What does walking (as an artform) mean when you’re a migrant? Crossing place, and places, spaces and land, over and over again, each time in different ways. Crossing, somewhere or something. Traversing places.
It’s something we all do, but as a migrant, one’s relationship with place is a very openly complex set of situations and encounters, in a contested context. The ‘where are you from’ and ‘when are you going back’ questions arise: a frequent question directed at someone with (a perceived) ‘difference’. Black people receive this question, regardless of whether they were born here or not, and I receive this question too. Being white in appearance, it’s not my body that stands out but my foreign accent – so the ‘where are you from’ enquiry is triggered by sound. I sound odd, out of place, which regularly inhabits the antithesis of belonging. An antithesis twice over: I am, when walking in the area where I live, not only a Londoner in West Cumbria, I am a foreign Londoner in West Cumbria – and therefore not a Londoner at all. As if twenty seven years of my life (where I lived in London) don’t exist, and neither the three years I have lived in West Cumbria. I am, in the imagination of many, the eternal tourist, or migrant.
Though this is a daily experience, not everyone reacts to my presence in this way. Some people are familiar with multiculturalism, and I don’t always have to explain myself. But the question is posed often enough – or my utter foreignness is assumed ‘without question’ – so that I have to be prepared for this kind of encounter to take place.
If ‘where are you from’ is not the first question I receive but arises later on in a conversation, I am happy with it – but if the question is posed upfront, it is unnerving, un-placing, somehow undoing the concept of hybridity, and multiple belonging. The sound of my out-of-place accent structures encounters, conversation, dialogue, assumptions, imaginaries.
So I am a hybrid. As if I walk with another place within me when encountering local places – something that may or may not be true. Of course the coast reminds me of the coast I remember from childhood, even if that was a different coast – but who else might have grown up along a coast different to where one lives now? So my childhood coast is one where a different language is spoken: and that makes all the difference?
Where do we draw the line, when is another place ‘different enough’ to be foreign? Even if I don’t ask myself these questions, somebody else will do so subconsciously, and I am ‘framed’ in this way. My presence provokes psychological processes otherwise confined to the undergrowth. Walking as a migrant, then, is a kind of ‘wild walking’: more liable to be interpreted as unauthorised. I have to become my own author, make my own ‘lines made by walking’, though I may be said to have crossed a line before you have even started walking?
Surely I am walking between the lines too, and what is it that may be read here (between the lines): there is whole space out there! – in here, between here and there, here and now – the temporal is a space too!
My framework then, is both a double-space, and a space in between spaces. Or also: a hybrid place, as well as a two-fold place. Two-fold, at the same time two-fold in inverted commas, as I don’t want to limit my experience to fall in the trap of being reduced to the most obvious ‘migrant-continuum’. Two-fold, therefore, apart from myriad other foldings, and spread-outings, of the land(s) before, around and within me.
I am a migrant-situationist perhaps: moving, though stuck in a location as ‘other-by-accent’. In a poem I wrote in 2009, one of my lines was: “my belonging depends upon my silence’: a state before sound/language is detected, is a ‘safe space’ before difference, where I could belong without qualification as ‘out-of-country’.
The sea is a connector and so are the trees, and the grass and the hills. We have been hearing a lot on how trees communicate – nature connects then, and what about us?
“When are you going back?”. Well, I am moving, walking, I am still going. The personal seems political, not just on account of being a woman, but also of being ‘from elsewhere’. In the context of Brexit, this identifier is enhanced, and we are losing on all sides: walking in each other’s countries (of however long-distant origin) makes it harder and harder to ignore politics. And maybe we shouldn’t: maybe this is a reminder of how important it is for us to not to keep quiet when we are being separated, but to take a stand: take a walk.
