ARTICLE: What is an asylum-seeker?
by Benjamin Zephaniah
First published in The Independent 28 December 2002
We should try listening to the refugee's story. They are all very different, with very different stories to tell. They have in common great suffering.
What is an asylum-seeker? To a lot of people in this country "asylum-seeker" has become a term of abuse. Not so long ago I even heard a girl use the phrase "asylum creeper" about someone. I asked her what she meant. She said that an asylum creeper was someone who hung out with asylum-seekers. It reminded me of when I was young and some women were called "black man lover", simply because they happened to be friends with someone with black skin. This made me think again about the debate we are having in this country about immigration, which is very muddled and concentrates too much on the numbers game. It also reminded me about what that debate is doing to our language.
When Ruud Lubbers, the former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, talked about Britain taking more than its "fair share" of asylum-seekers I wonder what he could have mean by that. He is right to say we should talk to other countries about the issue, but I think he is wrong if he means that we can simply divert many asylum-seekers to, say, Portugal or Finland or France. Many want to come to Britain because they have existing friends and families in this country, because they speak some English and because they can get on and get some work and make a life more easily in this country.
Different countries have always had different traditions when it comes to immigration, such as the Moroccans and Algerians who went to live in France or the Turkish workers who went to Germany or the Jamaicans, like my mum, who responded to the posters and were asked to come and work in the "mother country" as nurses. I think it was Enoch Powell who was behind that plan, before he changed his mind. Britain has always been a safe haven for asylum seekers, and it shouldn't be surprising that it still is, or some people think it should still be. And these people do need a safe haven. I know what an asylum seeker is because many of them are my neighbours in my part of London. They are all very different, with very different stories to tell. They have in common great suffering. Like the boy from Sri Lanka I met who was having problems at school. He was a Tamil and his family became caught up in the civil war. Sri Lankan soldiers shot his mother in front of him. They then forced his father to committed a sexual act with the body, and then they shot his father. The boy ran away, and then met some Tamil Tiger guerrillas. They gave the boy a choice; join the guerrillas as a boy soldier or accept their help to go into exile. He became a refugee and I defy anyone to say there is anything bogus about his plight. The strange thing is not that he has been spoiled by the authorities over here, but that he has had so little help in dealing with his trauma.
When I was the poet in residence at the barrister Michael Mansfield's chambers I witnessed a judge saying to a Roma woman from Poland that, although he did believe her story that she had been repeatedly gang-raped he couldn't accept her claim for asylum because rape is not a form of persecution. And yet rape has been used as a weapon of war for centuries, and more than ever recently, in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda. She was not in a civil war, but I doubt she would have suffered in that way had she not been a Roma. This is the poem I wrote about the case.
Appeal Dismissed
I can see your fearful tears
Before me on your statement,
From where I sit I can see your dark terrorised skin
Shivering and barely holding your self together,
I can see your gaping scars wide open
Begging for compassion,
And in addition to your evidence
Both documentary and oral
I have before me
The encyclopaedia of your oppression,
I have the names and addresses of your demons.
I don't have to see you dance to know your suffering
I don't have to hear you cry to know that you are crying,
I saw your harassers on the news
I saw your house on fire via satellite,
I have no doubt that you are not tolerated by your neighbours.
But let's face it
You are not a dissident,
You are not even a liar,
You are what I would call a credible witness,
But I have no reason to believe that your persecution was official.
You were not raped because of your dark skin
You were not raped because of your gypsy tongue,
You were raped because you are a woman
And rape is one of the things that can happen to
A woman,
So go home.
You have been the victim of an act of depravity
And you may never love again,
Nevertheless you have only been raped
And in the books that I have read
Rape does not constitute torture,
Not within the ordinary meaning of the word,
So go home
And take your exceptional circumstances with you.
These stories are much more powerful than any of the statistics that I hear, which I don't think mean very much. I like to imagine how I would explain to a man from Mars about how we all came to live on this island. Once upon a time, I might tell the man in the spaceship, it must have been all but uninhabited, but then came Angles and Saxons and Celts and Norman French and Huguenots and Jews and West Indians and East African Asians and Indians and Chinese and many more. The Martian would say "wow, what a place, a place like that could never have racism". And yet, of course, somehow, that is precisely what we have managed to do. I think we need to remind ourselves that most people in the world would rather not move from the land of their birth. But if they have to suffer persecution or torture, or if the chances of getting a job or just surviving are minuscule, then of course, they will try to find a better life. All of us would. And there is no bigger factor in creating desperate circumstances than war.
We have got our priorities wrong. Instead of spending billions of pounds on a war with Iraq that will create thousands more refugees, we should spend that money on making peace. And politicians should spend a lot more time explaining to people why the refugees are here and what they have been through. Then, perhaps, we would put compassion before numbers.
Benjamin Zephaniah
