Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I was privileged to see Motherland directed by Juliet Stevenson last Sunday at the Young Vic. It was packed out and because of the demand they are now going to put on just two more performances both on Saturday 15 March. I have never seen anything quite like it, a skillful and engrossing mixture of drama and performance, witness and testimony, music and reporting. Go to it if you can. Its theme is the treatment and responses of children and mothers held in indefinite detention here in the UK because they are asylum seekers. It came about after Stevenson and Natasha Walter went to Yarl's Wood detention centre (one of 10 in the UK). They decided to give voice to those who could not speak. The script is read by young people as well as professional actors including Juliet Stevenson and her daughter Rosalind - Juliet also hosts the event very nicely. It is carefully dramatic. When it shocks you don't feel lectured you feel, well, you learn from a mother how she was separated from her new born child and offered pills to dry up her milk. After finally being rejoined with her skinny child it was suffering from "touch deprivation". This was described to us by Paola Dionisotti who acts one of the Yarl's Wood befrienders who help the mothers and provide intimate kit.
This inhuman treatment happens here in Britain, is what you understand, and not by chance but systemically; as also does resistance to it, including by officials. Helen Bamber, well known for her work for victims of torture, presents the "creative survival" music her Foundation supports:
While the show is mainly about the stories of those who opposed their expulsion, many are being returned every week to the atrocities abroad that the mothers seek to protect their families from by coming here. How did we get to the point, Helena Kennedy asks, when 'asylum seeker' is a phrase of abuse?One reason we got here is reflected in the fact that in the whole of his long speech on the British values behind Managed Migration and Earned Citizenship the Prime Minster gave last month, there was no mention of the historic tradition of this country of offering asylum to those in desperate need.
I also learnt that when the government was passing its excellent Childrens Act it suddenly realised what it meant and amended it to ensure it did not apply to itself when it imprisoned the children of Asylum speakers! I can't quite believe this yet - any help on the details welcome.
Go to Motherland if you can, support Women for Refugee Women if you can't.
Comments
Surely asylum should begin at the first safe country - not one half way across the world?
Most do. Millions of refugees fleeing oppression are trying to remake their lives in Egypt, Jordan even Syria. Most Afghan refugees from the Taliban went to Iran. The implication that most are coming here is wrong.
Anthony
The British government no longer wishes to accept asylum seekers and so, to appease white racists, makes it as hard for them to stay here as possible. This is reflected in the above comment: 'Surely asylum should begin at the first safe country - not one half way across the world?' which is simply an attempt to evade the issue of inhuman treatment. If true, how does it justify continual breaches of human rights? The poster does not say because he does not have the moral courage to do so. His is simply a political response to an ethical issue that seeks to pretend an asylum seeker would know which was the "first safe country". In reality, no one would necessarily know this and could only make a mistake once. If the first country they visited were not safe, they would most likely be deported back to their first unsafe country of origin and be unable to leave thereafter.
Only someone who has never been in fear of his life in his own country could ask such a crassly racist question and expect to be taken seriously. Before you can get to the first safe country, you may have to cross a great many unsafe ones; relying perhaps only on the white propaganda that says Great Britain is safe. Presumably, he believes everyone has access to the good education he never had, since he's not as intelligent nor as experienced as the average asylum seeker. As always with the stupid, they criticise what they do not understand.
This poster refuses to listen to the experiences of others because he wishes to place his own opinions above the facts of reality and cynically believes that everyone in the world is as cynical and materialistic as he. There is no world outside his own schizophrenic head, so mired is he in narcissism and solipsism. Ultimately, he believes there are no genuine asylum seekers, only bogus ones out to exploit our supposedly generous welfare system.
Surely asylum should begin at the first safe country - not one half way across the world?
Frank.
Easy tiger!
I won't resort to your level of personal insults - not that they'd get past the OK moderator if I did.
Your diatribe reveals far more about you than it does about me old chum. I have made no assumptions and merely asked a question. You have assumed all sorts of things about me based on that question.
How you can assume that someone is racist, badly educated, inexperienced, cynical, materialistic, schizophrenic, narcissistic and solipsistic – from a single question?
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