This line from Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC really resonated with me, of all the wonderful happenings at the convention, which I watched with much relish from my home in Sussex England, this line left me with a hum, that gentle resonant sound from satisfaction and a warm caress of the soul in a manner of speaking.
Flashing back to a few weeks ago, when the riots started kicking off in Southport, it was probably the first time ever I felt afraid living in England. It’s funny, I always thought the only place I would ever feel settled, at home, is England, the place I felt sure that I would have voices to speak up for me in the event that something nefarious happened to me. England is the place that no matter where I travel to in the world, I always want to come back to as home and it’s for simple reasons really, I can find ingredients to make jollof on my doorstep, I can find a shop where I can buy items for my afro hair easily without have to journey too far, I can find places and spaces that cater to me and mine within our community because we are part of the community. England is the place where I felt sure that people would take to the streets if I did not make it home safe. I felt safe in the privilege of that knowledge. I walked the streets as if, my friends often tease me, I was married to the kingpin of London town. It is why I am able to go to Oxford Circus at midnight to do something as frivolous as take pictures of the Christmas windows in Selfridges without a care that anything would happen to me, because this is my home, a place where I felt safe, a place where people would look for me. I moved through the night with a kind of swagger of being safe in the knowledge that I would make it home always; not matter where I was or what time of the day it was. I would make it home.
I lived on a council estate where we knew our neighbours and gave a damn about each other. Our neighbours were Irish, Jamaicans, Somalians, Eritreans… a smorgasbord of us immigrants who lived in close contact with each other. At one point or another, we faced discrimination to varying degrees but discrimination no less, so we know a bit of what it was like to walk in each other’s shoes. And through all that, we still felt safe within a community that reflected the realities of our world.
There was a caller to Shelagh Fogharty’s show on LBC a few weeks ago, Darren; his call will live on as one of the most important moments in broadcast radio. It was a rallying cry in our history as a nation. Darren talked about the essence immigration brings to a community, to England as a country, and the union as a whole. The depth it adds, the wealth it enhances and the importance of it. Darren talked about immigrants as his people, welcome wherever, because he’d seen how they’d become part of the fabric of society. We are his people.
Darren’s call went a long way into calming my nerves, calming a lot of people’s nerves I would imagine; knowing that there are people like him out there, going to bat for people like me. Though it did not make leaving home any easier in the wake of the riots themselves, it made it a little easier to settle on the train journey to work.
London… I love London with the same passion I love jollof, immensely because when talks of these riots coming to London started to circulate I knew with all my chest that London will regulate. People took to the streets in their droves, in counter demonstrations; Walthamstow, Brighton, Crawley, central London, everywhere these morons promised to invade with their hate, the forces of good turned out for the greater good, to protect their community, to show the very best of a multi-cultural Britain and how good it is for our country, our communities. That night dinner would’ve been from the kebab shop, a local curry or cheap Chinese because that is the taste of Britain, the clean-up would have involved all races and all religions because that is community. The kebab shop is a pivotal part of a night out; a right of passage, as is left over Chinese for lunch at work the next day… these microcosms that melt together to form a community. Our people, the people who gave us items for free during the pandemic because they knew how much we were struggling, the ones who made sure to stock up their shelves with foods without hiking up the price because they knew the big shops would likely be sold out or rationing items, the ones who stopped to chat because they knew how lonely a time we were having indoors. The ones who looked after us and held our economy together. Our people.
Same as our forebearers were when they came to England at the country’s behest in order to help them build up their economy; teachers, bus drivers, nurses, doctors… who stayed even when they did not want them, they left their homelands and the tongues and tones they knew to come to a foreign land full of strangers, some who were not friends, openly hostile to them because of their skin colour or the difference in their tongues. They showed up. And stayed. And made new roots that today is threatened with the Windrush scandal. They stayed and fought for what should be theirs. Today that fight still goes on.
When Joe Biden dropped out of the race POTUS, and in so doing anointed Kamala Harris as his successor, the conversation started to shift and the world started to talk about the possibility of an African-American woman becoming the first president of the United States of America, the leader of the free world, a child of immigrants; an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, same as my neighbours were growing up, the most significant leader on the world stage. I watched as Harris’ nomination changed the conversation, rallied together different factions of society; races, religion, gender, creed, class… and shut the rising far right and fascists discourse down. Slowly yet surely, that hope the eluded us in the wake of the riots started to make its way back up, the crack that fear opened up inside which Darren filled with his word, started to heal and then I listened to Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC, her opening tag line, “Hope is making a comeback” and immediately I sat up straight, filled in my chest as the electrifying scenes on our TV laid the ground work for hope, for change, for possibilities of a better world. For a world where people are centred in the conversation and the reasons for doing and being, rather than gains and popularity. As I listened to her speech in the small hours of the morning some six hours ahead in England, some 4,000 miles away, it felt good, it felt hopeful. I hope, hope sticks around because she is much needed and wanted.
And in the aftermath of the speech when her husband, Barack, came onto the stage to give his own resounding speech, it was the spring in his step as he walked towards her, making her know how incredible that speech was, it was the fact that he stopped to give the crowd more of Michelle on his own time, it was the lingering touch between these two almost unwilling to let go and it was his acknowledgement of the speech before he started to give his own equally as resonating speech. It was seeing these two back on our screens fighting the good fight and giving us hope.
Hope is a love story sight unseen, yet feelings felt keenly.