#59 Migration Watch (3): Three-Way Street

September 6, 2015

1. East to West

Swaddled in tin foil, stranded on the seawall straddling Italy and France, refugees from 1970s glamrock, obviously. Or perhaps Gregor Samsa’s younger siblings: insects already; further metamorphosis forbidden.

Salt-blasted and skin peeling after days at sea in an open boat, the girl’s face is patterned like a leaf.

Three proud women on the beach at Kos, pointedly not looking at the photographer. Mother suckling her baby, then grandma in the middle; at her side the younger daughter with film star’s pout. All told, three pairs of lips pressed firmly together in a silent snub – thumbing the eye of the camera.

The logo painted on the side of the refrigerated lorry shows slices of ‘Hyza: honest chicken’ (pretty in pink), twirled round to resemble a rose. By any other name….. Butthe cooling system had died, and putrid liquid was seen dripping from the back of thevehicle. Next morning, the ‘coffins’ sent in to contain human remains were more like sealable sinks.

2. Wessies to Essies

A warm welcome they made of it: the German townspeople of Oer-Erkenschwick setting a precedent, greeting their coach load of migrants with cheery sunflowers; among them burly bloke in hi-vis vest – Westphalian version of white man van, standing firm against what’s expected of his xenophobic type (supposedly)

3. West to East And Back Again

Zahera Tariq and her four children had exited England via London City, the upmarket airport designed for business travellers. But they were brought back in through thebreeze blocks of down-at-heel Luton, where Burger King counts as fine dining. Alleged to have been migrating to IS before she was stopped and detained in Turkey prior to repatriation, Mrs Tariq may not have noticed the difference. Appearing at Camberwell Magistrates’ Court charged with child abduction, piety was her paramount concern: she refused to stand when Judge Susan Green entered the courtroom, saying her religion required her to sit. Speaking of child abduction, the four smaller Tariqs have been taken into foster care, even though the husband and father was the one to blow the whistle on where they were going. read more

#58 Migration Watch (2): For Theresa, UK Home Secretary

August 21, 2015

May you never lay your head down, face down in the wine-dark sea. May you never lay your head down in the hold.

You’re just like a great Big Brother to me, the Secretary for Sending Me Home. You’re just like a great Big Sister to me, the Minister for Beating Me Back.

So what would you, what would you have her do? Send in the clowns – a hand to hold instead of the strong arm of the state? Meanwhile, Britain’s home grown working class – feeling the pressure of the next wave, ‘white trash’ under fire from incoming – would be left out in the cold, presumably.

On 20 August UK Home Secretary Theresa May signed an agreement with French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve setting up a new centre from which to command joint operations to control migrants seeking to cross the Channel into England.

During a tour of the Eurotunnel site in Coquelles, Mrs May explained that the control and command centre will prioritise the relentless pursuit of people-smuggling gangs.

Her emphasis on trafficking may have been designed to draw attention away from the plight of the migrants themselves. Thousands are currently sleeping rough in a camp outside Calais known as The Jungle.

Many of the migrants making their way to Western Europe have already borne the brunt of civil war and economic collapse following the long wave of failed Western foreign policy interventions stretching from Africa to Afghanistan. Mrs May chose not to suggest that events which served to put migrants in the hands of ‘callous’ people smugglers, were often made in the West.

May you never lay your head down without a hand to hold.

May you never make your bed out in the cold.

(with apologies to John Martyn)

#57 Migration Watch (1): Anomalies

August 9, 2015

This is the male that walks the tunnel, crosses the Channel, caught on camera.
Arrested attempting a life left in peace.

Splayed against the wall, 40-year-old Sudanese migrant Abdul Rahman Haroun is desperate to stay out of the slipstream of yet another train thundering through at more than 100 mph.

After more than 10 hours in the tunnel, has he got used to this? Or would he crucify himself if only he had a hammer?

On 4 August Rahman Haroun was picked out by Eurotunnel’s monitoring system and recorded as an ‘anomaly’ in ‘interval 5’. Picked up and detained as he approached themouth of the tunnel on the Kent coast, currently remanded in custody he is due to appear at Canterbury Crown Court on 24 August charged with causing an obstruction under the Malicious Damage Act 1861.

This is a cat to catch the mice, gone in a trice down the hole.
And on to Merrie England where the streets are paved.

He can’t find it in himself to blame them – the French police officer deployed to catch migrants trying to make it from Calais to the UK.

He sleeps all day and wakes when they do. He too is away from home, encamped with brother officers in a tent city that mirrors the migrants’.

‘We’re all migrants, now,’ he quips, forgetting that the mirror is always shinier than thereal thing.

#56 On The Beach

July 6, 2015

Relentless light hitting the white sand without mercy. Pink-tinged Brits like lobsters waiting for the water to boil – but this only with hindsight. How could you know, Mr Smith, that on this North African beach, killing an Arab would come in at No 39?

With nothing to be done for the dead (by definition), what else should we be doing? Walt Whitman, poet, says that the role of the father, standing on the beach next to his child when darkness rolls in, is to point out that ‘the ravening clouds shall not long be victorious’, since they ‘devour the stars only in apparition’.

Another night on the beach, but this time standing alone, Whitman further reports that ‘a vast similitude interlocks us all…all nations, colours, barbarisms, civilisations…all lives and deaths.’ For those like Whitman with the confidence to see the common ground, no one is out of reach.

Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, on the other hand, is a story of human beings becoming untouchable. In this novel of Cold War paranoia, published in 1957, fatal radiation sickness is on its way South from a Northern hemisphere already destroyed by nuclear war. Even in Antarctica and the Antipodes, there is no escape from the death-dealing apparition which we ourselves created.

Who knows how Seifeddine Rezgui arrived at the choices he made? Especially if his motives were anything like the haphazard killing spree he embarked upon. In theaftermath of the massacre on the beach of Sousse, however, we can be deliberate about how to react.

Whether to affirm the ‘similitude’ and keep our Whitmans about us; or fall prey to ‘apparitions’ we ourselves have created, and let it all go down the Shute.

#55 Letter To America

June 28, 2015

There was a white lady of Spokane

Who presented as African woman

The hurt she pretended

As if she had mended

Herself, herself, herself, herself, herself……
Self-proclaimed and self-obsessed, so where did the open-faced girl go – the middle class white kid with room to choose?

Gone away when the ugly world closed her down, perhaps. Or when Rachel Dolezal chose to resign and re-assign herself, signing up to the victimhood newly associated with the confines of the ‘hood, and blacking up to ensure no backing out.

But look at her eyes, mouth, lower jaw – it’s there in the rest of her face as much as thefrizzed up hair and sunbed skin.

All her features – both white and ‘black’ – jointly comprise the face of that general fatalism which now underlies even the most voracious appetite for particular advancement.

Whether for personal gain or the ‘advancement of colored people’, underneath theshrills of advocacy lies a recurring note of resignation.

The fatalist frame of mind is now as widespread as its euphemism, ‘resilience’. General fatalism was the officer in charge of Barack Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney,the pastor gunned down in a Charleston church along with eight members of his congregation. It is the bass line underpinning the President’s second term as well as his rueful rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’.

Though they are not be identified as one and the same, the closure characterising this mindset is kith and kin to the dehumanising condition formerly known as oppression.

Sure, she was fakin’ the black thing. But Dolezal was truer than she knew to the stateof the nation; and closer to the rest of us than we choose to understand.

#54 In Borneo, Desperately Seeking Something

June 12, 2015

Desperately seeking something:
In the Instagrammed yoga poses of a British backpacker, shot against South East Asian sunsets that are ‘pretty damn amazing’, says she.

Desperately seeking something:
In the decision to strip off and goof around near the snow-dusted summit of a sacred mountain; seven o’clock on a sun-kissed, kiss-my-arse morning, mooning and communing at the same time.

Desperately seeking something:
In the park ranger’s complaint that he felt ‘offended as a Dasun’. Defending tribal spirits against ‘disrespect’ he finds his spirit level, having heard about the incident from the mountain park’s manager.

Desperately seeking something:
In the pubescent girl wearing black and wishing her girlishness away. For the film of theschool trip she waves the briefest ‘bye’ to her parents, just short of dismissive.

Peony Wee (12) died in the recent earthquake on Mount Kinabalu. Her body was flown home to Singapore for cremation.The spirits of Borneo’s highest mountain were said to have been angered by a group of 10 Western tourists who took their clothes off nearthe summit. Following a complaint made to Malaysian police by park ranger Daikin Anam (32), four of the trekkers pleaded guilty to committing an obscene act in a public place. British consular officials arranged for aeronautical engineering graduate Eleanor Hawkins (23) to fly home to Draycott in Derbyshire having served her three-day jail sentence.

#53 Cargoes 2015

April 19, 2015

Rubber boat from Libya en route to Malta
Butting in to winds and waves of wine dark sea
With a cargo of Africans
Crammed in, jammed on
Hopeful helpful Europe will set them free.

Loud colours, cotton print lifeless in the water
Floating not yet bloated from the wine dark sea
With a cargo of cadavers
Waived quietly on their way
Who cares what colour dead turns out to be?

Scooping up survivors is a white man’s burden
Face masks and boiler suits, colour coding’s clear
With cargoes of Africans
Still more cargoes of Africans
Healing and helping hands giving way to fear.

(with apologies to John Masefield)

#52 London-Charleston Express

April 18, 2015

Jewel heist. Diamond caper. Scarper, it’s the Rozzers. What larks!

The real location was London’s diamond trading district, near Holborn, yet the £300m Easter raid on the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company suggested relocation to an Ealing Comedy, complete with burglar alarm that went off but prompted ‘no action’ onthe part of bungling police.

But Key Stone Cops ‘n’ Robbers wasn’t much of a comedy; certainly couldn’t cut it as tragedy. The Daily Mirror tried for Jacobean, positing Mr Ginger and Mr Strong alongside footage obtained from security cameras at the entrance to the vault; paintingthe thieves as Reservoir Dogs. But the footage itself was closer to outtakes from health and safety information films, complete with operatives in High Vis vests demonstrating how not to lift heavy loads.

Nefarious or not, a lot like watching paint dry.

Heavy-set bloke running away from car, more like something from Family Guy. Cut tothe park where there’s an ugly clash between his green top, tending towards turquoise, and the lime-like foliage of an overhanging tree.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat: rim-shots but too many of them for Ray Charles’ girl knocking on his door. It’s really the sound of Walter Scott going down to meet his maker (Hallelujah, He Loves Us So), the proverbial black man blasted in the back while running away from a white police officer.

Shot by a passer-by, the cellphone footage is neither comic nor tragic. Looks a little ludicrous but lacks a single punchline; instead it takes seven hits to knock a man down. Following procedure, the shooter logs on to a different (tragic) order of things, but only post festum, post mortem. Death itself comes un-masqued, without tragedy or comedy; it is desultory, diminished, demeaning. read more

#51 Resurrection Man

April 4, 2015

‘Sun do shine’, is how one source had it – though the reporter may have been hamming him up to appear suitably folksy. ‘The sun does shine’, is how others presented it – though they may have imposed grammatical correctness in order to achieve political correctness, i.e. to avoid accusations of having made him appear unduly folksy.

Either way, the speaker was Anthony Ray Hinton (59), who came back to life after 30 years on death row for a double murder he didn’t do.

(Two fast food restaurant managers shot and killed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1985.)

On 3 April 2015, making his way through the media crowd, a dignified black man in a dark suit. We hear the ululations of his mother or sister as she falls on his neck.

But we don’t know which she is. Is she too folksy to figure in the official account? And was it one of those prisons where visitors and inmates mustn’t touch, making this their first embrace for 30 years? No one has found the time to find out.

Having rolled away the stone, releasing Anthony Hinton from three whole decades buried in a five by eight foot sepulchre provided by the state of Alabama, the public gaze has already moved elsewhere.

Leaving Hinton alone to get on with what’s left of his life, perhaps.

Either that, or sending him down again to the place where people are discounted; to thepurgatory which put him in the frame in the first place.

#50 What A Carry On!

March 24, 2015

Head down, ready for the rotten egg, exit Nigel Farage pursued by a so-called carnival of diversity in a bare-naked tale of the 2015 non-election.

Sunday lunch in the commuter village of Downe, where beige is also known as ‘browne’. Tothe George & Dragon with its suitably suburban rendition of olde worlde, the rag tag ofprotesters bobs along looking for the UKIP leader, who is known to frequent this hostelry in search of the perfect wallop.

You got your LBGTs (all very transgressive – yeah, right?!), and your breastfeeding mothers represented by plastic babydolls nestling in everyone’s bosom, and a scattering ofpatchwork capes and Lycra jumpsuits which zip up over your head; possibly containing the carnival’s immigrant population – who knows?

The assembled company could be on an outing to Comic Con, except that none of thecostumes is clever enough.

Except he’s not here. He’s in the other one, isn’t he? The one with the tiny leaded windows hardly seen in public since the most recent TV adaptation of Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or whichever one it was – the Queen’s Head. The protesters duly troll over to this other pub, where they are briefly united with their quarry.

Nige with his face crinkled up like a crisp – not the full Sid James but well on the way. Ducking and diving out of the bar, making for his car. But some ‘scum’ are already climbing on the bonnet and he’s scuttling off into the distance, as fast as his legs will carry him.

It used to be that the second time was farce, but now it’s a right Carry On from the first-off.

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