Nadiya Hussain
Source: Public Domain
As someone who hates cooking, the only oven I’ve ever truly been interested in is the one Sylvia Plath stuck her head inside back in the ’60s.
Another lady who could do with cooking her own head at gas mark 7 is Nadiya Hussain, the alleged U.K. “national treasure” and TV chef who shot to fame back in 2015 after winning twee BBC cookery contest The Great British Bake-Off (The Great British Baking Show in America).
A British-born Muslim with Bangladeshi parents, who entered into an arranged marriage with a stranger aged only 19, Nadiya was immediately adopted as a poster girl for the supposed “successes” of multiculturalism and integration: Memories of al-Qaeda’s infamous How to Cook a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom! manual were to be banished forever in favor of How to Drizzle Honey Whilst Looking Like a Sunni!
Sheikh and Bake
As Nadiya whisked, polished, varnished, incinerated, and inflated her sponges on camera while wearing a colorful turban-style hijab, she was praised as being “visibly Muslim”; had she worn a full-blown burka, she would have been “invisibly Muslim.” Entire academic studies were penned about this Highly Important Fact, praising how Hijab Hussain was disrupting the traditionally “white space” of the kitchen, within which DEI-brainwashed U.K. housewives would never be able to look at a tea towel in the same way again.
“The strain of simultaneously belonging to two obviously incompatible cultures appears to have seriously pressure-cooked Nadiya’s brain.”
Throughout the next decade, the BBC ladled Nadiya out boring cookery show after boring cookery show, none of which were ever broadcast during Ramadan. And then, all of a sudden, this summer…it all stopped.
BBC bosses announced they were not renewing her contract, leaving Nadiya in a huff. She temporarily abandoned her social media, on the excuse that current events in Gaza were making it “hard to post about food in a positive way”; the starving Gazans probably feel similarly.
No longer constrained by rules requiring prominent BBC presenters to pretend to be politically neutral in public, Nadiya said she would be becoming “way more mindful” of which brands she lent her name to in future, “especially if they are brands that support the genocide.” Odd, I hadn’t noticed any pro-genocide messages on packets of Betty Crocker’s Light & Airy fairy-cake mix before.
Kitchen Sink Drama
Nadiya has now abruptly emerged from self-imposed purdah to make an appearance on a podcast, where, by “speaking her truth,” she hoped to demonstrate that, unlike many U.K. Muslims, she really had successfully adapted to various key aspects of contemporary British culture—mainly therapy culture and victim culture.
Previously, Nadiya had seemed content to be marketed as “A Muslim that was relatable, like the People’s Muslim, the people’s person of color, the digestible version of myself,” but no more.
Following her BBC dismissal, Nadiya was contacted by fans with messages like “Never mind, you got ten years’ worth of well-paid cookery shows and lucrative advertising contracts out of it, be grateful for what you’ve had.” But gratitude to Nadiya no longer appeared as a positive sentiment, but as a vile emotion of false consciousness, deliberately embedded within brown people’s minds by white neocolonialists to keep the darkies in their place:
Now my whole life as a child in an immigrant household, I used to think I had to be grateful all the time because I watched my family always grateful, grateful for being let in, grateful for having work, even if underpaid, grateful for safety, even if it meant silence…. But after a while it starts to get really heavy. Gratitude became something that I was expected to wear like a uniform [or a hijab?]…. But, here’s what I’ve come to understand, I am a human being and…I’m allowed to speak up, I’m allowed to exist…. So, gratitude has its place, but it shouldn’t be a muzzle…like a dog. We didn’t come here just to survive. We came here to live, to grow, to contribute, to belong. Not as a guest, but as a person who has rights and dreams and dignity just like everyone else…. So I’ve got here through hard work, through determination, through talent. So no, I won’t be grateful. I got here because I’m good at what I do.
To which one can only say: That’s gratitude for you.
The Absolute Nadiya
Did Nadiya Hussain really get ahead in life because of her “talent” for standing in a kitchen and then turning the oven on, though? Or did she actually get ahead because she was so “visibly Muslim” on a characteristically quaint British show about cake-baking, and thus stood as the embodied diversity wet dream of wanky liberal white media folk? Reader comments beneath one report about her complaints suggested most normal Brits thought the latter, ranging from “She should go and work for the TV in Kabul” to the surprisingly erudite “As Thomas Sowell said, eventually a lack of preferential treatment begins to look like discrimination.”
After being let go, Nadiya also complained that “It’s really difficult as a Muslim woman [to] work in an industry that doesn’t always support people like me or recognize my talent or full potential” like the imams would back in Bangladesh. But being “unsupported” was the last thing Nadiya was. She got an MBE (Muslim Being Excellent) award and was chosen to bake the official 90th-birthday cake for the Queen.
Alongside all her many cookbooks, like Nadiya Boils Some Soup, Nadiya Operates a Kettle, and Nadiya Places Objects Inside a Microwave, she is also a published novelist—her novels ghostwritten by someone else. Nadiya’s contribution was limited to meeting with the ghost “to brainstorm the baker’s vision” for some shitty 200-page chick-lit, before getting the full manuscript through her letter box six months later with her name printed on the front.
When authoress Jenny Colgan dared complain about this, rival lefty novelist Joanne Harris complained back on Nadiya’s behalf, saying this sounded like a privileged white scribe ranting about “foreigners stealing our jobs.” In “a world dominated by white celebrities” like the Kardashians, “is it really too much to allow Muslim girls this one successful role model?” Harris asked. If only a single Muslim girl “sees Nadiya Hussain on the cover of a book and tells herself ‘I could do that,’ then…it will have served its purpose.” But Nadiya Hussain couldn’t do that, could she? Someone else had to write it for her, that’s the whole point.
Turban Warrior
Another way in which Nadiya was wholly “unsupported” by her employers was the time some BBC producers agreed to literally move into her house and babysit her after she received death threats from viewers. So fearful is Nadiya that she will be murdered by racists who don’t like cakes that she now “lives in a house that’s overlooked by seven neighbors,” whom she demands keep a constant eye on her, like some kind of suburban panopticon. “If there are any problems, we’ve taught our kids to go out into the garden and shout,” Nadiya has said. Shout what? “Please adopt us!”
This is in contrast to the words of her early fame in 2016, when Nadiya enthused:
I love being British and I love living here; this is my home and it always will be regardless of all the other things that define me. This is my home and I want my kids to be proud of that and I don’t want them to grow up with a chip on their shoulder, so I live as positively as I can.
What changed? The death of George Floyd, which, by 2020, had made Nadiya realize instead that:
The truth is, I’m never going to blend in. They [the whitey scum running the British media] will always tower over me, they will always be whiter than me, and they will be more English than I am, and they’re men. I will never, ever blend in.
Nice of her to finally admit she isn’t truly English at all, then. When’s she handing back her passport?
Recipe for Disaster
Life in England (if her birth town of Luton really is still England) doesn’t sound like it has made Nadiya very happy. It appears to have made her mentally depressed—her onetime BBC oppressors even once cruelly allowed her to make a prime-time documentary about it all. Here she revealed that schoolgirl memories of having her head flushed down a toilet “for being dark” left her with PTSD so severe that “something as small as a supermarket substituting a delivery ingredient can set it off.” Surely only when they swap out the Prozac for a Pez dispenser?
Yet life back on the subcontinent may not have made Nadiya entirely euphoric either. If chocolate-gâteau-skinned Nadiya doesn’t like being bullied “for being dark,” she won’t much like the Indian caste system, will she? Even worse, she was sexually abused by a male cousin while visiting Bangladesh at age 5 but never told anyone until after fame arrived, as “I live in a community where the men are protected.” Thanks to all the other subcontinental child rapists moving over here, so do the white English.
The strain of simultaneously belonging to two obviously incompatible cultures appears to have seriously pressure-cooked Nadiya’s brain. Once she gained celebrity, “There was constant pressure to prove how British I was, how Bangladeshi, how Muslim…. People are going to say I’m not British enough to do a trifle, or not Bangladeshi enough to do certain curries, but I just don’t really care. I’m quite happy in my gray area.”
You don’t sound it. It must be the same for many other non-whites, transplanted from their old ancestral homelands and hurled like mismatched ingredients into the same colossal Weird Sisters’ mixing pot as yet more collateral human damage in this whole disastrous half-baked demographic experiment.
Perhaps the BBC should launch a new replacement for Nadiya’s now-canceled shows, in shape of a one-way culinary travelogue format called Cook Off Back Where You Came From.