Three
sketches
Ed
Emery
1. Refugee solidarity – Porte de la Chapelle,
Paris
15
February 2019
Porte
de la Chapelle. Outer periphery of
the city. The asphalt track of what should be the cycleway, running
alongside the tramway. There are long, low iron railings that demarcate the
road from the central reservation. All the way along, the asphalt of the road
next to the railings is pitted with the scars of small fires of some more or
less distant past. The “why” of those fires is self-evident.
On the low iron railings, men are sitting. Sitting and
thinking of nothing in particular. Sitting and staring into the middle
distance. Barely in conversation with the men sitting next to
them. On the ground next to them, each to his own,
small rucksacks which hold their entire worldly possessions. These are
France’s migrants, immigrants and refugees. These are the people who have
arrived from many parts of the world seeking for a better life.
I
sit on the railings with them. Desultory conversation.
With Syrians, Eritreans, Libyans
and others, about the circumstances that bring them here.
Overhead
is a bridge. The railway crosses the roadway. Another central
reservation. Once grassy, now dry trodden mud.
I’m watching it, idly musing, and become aware of large rocks parked right
there. Curious, I think. Rocks – why that? There is no apparent logic. Because the rocks are all in a cluster. But then I realise –
the rocks are situated directly beneath the railway bridge. This is precisely
where France’s refugees and migrants would have huddled, in their makeshift
tents, to gain shelter from winter’s winds and rains. The rocks have been
placed here as an anti-migrant measure, to stop the little camps. Part of the same logic as the evacuation of the Calais jungle.
The harshness of state policy.
From
a distance I make out words that appear to be spray-painted on the rocks. “Fraternité”, “Liberté”,
“Egalité”. The watchwords of
the French republic – brotherhood, freedom and equality. Curiosity
aroused, I cross the tramway to take a closer look.
A shock to discover that the words are not in fact painted. They are sculpted. Inscribed onto the rocks.
Carved with hammer and chisel onto these big lumps of
limestone. Bold, out-standing letters. And what
we have here is simultaneously a statement of irony and an outcry of moral
indignation. The rocks physically embody the racist anti-immigrant exclusions
practised by the French Republic, and at the same time they represent an in
memoriam for the many thousands who have died while making their dangerous
sea-borne journeys to reach safety on these shores.
Somebody,
at some time, has thought fit to carve these rocks of repression and inscribe
them with an alternative meaning – of love and liberation. I decide to
photograph what I see.
The
rocks do not give up their messages easily. I pick my way around them once, and
think that I have captured them all on camera. The men seated on the railings
watch me from a distance (at least this lunatic enlivens their landscape). But
then I notice a small carving that I missed the first time around, and that
leads to another, and another. And, in particular, at every ten minutes of my
circulation the sun has moved across its horizon, and has thrown new things
into relief that previously I had missed. For instance, an inscription in a
vertical plane – someone must have lain prone to carve it – that reads in
French: “In memory of all those who did not manage to arrive.” Where it meets
the ground is the skull of a dead rat, lying there like a memento mori, but also testifying to the fact that this was
once a (living, laughing, eating, shitting) community, bound by the solidarity
of passage, and the exigencies of indigence.
Of
one carving in particular I must make report. In the horizontal plane, it is
inscribed within a chiselled frame. The first thing that catches the eye in the
glare of the afternoon sun is a small upturned half-moon shape. It is a boat.
In the boat are three figures. These figures are migrants, refugees. Storm-tossed on the Mediterranean. The rest of the carving
is a swirl of wind and high-curling waves. It is only when I check the image in
camera – controlling exposures etc – that I realise
that the swirl of wind and water is in fact a huge sea monster intent on
devouring the occupants of the boat.
What
we have here is truly astonishing.
The
various different carvings are clearly done by different hands. One, in square
lettering, pronounces “Refugees are welcome”. Another is a carved heart with
the one word, “Love”. Elsewhere, barely finished faces appear out of the lichen
that is beginning to encrust the carvings. To the right, a magnificent face, in large profile, of an African, done in the
Phoenician style. On other rocks, the words “Solidarity” and “Refused”,
testifying to welcome but also to state exclusion. And then a
single large inscription – bright and distinct and apparently cleared of lichen
– which reads “Karim – 1998-2018”.
Beautifully lettered, with strong descending curves.
And leaving no doubt that here we are in a moment of deeply-felt and
artistically framed in memoriam.
It
is also, in the best tradition of French situationism,
a détournement. The
aesthetics of subversion.
I
have a sufficiency of photographs to represent the moment, and some of them I
have reproduced in this present piece of writing. But for what happens next I
have no images – only words.
I
turned momentarily to survey my public. It was a moment of intense shock. What
previously had been a landscape of men quietly engaged in their thoughts, or
strolling in the sun, was now entirely naked, stripped bare, not a person to be
seen. The reason was not hard to find. At the head of the
pass stood three riot police, with their heavy truncheons in hand. The
afternoon’s round-up was about to begin.
White
riot police vans appeared in the street. Disgorging other police, similarly
equipped. They blockaded the pavements and proceeded to check the identity
papers of anybody they could capture – those who had not scooted into the
middle distance – and harass people, and drive them away, and, as far as I
could see, to take some of them into custody.
What
was being enacted here was control of territory. People who have no place to go
– and their exclusion from the last places where they might possibly,
eventually find a standing point. Why do these men sit on the iron railings? Because they have no right to sit on the public benches. I
watched as three police approached two black men sitting at a tram stop. “Move
on!” The men protested. The police explained forcefully, and in the French
manner (this being a country of droit): “You
have no right to sit here.”
No
rights, precisely.
A young man, a black man, wearing a hoodie
and carrying his possessions.
His features recall those of the rock carving. He has been removed by the
police. As he passes me, he says: “What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed
to go? At night we have to go and hunt among the buildings to find places to
sleep. And then they come and chase us out. What does this Macron want us to
do?”
The
answer is simple. Macron and his fellow racist countrymen just want you to fuck
off and die. If they could, they would set for you the same kind of poison
traps that they set for the rats that are your night-time fellow residents in
this place.
We
had arrived in Paris with the intention to go and play music for and with the
refugees and migrants encamped in small makeshift tent towns scattered around
the French capital. But, as of mid-January, those camps were evicted in a major
police operation, and now these people drift – a multitude of isolated and
individualised singularities – in the desolate urban spaces of the outer
suburbs. So even moments of solidarity become hard to
sustain.
In
Lebanon there is a valley in which invading armies, over the passage of time,
from Alexander the Great to the present, have left their names inscribed as engravings
carved into the rock. The inscriptions are preserved and prized as a national
monument. These present carvings will soon be overcome and infilled
by dirt and vegetation. They should be preserved, in that same spirit. They are
precious.
Karim, whoever
he was, died young. And his memory is preserved here.
As
carved onto another rock, “Salut a toi le Soudanais”.
___________________________________
Figure 1:
Porte de la Chapelle – Head of an African
Figure 2:
Porte de la Chapelle – Storm at sea
Figure 3:
Porte de la Chapelle – “Humanité”
Figure 4:
Porte de la Chapelle – Head of a man
Figure 5:
Porte de la Chapelle – Storm at sea – detail
Figure 6:
Porte de la Chapelle – “Au memoire
de ceux qui ne sont pas arrivés”
Figure 7:
Porte de la Chapelle – “Karim
– 1988-2018”
Figure 8:
Porte de la Chapelle – “Solidarité”
Figure 9:
Porte de la Chapelle – “Salut
a toi le soudanais”
Figure 10:
Porte de la Chapelle – “Fraternité”
______________________________________
2. Wave over wave, sea over
bow
18
September 2020
Silence. Not a
breath of wind. Out on the water, the ascending call of a
lone screech owl in the night. The still point of the
great turning world. The full moon pulls up the tides and today is the
highest tide of the year.
Each
day I rise at dawn and work at my makeshift desk. My window faces south. I sit
in the middle of a parabola. The sun rises above the cliffs on my left and sets
on my right, behind the lone oak tree on its little island – sometimes hazed in
mist, sometimes fiery-furnace red. The moon also rises on my left and sets on
my right, moving regularly through her phases. The tide comes and goes twice a
day, receding far into the distance to become a trickle and then inwelling massively and imperiously, coming in from the East and stopping just short of
my wall.
Will
the wall hold or will it not? Ancient stonework going back in
time. Rough rubble, patched together by inexpert
hands. Red Devonian sandstone that was once volcanic,
embedded with grey stone because then, for an aeon or two, it became the bed of
a river. Sweating in the noonday sun to bring sand and cement to fill the gaps.
Hold it right there while I hit it, well I reckon that ought to get it.
The
wall does not hold. The wall has imperceptible cracks. My mind is somewhat
elsewhere, absorbed in things. Desolation Row. The
Futurists wanted to do away with adjectives. Let the noun stand on its own. Why does everything have to be “like” something
else in order to be appreciated? Wordsworth on The Daisy: “Oft on the dappled
turf at ease / I sit and play with similes”. Is there a worse rhyme in the
whole of English verse? Shelley waxed lyrical and dressed the west wind in all
kinds of fancies. That is a nonsense. The west wind
blew for days, beating my walls and windows. It destroyed my plants, reduced
each of them to brown stunted stubs where previously they were rich in
greenery, with red flowers that played in tune with the red flag at the water’s
edge. The flag of the Chicago martyrs and all that followed. Brutal, that wind.
Afternoon, and the
bait diggers are raging. They’ll be heading north to fish cod on the Bristol
Channel. Raging and sweating in their long thigh waders (lethal if you fall
over in the water… the air rushes to your heels and suspends you upside down
till you drown). Forking doggedly in the mudbanks
on the receding tide. Hunting worm. Red
lugworm, ooze around your fingers, throw them against something hard and they
stiffen. White ragworm a little treasure if you can
find them ‘cos cod are crazy for them. Two hours
they’ve dug. Look, they say, pathetic! The banks are stripped bare, they say. For why? Because the local worm man has got there first.
Takes ten pound a day, they say, ten pound a day and he sells them in town. Ten
pound a day, every day since lockdown began, they say. And all you want is a
bit of worm to put on your hook to catch your supper. Look at this. Two hours
and I’ve got seventy. Two hours over on the other side and my mate got only
thirty-six. Why does he need to take ten pounds? What makes me angry is that he
brags about it. Ten pounds! And anyway, they say, he’s got a heart condition
and he’ll be dead soon, so why does he need ten pounds?
But
now it is night. With a beer on the bench, and the red glow of the fire, and a
good supper in prospect, my mind is on other things. How do you tell the call
of a whimbrel from the call of a curlew and why is
the plural of salmon salmon? Until
thought gives way to a new sound in the night. A
trickle, a gurgle, a runningness of water that is
closer at hand than it should be. I step out of the door. Indeed, the
wall has not held. On the other side my dinghy, hitched to her mooring post, is
riding high, almost taller than me, or so it looks. The knot will hold because
it is a clove hitch, the most beautiful supple-conceived knot in the universe,
a simple flick of hand-over-hand and she holds for ever. But on this side,
between ancient concreted sandbags that must have been laid in the war, the
stubborn, insistent force of incoming tidal water is pressing through the
cracks that it has found. A seeping, a trilling, undramatic, almost pleasing, and at all events unstoppable.
Already my back yard is under six inches of water. The
potatoes, the leeks and the onions will not like this, but the camomile and the
sea spinach will welcome it because it is their vocation. And the trickle sound
is because the waters have found the hole which the rabbit dug next to the
front door post last year, and they are gushing down it with gay abandon.
In
short, we are flooded, and there is nothing that determination or the wit of
man can do about it. Nothing except enjoy the heat of this
late summer night, and rejoice in the ultimate permeability of closures, blocks
and borders. Wade in the water. Tidy the bits that have floated loose
from my woodpile. Pray that the salt water has not reached the newly planted
grape vine, because she will definitely not like it. And then go inside, back
to the fire, and read a book and listen to the water swilling beneath the
floorboards.
Figure 11:
Window at dusk
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3. Droit
de voyage, droit de séjour
1
December 2020
The
musician sent me a photo of his kids. Lovely kids. Somewhere en route, on their travels. They look tired. The older
daughter speaks good English. She translates for her dad.
On the North Kent coast, the
vigilantes (they call themselves the “Coastbusters”)
are out in force. They are hunting down illegal immigrants. When they find
them, they smash them with hammers. These immigrants cross from northern
France. They have been declared an “invasive species”, a “fouling species”.
They have no place on British soil. These hapless travellers are the Pacific
oyster, Crassostrea gigas,
and the people of Kent have declared war on them.
At Scardovari
in the Po delta south of Venice, Lucio has been
experimenting. The Pacific oyster has an interesting breeding pattern.
Depending on the balance of genders in their community, they may switch between
being male or female. In the summer months, when the time is right, the female
releases up to 200 million eggs into the water. These are then fertilised by
sperm that the male releases into the water. The resulting larvae then spend up
to three weeks looking for a place where they can settle and grow. They are
very particular about their choice of surface for settlement. Preferred options
are ground-up sea shells (cultch), other sea creatures (winkles, cockles, other oysters), roof tiles, house bricks, even old tyres. Lucio’s stroke of genius has been to get lengths of old
plastic cargo strapping from supermarkets, wrap them into a coil, and put them
into sacks. The oyster larvae swim along, settle on the plastic strips, and
after a while you find yourself with a healthy crop of oysters. In the
Mediterranean it works. On the coast of southern England every year larvae
travel across from France into English waters.We
tried Lucio’s system here but it doesn’t work. A puzzle.
Kent,
a hotbed of anti-immigrant activity. While Coastbusters are out killing foreign oysters, British
anti-immigration groups have been sending vigilante boats into the English
Channel to watch for small boats arriving from France with migrants on board.
“Migration Watch”, they call themselves. As if they are visitors at a zoo, they
watch and film refugees and migrants as they struggle to get through the
Channel waters to reach England. Sometimes desperately baling
out water, sometimes sinking, and always hoping against hope.
Dateline Kent, 2 September 2020: The BBC reports
that more than 400 migrants have crossed the English Channel in small boats – a
record for a single day. “Border Force has intercepted 416 people, including
young children, on board 28 boats, the Home Office has confirmed. Some of the
migrants were carrying children too young to walk.” During August, more than 1,468 migrants made the crossing by small
boat in August, with one group landing at Shakespeare Beach, Dover.
The problem for the British government is that
there are transnational human rights laws that
protect the rights of refugees. "We will address the rigidities in our
laws that make this country a target and a magnet." Thus spake Boris Johnson, our flatulent
Primo Minestrone. Every time he opens his mouth, his arse
speaks. Complains that our human rights laws are too
restrictive and need to be replaced. Shut up, du
Arsch…
Pacific Oysters were deliberately introduced into
the UK as early as the 1890s, to bolster the ailing Native oyster fishery.
Then, in the 1960s, the UK government gave active encouragement to their
further development. Initial trials had concluded that Pacific oysters could
grow, but would not be able to reproduce in Britain’s cold waters. However,
with global warming, sea temperatures have risen and have reached a threshold
which enables reproduction. To such an extent that the Pacific oyster is found
as far north as northern Norway, and the UK now has substantial oyster
fisheries.
In fact, it is
remarkable that we have any oysters at all in our rivers. On
the River Teign in Devon, for instance. Just
five years ago, in October 2015, there was an outbreak of oyster herpes virus –
the same virus that had decimated the oyster fisheries in France and Ireland.
It has no health implications for humans, but it kills Pacific oysters. Indeed,
local oyster culivators say that about 98% of the
Pacific oysters on the Teign were killed at that
time, numbering about a million in total. A specially
heartbreaking time for those who had worked so hard to develop the local
fishery.
However during
the past five years there has been a recovery. The local Pacific oysters have
developed immunity. It is possible that these are larvae that washed in from
France – these oysters have distinctly French DNA – and that the immunity was
developed over there. The benefits of illegal immigration.
The musician was banned from
playing in his own country. He was tortured. They plunged his right arm into
boiling water to prevent him playing. Faced with death threats, he decided to
take his family and leave. The long, desperate, costly trek
to France, in the hopes of finding refuge in Britain. They lived for
several months in the Jungle refugee camp. All around them, migrants were daily
attempting the harsh, desperate, life-threatening crossing of the border. Many migrants
died. Recently migrant support activists have begun a project of counting the
numbers of those killed by the border. Compter les morts.
I did not know how he and his
family reached England. For sure the means were illegal, since there are no
other channels for entry. All I know is that I received a phone call the other
day. The young daughter, translating for her father: “Hello, we are in London.”
Settled, and, as far as I know, with permission to stay.
And he sent me that photograph.
The children are in a big space, sitting on the floor. The space looks like a
shed, but then I realise that it is the back of a container lorry. That must
have been how they made their entry into England. The children look tired but
secure in themselves. Only when I magnify the picture do I realise that they
are sitting on hundreds of cartons of Petit Filous
(“Little Rascals”). These are French yoghurts targeted at children. Curiosity
took me to the company’s website (Yoplait, a French dairy cooperative founded in
1965). It is full of picture of Happy Children. And it proclaims: Born to Play
Free: “We’re helping parents to inspire their kids and to help them rediscover
their imagination through free play.” Who knows, perhaps the parent company
will be proud of having brought these three children to the possibility of a
new life in England.
I hope that my musician friend
will not be offended to find that I speak of him in the same breath as speaking
of oysters. This has been a moment of reflection, a moment for thinking about
the permeability of borders, and the unstoppability
of nature’s flows, and also hopes for better futures.
______________________________________