Take Me Home, Country Roads

On living in the city, winter, belonging

my new years day tradition: walking to the tower bridge and taking a candid photo…

An envelope arrived in the mail this week, encasing a slip of plastic painful and expensive to acquire. It is ludicrous that such a small card, with its holographic British empire emblem winking at me coquettishly, holds so much power over my life. The card is a permit, proof of my leave to remain in the country I chose to make my home almost seven years ago. Although the process is convoluted, I am fortunate to be able to make the choice ‘legally’ in the eyes of this nation’s law, unlike many of my countrymen who risk life and limb to scramble onto this island’s shores only to be taken directly to Her Majesty’s Prisons. Too many on the small boats turned political footballs are Sudanese, too many of the faces remind me of my brother’s.

I find it darkly amusing, how much I love this Imperial city, despite its cold and misery, its impenetrable class system, the exorbitant cost of living and the chasm of inequality that itches like a blanket of thorns. My father lived in this same place over forty years ago and despised it; anyone who hears about my Sudanese father in Thatcher’s 80s England nods in dolorous understanding. I wonder sometimes, how his Brisbane is my London, how through a twisted trick of fate the place that spat him out chose to welcome me in, how I ran away from the city that was his salvation. I think about how when I die, each of the last three generations of my family will likely be buried on different continent. The distance between our graves feels Shakespearean, tragic.

Winter can be tough in the city. I attempt to fend off the invading grey by donning brighter and sunnier hues, my newest scarf a scary fluorescent fuchsia. On the mornings I open my eyes to a sky of clear blue, I feel as if I am against the clock: out of bed I leap, into my warmest thermals, outside we must go, to make the most of it while we can. The clouds might return before the sun rays caress my cheeks, a small crime, but serious nonetheless.

I had never quite understood why Brits would talk about the sunshine constantly when they visited Australia; now I have become that person. Fine weather as cause for celebration, one’s mood in the hands of fate. There’s a lesson in that somewhere.

As I think of blue skies and belonging, I thought I would share a piece I wrote some time ago, published in the companion piece to the National Portrait Gallery’s Portrait23 Exhibition last year. The prompt was ‘identity’, and it was an absolute honour to be asked to contribute alongside some of my favourite Australian authors.

I hope you enjoy the read 💜💙🩵

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Cicadas roar outside my window, tymbals vibrating in song. The volume starts low, rising with each undulation, higher and higher until it snaps. Silence, for a moment, until the rhythm is picked up by another, somewhere else in the fields that surround my residence. The commotion transports me from the bare studio I am sitting in to the comforting streets of my childhood, ambling home at dusk through the lush suburbs of Sunnybank Hills.

I’m in a small room, near a small town, somewhere in southern Virginia. The closest grocery store is twenty minutes drive away, in a place named Lynchburg. The town is allegedly the namesake of Judge Lynch, from whom the term ‘lynching’ is believed to have originated. I am here for a writers’ residency, working on a novel, my solitary mind hemmed in by the surrounds of flourishing life. The residency buildings are cosseted by a vibrant abundance of green; shades of viridian and shamrock, pine and umber, glittering and sweating in the August heat. The forests trill to me as I walk through the trails. I fastidiously avoid ticks and keep my ears pricked for the stories, the land speaking to me of its memories. For as much as this is now a place of creativity and creative opulence, it is also the site of atrocity.

‘We must acknowledge a long history of violence in Virginia and the legacy of colonialism and systemic racism that paved the path for our current claim to this land,’ the introductory handbook reads, before continuing on to mention the ‘preserved slave cabin’ and the ‘Plantation Burial Grounds’ that are part of the all-girls college next door. We, visiting fellows, are encouraged to visit websites to learn more, not only about the local history of enslavement, but of the First Nations people, the Monacan community, from which this land was wrested. I want to speak to someone, learn through oral tradition, but I settle for online resources. I cannot decide if this feels empowering, or hollow.

I wonder how to relate to this place, to its present, to its history. It is a question I have asked myself often, reflecting on my relationship with the land on which I was raised. The continent of so-called Australia, and the city I knew of as Brisbane, though its first name was Meanjin.

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‘Where are you from’ is not a slight, or accusation, in a place like this. At an artist colony, everyone is from ‘somewhere’. While others offer the specifics of their existence (‘Maplewood, New Jersey’, or ‘Springfield, just outside of DC’), I prefer to keep it vague, mysterious. ‘I live in London,’ is my typical response. It’s simple, easy. There are no immediate follow up questions. But then at some point, over the days and weeks, someone will ask about my accent. ‘Ah,’ I will reply, almost apologetically. ‘It’s a real mongrel mix of Australian and British, I suppose.’

If prompted, I explain, with hesitation. ‘I was raised in Australia, you see.’

Then, in the following pause, ‘But I was born in Sudan, yeh.’

Folks I meet on my travels, with little understanding of the sin of Terra Nullius, ask why I left Australia, or why I have yet to return. ‘I don’t want to be a settler any more,’ has become one of my canned replies. ‘I want to live without knowing my opportunities in a place are predicated on the dispossession of the oldest continuous living civilisation on earth, you know?’

Part of me aches for the warmth of moral certitude, but deep inside the core of my marrow, the chill refuses to thaw. Yes, my answers speak to a truth, but they do not do justice to the full story. Instead, the reasons offered betray my desire for a clean conscience, assurance that my presence is not part of an unconscionable legacy. But is that even possible? Is that a reasonable position to seek? No land is without its history, without its horrors, without its grief.

‘Oh. Okay.

So where is home?’

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Home. A concept written about endlessly, but whose meaning has become all but incomprehensible as my life has unspooled around the globe. ‘Home’ has been stretched beyond breaking point, the elastic oxidised, brittle, no longer fit for purpose. What can such a word mean when one has moved four countries in less than ten years? When one’s family has been violently flung across continents? When one’s birthplace has been rendered unrecognisable, through violence and poverty and centuries of imperialism and intervention? There is no unscrambling the egg, but the meal was poisoned anyway.

I sit in the residency’s library, looking out to a semi-wild garden bed. Its banks burst with ecru yarrow, blooms of blush swamp milkweed, mustard marigold and lavender lupine. A garnet cardinal swoops by, one, two, three in a scuffle. An eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly loops and swings above, bounding from one pollen buffet to the next. The landscape is worlds away from the lilly pillies and grevillea of my childhood, the screams of the rainbow lorikeets and the morning roll call of kookaburras outside my window. Despite saying there is nothing I miss about the country on which I was raised, I find myself nostalgic for the land, for the unique life it births. I yearn for its rich earth, the colour of bruised peach, the endless horizons, azure and robin’s egg blue. I wish I could hear its stories, ask its permission. Because as much as home is about where you claim, it is also, I would argue, about where claims you. Who has that moral authority?

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In my yearning, I wonder. Am I retrofitting noble reasoning for my distance as a way of comfort? Is this merely insurance against the sharp edges of heartbreak?

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My relationship to Australia is a public one. One with which millions have their own relationship to, ideas on, opinions about. Such a public narrative leaves very little space for the negotiation of the private story. It crowds out the life lived intimately, day in, day out. It moves us into the realm of ideas, history and abstraction, one where I can confidently assert my reasoning for staying away as a political, if not moral choice, rather than the natural conclusion of an incomprehensible series of events.

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My friend sends me a voice note from her backyard. I hear the symphony of cicadas in the background, as she shares an update from her life. It occurs to me that perhaps home is not where the cicadas rest, but inside the orchestra they perform. It is there, in the sharp scent of the eucalypt or the glint of a magpie’s eye, where my permission lies. It is a moral authority neither bestowed, nor claimed, but understood, shared. Inshallah.

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1. Watch: Aljazeera feature on Sudan: 2023’s Forgotten War

Thanks to the folks at Aljazeera for interviewing myself, alongside the esteemed Isma’il Kushkush, for this feature on the war in Sudan.

2. Read: The 7 types of rest that every person needs

Avalon Nuovo via TED

I found the idea that we need distinctly different types of rest to be rather revelatory. Physical, mental, sensory, creative, and more. Are you getting enough of the different types of rest? Not to add to your to-do list or anything…

3. Listen: Classy with Jonathan Menjivar

A podcast series on one of the hottest topics of one’s thirties - class. The host explores the way class infiltrates our daily lives, an endlessly fascinating venture. Menjivar starts with the question, ‘Are Rich People Bad’? Guess you’ll have to listen and decide!

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Until next week inshallah,

Yassmin

i wasn’t joking about the fuchsia…