On an overcast day in Oxford in 2003, a few weeks into the first year of an English literature degree, I found myself doing something out of character. I broke a rule. Rather than going to my scheduled tutorial, rather than sitting on the ungiving sofa and offering halting analysis of Middlemarch, I slotted a note into my tutor’s pigeonhole and darted out of Wadham College. I hadn’t told anyone I was going; I was unsure if I would ever come back.

I was unaccustomed to disobedience. I went to a large, fiercely aspirational comprehensive where for years I had been a picture of compliance. I had exceeded predicted grades and been garlanded at prize-givings. It followed that the result of such cheerful tractability and success should be continued tractability and success at the University of Oxford, the very place I was fleeing.

As I rushed in my battered Converse, my heart thudded in weird patterns. I kept dropping things, stopping to scoop up my belongings. I couldn’t wait to get back to London, to my own bed, to my schoolfriends who were grownup-ly working in bars and bookshops, saving for gap-year adventures. I flopped on to a seat on the coach, alternating between weeping and snoring all the way down the M40. It was a bloody awful end to a bloody awful few weeks.

Before I got to university, I had imagined that the much mythologised pressure of the place would come from on high: disciplinarian, gowned fellows would swoop around making all manner of unrealistic intellectual and organisational demands. But, on arrival, I found it was other students and their attitude to work that was most tricky.

In the junior common room, over sweaty brie and cranberry paninis, the writing of essays was exclusively referred to as having an “essay crisis”. At dinner, in the grand dining hall, panicked girls asked how many paragraphs I had managed to write, how many more I intended to write that evening, if I was gearing up for an “all-nighter”. Was I worried about not having enough to say? Wasn’t I concerned that my ideas might be too thin? The whole business of thinking about texts – something I loved – was reframed as a pursuit full of risk and without pleasure.

When studying for my A-levels, I had worked in a much more self-contained fashion. I did my homework in peace and quiet at the dining table. I stopped for regular dance breaks, stomping around the front room to MTV Base. But at Oxford the production of work came with an oppressive theatricality. I started to secrete myself away in my room, rather than engage in yet more competitive grandstanding about word counts.

I told Mum I wanted to leave. She snorted before saying, ‘No. That is not the answer at all’

But there were other aspects of my fellow freshers’ behaviour that bothered me. I am not now, nor have I ever have been, a particular fan of Eminem’s oeuvre. But throughout that first fortnight the sentiments of the curt line “y’all act like you never seen a white person before” from The Real Slim Shady circled through my mind. The interactions I had with several students made me feel that my blackness was something curious, difficult to handle.

At one of the endless icebreaker events, a history student told me that I must be really “into African beats” (what even are African beats?). A girl from another college launched into an expectant monologue about her gap year in Togo, keen to hear of my own “experiences of Africa”. My hair – arrayed in a cloud of messy twists – was the subject of profound speculation and inquiry. When I ventured into other Oxford colleges, the porters who guarded the entrances eyed me quizzically and checked my ID card with suspicion. In all fairness, my blackness was a surprise. As far as I could tell, in 2003 I was the only first-year undergraduate black male student reading English literature in the entire university. In my college, I was one of only two black freshers. (According to the official records, there were 21 British students who identified as black who accepted a place at Oxford that year. The total number of British students admitted was 2,940.)

Lots of my closest friends at school were white and middle class, as were most of my teachers. So being in the minority was not unfamiliar. But in my A-level English class, there were people with Jamaican, Spanish, Polish, English, Pakistani, Irish and Nigerian heritages. Whiteness was surrounded by all kinds of racial diversity. So the very particular, ubiquitous whiteness of Oxford – a whiteness so self-confident that it didn’t notice itself, never needed to think critically about itself – struck the 18-year-old me.

Michael Donkor with his mother in Ghana. Photograph: courtesy of Michael Donkor

On many occasions in those first few weeks, it was my blackness that fellow newcomers found worthy of (awkward) conversation. Part of me now thinks about these interactions in an amused way; often, it was youthful gaucheness. But I also have to be honest: those encounters – or microaggressions – left me feeling alienated and conflicted. Making these strangers face up to the cheapness of their interest in my heritage seemed unfriendly. So I remained silent, smiling, complicit. I knew that, if I were to launch into an anti-racist challenge, there were very few people of colour to come to my aid. I was fraught and sad, full of complicated anxieties about my sexual as well as my racial identity. How, I wanted to know, do you exist and survive as a black man in Oxford? How do you exist and survive as a black, gay man?

I remember going to the welcome drinks for the university’s African and Caribbean students’ society. It was in a little basement bar filled with people drinking sticky shots and fluorescent cocktails. I largely withdrew; I remember chatting with a Congolese zoology postgrad who looked as despondent about his surroundings as I did, without allowing the conversation to get very far. I spent the evening skulking by the exit and thinking I should be focusing harder on integrating with my white counterparts, rather than hiding myself away with the black folk. Did this society exist mainly because these young black people felt unwelcome at Oxford? I doubt things are very different for today’s BAME students – a few months ago, the admissions figures revealed that more than a quarter of Oxford colleges failed to admit a single black British student between 2015 and 2017.

***

What I recall most vividly about those first few days, as I walked among sandstone and privilege, was feeling noticed and observed. Trying to shake off that sense of intense surveillance was what made me take the coach home on that grey Monday afternoon.

My mother was gentle with me when I turned up without warning on her doorstep. For a few days, she left me to my own devices, letting me mooch around our maisonette. She offered me bowls brimming with her piquant chicken soup. Mum took her time before asking what had happened. I said I wanted to take a year out. She made a small and knowing snort, before calmly and evenly saying: “No. That is not the answer. Not the answer at all.” I needed, according to Mum, to find a way through whatever difficulties had made me run away, rather than dodging and delaying and deferring. I was, as she saw it, more than clever enough to figure it out.

My mother can sometimes be a stubborn soul: if she sees one sensible way of doing something, then that is the way it will be done. In my earlier teenage years, such rigidity had sometimes created tension between us, but now, amid all of my unhappiness and fuzzy thinking, my mother’s certainty was useful. And kind.

By opening up, I discovered friends had their own problems​ to deal with​: homesickness, misogyny, classism, regionalism

Three days after I ran away, Mum sent me back to Oxford with washed laundry, Tupperware full of delicious jollof and the memory of her keen glare. On the journey back, I thought of a trip we had made to Ghana a few months before I started at Oxford, when my mother and I went to bury my grandmother. Ghanaian funerals are protracted, demanding affairs, but throughout the noisy, painful process my tiny mother was the epitome of grit and poise. When I returned to my desk, I sometimes quietly remembered that, hoping I had inherited some of her resilience.

I also thought about how university was a special, singular opportunity to experience things beyond the narrative of adversity young black men sometimes find themselves mired in – or have thrust upon them. I didn’t want to be another black boy crushed by a different kind of system. So I resolved to really, really enjoy myelf.

I wrote a couple of shoddy plays. I wrote some outlandish essays – my favourite one argued that John Donne and Tracey Emin were, like, the same? I wore silly costumes to fancy dress parties – a recalcitrant baby one week, a 1950s secretary the next. I had “gatherings” in my room where people stretched condoms over the smoke alarms so we could puff away on our Marlboro Lights. I stood in the middle of a packed, sweaty house party and – doing what felt like the unimaginable at that point – confidently snogged a boy in front of everyone.

I certainly don’t think I ever “mastered” being at Oxford. There were many occasions when I shoved my head under my pillow for a pause. But mostly I began to feel more in charge of the kind of time I was having.

‘I wore silly costumes to fancy dress parties.’ Photograph: courtesy of Michael Donkor

Not only did I learn about Tennyson and Woolf, I also learned how to articulate my emotions and anxieties. By opening up, I discovered that, beneath the shiny appearance of coping, those who would go on to become some of my closest friends had their own problems: profound homesickness, experiencing misogyny, classism, regionalism, the difficulty of starting a relationship in a strange new world. Sharing these stories was restorative. Talking through some of the absurdity I was presented with – the fragile public school boy who was affronted when I had the gall to say I “wasn’t sure” about the work of a poet he liked, or the girl whom I overheard describing me to someone as “erm, you know, the, erm, one who… erm…wears the scarves?”, rather than calling me black – was liberating.

When my parents came to my graduation, we decided to begin the day by taking a quick turn around the college grounds. I walked them through the entrance I had bolted from years before. I pointed out the window of my first-year room; now someone else’s bland posters surrounded the large mirror on the back wall.

I remembered how, in my first spring term, I had stood in that room and looked in the mirror as I got myself ready to go on a date, with a girl. Two friends knocked on my door. Perhaps they had an inkling that going out with a girl might not, in the long run, be what I was after. But because they understood that I was trying to figure out what I actually wanted, and because it didn’t matter whether I was interested in boys or girls, or both or none, and because they wanted to see me happy, they bundled in, full of enthusiastic questions. They dispensed casual advice and rigorous critiques of my outfit. We whacked on some Beyoncé and danced around the room.

The date was a total failure: she brought her friend with her, which I was not expecting; the bar was too noisy to hear anyone speak. After extricating myself, I plodded home over the cobbles, overcome with embarrassment.

But I tried as hard as I could to think otherwise: I reasoned that, when I got back to college, I would tell my friends what had happened. They would demand that I didn’t skimp on the detail. There would be red wine to ease the storytelling. They would be tickled by the ridiculousness of it all. And they would come up with consoling and clever wisdoms – observations I could never have come up with on my own.

• Michael Donkor’s debut novel, Hold, is published on 12 July by Fourth Estate at £12.99. To order a copy for £9.99, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

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