This week has been all about gastro intestinal response to politics. I’m sitting here conscious of work uncompleted, only coming to it now. My feet ache and I have a curious inflammation of my left thumb joint which I don’t understand and cannot make sense of.

My aching arms were relieved by exercise and perhaps the drink shared with friends to welcome the New Year on the beach and I can’t help but wonder why or how.

It’s been a busy week all about attempts at home making against a background of internalised displacement through bereavement. Language barriers and irritation. New net curtains and not having the tools for the job, practicing with a new key and misunderstandings, imposition of dates without consultation.

The phone calls and need of support exceeding patience. Repetition of plans, confusion, misunderstandings.

I’ve eeked out some time to finally read an article I’ve been trying to get to but I’m constantly interrupted by phone calls reiterating the same thing. The anxiety of moving is destabilising in the extreme. Reassurance falling on deaf ears, coupled with my own anxiety of how she’ll cope when even a few minutes alone is hard to bare at times. A message from someone else who is supporting asking me the same thing. Who organised this date and time without anyone else being aware? Without support?

With a deep breathe I try to get to the article Dr Asani and Dr Kinouani’s experience of home and homelessness. I contrast their experience to that which brings me here. Some without ever having owned a passport and some as a child. Me a few miles from Home, the connection felt in community with those who’s childhood sense of home was lost abruptly. Bereavement.

“I experienced an emotional and mental crisis in August of 2019, when my application for this visa was denied and I was threatened with deportation (Asani et al., 2020).” Dr Asani’s experience resonates with the crisis I witness on the phone. It feels like something about the loss of belonging, that threat of loss of home.

In a way by comparing the two experiences it feels somewhat abusive, hides the historical marginalisation of black and brown bodies but I want to foreground the shared pain of loss of belonging.

Another panicked phone call interrupts my train of thought. All sense of what has been spoken of gone out of the window such is that emotional distress and turmoil. That desperate need of kind reassurance. I wonder if that’s how Dr Asani felt, what with her loss of employment when her right to be here expired.

Our home office doesn’t provide that much needed reassurance or safety. Or for that matter the other services set up to assist those who are experiencing homelessness in its broadest sense.

Dr Asani was no longer allowed to work, no longer allowed access to NHS care.

“I was born to parents who emigrated to Nigeria in the early eighties: a father from the Democratic Republic of Congo and an Armenian-Ukrainian mother born and raised in the Republic of Georgia (in what was, at the time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR]). It is important to note that my journey has been cushioned by relative privilege in many aspects and that my cultural grounding was very much in northern Nigeria. So, in the first instance, I could perceive that my parents were migrants – albeit very welcomed and at home in Nigeria. I – of course still being aware of my migrant heritage – felt very much at ease, loved and accepted as Nigerian, which is something I will forever be grateful for and never take for granted. From my childhood through to my young adulthood it felt balanced to accept two facts: that I was a DR Congo national by virtue of my heritage, while my personal national identity felt very much Nigerian. I managed to carry this balance around my feelings of nationality for many years, across countries and continents, as I moved for scholarship and to advance my academic career. My father’s final resting place is within the soil of northern Nigeria.”

“I always required a temporary residence permit to remain in, and a visa to enter, Nigeria (because I held a DR Congo passport); there were no indefinite-leave-to-remain (ILR) options available to me (Nigerian Immigration Service, 2021). This tension was heightened in 2019, when I encountered obstacles in returning to Nigeria from the UK, where I had lived, studied and worked since 2013, and I felt my only option was to apply for a compassionate visa (Gov.UK, 2018) to remain in the UK for a further 2.5 years. I experienced an emotional and mental crisis in August of 2019, when my application for this visa was denied and I was threatened with deportation (Asani et al., 2020).”

As I read that I thought, deportation to where? Where do you belong when all doors are closed? The experiences we’ve had with my cousin leads me to recognise how inaccessible mental health services can be due to lack of investment and she was at least in theory allowed to access the NHS unlike Dr Asani who couldn’t get support or medication to ease her emotional pain.

I wonder how she paid her rent, having lost her job through visa denial and I wonder who if anyone benefited from that?

I reflect on my privilege and how we sail through immigration and how that just isn’t the same for people who are Black or Brown. Travelling through Europe as a child I didn’t have a passport of my own. I was on my parents passport. I don’t know how that worked but I know there was an issue because there wasn’t a photo of me. I was I guess about nine and I was scared. Luckily my sibling could intervene on my behalf because I didn’t understand the questions that were directed at me. I just remember being really scared. I was scared I wouldn’t be allowed to cross the boarder, scared I’d be taken away some where, separated from my parents and all that helped me feel safe in a land far from home. Scared of people carrying guns. It’s not hard to feel how children escaping war torn lands feel these days.

I remember as a child, reading the silver sword and making a plan to meet in Switzerland like the people in the book. Odd now when I come to think of it, being from the UK. Speaks perhaps of some sense of outside threat. link https://www.booktrust.org.uk/book/t/the-silver-sword/

My thoughts take me to the person who I met, experiencing homelessness. One day they had their passport the next it was torn and useless, recognise how easily that could happen when without a home. What a living nightmare that might turn out to be.

The article goes on to describe the death by deportation, historic policies and those fighting for compensation for immigration mistreatment right up to the here and now, even in the midst of a global pandemic. I think about the horror stories we’ve heard from immigration detention centres.

Is it reasonable that this state of unbelonging went on for two and half years for Dr Asani? Is the violence on the person of this recognised in terms of health and wellbeing? Only for all this to happen again in another two and half years. It feels barbarous.

I look up barbarous in the dictionary, puzzled by how I came to this word.

barbarous[ˈbɑːb(ə)rəs]ADJECTIVEextremely brutal.”many early child-rearing practices were barbarous by modern standards”synonyms:cruel · brutal · barbaric · brutish · bestial · savage · vicious · fierce · [More]primitive and uncivilized.”a remote and barbarous country”synonyms:uncivilized · primitive · unsophisticated · barbaric · heathen · wild · [More](of language) coarse and unrefined.”avoiding barbarous sentences or ambiguities”synonyms:coarse · uncouth · rude · discourteous · impolite · ungentlemanly · [More]

When and how will this change I wonder.

In her search for home Dr Asani asks herself and us what do we mean by home. How do we recover from this epistemic homelessness – this internalisation of gaslighting and thus a displacement from what the mind and body know (Kinouani, 2017). It’s been a big week for many with revelations about parties in UK Government, everyone I have spoken with this week have used terms like “piss boil”, “blood boil”, “makes me want to vomit”. My own engagement has often left me with feelings of dyspepsia (link https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/indigestion/ ) or heart pain and palpations.

I’m sure I’ve read somewhere only justice can resolve these things.

“While I have no influence on border laws, I have power over how I choose to tell my own story, which is that every migrant is deserving of reparative justice for the harms inflicted upon our bodies, minds and lands, which have often led to our precarity in the present moment.” Dr Asani

The words liminal spaces have come up several times this week in different contexts and I don’t know what that means so I look it up and find something about a threshold. That space between what was and what is yet to be, how it’s the space of possible transformation and as if to underline the point a car alarm goes off

The lack of a full stop seems appropriate at this point, it’s intentional

In the article Dr Kinouani shares her story:

“Mine is a story of multiple waves of migration, too, over generations. I have, for very long, considered myself the child of migrants. This is the story that is recounted in France about my parents, who are ‘from’ Congo-Brazzaville. In the UK, too, the notion of ‘second generation of migrants’ forms a cornerstone of migration and diaspora studies. But this story is really a partial story. My parents were, in fact, never migrants. They were born French colonial subjects and it is their status as colonial subjects that later enabled them to be classified as French citizens.” Dr Kinouani lives in England.

The contrast in our stories couldn’t be greater. My cousin and I were born just down the road, as were our parents and their parents. All the more important to listen to untold stories, something that’s been on my mind for a while.

“I am not exactly sure at what gestational stage the coldness of France became forced upon me as my new home, but the indications are that it would have been past the first trimester. I was born in winter. The fantasy of the impact of this initial dislocation may be far greater than the reality of what a developing foetus can grasp through their developing senses. As human beings, we are designed to fill in the blanks of what we do not know, after all. But I do know that I have been on the search for home from a young age and that this feeling of living at the border of home was part of what drove me to attempt to find a new home elsewhere, outside of France, and therefore to become a migrant myself, in England.”

Like Dr Kinouani I too was displaced at birth, othered in my case by being born to a woman who was old enough to be my Grandma. The assumption would have been that I was actually my sister’s “illegitimate” child. My earliest connections to friends being on that shared basis. A close friend being someone who’s Mum lived in London and she was brought up by her Grandma such was the shame associated in those days. Though significantly different these days here and nothing like the extended and ongoing racial trauma.

“Every four years, pretty much like clockwork, when the presidential elections come around, questions of ‘integration’, of belonging and French identity occupy centre stage. The National Front threatens victory. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. Every four years we are reminded that we do not really belong ‘here’. We are rendered homeless by the state. We are debated, with typical French passion.
There is only one way to be French and it is to be white. So, the story goes, at least.”

The questions over National identity are relived here in the UK. Yet perhaps surrounded by silence and politeness as is the violent English way? Live with that racist Bill that further threatens belonging.

“My mother has always, for example, told us that she wants to die and be buried in Africa. This was drummed into us from a young age.
The repeated request to be laid to rest in the land of our ancestors powerfully asserts where one’s sense of home and lineage lie. It also establishes that connection between death, home and homelessness.”

I contrast this to my sibling migrant, plot in Australia. Speaks to colonial “at homeness” or perhaps the “not at home, here”.

As I read Dr Kinouani’s words I’m mindful of someone I Nursed. Makes me wonder about their stated need to “go back home”. Their return home (somewhere in the Caribbean, I seem to remember) raised questions about the availability and affordability of therapeutics and who would be there to care, why they didn’t see home as here despite living here most of their adult life. Long lost family overseas with loss of intimate ties. Months later, we received a postcard, thanking us for our care.

As I return to the article I can’t help but wonder what barriers there are to people being all of themselves. Caught up in false narratives of being one thing or the other when all of these identities are who a person is yet not reflected in documentation needed to cross boarders.

“My resistance to homelessness has included claiming both Congo and France loudly, unapologetically and with the confidence of white settler colonialists.”

There’s so much in this article that I find myself conscious of huge bits I’m leaving out. The history, the pain, that it’s all still going on. Trying to prioritise what I feel is the most important, those with the least power in this place we find ourselves in, those in the immigration detention centres and Post Brexit and all that. When on the evening of our anti racism group I settled to read the piece I was constantly interrupted and in my hast to get to it rushed out to quell the noise. I randomly was aware of the smell of fish (there was no fish in the house and this made no sense, but I quickly dismissed it as the history I was bringing to the piece.) I’m conscious of feeling pressed for time despite it being a Sunday. We can’t wait is something that I’m conscious of as I write. But the need to take my time and get it right is also on my back. Which is odd because making mistakes is a human thing.

“As he started bleeding profusely, the powerless and terrified witnesses – both migrants and staff – were plunged into a state of intense shared terror. This incident crystallised the disturbance in the centre. It was a symptom of extreme racial trauma and a manifestation of border violence. It was also an apparent act of ‘self-mutilation’ and the source of further collective harm.”

“I discussed it in supervision at the time, reflecting on the symbolism of the blood poured out, the depth of the suffering but also the complexity of the layers of meaning – the disturbance it laid bare. Group analysis’s concept of location of disturbance (Foulkes, 1973, p. 290) proposes that within groups, institutions or nations, wherever distress expresses itself is not necessarily – or at least not exclusively –where the disturbance lies.”

Is this what Brexit was too? An uprising of discontent, an act of ‘self-mutilation’? In response to past and present systemic harm? A misplaced source of rage at systemic injustice?

As I read about necropolitics I think of my cousin and her cries for help that went unheard. The rates of death among those with learning disability, over prescription of medication the inadequacies of healthcare for those seen as “other”.

People with learning disabilities had a significantly lower life expectancy with women dying on average 27 years younger and men dying 22 years younger. The covid death rate 6 times higher for people with learning disabilities during the first wave of the pandemic than the general population. A third of those living with learning disabilities who sadly died were living in residential care. (Learning Disability Mortality Review LeDeR).

“The ultimate form of necropower may well be the capacity to have others act out one’s murderous wishes and impulses through projective and identification processes. Revisiting the public distress of that suicidal detainee at Yarl’s Wood, the public sharing of suffering and the blood being poured out, if not sacrificed, symbolised the blood of the collective migrant body. It spoke of a shared wound. But equally, Fanon and Klein might invite us to consider that the death wish on display perhaps did not belong to the detainee or the detained migrants group. We may argue that the suicidal gesture displayed the epidermalisation of ethno-nationalist violence and that it was an expression of internalised necropolitics.
In other words, the act of self-mutilation also”.

“Healthcare professionals, allies and those who act in solidarity need to take account of the multilayered sense of homelessness that so many of us grapple with, often over several generations. It is clear that border trauma plays a significant role in the formulation of how we understand ourselves and the world as migrants, constantly confronting displacement and its ultimate manifestation, necropolitics, which some may be at risk of acting out by their own hands on behalf of society at large. Resisting internalised displacement and the introjection of murderous ethno-nationalist border-related violence must be centred on the imperative to theorise and thus externalise the structural realities from our own embodied standpoint, from our flesh, and as part of that, we must tell our stories in our own words. There is no doubt that there will be psychological and even spiritual entanglement with socio-political structures and, thus, invariably an introjection of violence, provided the status quo remains unchanged. Fanon and Klein offer particularly helpful frameworks to theorise the why and the how. For this reason, we would argue that a dream we dare to outline – a world without borders – is a critical step towards reparative justice (Washington, 2019). But equally, and perhaps paradoxically, a world without borders would also mean a world without colonial intrusion into our land, body and mind.”

Ref: Social and Health Sciences
https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/SaHS/index
Volume 19 | Number 2 | 2021 | #10496 | 19 pages

link https://www.samaritans.org/

On the family zoom I was asked about various relatives. The assumption was that we wouldn’t hear about people who had died. I think about relatives I’ve known. Aunties I was close to how they died and their deaths weren’t spoken of. How I didn’t hear for years afterwards. That seems quite odd and I can’t help but wonder at why this might be they too “rendered meaningless, insignificant and, therefore, invisible” much like those experiencing homelessness.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10397531/Child-wrapped-blanket-carried-ashore-migrants-arrive.html The news article fails to tell the human stories of those journeys in homelessness.

There goes the phone

I wrote most of this on Sunday. Yesterday too exhausted to write.

Today’s a little easier now that the immediate presenting needs have been met. What if that were the same for everyone