If all the doors are closing, how do you open
them? That’s the question that’s been
troubling me all summer. How do you keep
working for tolerance when the tide of opinion
has shifted against cosmopolitanism, when a
society has become terrified of difference?

Last spring I had an email from a woman called
Anna, who asked me if I’d like to be involved
with Refugee Tales, a project that works to
bring about an end to the indefinite detention
of refugees in Britain. We’ll pair you with a
former detainee, she said. He’ll tell you his
story, and then you’ll write it up .

I met R in the foyer of King’s College. Spring in
the air, the Thames running under the cool
green shade of plane trees at the bottom of the
street. R looked sick, but said he wanted to go
ahead with our conversation.

As a boy, he’d been involved in student protests
against corrupt elections in his country.
Everyone had been arrested. The booking
policeman happened to recognise his name,
which was the same as a relative in a position of
power. Leaning close, he told R that he was
going to be transferred to a secret prison, and
that if he went there he would never come out
alive.

Two days later, everyone was loaded into black
jeeps. R’s swerved away from the convoy and
took him to a hotel. His relative was there. “I
am not sending you to France,” he said. “I’m
going to send you to a country where they have
human rights.”

His case went to trial 17 times. On
the 18th time, the judge was kind.

R and I were sitting opposite each other in a
windowless room, on plastic chairs; a kind of
interrogation chamber. I hated asking him to
tell me his story because I knew he had told it
and told it and told it, that he had recited this
repertoire of facts, that in some way he had
vanished behind them.

At first things were good for him in England. A
flat in London, money from the government, a
college course, a degree. And then a mistake, a
stupid error of judgment. He bought a plasma
television from an acquaintance. The next thing
he knew, the police were at his door. He was
arrested, he was sentenced for receiving stolen
goods. He went to prison, he served his time, he
was released.

Outside the prison, UK border guards were
waiting for him. While he was inside, the law
had changed. If you were sentenced for more
than a year, you were automatically a subject
for deportation.

Now the nightmare began. He was held, in a
detention centre, for almost a year more, and
when he was released the outside world, too,
had become a prison. He had to wear a tag and
keep to a curfew; he had to report to the border
authority three times a week. He couldn’t work.
A return train ticket to the place where he had
to report was £24.

He went back to the detention centre yet again.
He was crying as he told me what it was like to
serve an indefinite sentence, time with no end
in sight. “Miss, your dog couldn’t endure it,” he
said. His case went to trial 17 times over the
course of three years. On the 18th time, the
judge was kind.”

He was released but, after 20 years in Britain, is
still not at liberty. He is depressed, he doesn’t
like to be around people, feels afraid of them.
Sometimes he hears voices that tell him to kill
himself. Sometimes he thinks he’s dreaming,
that nothing is very real. He still can’t work,
still has to report in every week, still doesn’t
have indefinite leave to remain. Soon, he told
me, that might change. Almost there, I said, and
he said bitterly: “It’s not about ‘almost there’,
it’s half of my age. Two decades and a half.”
I felt sick with shame when he said that. Shame
at my country, shame at the squandering, the
theft of time and talent. Shame: the signature
sensation of this summer.

Two months later, I caught the train from St
Pancras, rattling over the marshes of Kent. The
Refugee Tales project had organised a walk
from Canterbury to London , a pilgrimage
straight out of Chaucer. Each night a writer
came to join them, to tell the stories of people
who exist in silence, behind the locked doors of
detention centres.

It was 10 days after the referendum. I stopped
for a drink on Faversham high street. A red-
faced man, already drunk, was looking at the
event programme on his iPhone. “A right bunch
of lefties,” he said. “Shami Chakrabarti, that
bitch.”

I arrived at the Assembly Rooms in a state of
despair. Who’s going to come, who’s going to
care about the treatment of refugees in this
climate, when we’ve already slammed
the doors.

But people did come. People came who’d been
walking all day. Old people, teenagers, former
detainees. Suddenly, the room was full;
suddenly I was in another Britain: a Britain of
patchworked banners and communal pots of
dahl and rice; a Britain cheerfully, earnestly
invested in being kind.

I read R’s story. At the end I talked about how
ashamed I was of my country, and how
haunted I was by the question of what R might
have done with his life. Anna was sitting
opposite me, in the front row, and this tough,
dogged, indefatigable woman was sobbing.
I started to feel hope again that evening. Right
now it seems as if everyone in the world is at
loggerheads, breaking down into smaller and
smaller units, on a relentless crusade for some
kind of impossible, insane purity. I find it
terrifying, this dream of inhabiting a world
populated by people exactly like you.

It doesn’t have to be like that. We could stop
being so lethally afraid of strangers, so
dangerous in our self‑protection.

This is why stories are such a stealthy force. In
telling someone’s story, you make them real,
just as in forcing someone to stay silent you
destroy them. And in making people real you
have to make space for them, to acknowledge
their presence in the world. R, for example,
twisting his baseball cap in his hands, saying: “I
was sent to a country with human rights.”


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/24/refugees-tales-detainees-in-britain-shame