Bidisha Mamata responds to the proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’.
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This piece is part of a collaboration between English PEN and Counterpoints Arts in response to the UK government’s proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’. For this PEN Transmissions series, writers have been given an open platform to write an essay in response to the Bill. Counterpoints Arts coordinate Refugee Week, a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. The theme for Refugee Week 2023, taking place 19–25 June, is Compassion.
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I began doing outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees eleven years ago, visiting charities across London to give writing, critical-thinking and performance workshops. These were set up in partnership with English PEN, which then, as now, did the important work of connecting the world of literature and its creative writers with vital issues around human rights, social justice, liberty, and freedom from violence. In under-resourced, unheated rooms, fuelled by PJ Tips and photocopied printouts of plays and poetry, we remade the world as we wished to see it: equal, diverse, collaborative, considerate.
The work was eye-opening and lifechanging for me. It led to my fifth book – Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices – and to greater depth and new dimensions in my human rights work and political analysis. Here were people from all over the world – Iran, Cameroon, Afghanistan, Congo, more – gathered in one of the most multicultural capitals in the world, not gibbering with misery but full of determination, resourcefulness, humour and hope. It always jarred when I went from these laughter-filled workshops with people who’d survived torture, to a publishing party or art opening attended by exclusionary, po-faced characters who took themselves way too seriously.
For my students, I wonder if this kind of outreach work was quite so transformative or positive. Gatherings like ours were certainly creative, enjoyable and safe – a respite from the grind of trying to regularise status, establish an existence with some structure and dignity, build a life, gain some rights and a foothold in an asylum system designed to drive people to despair and force them to drop out, to psychologically torture them. The workshops were a rare space free from cruelty, punishment or judgement. But have we changed the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees for the better? Have attitudes improved? Policies? Headlines? No, they are all worse. The political environment is so much bleaker. Xenophobic, insular, rebarbative notions of national identity have been normalised; a backlash against multiculturalism has thrived; anti-democratic, jingoistic, authoritarian dictatorships have risen globally; mainstream political discourse has been polluted by ideas which were once seen as the preserve of the racist far right. Trump and Brexit are the least of it – it’s happening all over the world.
I have also become wary of the bourgeois creative economy that has sprung up around the refugee crisis and its humanitarian emergency – the endless do-gooding artistic works (movies! graphic novels! albums! live interactive theatre!) that focus on trauma narratives, giving a voice to the voiceless (a phrase I am certainly guilty of using) and otherwise enabling an entire class of privileged and ambitious arts, cultural, media and political players and dilettantes to make their careers off the backs of other people’s suffering. There is so often deep patronage, power-play and a sense of superiority and smugness at its heart.
I remember speaking at a human rights conference a few years ago, just before the pandemic. The organisers were very careful to counsel speakers not to use aggressive phrases (like ‘hammer home the message’) because they might be triggering for people who had survived violence. But there were no survivors, asylum seekers or refugees in the audience; there were only local charity workers. The sessions in which these white charity workers talked about their courses for refugees – art therapy, cookery, yoga and massage – were packed. But the session I chaired, entitled ‘Educating Our Allies’, was nearly empty. The session was billed as ‘a conversation challenging the one-dimensional and often victimising representations of refugees and asylum seekers […] aimed at examining power and privilege and how they play out in the humanitarian and charity sectors […] about teaching allies (the audience) how to be better in our approaches’.
What a joke. For that one session, the delegates, 95% of whom were white, all, as one, got up and went to the café, to make the young non-white woman working there make and serve them coffee. They thought they knew it all about how to be good allies, so they vacated the room despite the four non-white experts on the stage. They were comfortable seeing refugees and asylum seekers as abject victims, nameless and faceless sufferers, craven and grateful recipients, pets to be fed, but they could not sit for just forty minutes, listen respectfully to, humbly hear and learn from, refugees, asylum seekers or indeed any of the non-white people on the panel. That said it all.
The overt, go-home racism of the right, or the belittling, patronising, self-regarding racism of those who see themselves as liberals: what a choice for the twenty-first century. I can say from experience that micro-aggressions – a depressing euphemism for the casual and obvious disrespect, dismissal, insults, ignorance, negative and demeaning assumptions, degrading stereotypes and bad treatment meted out to non-white people – have increased a millionfold since 2016. Now, they occur daily. It is all just the same racial profiling, singling out and targeting, only in a liberal, progressive guise – like a ‘nice’ rendering of a Home Office interview. There are constant racially targeted questions and biases in interactions with strangers in a workplace setting, and there’s the seemingly universal requirement for people of colour to talk to white interlocutors and audiences about – only about – race, identity, diversity, heritage, homeland and belonging. The underlying drive is always to let you know that you are different, of lower value, alien, other, worse; that you are not the norm and will never belong. Or that you are a fascinating, exotic novelty, a trinket from a magical place, a source of scintillating detail to make white people feel richly cosmopolitan and spice up their lives.
But for all own my moments of discomfort, refugees and asylum seekers are represented, talked about and treated with outright sadism and inhumanity. This has become so much the norm that, post-pandemic, it no longer dominates the headlines, instead occupying marginal news reports about ‘small boats’ and ‘migrant crossings’, euphemisms which elide the terror, danger, urgency and desperation of such journeys and any questions about why human beings would be driven to undertake them.
From the dysfunctional, fear-driven vantage point of 2023, 2012 feels at once very recent and a lifetime ago. But the factors that force people to leave their homes are unchanged from all the centuries past: poverty, war, post-war fragility, a lack of opportunity, persecution, the threat of violence, no future fit for a human being. In other words, reasons that would prompt any person to leave one place and go somewhere else. Those reasons have been joined now by climate change, by invasions and the long tails of flawed invasions, failed uprisings, factional fighting and societal breakdown. The endless churn of human suffering will produce refugees in perpetuity, and yet the reaction to this sadly universal and timeless dynamic is one of hostility, disgust and cruelty, especially when the refugees are not white. When your government is shamelessly touting sending refugees to Rwanda, or piling them up in shipping containers and empty office blocks, you’ve lost all sense of normal human decency – but so has anyone, any party or newspaper, which fails to challenge you. The old multi-polar political spectrum, with its economic and social lefts, rights and centre, is being warped by a toxic magnet in which all debates, all arguments, all methods, all values are being pulled to the far right. The old fringes are the centre; the old centre is gone.
In many ways, that early period of my work with refugees, from 2012 until 2015, at least contained the possibility that things might change and issues were at least up for discussion. People could be of two minds about complex issues and there was a chance that things might get better.
It was Theresa May who coined the term ‘hostile environment’ in her role as Home Secretary, a chilling clue as to what was to come: a deliberate strategy of state-endorsed sadistic deterrence taken on with full fervour by not one but two further Home Secretaries. (Hello Suella, hello Priti. So embarrassing, these racist women of colour doing the colonial masters’ jobs for them, thinking that kicking down onto whoever’s beneath them might protect them from the racism of their own white peers, instead of realising that they’re just being used and will be discarded when the job is done and Make Britain White Again is put into play.) But during that period, moving away from the headlines and Parliament, there were also dozens of civil society groups, charities, grassroots organisations and local enterprises that did not feel as Theresa May did. The debate around asylum and exile, flight and forced migration, safety and haven contained nuance, detail, and fact. Public discourse had not yet descended into the vicious, counterfactual, sloganeering mess that it is now – one which repels reasonable commentators altogether. ‘Debate’ back and forth, and get interrupted and shouted down by a basic racist on GB News, or even one of the respected channels? Why would anyone do that to themselves?
We are in danger of a hopelessness – a numb fatalism – setting in, because almost nobody is standing up for refugees and asylum seekers openly in the mainstream of politics, the media, public life and civil society. Where are those bold, accepted, reasonable voices speaking up together, above the grassroots level? Where are the big beasts, the no-nonsense decent figures? Surely they are not too cowed, too frightened by the actual, literal, torch-bearing Nazis to stick up for what is right? There is a failure of normal human consideration and empathy, of basic decency and recognition. What is everyone waiting for? We could change things in small ways for the better, right now, just by speaking and behaving differently towards others. Is everything and everyone – at every point on the political scale – waiting numbly to get to crisis point and total social breakdown before we start to rebuild? I don’t want to wait for some scorched-earth, tabula rasa, final cataclysm before we begin to entertain the possibility that we can – we must – create a kinder world.
Bidisha Mamata is a broadcaster, journalist and presenter specialising in political analysis, international relations and human rights. She writes for the Observer and the Guardian and works for BBC TV and radio, ITN, CNN, Channel 5 and Sky News. Her fifth book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices (2015), is based on her outreach work in UK prisons, refugee charities and detention centres and her latest publication is called The Future of Serious Art (2020). As an artist she creates films and stills. Her first short film, ‘An Impossible Poison’ (2017), was selected for multiple international film festivals and her next film series, Aurora, ran from 2020–2023.
Photo credit: Suki Dhanda
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