From Sudan to the Sydenham Road…

Dr Anne Darcy is part of Psychologists for Social Change NI who apply psychology to policy and political action.

He sat tall and straight in his chair with his infant daughter on his knee. When I was greeted by his kind eyes and invited to sit, she suddenly sat very still and fixed me with her big brown eyes. Again and again, she would go back to being content and animated as she sat within the protection of her father’s slender frame, and her older brothers and sisters tended to her with toys and smiles and hand holding from time to time. Whenever I caught her gaze she would sit transfixed and unsure of this stranger in her midst, but she did not cry or frown. She just stared because I was different and unfamiliar. He told me his name is Abdul and a warm smile stretched across his face as he said he could not wait until the fast ended. I told Abdul I had not been to an Iftar before, and it seemed unfair to eat with everyone else when I had not been fasting. From that point on he took me under his wing. He told me that his wife Sahar would join us once the cooking was done, and I could look forward to food from nine different countries, including his own Sudan as well as Iraq and Syria. When most of the room had their plates of food, after first breaking the fast in the traditional way with dates, Sahar went back to get more dishes that I had not tried yet. The welcome they gave me was as warm as when I visit aunts and uncles of my own. I was enjoying a delicious selection of desserts and steaming hot spiced Iraqi tea, when one woman stood and spoke about how she had once been a newcomer seeking asylum and facing so much uncertainty. She urged other newcomers to Belfast to have confidence that they too would come through the difficult first months and they had a community around them to help. But this was a small sanctuary within our wider community that ranges from indifference to outright hostility towards migrants and people forced to seek asylum.

This was only the second time I had been in a room in Belfast where white faces were in the minority. The first time was in 2002. I sat in this same vaulted space of Redeemer Central Church on Donegall Street. The Kind Economy Project were holding a public meeting to do what they could to address the increasing hostility from our government towards migrant families here in Northern Ireland. I rushed in from work and was humbled and grateful to be offered a home cooked lunch. I found a seat, and when the man seated beside me switched to English for my sake, I told him that I enjoy being alongside Arabic sounding languages. I feel nostalgia for my grandmother who spoke Maltese, which is the only Semitic European language and is based on the Arabic alphabet. He asked me to guess what language he and another man at the table were speaking. I came fairly close, but then he explained how they could get by in Syrian and Lebanese and mostly understand each other. When the meeting began, one speaker gave an account of the mistreatment families seeking asylum face in their accommodation, and another spoke of the impact of mistreatment during her pregnancy. Denied essentials such as maternity clothes suitable for winter temperatures. An aerospace engineer from Sudan declared it a disgrace on the United Kingdom that people lack such basic needs as healthy food and clean clothes in these lands. The Home Office and Mear’s, who provide this accommodation, had been invited to send representatives, but their seats in the front row sat empty.

Some time later I met with the Anaka Collective and another Belfast resident spoke of how devastated she was to see war break out in Sudan again while she was so far away and could do nothing. She looked heartbroken. Yet I was the one doing worse than nothing. Twasul works to support asylum seeking families who are denied a home address and housed in cramped unsuitable conditions within hotels. With whole families placed in a single hotel room. No access to a GP because of having no address and no access to a kitchen to cook for their own children. Watching them go hungry because of the cheap, unfamiliar food given to them. These families are given an allowance that does not cover the cost of the milk for their babies’ bottles. Twasul carries the weight of knowing the Sudanese people as her kin. I have been brought up in a world where we are taught that the plight of many so-called ‘developing’ countries has nothing to do with our own colonial past. So I did not know about the war in Sudan, and to be honest, the news had not made me feel anything in particular. Maybe, if I am really honest with myself, I felt indifferent. I’m trying to change that fact about myself, because I think that indifference exists on a large scale and it allows wars to be stoked and profited from in revenue and in power. While we stand idly by, looking away from the evidence that we are complicit. Every touchscreen we own traps about 60 or 70 people in modern day slavery. The ties between wealth accumulation and war continue to strangle the globe just as much as in the age of empire.

One thing that led to me seeking out these spaces was having worked through an anti-racism booklet created by racereflections.co.uk. It asked me to consider when I first learned about race and knew what my own ethnicity was. I struggled to think about my whiteness, with religion coming much more easily to mind as categories that created societal hierarchies in my early life. The booklet suggested I could reflect on other oppressions like sectarianism to help me to contemplate anti black racism on a human level, but it urged me not to imagine equivalence between the vastly horrific impacts of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade and other injustices. Such as the many hierarchies that exist within whiteness. It is only in recent decades we know that our true ancestors were black, with white skin emerging a mere 8000 years ago. Surrounded by the lies and denialism of whiteness, we have all forgotten our connectedness. Like the rhizomes of Aspen trees growing beneath the earth out of sight, it seems as if we stand like trees, separate and unconnected. But the unseen inter-connectedness is as real as can be.

When I sat in the Redeemer being warmly invited to share in a community Iftar, it was almost a year since war broke out in Sudan. A year on, and that Lebanese man has gone through the same heartache of seeing war erupt in your homeland from afar. I hope that eating together at the Iftar, my own child, learned as wide a sense of community and identity as my grandmother’s soft brown hands and the sound of her beautiful language taught me. I might once have thought Abdul and Sahar were out of place in East Belfast, but no more than William from Larne was when he was one of the soldiers enforcing British interests in North East Africa in 1943. William had been posted in Malta before the war broke out, and when the war ended he brought his young Maltese wife over to a life in North Belfast. As William’s grandchild, I grew up in the 1980s with images of starving Ethiopians portrayed as victims of drought rather than starved by the man-made wars that had ravaged the country for ten years before. Those images obscured the humanity and familiarity that was so abundantly clear as I watched Abdul’s little daughter take in the world around her from her father’s lap. For the sake of yourself and your children, find your own local Abdul, Sahar, and Twasul and get to know them, because those of us who know only the preferred stories and lies of the Global North have a lot to learn, and a lot of kindness and wisdom waits there for us.

https://ti.to/local-welcome/local-welcome-meals-in-belfast is one way to get started, with meals organised once a month by Ormeau Refugee Partnership.

This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.