’ as ‘fictions that either directly respond or imaginatively allude to Britain's exit from the EU, or engage with the subsequent socio-cultural, economic, racial or cosmopolitical consequences of Britain's withdrawal’ (2018, 18) this article will firstly outline some prominent examples of ‘BrexLit’ and particularly their engagement with the figure of the EU migrant in the context of the pre- and post-referendum immigration debate, before moving on to the presentation of non-EU ‘incomers’ to the United Kingdom by focusing on Isabelle Dupuy’s 2019 novel Living the Dream. This novel, I argue, rewards detailed discussion as it does not fit into the usual category of ‘BrexLit’: instead of focusing predominantly on the lives of Britons and, occasionally, on those of EU citizens, it looks at the impact of Brexit on a housewife of Latin American origin and her close circle of family and friends. Starting with the epigraph by Caryl Phillips preceding this article, I will first engage with the terminology of ‘the stranger’ and place it in the context of the Brexit debate. I will argue that Brexit has affected individuals and families beyond EU incomers by focusing on Dupuy's main character Naomi, originally from Colombia but now a naturalised British citizen and married to Tom, an increasingly successful employee at an influential City investment firm. I will also discuss the complex and extremely conflicted character of Solange, Naomi's best friend, originally from Haiti but, like Naomi, now a nationalised Briton and married to Dutchman Andreas Wolf. I focus intensively on this single novel for a variety of reasons. First, there is, to date, no extended critical engagement with Dupuy’s 2019 novel. Second, and more importantly, I contend that, despite the fast growing genre of BrexLit, Dupuy's novel is significant because of its focus on non-European characters for whom the Brexit Referendum acts as a seismic shift that threatens and at least partially destroys the seemingly secure lives they have built in London. To support my analysis, I will utilise the as-yet little discussed concept of ‘Unbelonging’ by Rosa Mas Giralt, a Human Geographer and cross-disciplinary social researcher involved in the University of Leeds’ Migration Research Hub, as set out in her 2020 article, ‘The Emotional Geographies of Migration and Brexit: Tales of Unbelonging’. Giralt's sociological study of the emotional impact of Brexit on EU citizens is important for any study of Brexit Literature but I will develop her concept by applying it to non-EU characters such as Naomi and Solange in Living the Dream. My article will show that Dupuy's novel critically and emphatically engages with the impact of Brexit on the daily lives of characters of non-EU origin by affecting their sense of identity and threatening formerly secure family setups in a way that is otherwise still underrepresented in contemporary cultural representations on Brexit. It will conclude that characters such as Naomi and Solange find themselves in a liminal post-Brexit state of unbelonging: no longer a part of their native culture; not fully accepted by their adopted new culture; and ultimately also alienated from the people formerly closest to them.

The issue of immigration played an infamous part in the Vote Leave campaign and built on a long history of anti-immigration feeling in the UK that is gaining traction even now with the extended and extremely hostile debate about stopping small boats with migrants crossing the Channel (see, for instance, Adu & Syal, 2023, n.p.). It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the use of immigration in the run-up to the referendum of 2016 in detail but Andrew Glencross's explanation from 2016 might serve as a succinct summary: ‘traditional Euroscepticism […] tapped into a groundswell of anti-immigration sentiment determined to see the end of free movement’ (2016, 3). In short, the immigration issue in the Brexit debate conflated several separate points: the traditional Eurosceptism, prevalent among many especially Conservatives that had stood in the way of Britain meaningfully engaging with Europe joining the EEC prior to 1973; general ‘antipathies’, as Anshuman A. Mondal has outlined, ‘towards non-white migration from outside the EU’ (2018, 86); and a negative attitude towards the EU's ‘free movement’ principle that, in the eyes of many, increased migration into Britain to unsustainable levels. The tabloid press further fed this anti-immigration frenzy with fear-mongering headlines warning of Eastern European criminal gangs and unfettered immigration from newer EU member states such as Romania and Bulgaria (see, for instance, Daily Express, 27 February 2013, or Daily Mail, 30 December 2013). Immigration, as Levy, Aslan and Bironzo point out, became the most widely used pre-referendum media topic, using language that was not only predominantly negative but downright divisive and incendiary (2016, 22–23; see also Berberich, 2022, 154). Kristian Shaw outlines a concept by Jackie Hogan and Kristin Haltinner from 2015 that divides the perceived threat of immigration into two categories: those that focus on economic and security threats and those that seem to affect national identity (see Shaw, 2021, 32). The Brexit debate had seen a conflation of those different ‘threats’: uncontrolled numbers of EU migrant labourers were portrayed as threatening to the economic stability of the country via lower wages for migrant workers, while EU Free Movement was also perceived as making it easier for potential terrorists to enter the country. Simultaneously, all migrants, irrespective of whether they came from the EU or from further afield, were depicted as threatening a sense of a unified British national identity (a debate that did not take multiplicities of national identity or the benefit of multiculturalism into consideration). This led to an increasing – and increasingly hostile – politicization of the immigration debate, with incomers to the UK being referred to repeatedly as a ‘swarm’ (for instance by Nigel Farage on ITV's Good Morning Britain [see Mukherjee, 2018, 80], and David Cameron in 2015 [see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-33714282]), and that found particularly unpleasant expression in UKIP's distasteful ‘Breaking Point’ campaign poster of 2016 that openly conflated EU Free Movers with asylum seekers and refugees (the poster showed refugees queuing at the Croatian-Slovenian borders and suggested that EU Free Movement would further open the way to refugees from other parts of the world). This poster, in particular, conflated the different perceived ‘threats’ through migration outlined above: the people depicted in the queue were presented as endangering Britain's economy, Britain's safety and, ultimately, Britain's identity. Despite the fact that the poster was reported to the police at the time (see Stewart & Mason, 2016, n.p.), its imagery and implied rhetoric have – lamentably – persevered.

In light of this prominent and fraught immigration debate in the media and by politicians, it is unsurprising that literature makes a concerted effort to touch on the lives of ‘others’, if often only by highlighting their marginalised status. Shaw's book (see 154ff) admirably engages with short-story collections such as Breach (2016) by Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, or David Herd and Anna Pincus’ collections Refugee Tales I (2016), Refugee Tales II (2017), and Refugee Tales III (2019) that address the refugee crises and the plight of migrants coming through Britain's refugee centres. Brexit novels, by contrast, more specifically present EU characters, albeit also often on the margins of the narrative: a Romanian drowning victim in Linda Grant's A Stranger City (2019), for instance, or a Lithuanian cleaner, assaulted for speaking her own language in public in Jonathan Coe's Middle England (2018, 381). Amanda Craig's The Lie of the Land (2017) focuses in some detail on the stark situation of Polish migrant workers doing long shifts at low pay in a Devon pie factory. One author who combines narratives of EU migrants with those of refugees is Ali Smith whose Seasonal Quartet – Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020) – highlights the marginalised situation of EU citizens and the hostile environment all incomers to Britain face: there is, for instance, Paulina, the Latvian nurse in Summer who is preparing to ‘[leave] Britain soon’ after living and working in the UK for 14 years (Smith, 2021, 143) or Daniel Gluck, the 101-year-old Holocaust survivor who, in Autumn and Summer, recounts his experiences of being a refugee in war-time Britain. Similarly, Spring focuses on a refugee and asylum-seeker ‘detention centre’: the narrative here focuses on central character Brittaney – whose name is certainly not a coincidence – a young guard in the centre who has been, if not brutalised then at least de-sensitised by her environment and who displays a condescending attitude towards the people effectively in her care who she treats with disdain: she dehumanises the detainees by referring to them as ‘deets’, short for ‘detainee’ but also reminiscent of Deet pest repellent; she does not address them by their proper names; and she ridicules their use of English (Smith, 2019, 160). In a chapter on Romanian examples of ‘BrexLit’, Roxana Patras has referred to the kind of writing that foregrounds the migrants’ experience as ‘migrature’: a, in her words, ‘hybrid term’ (Patras, 2022, 177) that focus on the migrants’ characters and their attitudes towards their host country, in particular their struggles to find jobs and housing, to make ends meet, and to be accepted for contributing to their new home culture. Baroness Young of Hornsey has commented that ‘There's a role for literature, so adept at humanising big questions and creating emotional and cultural landscapes, in metaphorically poking us all in the ribs and urging us to start thinking critically and becoming politically active again’ (Young, 2018, xviii). A focus on Brexit ‘migrature’ consequently gives a voice to those who were not given a voice in the Brexit Referendum or in its aftermath, who have been reviled and who no longer feel ‘at home’ in their country of choice. By presenting their readers with these different voices, experiences and viewpoints, these books help paint a more comprehensive picture of the effects of Brexit on everyday lived experiences.

Brexit has also generated a new critical field, predominantly in the social sciences: books that engage with the road towards Brexit, the potential reasons behind it, the political truths of it. Early titles include Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (2017) by Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin, and Paul F. Whiteley or Graham Taylor's Understanding Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (2017). Fintan O'Toole's seminal Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) situates Brexit in post-imperial nostalgia while Kevin O’Rourke's A Short History of Brexit: From Brentry to Backstop (2019) provides social and historical context. Increasingly, however, there is now also cultural engagement with Brexit and, in particular, the literature it has engendered. Robert Eaglestone's collection Brexit and Literature. Critical and Cultural Responses of early 2018 was the first academic study of the new subgenre of BrexLit that brought together academics discussing both individual works of BrexLit as well as their social and cultural context. Since then, Kristian Shaw's previously-mentioned Brexlit. British Literature and the European Project (2021) has been instrumental in shaping academic discourse and setting the parameters for pre- and post-Brexit literature. More recently, Dulcie Everitt's BrexLit. The Problem of Englishness in pre- and post-Brexit Referendum Literature (2022) assesses the impact of Brexit on national identity and, specifically, English identity while Hywel Dix's excellent Compatriots or Competitors? Welsh, Scottish, English and Northern Irish Writing and Brexit in Comparative Contexts (2022) uniquely focuses on British writing often marginalised in the overriding Englishness-debate of Brexit: that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is now also a growing canon of work looking, in particular, at the position of EU citizens within British literature and culture. The focus in these works is firmly on the experiences of European migrants. Vedrana Veličković's Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Imagining New Europe (2019) assesses the cultural representations of Eastern Europeans in contemporary British literature and film. My own collection Brexit and the Migrant Voice brings together scholars from European countries as diverse as Portugal and Italy, Romania and Lithuania, Finland and Germany (among others) in order to give voice to the experiences of citizens from those countries and their wide-ranging attitudes towards Brexit. Ben Dew and Maggie Bowers’ forthcoming Polish Culture in Britain – Literature and History, 1772 to the Present (2023) assesses the legacy of centuries of Polish life in Britain as well as discussing Polish literature on Britain. Consequently, this article will build on all of these various works but widen the lens by analysing Living the Dream's representation of a Latin American character who has come to the UK not as a refugee, not as a migrant worker but in order to start a family with her British husband. Brexit, nevertheless, forms an integral part of the narrative as the fall-out from the Referendum begins to derail lives. Characters like Naomi or Solange are not often represented in contemporary literature and certainly are not usually the central characters. At the risk of generalising, the assumption often seems to be that Brexit affects, in the first instance, the lives of EU nationals wishing to live and work in the UK, as well as those of British citizens hoping to build or retain their lives in the EU. However, as this article will argue, Brexit affects everybody living in the United Kingdom, and Dupuy's novel provides one way to understand the wider complexities of this.

The concept of ‘the stranger’ is a good starting point for the following discussion given that migration has become such a hotly-debated topic since the Referendum. As I will show in the following paragraph, the Brexit and migration debate resulted in a comprehensive ‘othering’ of all incomers into Britain. As my starting point, I will use Bülent Diken's argument that ‘I want to view immigrants, foreigners, refugees etc. all as “strangers”’ (Diken, 1998, 123). In my reading, this is a highly problematic statement that tries to force a ‘one size fits all’ approach without considering different backgrounds, different stories, or, difference in general. The epigram to this article, from Caryl Phillips’ 2003 novel A Distant Shore, serves as a good starting point for this discussion as it highlights the stark demarcation line between those who are considered ‘natives’ and thus ‘belong here’, and incomers who are ‘strangers’, ‘others’ who, by definition, do not belong. Phillips’ narrative brings together a cast of diverse characters in the North of England; the focus is on two ‘newcomers’ to the village of Weston: Dorothy, a retired school teacher, and Solomon, a refugee from an unnamed African country who has been left deeply traumatised by fleeing his native land and the hostile immigration experience he has endured in England. Both Dorothy and Solomon are considered ‘strangers’ in Weston, a parochial community that prides itself on its inhabitants looking out for each other, but that turns out to be narrow-minded and openly racist. While Dorothy is eyed with mild suspicion – an elderly, retired white woman living on her own and who does not yet know many people in the neighbourhood – Solomon, who works as a resident handyman on the development of Stoneleigh, is perceived as a threat and met with open hostility simply because of his race: items posted through his letter box include letters with razor blades sewn into them, telling him to ‘go away’ (Phillips, 2003, 44) and dog excrement. Eventually, local thugs murder him in cold blood. Sara Ahmed critiques Diken's approach because it actively ‘functions to elide the substantive differences of being displaced’ and ‘works to conceal differences’ (Ahmed, 2000, 5). Applying Diken's concept to Dorothy and Solomon would gloss over the fact that one of them is white, the other black, and that this is the sole reason the locals’ attitude towards them differs so dramatically.

Nevertheless, this homogenisation of others that Diken appears to advocate, is exactly what has happened during and after the Brexit referendum: politicians and tabloid journalists alike fostered a discourse that demarcated all incomers to Britain, irrespective of origin and reason for their move, as ‘strangers’, as ‘other’ from the normative Briton, and thus eyed with suspicion. Mondal convincingly argues that ‘fear and loathing of African, Middle Eastern and Asian refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean into the EU was sutured to arguments against migration of EU citizens’ (2018, 86). By extension, EU nationals living in the UK were suddenly ‘otherised’ alongside migrants from other parts of the world. In fact, the terminology for them changed, too: no longer ‘free movers’, they suddenly found themselves labelled ‘migrants’.

It is in this context that Rosa Mas Giralt's concept of unbelonging is particularly helpful. Giralt states that Brexit has ‘“visibilised” a particular version of the politics of belonging in the UK, transforming EU/EEA citizens into immigrants and questioning their “right to belong” (2020, 30). Many cultural commentators have discussed and assessed the initial affective responses from EU nationals after the Referendum result. Helena Carrapico refers to the ‘emotional turmoil that accompanied this change’ for the Portuguese ex-pat community living in the UK, stating that ‘they felt increased hostility towards them, as well as the need to avoid drawing attention to their migrant status’ (2022, 49, 55); Rosario Arias, talking about Spanish migrants’ post-Referendum emotions, lists words such as ‘uncertainty, instability, doubts [and] anxiety’ (2022, 66); and Jopi Nyman, discussing Finnish experiences, highlights that Brexit ‘disrupted their sense of belonging and shattered their sense of privilege as “White Nordic” migrants’ (2022, 122). All of these emotional responses – shock, disbelief, fear, anger – affected EU nationals’ sense of self in post-Brexit Britain: overnight, they felt they had gone from respected and liked neighbours to vilified strangers in a country they had thought of as their own. Giralt labels this process unbelonging and explains that it is ‘characterised by two key processes: the acquisition of “migrantness” and the non-recognition of the contributions and efforts made to belong’ (2020, 30). The important point here is that prior to Brexit EU nationals had not considered themselves ‘migrants’; they were Free Movers with an EU-guaranteed right to move anywhere within the (then) 28 member states. She refers to ‘four […] patterns of belonging’ as identified by Ranta and Nancheva in 2019: ‘“breakaway” (integrationist or assimilationist), cosmopolitan (beyond nationality-based belonging), in-between (belonging in both sending and receiving societies) and patriotic (strong attachment to community of nationality) (2020, 33) which outline different approaches to trying to fit into a new home country. The most important fall-out from Brexit, in Giralt's assessment, was the fact that EU nationals suddenly had to consider themselves ‘migrants’, too. This took away what Nyman describes as their ‘sense of privilege’ as Free Movers with inbuilt rights and made them part of the much wider demographic of ‘migrants’ stripped of individuality, identity and, mostly, agency.

While Giralt's concept focuses solely on EU citizens, non-EU migrants have, arguably, always felt more ambivalent about ‘belonging’ in the UK, having long been subjected to stringent immigration policies and a government-driven ‘hostile environment’ (see, for instance, Grierson, 2018). It is for precisely this reason that Giralt's concept is so useful to apply to Dupuy's novel Living the Dream and, in particular, her character Naomi as a non-EU migrant. In the following analysis, I will discuss how Naomi's identity is impacted by the lead up to and the result of the Brexit referendum and how her carefully constructed and maintained sense of Colombian-British migrant life falls down like a house of cards in a complex and revealing example of ‘unbelonging’ in action beyond the usual parameters of Brexit discourse.

Living the Dream, published in 2019, can be included in the rapidly growing subgenre of BrexLit for its many references to the Referendum evident from Chapter One: ‘Someone had taped a blue referendum poster with yellow stars on the inside of the window: Vote IN on 23 June’ (Dupuys, 2019, 18). It can also be labelled a postcolonial novel, in particular via its engagement with the rags-to-riches story of Naomi's friend Solange, who has moved from a Haitian slum to a prestigious and successful life in London. It is, certainly, a novel about class, about the lives of a business elite in London that has neither time nor empathy for outsiders or those who do not want to subscribe to their fast and furious lifestyles. In particular, though, it is the story of a migrant, Naomi, a mixed-race Colombian, and her marriage to Englishman Tom.

Dupuy complicates Naomi's identity from the outset: a born and raised Colombian, her identity is a palimpsest of different influences and heritages. Having been a migrant in both New York and London for more than a dozen years has further affected her. After long trying to acquire a layer of assimilated Englishness in order to ‘fit in’ better, her origins are becoming harder for her to grasp. The result is that, most of the time, she does not fully know who she is: ‘I lack a point of reference. Everytime I look in the mirror the same image confronts me, an alien, a multi-breed conceived in violence, lust and sorrow. African, European, a lost Guayabero ancestor and behind this face, my eyes marking time … ’ (Dupuy, 2019, 14). Naomi's uncertainty about her own identity and sense of self comes from having moved about so much, but also from her family's deeper history of relocation, forced or otherwise, in imperial contexts with long-term legacies. In every location, she has tried to shed more of her Latino inheritances in order to blend in better; the result is an uncertainty that stands in sharp contrast to her husband Tom, who, apart from a short spell in New York, has always lived in England. In response to her fearful question what he sees when he looks into the mirror, his answer is assured and condescending: ‘What a silly question. … I see me. Tom. A man. A human being’ (2019, 14). Tom's response is symptomatic of their different life experiences: as a white British man he never felt he had to adapt or change, but as a mixed-race South American woman, Naomi has always felt the need to adapt to people's expectations. Her approach to migration has consequently always been ‘integrationist or assimilationist’ (Giralt, 2020, 33), trying to appear more British than South American, if not in looks then certainly in deeds and in speech. The one thing she is sure of is her ability to act according to expectations levelled at her. She reflects that ‘I perform well’ precisely because ‘I come from further away’ and thus ‘take nothing for granted’ (Dupuy, 2019, 13). Naomi is acutely aware of the need to act differently from how she might do instinctively. Yet this comes at the expense of her psychological equilibrium and her individuality. On the opening page of the novel she confides, ‘yet the ground keeps shaking beneath my feet no matter how small my steps’ (2019, 13) and this sentence sets the tone for the narrative that, slowly but steadily, witnesses the further disintegration of Naomi's sense of self.

Naomi's anxious and painstakingly-managed identity construction involves lessons in ‘Englishness’ from her next-door neighbour, Harriet who ‘had taken it upon herself to enlighten me as to the ways of the English’ (2019, 42). While Harriet's suggestions seem well-intentioned, they usually start with the phrase ‘in this country’ followed by pointing out something she feels Naomi has done wrong: ‘In this country […] we tend to our gardens; we don't allow children to scream and shout’ (2019, 42). Harriet's comments thus always ‘other’ Naomi and her actions; the underlying message is that Naomi's ‘strangerness’ to the ways of the English leads her to neglect her garden or permit her child to run riot. Such comments do not lead to Naomi becoming a gardener, but she nevertheless stores them carefully and tries to adapt her behaviour according to what her neighbour might expect of an English rather than a Colombian woman. This is also evident in the way Naomi speaks, in particular when meeting well-to-do fellow mothers from her son's expensive private school. While at home, Naomi considers herself safe and unobserved; this allows her to occasionally let her guard down and she often ‘feels [her] accent thickening’ (2019, 21). Outside her own four walls, however, she takes great care to pronounce every word in a way that avoids any trace of an accent, referring to her carefully enunciated ‘djes’ or ‘dyies’ (to recreate a drawled Received Pronunciation ‘yes’) as her ‘best Eliza Doolittle imitation’ (2019, 32; 86). Like Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney girl coached to speak and act like a lady, Naomi is also aware that in order to blend into the society she and her husband move in – private-school mums and hedge-fund managers – she constantly needs to present a carefully-constructed façade that requires 24/7 maintenance. Rather than feeling secure in herself, her identity becomes purely performative.

Naomi's strategies to ‘belong’ fit into what Giralt terms ‘tactics of belonging’ and ‘strategies of self-securisation’ (2020, 32). Giralt explains that EU nationals started applying these strategies in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in order to secure their status in the UK and blend in more. Naomi, as a non-EU native, had to take recourse to them much earlier to assimilate more. As her friend Solange puts it so succinctly: ‘[we both] have British passports. I guess that's the advantage of not being European. We couldn't sit on the fence; we had to take the plunge’ (Dupuy, 2019, 189). As such, both Naomi and Solange fit into the ‘integrationist or assimilationist’ ‘“breakaway”’ [pattern] of belonging set out by Ranta and Nacheva (in Giralt, 2020, 33). Both try to deny their South American and Haitian identities in order to appear more British. Both have taken careful steps to further legalise their position, and try to assimilate even further by taking British citizenship. Naomi's explanation of the path to acquire the ‘brandnew burgundy red passport’ (Dupuy, 2019, 22) that comes with it exemplifies the difficulty of living and working in the UK that has always affected non-EU migrants (but that, as a direct result of the Brexit referendum, has now also been extended to EU citizens):

after one three-month tourist visa, one year of six-month temporary resident visas, seven years of Indefinite Leave to Remain visas and a citizenship class where I had to learn about the Welsh parliament and what the ‘British’ reaction is to a man touching your girlfriend in a pub (no it is not to go find your terrorist friend and plot to blow up the pub). Then came three recommendations by ‘real’ British people, ten attempts at getting two passport photos where both my irises fit on the same ruler and a swearing-in ceremony where I had to choose between the Queen and God for my allegiance. (2019, 22)

Naomi's narrative clearly shows how the process of ‘naturalisation’ always assumes the worst of the applicants (i.e. having terrorist friends and murderous intentions) and are a clear example of the ‘hostile environment’ Theresa May first announced during her tenure as Home Secretary in 2012. As Jamie Grierson outlines in an analysis in The Guardian, this reflects the ‘broader rancour towards migrants in the UK’ (Grierson, 2018, n.p.) and reflects the perceived threat to British national identity I outlined earlier on: migrants who wish to become British not only have to learn about British traditions and institutions but have to internalise them. When in Britain, do as the Britons do – or risk being continuously marginalised. Naomi's and her husband Tom's reactions to her British passport vastly differ. For him, it indicates that ‘You’re British now’ (Dupuy, 2019, 22), as if, in one fell swoop, this piece of official cardboard and plastic could undo Naomi's Colombian identity. Secure in his own British masculinity that has never been put to the test and that he has never had to interrogate, Tom believes that the process of naturalisation is clear-cut and a simple, with a straightforward and unequivocal result: British now, Colombian no longer. Naomi's perspective on the swearing in ceremony and the passport are much more realistic: ‘Of course, none of this made me British’ (2019, 22). For her, it is evident that while the passport might provide more legal rights, allow her to vote, and to end the agonising process of having to reapply for short-term visas, it does not make her any less ‘foreign’ in the eyes of many of her fellow citizens, nor does it allow her to feel she belongs.

While Naomi's identity is thus conflicted from the outset, she uses her marriage as a protective shield to mask her own ‘foreignness’ – ‘I’ve been here a while, nine years now. […] My husband is English’ (2019, 31) – as if this could give her more legitimacy. But Tom's ambition makes their relationship increasingly fraught, so that Naomi is always trying to ‘make him proud so he’ll never regret choosing me’ (2019, 22). This immediately highlights that she considers him superior in their relationship: he chose her, rather than she him, or they each other. As such, their marriage, though initially very much based on love, does not seem to be that of equal partners. Naomi stays at home to look after the children, while Tom is the provider on an ever-grander scale as he joins the hedge fund company of ruthless Reginald Danton. Regular throwaway comments such as ‘What a silly question’ or ‘Don't be silly’ (2019, 14; 22) show Tom's condescension, and the superior position he assumes for himself in the family unit, not only as the provider but also as the white, middle-class Englishman who thinks he can correct the errors of his Latina wife. Tom seeks fulfilment in his career – without realising that this further impacts Naomi's already fragile sense of identity. Moving in the exalted circles of filthy-rich investors, in locations that she had previously only known from TV programmes such as Downton Abbey, Naomi realises that they are turning into ‘different people’ and that ‘I stopped walking the way I used to. The ground had shifted. I now took smaller, more hesitant steps’ (2019, 111). Naomi's confidence decreases further; she no longer feels carefree and loved in her own house but finds herself, on a daily basis, ‘report[ing]’ to her husband ‘what the boys and I had accomplished’ each day (2019, 112). Tom's new professional life is so driven by the need for results and success that she feels that she and the children constantly have to perform well in order to deserve and secure their position within Tom's life. She realises that her life ‘had become a series of tasks and tests and I had the vague feeling I was failing them all’ (2019, 112). Giralt explains that ‘belonging also relates to being recognised’ by those around us (2020, 37). However, Naomi feels no longer recognised and appreciated by her husband. Her increasing sense of estrangement from his new lifestyle is then considerably exacerbated by Brexit.

Mention of the Referendum occurs throughout the narrative, in particular as Naomi is surrounded by many fellow ‘non-Brits’. The group of fellow mums she befriends contains a Greek woman; her best friend Solange's husband Andreas is Dutch; some of Tom's colleagues are Europeans. Although Naomi and Tom start moving in a circle that predominantly consists of rich upper-middle class Englishmen and women, they live in a multicultural society, thus fitting into Ranta and Nancheva's second pattern of belonging, ‘cosmopolitan (beyond nationality-based belonging)’ (Giralt, 2020, 33). While Naomi is initially oblivious to the upcoming referendum, Tom is, at first, violently opposed to it and considers it nothing but a political exercise to maintain power:

Bollocks […] This referendum is the latest trick of the upper classes to keep their power. They’ve lost their City jobs to better qualified French and Italians. They’ve lost the law firms to the Americans. And the Eastern Europeans are visible enough for them to pretend that the EU should scare the rest of the population. Bollocks, all of it. (2019, 78)

His outburst identifies migration as at least one of the motivations behind Brexit: the fact that better-qualified incomers to the country can suddenly gain the jobs that the British elite had, over centuries, felt entitled to themselves. This suggests that he is aware how much the issue of ‘migration’ is going to be politicised in the run up to the vote. Even attending a Brexit debate in a club on St James's Square, where Tom and Naomi are the only ones indicating their plan to vote for ‘Remain’, does not revise his conviction that ‘the Remain vote would win’ (2019, 126). But Tom's stance soon changes when he realises that his new employer Danton is actively campaigning for Brexit. He unquestioningly submits to Danton's knowledge – not to mention company orders – but overreaches himself when he tries to pass these to his wife: ‘“on careful thought, I think Naomi and I will vote for Brexit after all on the 23rd”’ (2019, 151). Tom's behaviour here shows that he has ceased to consider Naomi an individual with her own opinions and, importantly, her own rights; she now seems a mere appendage for him, to do as he demands. This is important as the general discourse in connection with migration has also tended to no longer see incomers to the country as individuals with individual stories, backgrounds and opinions. For Tom, voting for Brexit is a strategic decision to ensure his further success in Danton's company where he is coming under increasing pressure; for Naomi, the referendum is becoming something altogether bigger: a vote for integrity, for inclusion, for open-mindedness. Because she has always been attuned to shifts and changes in identity, she realises that Tom is allowing his work to affect his identity and individuality that, contrary to her own, she has always considered to be safe and unchanging.

Tom and Naomi's marriage breaks down over Brexit – albeit briefly. For her, the referendum and Tom's insistence she vote ‘leave’ are a turning point that she uses to claw back some of her own autonomy and independence: ‘I went to vote by myself. I scratched my X with a vengeance on the Remain box’ (2019, 177). The result shocks her as she once again sees the precariousness of her situation. In spite of her British passport, she realises that her position has been ‘weakened’ (2019, 189) and that people might start singling out those they consider ‘foreign’. For Naomi and her other international friends, the Brexit referendum is an act of betrayal by family, friends and neighbours. Giralt explains that the referendum created ‘a sense of having been betrayed by different sides of the imagined national community’ and that ‘the sense of betrayal and the “in-securitisation” of their everyday lives and futures expresses itself in the form of a deeply felt rejection by the social place which they call home and the de-stabilisation of the emotional and social bonds which they had developed in it’ (2020, 36; 37). This suggest that incomers to the country always construct a version of the host country for themselves, one that fits their hopes and aspirations, and that they are striving to fit into. The ‘Leave’ result destabilised this vision of the country and the place of individual incomers in it. For Naomi, the realisation that her own husband, her in-laws, friends and family have voted ‘LEAVE’ is an active act of betrayal, a sign that she is not welcome or wanted in the country even by those she considered to be her family and friends, and it is this that leads to her feeling of unbelonging: no longer part of her husband's life, separated by ‘difference’ from friends and acquaintances and, by extension, the country she has called home for years.

Living the Dream ends on an ambiguous note as there is further fall-out from the Brexit referendum when Naomi realises that Solange, too, has voted ‘LEAVE’. Solange, the British Haitian, has used the vote to wreak revenge on her Dutch husband who has left her for his younger Dutch mistress. This betrayal by Andreas unhinges Solange: she aligns herself with the small majority of British people who have voted against multiculturalism and free movement in an act that can only be seen as an attempt to assert her own newly-confirmed Britishness over her husband's precarious Europeanness. Simultaneously, though, she also seems to take recourse to stereotypical versions of ‘Haitianness’, dabbling, seemingly, in Voodoo: this act further ‘others’ and distances her from her British friends and neighbours, including Naomi. When Naomi finds an evil-smelling bottle attached to a leg of her desk she concludes, ‘I was Caribbean enough to know what this was. A maldicion, a curse’, and that ‘it had to be Solange[‘s]’. Henceforth, her formerly best friend is reduced to the term ‘Crazy bitch’ (Dupuy, 2019, 211).

For Naomi, this betrayal by a fellow migrant – both the Leave vote and the perceived ‘curse’ – is worse than the betrayal by her husband and other friends. With Solange, she had felt real kinship via their shared migrant experiences but the referendum result has heightened her sense of vulnerability. Unwilling to contemplate returning to Colombia, a country and culture she has long tried to distance herself from via her painstaking efforts to ‘assimilate’ into British society, and similarly unwilling to live as a single mother, she again attempts to find stability via her husband. Through Tom, Naomi once again seeks a legitimacy of sorts, a continued right to remain in the country and to feel part of a wider community. After a few weeks of separation, she returns to the family home, picking up where she left off: performing as Tom's wife, attending receptions and events with him as part of his life at Danton's company. Their reunion, however, is problematical as it appears to come at the expense of the remnants of Naomi's free will and identity: Tom surprises her with a diamond necklace which she at first rejects angrily but ultimately accepts. More troubling, however, are Tom's comments: ‘I forget where you come from, I’m sorry. It must be terrifying to you, all of this’ (2019, 206). By ‘all this’, however, Tom does not mean Brexit, the Leave result he has been supporting, and the very real consequences this will have for any non-native living in the country. No, by ‘all this’ he means the luxury and riches the diamond necklace represents and which she, as a migrant from a poor background, is not in a position to comprehend. With this insincere apology, as well as his term of endearment, ‘my dark beauty’ (2019, 206) Tom ultimately ‘otherises’ Naomi more than he has ever done, and their future life together is clearly mapped out: Tom, the white British male, will make decisions for the family; Naomi, more than before, is relegated to the role of submissive wife, equipped with enough money to deck herself out luxuriously when his work social events require it, but without any independent agency. Giralt talks about the ‘lack of understanding or support’ for the needs of EU citizens and migrants by their nearest or dearest who supported ‘Leave’ in the referendum and explains that it ‘can be understood as a rupture of […] mutual principles of recognition’ (2020, 37). In Living the Dream, Tom utterly fails to recognise Naomi's needs; he thinks providing her with an impressive house and plenty of money is all that is required of him and all that she needs to feel secure. Not only does he fail to recognise her needs, he fails to recognise her: he does not want to engage with her as an independent woman, but rather as an appendage he can order about. Naomi consequently acknowledges that ‘his words in the car had not so much convinced as defeated me’ (2019, 209). Although they are, de facto, back together, their estrangement is complete, as is Naomi's sense of unbelonging. Driven back to Tom solely from a need to belong, even this consolation is unforthcoming.

Giralt explains that ‘the dynamic nature of unbelonging by which efforts and yearnings to belong to particular places or social spaces maybe be undone through time’ (2020, 42) but she is not very hopeful about this. Her research has shown that the majority of those queried about the fall-out from Brexit feel that their disillusion with the country is permanent, a betrayal that cannot be forgiven or forgotten. She talks about the need to rebuild an ‘emotional citizenry’ amongst those who ‘unwillingly [stay] put in body but unbonded with the UK in mind’ (2020, 41). The same applies to Naomi, who tries to rebuild her emotional bond with Tom by returning to their old life but, ultimately, feels ‘unbonded’ with him in her mind. This becomes obvious at the very ending of the novel, when she accompanies him to Danton's birthday celebrations in the Bahamas where she feels more out of place than ever. Her efforts to look particularly nice during a reception on board a superyacht are left unacknowledged by Tom who had also omitted to tell her about the dress code onboard the yacht: no shoes, short dresses. The only woman in a long dress that, without her high heeled shoes, is now too long for her, Naomi stumbles around the yacht, having to hold up her dress all the time for fear of falling over its hem or having other guests step on it. She reflects that ‘the other women looked sexy and confident in their shorter, brightly printed and embroidered tunic-style dresses and their naked, carefully pedicured feet’ (2019, 236). Once again, she feels the odd-one-out in this gathering, and during her time on board, she sees Tom making advances to another woman, Suzie, Danton's niece who is everything Naomi is not: ‘porcelain skin, loose auburn waves: Central London beauty. You could hear the fees in her voice, the perfectly rounded vowels, the studied pitch so that her voice sounded rich and sharp at the same time’ (2019, 224). It is at this party that Naomi seems to decide to let Tom go for good, to allow him to be with Suzie who, in her words, is ‘Tom Barnes’ kind of girl, just like I used to be. And she may be better suited to the programme than I ever was’ (2019, 240). Naomi realises that her place is no longer at Tom's side, in a luxury lifestyle dominated by the will of his fickle employer where she will never be recognised for who she is. She finally accepts that ‘My life lay elsewhere’ (2019, 241) before jumping overboard. The last words of the novel are ‘the water was warm’ (2019, 241) but while Naomi is, quite literally, adrift at sea, just as she had symbolically been throughout her life with Tom, it is at this moment that she seems to have (re)found herself and a willingness to build a life of her own.

At the beginning of this article I referred to the negative migration rhetoric applied by politicians that demonises migrants as a ‘swarm’ or an ‘invasion’. This highly problematic and populist rhetoric turns individual migrants into a faceless mass, a tsunami of people stripped of their humanity and individuality. Brexit has considerably contributed to this kind of discourse; individual stories have been replaced with mere numbers – how much immigration has risen or fallen, for instance. This article has sought to show the ongoing need for, and value of, individual stories of migration, because they reveal how individuals are impacted by their experiences, and how migration affects identity. Using Isabelle Dupuy's thought-provoking novel, I have demonstrated that individual migrants’ identity is starkly affected by their attempts to adapt to the expectations of their new host countries: personal identity can buckle under the pressure of ‘assimilating’ or ‘integrating’ at all cost. Even though Naomi Barnes seems at first to be in a loving relationship, her perceived difference in status makes her subjugate herself to her husband in her perpetual quest to better fit in and to find legitimisation in the country. Brexit affects their relationship as he changes allegiances due to his new career: loyalty to an employer rather than a wife who is already struggling with the daily demands of living in a new country. Giralt's concept of unbelonging has been vital in demonstrating the various stages of Naomi's disillusion with and her eventual and hard-won conscious ‘uncoupling’ from both her husband and her new country. Sara Ahmed poignantly asks, ‘how can we understand the relationship between identity and strangerness in lived embodiment without creating a new “community of strangers?”’ (2000, 6). The answer can be found in fiction that successfully fills a gap in being able to depict individual stories and individual lives. More narratives such as Living the Dream are needed to remind us of the real struggles faced by those who move to a different country to start a new life. By extending the recent and welcome focus on the plight of EU citizens to consider one example of a complex wider world of experiences, this article traces the difficulties of belong and unbelonging in Brexit and post-Brexit Britain, while firmly resisting the construction of a single category of ‘strangerness’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).