Letter to the Walking Inquiry, from Felicity Allen

Deptford, London

12 June 2021

Dear friends

I am very grateful for this chance to write to you and I hope you are all well. I miss you.

            I’ve been writing this letter over the last week, first in Ramsgate and now in Deptford, a short walk from the Thames in south east London. I’m here to look after my son Stanley who’s just had a second operation on his foot. He’s been unable to walk properly since last September when a broken heel led to 3 months sitting on a sofa.

            So on Wednesday I was walking the streets around Guy’s Hospital at London Bridge. I was passing the Immigration Reporting Centre where X, who might be here with us, told me he had to come fortnightly to sign on, always terrified that this time he might be detained again.

            Stan is about the same age as X, and I feel lucky that he has invited me to look after him for the few days while his girlfriend is away. His hobbling foot reminds me of the film I made with my Syrian friend who still lives in Damascus. Its draft title, Eleven Impediments, had a double meaning: first, the eleven impediments to making the work because of the situation in which she was living which meant we couldn’t communicate openly. But impediments also suggested feet impeded from walking (‘impediments’ comes from ‘ped’, Latin for foot). My Syrian friend’s footage was filmed on her mobile phone, pointed down at her feet walking on Damascus pavements, as if reading a text, because filming openly and straight ahead is simply too dangerous. Therefore she could never represent the horizon and she emphatically agreed with me when I suggested that visualising the horizon is essential for imagining a future. (Can you think of an American Western film that doesn’t use the horizon in this way?) For people living under tyrannies, such as Syrians living under the Assad regime, where the present is intolerably dangerous, representation of the future is also impossible. This is why you leave. Yet the British government and its media acolytes accuses you of simply ‘wanting a better future’. As if it were so simple. As if you were shopping. A survivable present might be all you’re seeking for now.

            Last weekend I had a wonderful time with old friends looking at real art walking around central London galleries for its annual Galleries Weekend. (No real art in lockdown.) I frequently hear of artists who’ve not been able to travel to British exhibitions of their own work because their visa application has been refused. They say, the British want our ideas, and they want to trade our objects, but they don’t want our bodies. I’ve been looking at the Walking Enquiry website which, like an exhibition, invites you to swivel between different voices, equivalent to standing in a gallery looking around at a variety of pictures. The collective voice with its very varied accents, interests and temperaments creates an extraordinary chorus, harmonic yet full of vital frictions. I’m looking forward to walking live with Refugee Tales in July; being part of a longstanding community sharing walking and ideas, plus some frictions, freely moving among each other.

            After the galleries we ate delicious Sri Lankan food in a restaurant parallel to Regent St. I couldn’t stop thinking of X whose native culture I was tasting for the first time. Living in London as an undocumented, young, isolated and exploited migrant seeking refuge, after a few months he’d been invited home by some older Sri Lankan people. He said it was wonderful to relax and eat Sri Lankan food again, to feel so looked after, at home, familiar. In fact it was sham hospitality from a criminal gang and he was left worse off than he was already: imprisoned, threatened with deportation and in danger for his life. The government’s policies reinforced the betrayal at every step over the next decade.

            As I write my table is full of stuff including a sheet of old Walking Enquiry questions, ‘how does detention affect people’s physical + mental health? what are the hidden impacts? what forms of support can we offer to help overcome the trauma? what could be different?’

X’s desire for familiarity, for hospitality and food as his mother might have made him is entirely normal. If you’re longing for hospitality, what detention is doing is a fundamental betrayal. How could it not have dire consequences for people’s physical and mental health? Not only has your mother, your family, your country, your food, your culture, your language gone missing but so has human goodness and decency. And so has time.

            Indefinite detention’s lack of horizon is both palpable and symbolic: there’s no end to the terrible present and no possible vision of a future. It is a replica of the regime you’ve left. One of the most remarkable things I’ve found about you, the refugees I’ve met through Refugee Tales, is your extraordinary ability to resume trusting people. It makes me imagine that you must have been very well-loved by your mums and dads in your early years to build such strong foundations of character.

            Through Refugee Tales and the Walking Enquiry I’ve observed the significant contribution that older generations, mostly but not entirely women, are making to the younger mostly men who you’re supporting. There’s a very important role you play by experiencing the mental anguish alongside, as a kind of proxy parent to a younger adult man. It is too dangerous, too de-stabilising for someone who’s the subject of the government’s torture by bureaucracy to dare feel it himself. I am not really religious but, from conversations I’ve had, I understood for the first time the meaning of the Pietàs that I’d seen in historic European paintings and sculpture. The Madonna as the older woman, the mother of the grown son, is in despair not just at the loss of her own son but at the socio-political world that has killed him. He is the public political scapegoat, and the Pietà shows both the emotional and the political cost of this. This is why, as proxy parental or sibling figures, with an embracing and open view of kinship, we keep manifesting our dissent and our mutual support. It takes time. On my fourth summer walk I finally understood David Herd’s phrase, which is about manifesting change around migration, both in the landscape and the language.

            Thank you for all the determination and hard work it’s taken from all of you to get here. Thank you for sustaining care and trust. Thank you for your time.

With love

Flick

(Felicity Allen)