I woke up to my news feed screaming. The other day, a certain right-wing “guru” I won’t name filmed himself slashing RNLI boats in the Channel, in an attempt to prevent volunteers from saving the lives of asylum seekers making the perilous crossing in dinghies. The whole British press seemingly had a field day thanks to this act of pure terror-making, and my feed sadistically listed headline after headline about the poor excuse of a human being they called a “nationalist activist”.
Is sabotaging RNLI volunteers now “activism”? Is calling for vulnerable people to die by drowning at sea now “nationalism”? I must have missed the memo or lost the plot somewhere in the 18 years that I’ve been living in this country. What, pray, did you do yesterday? I can tell you what I did: I wrote about medical research at my day job, emailed researchers; during my lunch break, I did my grocery shopping for the next few days, tried to plan a string of healthy, comforting dinners; after work I spent hours working on my side projects, my creative writing, the material for an upcoming resdiency. This, I suppose, isn’t headline-making material: “Writer spends day writing for day job, then writing for poetry festival”.
Speaking of poetry festivals, there is something else that won’t make the headlines, something I think of every single time I see the far-right bros making the news with their “stop the boats” chants and their plastic flags.
Back in April, I was poet in residence at a festival, too, a festival and residency hosted in a crypt repurposed as an art gallery, right next to a historical church in London. Many things happened during that residency that will stay with me, but there is one in particular that haunts me. There was a young man there – not a crypt apparition, nor one of us poets-in-residence but a young man in flesh and blood who slept in the church garden, in a sleeping bag. It didn’t take me long to conclude, from silent clues, that he must have been an asylum seeker, one of those who had, eventually, been granted asylum then abandoned to the streets with no support or resources. His command of English wasn’t great but he got by, and every evening, when us poets held our open mic down in the crypt, he would leave the crisp April cold of the church garden to descend into the bone-biting cold of the crypt and listen to us. He’d sit or stand quietly in the corner nearest the exit, and listen to us speak of our loves, our lives, our grief, our anger. He always looked like he was paying attention, immersing himself in this foreign language, trying to absorb it, desperately.
Seeing that the weirdos who spent their days pottering about the house of the dead didn’t avoid him or chase him away, that we stopped by to chat with him every once in a while, ask if he’d eaten, and that he was able to use the facilities and make himself a hot cup of tea unbothered, he worked up some courage, little by little. (One of us asked him, at one point, a question they then regretted. They asked something like “where are you from?” upon which, reportedly, the young man pointed to the ground of the crypt and said “here”.) Eventually, one sunny morning, he came to one of us to ask for directions. He wanted to find the nearest job seekers’ centre. All he wanted was to be able to work, to live his life. We never saw him again after that, and I pray he’s safe now, that he has a roof over his head, a job with a salary, and food to eat; that one day, the poetry of this language will no longer be a ghost in the crypt.
His name, as I remember it, is Mukhtar. A name that won’t make the headlines. Mukhtar never told us his story, and we were too embarrassed, perhaps too ashamed of ourselves to ask. A story that will never make the headlines, a story like many others’. I have no idea what he must have lived through to end up homeless, to end up calling a crypt something akin to home. I can only try to imagine, and I will most likely fail.
I think of him still, listening to poetry in the cold of the crypt, as I watch the men wishing him and others like him dead infecting the news with their hate, men who would laugh at our poems.
Mukhtar, whose name means “the chosen one”, I’m sorry we have failed you.
