Awet Fissehaye 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 Transmissionsseries, 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.

~

I am sitting in the Art Room at the London Library, facing a big, oblique, off-white glass window. It is the same colour as this Word document, currently blank beyond this sentence, which I plan to fill with words that say something about why and how I ended up in the UK. I am 5,700 kilometres away from my country, Eritrea – or, rather, it is 5,700 kilometres, with no countries you must enter in between, if you fly. It is 8,100 kilometres if you drive, in which case you pass through twelve nations. Or, if you walk, and then get a boat, and then travel by whatever means you can, it is some other distance, some other number of countries.

I must start like this – oblique, like the window in front of me – because arriving in a foreign land comes at the expense of leaving one’s homeland, and telling the story of that journey means revisiting and reliving its experiences, and, sometimes, these experiences are miserable. So it is hard to for me to go straight into my story of leaving home, of escaping the restrictions of Eritrea, not once, but twice.

~

Through reading books in English, and then studying English literature, I’d become familiar with and, to a great extent, fond of the UK.

During my teenage years, I’d ask older friends to borrow books from the university library for me – we didn’t have any at school. I cannot claim that I fully grasped what I was reading, and I still can’t, but it helped me familiarise myself with some British writers and their works. They – the Romantic poets, the Victorian novelists, the twentieth-century greats – allured me to the idyllic countryside, and unreservedly allowed me into the socio-political underbellies of the cities and towns.

In 2002, I joined the English department at the University of Asmara, Eritrea. To my delight, some of the books I’d been reading for fun were included in the course. My then professors, Rathinder N. Bhattacharji and Tej N. Dhar, for whom I have everlasting admiration for their deep-rooted love of literature, reinforced my understanding of writing, unlocking its meaning, essence, sublimity. The more I read Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Owen, Orwell and others, the more I connected to the literary consciousness of Britain. But coming and staying in the UK was not an option for me.

~

I contemplated leaving Eritrea many times between early 2003 and mid-2006, with the wake of the government’s 2001 crackdown on the media growing rather than subsiding. It nagged away at me, this idea, as I became less and less able to tolerate a state in which citizens were denied basic human freedoms, and where those who challenged this could be thrown into one of several hundred secret prisons. For poets and writers like me, it was, and still is, impossible to write, to project one’s views freely in any form of expression in Eritrea. Artists and journalists there face a bitter choice: becoming a propagandist for the government, or fleeing the country with unstained integrity. I went with the second option.

My then girlfriend of four solid years, Salem, and I agreed that I should leave first, despite initially planning to flee together. We promised each other we would meet again and have a future together. On 7 June 2006, along with my friends Tam and Meron, I set out for Ethiopia, leaving Salem, my family, and my friends behind. We left at night, to avoid being seen by Eritrean soldiers, who would either capture or kill us. After travelling on foot for several hours, we had lost our direction. When the sun rose in the morning, we found ourselves back where we’d started.

The following night, we again departed. There were a few difficult encounters with hyenas, but they were less dangerous than the soldiers. In the early morning, we arrived in Tigray. A few days later, UNHCR authorities drove us to an isolated refugee camp in Western Tigray. It wasn’t safe: Eritrean secret services had managed to kidnap people from inside. And so Tam and I left for Sudan, while Meron decided to go to Addis Ababa.

We reached Khartoum penniless. The Sudanese security forces had robbed us along the way.

~

We lived in Khartoum for a year, planning a safe route to Europe. We liked the city and its people, just not the endless exploitation and abuse from the police, and the fear of being deported to Eritrea. Then, in early October 2007, Salem messaged me. Her parents were pressuring her to marry someone else. I called her, and she said that she was devastated – that it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t left without her. And so, despite the complexities of getting out of Eritrea, the decision to return was straightforward.

I met Salem at her workplace the morning I arrived back in Asmara. But I didn’t get the reception I was expecting. I was heartbroken, but still hopeful that she would come to realise I had returned to fulfil my promise to live in love.

I stayed in Asmara for three weeks. Then, on 9 November, at 11pm, on Harnet Avenue in the centre of the city, towards the end of my friend’s wedding ceremony, four armed government security men appeared and handcuffed me. Harnet, by the way, means ‘liberty’.

They drove me to Adi Abeto, a notorious prison a few kilometres from the capital. In the morning, they beat me, dragging me along the floor, spitting on my face, pointing a gun at my temple. They asked me why I was back in Eritrea., and I answered pleadingly that I had returned to be with my girlfriend. With my hands and legs tied tightly, they tortured me all day. At 5pm, they moved me to Mai Serwa, a prison that’s no less notorious. I was locked in a shipping container with two others who had already been there for some time.

During the torture sessions in Mai Serwa, the interrogators read from my diaries. Salem and her mother were arrested for several days, simply for being mentioned in the notebooks. My friend, Tesfalem, was detained for a week – for the same reason, and for trying to discover my whereabouts after the arrest. The interrogators read aloud select passages from my journals that criticised the government. I was told to repent. When I asked them why they wanted me to repent for sins I hadn’t committed, intensified flogging and kicking followed. The torture left me with an enduring injury to my back, which I have suffered with ever since.

On New Year’s Eve 2007, I was again relocated, to Wia, an underground prison with unbearable heat and inhumane conditions, also known as ‘the Oven’. The number of people confined there fluctuated between 150 and 250. The space was too small to accommodate either figure. We were allowed just one ten-minute break a day, heavily guarded, to relieve ourselves outside. It was the only moment in which we had the chance to connect with the world outside (apart from the occasional visits to our cells from snakes, and the constant residence of rats).

Once, during my daily break, one of Wordsworth’s poems, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, came to me as I heard a local woman singing in the fields. I echoed a phrase my poetry professor had said in class: ‘How beautiful! This is poetry, my dear!’ This momentary sense of connection reminded me of the power of literature, of its transcendence. The poem stayed with me for months. I would repeat it, in my heart, and then out loud to my fellow inmates.

~

I was released in January 2009. I rejoined my family and friends, but the hope of rekindling the relationship with Salem had moved out of reach.

By 2013, I had got a job opportunity as a stringer for VOA, covering Eritrea. To get licenced, I had to submit my credentials to the Ministry of Information. To the Eritrean government, ‘Credentials’ means submissiveness. Three directors-general and two subordinates asked if I was ready to present a good image of the government to the world. I replied that I would abide by VOA’s tenets: accuracy, balance, comprehensiveness, and objectivity. They were unhappy with that answer.

So, in October 2014, I again left Eritrea for Sudan. In Khartoum, I received intense medical treatment for my back injury. After seven months, I was ready to go to Europe, via the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea.

I did not make that decision out of bravery. I did not take that decision lightly. I made it in desperation. I decided to throw myself into 9,200,000 square kilometres of desert and 2,510,000 square kilometres of water. I knew relatives and friends who had died, beheaded in the desert or drowned in the Sea. I had heard enough tragic stories of lives cut short in desperate journeys towards safety. I knew I had no guarantee that my fate would be different, that I would safely reach a destination. Because, who gives much thought to a destination when imminent danger looms at the origin? Because, a quick escape is more important than a safe arrival for a desperate refugee.

~

On 5 June 2015, we boarded a lorry and set off for the Sahara. At first, there were 56 of us; we joined another three lorries en route, and the number grew to around 200. Our Sudanese smugglers handed us over to their Libyan counterparts at the border, who beat us with whatever was in their hands and rushed us to board Land Cruiser pickups, packing the vehicles with twice the number of people they could safely accommodate. For those of us hanging on the edges of the truck beds, three quarters of our bodies were outside their walls. People would fall out, and we would bang the roof of the cab, and the smugglers would reluctantly stop to collect the fallers. Then, they told us stop letting them know. When a 5-year-old boy became extremely sick, and we had no option but to do so, the driver shouted back in Arabic, ‘Khaliyu Yemut’ – ‘Leave him to die’. The convoy stopped just three times after that, at three burial sites: a warning not to get sick or fall.

I’d had no doubt it was going to be a godless journey. No one had promised us a promised land. No Moses was mandated to lead us in the desert, or divide the Mediterranean waters in two. I hadn’t expected a smooth journey, because the smugglers we relied on to lead us to safety were just the modern pharaohs from whom we were running, but wearing different guises. I hadn’t any illusion that our thirst would be quenched in the desert, or our hunger sated in the sea that had fed on the corpses of our brothers and sisters.

Hundreds of thousands of people and animals have set their feet on the Sahara over the centuries. But the desert never fails to hide the traces of routes travelled. Footprints, hoofprints, pawprints left behind by the striding limbs of creatures disappear on the vast dunes. The desert is incredibly good at keeping its secrets. These days, I watch – and enjoy – David Attenborough’s spectacular documentaries on the Sahara from the comfort of my home. And then I remember being in the desert, famished, dehydrated, starved, weak and humiliated, and the Sahara becomes what it is to refugees: pitiless nature’s punishing instrument.

After a day and a night, we reached Ajdabiya, the first stop on the smuggling route to Tripoli. We were locked in a small room for two days, with no access to food or toilets. We were told that asking for either would bring our lives to an end. So we waited in patience.

We were finally boarded onto Isuzu pickups and started the next leg of the journey, to Bani Waled, which we reached after a week. It should have been a quicker trip, but we had to take a long route around the IS-controlled area. We stayed in Bani Walid for five days, while the smugglers arranged for two trucks to be loaded with bricks, and for us to be hidden between them. Then, the moment we entered Tripoli, a militia group stopped the vehicles and found us inside.

~

They kept us for four and a half months. We were locked inside a compound where, deprived of food, water, hygiene and medicine, disease thrived. I was infected with scabies. I remember vigorously scratching, rubbing, and squeezing my privates to alleviate the excruciating itch. The relief never lasted, yielding to broken skin and pain when urinating.

The group sold us to an Eritrean smuggler, who boarded 350 of us – Eritreans and Somalis – onto a small, unseaworthy boat. It was built to carry 150 people and, to save space, we were denied life jackets. After only a few hours at sea, smoke began billowing from below. Those suffocating in the hull strove to reach the upper deck, but found it crowded with women, children and the infirm. Chaos reigned when the engine stopped and water started to leak in. But two defiant comrades managed to fix the engine, and we continued sailing into international waters. There, a Spanish warship rescued us.

~

In January 2016, I arrived in the UK on the back of a lorry, dishevelled, wearing layers of dirty clothes, my shoes caked in thick French mud. Exhausted and hungry, I went to a McDonald’s in Cannock, armed with six one-euro coins. When the cashier said that they didn’t accept euros, a woman who overheard came forward and bought me food and drink, and gave me three one-pound coins. A taxi driver named Abdu gave me a ten-pound note and bought me a train ticket to Birmingham. At Birmingham New Street, I approached two Eritrean women. Hoping to get to London, and see Tam in for the first time in eight years, I asked them to help me use the ticket machine. They looked at me – at my dishevelled appearance, and my muddy shoes, and my dirty clothes – and asked me if I had just arrived. I said yes.

They hugged me. They told me how glad they were that I had arrived safely. Dehab, whose train was to leave in a few minutes, gave me a twenty-pound note and left. Elsa took me to Primark and bought me clothes that cost sixty pounds. Instead of going to London, I was advised to seek asylum in Birmingham, and so I did. Tesfit Yohannes, another friend, offered me a warm reception in his house for nearly a month.

Later, in February, I travelled to London and reunited with Tam. I visited Westminster Bridge in honour of Wordsworth’s famous sonnet, one of my favourite poems from university classes, curious to see if being at the actual spot could offer the splendid view of London’s natural beauty that the Romantic poet promised.

~

Arriving in the UK was not a panacea. The hardships and torture remained engraved in my mind. These things do not fade quickly from memory: human bodies being used to put out cigarettes, heads being cleaved with spades or AK-47 muzzles, threads of maggots dropping from neglected wounds. Every time I heard fireworks, I panicked, and the scarred, mottled skin around my groin constantly reminded me of the pain I had endured. All the while, Eritreans’ asylum claims were in collective limbo, because of the Home Office’s use of a profoundly flawed Danish report suggesting that Eritrean asylum seekers could safely return to the country. Eventually, the political motive was reversed when the tribunals found in favour of the Eritreans.

Now, six and half years after I was granted refugee status in the UK, it pains me to see refugees who have recently crossed the channel, hoping to have found light at the end of the tunnel, being threatened with ‘removal to their home country or a safe third country’. For most refugees, these two options are not, in fact, options. Eritreans cannot return home. And Rwanda, the UK’s ally in this scheme, has repeatedly failed to be a safe third country for Eritrean migrants deported from Israel, who found themselves dropped into the hands of smugglers and into slavery.  

Suella Braverman’s ‘dream’ and ‘obsession’ with ‘stopping the boats’ and deportingasylum seekers to Rwanda scares me more than Katie Hopkins’s 2015 article, about wanting to use gunships to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Hopkins’s xenophobia was straightforward. It came from a private citizen. But the Home Secretary’s anti-migrant sentiments are slightly subtler, more insidious. And, coming from a person holding ministerial power, much more dangerous.

~

The etymology of ‘oblique’ is unclear; it’s moved across too many languages, too many regions. We know it comes from the Latin ‘oblīquus’, but we’re not sure exactly what that word’s history is. Most people think it comes from a Proto-Indo-European word, which had a meaning that meant something like ‘to move’.

There are 1.3 kilometres between the London Library and the Home Office. Or 2.4 kilometres if you drive, or 1.8 kilometres if you walk. You do not have to take a boat. I hope this story can find its way there.

Awet Fissehaye is a poet, writer, and lyricist born and raised in Eritrea. A lover of English literature and a firm believer in the power of words, he started to write poetry at an early age before studying English at the University of Asmara-Eritrea. He was the first recipient of the National Poetry Prize for Students in 2000. In 2007, he was arrested by Eritrean government security forces, tortured, and kept in inhumane conditions for 14 months. In 2014, Awet left Eritrea for Sudan before continuing toward Europe through the Sahara and the Mediterranean. Awet is an Honorary Member of English PEN and in 2022 he became Executive Director of PEN Eritrea in Exile. He has lived in exile in the UK since 2016.

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