![TWO DINNERSI am neither an expert nor a journalist, and I don’t have an ocean of historical / political knowledge to draw from.I spent four nights in Calais in early December - one at a B&B with my Dad, and three in the camp that’s been nicknamed ‘The Jungle’, in my friend Darla’s campervan.I don’t know who concocted it, but I’m not going to the name The Jungle, because I didn’t meet an excitingly dangerous tangle of poisonous wild animals in the camp; I met people, and I want to allow you the imaginative space to meet them too.I went to the camp because I’d been on tour in France on and off over the autumn, and I’d driven past that sprawl of tents and police and people every time I rolled off or onto the ferry. Having seen my share of articles and news items, I wanted to understand what was going on for myself.I’ve tried to give as purely personal an account of my experience as possible. I hope it helps.All names are changed…====Monday: Dinner at Fabien’sThe wind howls around the solid, squat farm-turned-B&B where I’m staying with my dad. A big fire burns in the hearth. Fabien is a family man, and his daughters clamber on him while he serves sweet wine and shares his concerns.“The migrants are destroying Calais”, he says with an honest little furrow in his brow. “The prices of houses here are in freefall, and people are afraid to take their children to the swimming pool because the migrants go there to take showers. They are dirty and they smell, and they steal clothes from the clotheslines in our front gardens… I can assure you I have nothing against the migrants themselves…” he shifts on his sofa to let his youngest daughter off his lap, and tells us that he has been keeping bees in the area around the Eurotunnel entrance for thirty years, and now all the trees there have been cleared so there are no hiding places. There is nowhere to put his beehives now.Amandine, Fabien’s wilfully relaxed wife, saunters from the kitchen and we’re asked to sit at the table; the first course is ready. The TV’s wide face spiels rugby discussions and newsfeeds, and we take our places amid grins and shrugs and warmness. Stewed, steaming French food is brought and the discussion continues.Fabien runs a B&B, and my dad writes guides to B&Bs:he wants Dad to like him, a lot. Often in the conversation, I wonder how Fabien talks when he’s among his Calaisien friends, not trying to endear himself to someone he knows is a liberal. Even when talking with us, I can see how easily the simple fears of the loving father can twist into bigotries. And Fabien is loving, and he is also not equipped for complexity. However hard he tries, there’s the ghost of fascism patrolling the distance every time his talks turns to a description of the migrants. To him, they are always The Migrants, not The Refugees: that pervasive sense that it’s Their choice to be there, and that it would be a choice for Them to go home).Amandine clears the plates casually and brings the pudding out in a relaxed manner. On the TV, a protester is released from a Paris police cell, his face pixelated out.Earlier, Fabien drove us through Calais and to the camp, talking all the way. We saw many refugees in the town, and I tried as an exercise to see them as he does: ragged young men for the most part, many in ill-fitting clothes from the donations box, hoods up and scarves over faces, walking by the roadsides or standing making mysterious phonecalls, or sitting making phonecalls or talking together in languages he doesn’t hear. He sees just the eyes, glancing away or staring doggedly. He sees the FaceBook posts which show Migrants Throwing Rocks At Police (the ‘forces of order’ which he refers to often and reverentially); the newspaper headlines which show House Prices Plummet; the sudden presence in his town of outsiders whose ways are unfamiliar to him. Fabien, who prizes the cosy familiarity of his home town so much. What he doesn’t see is People, and it seems he doesn’t wish to: when he dropped me and Dad off at the camp earlier that day, he wouldn’t drive within 100 metres of it (“they’ll throw stones at the car”), and advised us strongly against going in. I asked if he’d ever been in himself. No he hadn’t. I asked if he’d ever personally met a ‘migrant’ from the camp. No, he hadn’t: “but I’ve seen the videos on FaceBook, and that’s enough for me”.There it is, another thing that blows my mind: we would rather build our perspectives from twenty-second FaceBook clips than by meeting the people they claim to summarise. Keep truth the other side of the muddy windscreen, and we won’t have to deal with the detail.We got out of the car and walked the 100 metres to the camp entrance (under the flyover, where a CRS van straddled the road and the wind whipped a flimsy nylon tent into torn remnants), our ears and minds full of Fabien’s fear, in spite of ourselves. We walked grimly and quietly, close to one another, our wallets left behind in the car. Within half an hour of arriving in the camp we’d been invited for tea and music in a shack shared by 6 Sudanese guys, and Dad had made friends with everyone he met.So back at Fabien’s, after hearing his very many views and his fears and furrows, after the pudding is served, we share our own new anecdotes about the warmth and generosity we encountered in the camp, about the people we met and the stories we heard which contradict so fully Fabien’s impression of a field full of criminals and freeloaders. We share them with Fabien and Amandine, both otherwise so open-faced and smiling, and from both are met with a strange blankness. The conversation, it seemed, ends there.After dinner, like something from a period drama, Fabien and his eldest daughter give us a rendition of a tune on piano and violin, a stumbling scratchy waltz in an Eastern key.In bed now. I don’t sleep well at the best of times: I find adrenaline sumping my heart against my innards and little pulses of unwelcome electricity which keep my mind on Wild Alert, however tired my body is. Tonight it’s worse than usual. The wind round the farm is fierce, tearing at the roof, the double glazing thudding weirdly as if under fists. Fabien’s after-dinner waltz loops through tannoy and I see the camp, those tents which are torn and not homes, flapping horribly open to the rain, some long-gone trampled into mud. How many newcomers arrive every day? Each from a different life, home, war, story, not belonging to this ankledeep shitpuddle of a camp but our Fabien-telling of them makes them belong, puts them all together in an inconceivable mass which boils over and fights itself and sometimes, out pops a stone, arcing through the air to scratch the paintwork of our five-door saloon. All of us round and round in these insane circles, the waltz playing warped and scratchy, eyes averted and screens burning overblue, all of us spiralling forever outwards from the centre and into the whipping rain and finally, to sleep.===Tuesday: Dinner at Omar’sIt’s a mild, windless evening in the so-called Jungle, and there’s a soft stink of urine and burning plastic. We pick our way around puddles and potholes, finding a path among the endless guyropes, patched-together tents and shacks towards Omar’s place. In the camp I have my bearings less than half the time, and the landscape changes so fast that even then I’m fumbling. The great raised eyebrow which arches over the camp’s entrance is the flyover which takes trucks and cars to the ferry port nearby, and the gap beneath it always seems to fix your gaze. French riot police, the CRS, swarm the eyebrow in their mock-sinister combat getup, their shoulder pads and hinges looking like Stormtroopers vs. Ninja Turtles. They are watching for trouble and waiting for nightfall, when a number of the people from the camp will go to The Chance (as Omar calls it with typical poetic skill) - the hiding, running, climbing, leaping ritual in which they try to get themselves aboard a lorry or train bound for the UK. The great majority of them will fail; many will be beaten by the Storm Turtles. Anecdotes of being hit with batons and verbally abused are two a penny when you talk with people here. In the CRS, all the hatred and intolerance that bubbles below the surface of our Civilisation finds its expression, and they stand proud and swing hard with the honour.We wave to people as we pass: Darla has spent months here on and off and knows pretty much everyone. She gives me snatches of their stories as we go: that woman arrived from the Cameroon three days ago penniless, shoes destroyed by walking, and spent two days in the camp without eating anything, not speaking English and not knowing where to find food; that shy fifteen-year-old boy arrived from Iraq on his own and has no relatives or friends here; that man is the father of the small boy he’s with - the boy has a throat condition which is getting worse by the day, and his dad is desperate to leave the camp and find somewhere warm for his son to sleep. We stop often to talk to people, and greet others in passing - a group of men sitting round an acrid fire; a man trying to split wood with a hammer. Darla reminds me that as well as there being woefully inadequate resources here to make homes, a lot of the people come from cities where they worked office jobs or in retail - they have as much grasp of carpentry as I do (very little); most have never even put up a tent before and have to be shown how when they arrive at the ‘Jungle’. Being here was never part of anyone’s plan.We have a brief conversation with Ahmed from Syria, who fled airstrikes and Isis brutality in his hometown, crossed the sea from Turkey to Greece in a dinghy with 62 other people in it, was attacked by the Greek special forces and had to swim the last stretch to Lesvos, was smuggled through Serbia by a Mafia man he paid 1500 euros for the privilege, almost suffocated in the back of a flour tanker and now has spent 43 days in the camp. If anyone has a legitimate claim to a breather, some calm and a comfortable bed, it’s Ahmed: but now he must find the energy and cunning to stow away on a lorry or a moving train with Swarm Turtles chasing, and stay hidden until England. He’s already been discovered and sent back to the camp twice doing this.We move on, past the Jungle Books library, past the Eritrean church in its weird semi-permanence (corrugated iron with a plywood walled enclosure; crucifix on the roof), past the Theatre geodome where we spent all day doing workshops and speaking Music (the one common language in the camp), past a barrel in which someone’s burning a sleeping bag, which is fed in gradually like a lolling tongue retracting, black smoke crawling upwards into the still air; and now into the Sudanese area. The Sudanese area is tidier and better-built than much of the rest of the camp; many of the people here from Sudan, for whatever reason, arrive with enough practical skills to construct passable shacks.Across the big puddle, over the pothole and we’re there - Omar’s place. It’s a tiny, sturdy shack which he built himself from donated wood and tarp; smaller than your garden shed. Omar comes to the door smiling: “you are most welcome”, and we’re gestured inside. There’s a candle burning, and just about space for a small camp bed, two rickety chairs and a butane stove. There are fifteen different varieties of beans in tins on a groaning shelf, and rice and pulses in a box below. Everything is impeccably organised. Omar’s friend Mohammed is chopping onions into a frying pan, and greets us warmly too. Omar and Mohammed travelled from the Sudan together - they’re old friends. Unlike Omar, Mohammed’s English is minimal, but he has a gentle, gangly presence that I feel immediately at ease in: one of those people whose company slows me down and stops me worrying. He shows me the palm of his hand which is bisected by a vicious scar. It’s a not an injury he got in Darfur, the civil war he escaped from, but a wound inflicted two months ago by the white fences of Calais. The sight of it brings tears to my eyes. The whole existence of the camp is a sad, stinking indictment of the state of the world, but something about Mohammed breaks my heart especially. I see my mate Dave in him, another gentle, loping human. Tall soft Dave, who was always yelled at by the P.E teacher for dropping the ball, and who was always the one I went to if I needed to talk something through. Dave, Mohammed. Some people are just not meant for running, hiding, climbing. Mohammed shouldn’t be here. He should be somewhere safe and warm, telling stories and reaching with long arms and making the vibes excellent. Fucksake. No-one should be here.The onions begin to sizzle in a puddle of oil, and the at-home smell of that fills the darkness. Darla and Omar are sitting on the camp-bed talking about a poem that Omar wrote, which he’s showing her on his phone. Omar has begun to write his poetry in English since arriving at the camp, and at the theatre dome earlier he showed me a couple of pieces. They were properly good; lean observations of camp life written with the freshness and jumble that I love in writers who don’t come from English. Darla says this poem, though, is her favourite of his. She asks if he’d show it to me - he shrinks away and is reluctant. Omar is thoughtful and very soft-spoken, not a performer at all, and today is particularly quiet. He apologises: “I am not in a good mood. I’m sorry”. As sensitive as I am, Omar is, and he tells us that today he cycled into Calais to get something from the shops there. The police stopped him and asked “do you speak French?” He said No. “Do you speak English?” He said no; sometimes it’s better to be inaccessible. “Do you speak Arabic?” He nodded, and they stabbed the tyres of his bike with a screwdriver. “Why would someone do that?” He doesn’t understand. “I was just walking, you know, in the town, not even near the trains…”We offer some condolences, some useless apologies and indignation, and then fall silent. We often are struck dumb like this, in the camp. In the grand scheme of injustice this incident is minor, but the truths it represents are so huge and horrible, at times it seems impossible to do anything but shake our heads: this hierarchy of language and culture that you must be on the right rung of to be allowed through; the violence of the act itself; the vulnerability of someone in a situation where the men at the last line of defence are the perpetrators of the very abuse against which they should defend you. Worst of all, as if the terrors of Darfur from which Omar has fled were not enough, that he should be punished here, now, for trying to escape those terrors. ‘How dare you want a life as safe as ours’, the policemen say, ‘how dare you bring your difference to our town’…A great whoosh of steam goes up. Mohammed turns to us and grins, the emptied tin of beans in his hand. Omar goes to the plastic box and picks out salt and spices, and shakes monsoons of both into the pan. We all stare into the stew, watching it become a rich swamp of goodness, smelling the horn-grabbing smells it’s sending up, brains alive with the impossible facts of the Camp, mouths watering. Before long it’s ready, but only me and Darla are served - “Omar, Mohammed, are you not eating?” No, no - “it is for you”, they say, “we have already eaten”… All of this, for us. It’s as powerful, warm and delicious as it smelled and we eat heartily while Mohammed smiles into his phone and plays Sudanese music on YouTube - women singing passionate duets, stately men in armchairs playing violins, and always a big chorus of singers joined together for the refrain. We eat while Omar sits back on the camp bed, his face unreadable. After we finish, he hands me his phone and I read the poem on it: it is full of ghosts and wide open places, and it’s addressed to someone who is drowning. It is horribly beautiful. After the third time reading it I look up.“It is for my best friend”, Omar answers quietly, “he died crossing with me to Europe”. That silence again. There is such a lot to do.===============================Questions you might have in your mind…[if !supportLists]1. [endif]Why have the people in the camp left their countries to come here?No official census is really possible in the camp, and I heard different ideas of how many nationalities are present there. Someone told me there are 11. As I’m trying to bring you a strictly personal account of my time in Calais, and I personally met Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Iranians, Kuwaiti Bedoon, Kurds and a lot of Sudanese, here are links to some articles / resources on each of these countries to paint a small picture of why those people would need to leave.Syriahttp://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26116868Iraq http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/11/foreign-correspondent-stories-iraq-151118091847629.htmlAfghanistanhttps://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/related_material/afghanistan_7.pdfIranhttps://www.hrw.org/middle-east/n-africa/iranKuwaithttps://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/stateless-kuwait-who-are-bidoonSudan http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/sep/09/sudan-security-forces-killed-raped-burned-civilians-alive-human-rights-watch-report-darfur2. Why is everyone in this camp trying to get to the UK? Why don’t they just settle in France seeing as they’re there?Here is a good article from Free Movement which attempts to answer this:https://www.freemovement.org.uk/why-do-the-migrants-in-calais-want-to-come-to-the-uk/3. What can I do to help?It seems to me that the refugee camp at Calais is the culmination of a lot of the world’s idiocies and sickness: for one, our dependency on oil, which led the USA & Britain to topple the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1963 because he’d announced the nationalisation of the oil industry there, which led to the western-puppet Shah being reinstated, which led to the Islamic Revolution and the reign of torture, misogyny, homophobia and religious persecution that so many are still fleeing from… that’s just one example of bullying Western intervention that’s turned very sour; Iraq is another obvious one; Afghanistan too…There is also of course the racism and cultural imperialism inherent in so much of our foreign policy and media representation; the strings-attached aid; the massive imbalance of power between global North and South; the relentless international pursuit of profit at the expense of stability and human life…I’m rambling. Basically I was left feeling like nothing short of pretty major systemic change is going to refresh the nasty post-colonial soil that many of these conflicts are rooted in; so one thing I feel I can do is work towards bringing that kind of change about: I’ve got a couple of ideas of what that work will be, but any suggestions are very welcome.On a more day-to-day level though, the fact is there are 6000 people cold and suffering in Calais, and at least another 2000 in Dunkerque just down the road (conditions at that camp are even worse). There are several networks of humans who are trying their best to provide the shelter, clothes, food and human warmth that is lacking there. They need donations and helping hands. If you want to find out how best to offer either of those things, try the links I’ll put at the bottom of this email.And very importantly, look beyond the kneejerk FaceBook perspectives embodied in much of our media and many of our minds. There’s a human truth the other side of Fabien’s windscreen that will blow your mind.Peace & Love, much needed.Dizraeli.====Calais People To People Solidarity:https://www.facebook.com/groups/CalaisMigrantSolidarityActionFromUK/Calaid:http://www.calaid.co.uk/A Home for Winter:http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/volunteering-with-homes-for-winter-in-calais](http://40.media.tumblr.com/39435308ef00163022815b5660c55b09/tumblr_o0fdza4GLa1uir2qdo1_1280.jpg)
TWO DINNERS
I am neither an expert nor a journalist, and I don’t have an ocean of historical / political knowledge to draw from.
I spent four nights in Calais in early December - one at a B&B with my Dad, and three in the camp that’s been nicknamed ‘The Jungle’, in my friend Darla’s campervan.
I don’t know who concocted it, but I’m not going to the name The Jungle, because I didn’t meet an excitingly dangerous tangle of poisonous wild animals in the camp; I met people, and I want to allow you the imaginative space to meet them too.
I went to the camp because I’d been on tour in France on and off over the autumn, and I’d driven past that sprawl of tents and police and people every time I rolled off or onto the ferry. Having seen my share of articles and news items, I wanted to understand what was going on for myself.
I’ve tried to give as purely personal an account of my experience as possible. I hope it helps.
All names are changed…
====
Monday: Dinner at Fabien’s
The wind howls around the solid, squat farm-turned-B&B where I’m staying with my dad. A big fire burns in the hearth. Fabien is a family man, and his daughters clamber on him while he serves sweet wine and shares his concerns.
“The migrants are destroying Calais”, he says with an honest little furrow in his brow. “The prices of houses here are in freefall, and people are afraid to take their children to the swimming pool because the migrants go there to take showers. They are dirty and they smell, and they steal clothes from the clotheslines in our front gardens… I can assure you I have nothing against the migrants themselves…” he shifts on his sofa to let his youngest daughter off his lap, and tells us that he has been keeping bees in the area around the Eurotunnel entrance for thirty years, and now all the trees there have been cleared so there are no hiding places. There is nowhere to put his beehives now.
Amandine, Fabien’s wilfully relaxed wife, saunters from the kitchen and we’re asked to sit at the table; the first course is ready. The TV’s wide face spiels rugby discussions and newsfeeds, and we take our places amid grins and shrugs and warmness. Stewed, steaming French food is brought and the discussion continues.
Fabien runs a B&B, and my dad writes guides to B&Bs:he wants Dad to like him, a lot. Often in the conversation, I wonder how Fabien talks when he’s among his Calaisien friends, not trying to endear himself to someone he knows is a liberal. Even when talking with us, I can see how easily the simple fears of the loving father can twist into bigotries. And Fabien is loving, and he is also not equipped for complexity. However hard he tries, there’s the ghost of fascism patrolling the distance every time his talks turns to a description of the migrants. To him, they are always The Migrants, not The Refugees: that pervasive sense that it’s Their choice to be there, and that it would be a choice for Them to go home).
Amandine clears the plates casually and brings the pudding out in a relaxed manner. On the TV, a protester is released from a Paris police cell, his face pixelated out.
Earlier, Fabien drove us through Calais and to the camp, talking all the way. We saw many refugees in the town, and I tried as an exercise to see them as he does: ragged young men for the most part, many in ill-fitting clothes from the donations box, hoods up and scarves over faces, walking by the roadsides or standing making mysterious phonecalls, or sitting making phonecalls or talking together in languages he doesn’t hear. He sees just the eyes, glancing away or staring doggedly. He sees the FaceBook posts which show Migrants Throwing Rocks At Police (the ‘forces of order’ which he refers to often and reverentially); the newspaper headlines which show House Prices Plummet; the sudden presence in his town of outsiders whose ways are unfamiliar to him. Fabien, who prizes the cosy familiarity of his home town so much. What he doesn’t see is People, and it seems he doesn’t wish to: when he dropped me and Dad off at the camp earlier that day, he wouldn’t drive within 100 metres of it (“they’ll throw stones at the car”), and advised us strongly against going in. I asked if he’d ever been in himself. No he hadn’t. I asked if he’d ever personally met a ‘migrant’ from the camp. No, he hadn’t: “but I’ve seen the videos on FaceBook, and that’s enough for me”.
There it is, another thing that blows my mind: we would rather build our perspectives from twenty-second FaceBook clips than by meeting the people they claim to summarise. Keep truth the other side of the muddy windscreen, and we won’t have to deal with the detail.
We got out of the car and walked the 100 metres to the camp entrance (under the flyover, where a CRS van straddled the road and the wind whipped a flimsy nylon tent into torn remnants), our ears and minds full of Fabien’s fear, in spite of ourselves. We walked grimly and quietly, close to one another, our wallets left behind in the car. Within half an hour of arriving in the camp we’d been invited for tea and music in a shack shared by 6 Sudanese guys, and Dad had made friends with everyone he met.
So back at Fabien’s, after hearing his very many views and his fears and furrows, after the pudding is served, we share our own new anecdotes about the warmth and generosity we encountered in the camp, about the people we met and the stories we heard which contradict so fully Fabien’s impression of a field full of criminals and freeloaders. We share them with Fabien and Amandine, both otherwise so open-faced and smiling, and from both are met with a strange blankness. The conversation, it seemed, ends there.
After dinner, like something from a period drama, Fabien and his eldest daughter give us a rendition of a tune on piano and violin, a stumbling scratchy waltz in an Eastern key.
In bed now. I don’t sleep well at the best of times: I find adrenaline sumping my heart against my innards and little pulses of unwelcome electricity which keep my mind on Wild Alert, however tired my body is. Tonight it’s worse than usual. The wind round the farm is fierce, tearing at the roof, the double glazing thudding weirdly as if under fists. Fabien’s after-dinner waltz loops through tannoy and I see the camp, those tents which are torn and not homes, flapping horribly open to the rain, some long-gone trampled into mud. How many newcomers arrive every day? Each from a different life, home, war, story, not belonging to this ankledeep shitpuddle of a camp but our Fabien-telling of them makes them belong, puts them all together in an inconceivable mass which boils over and fights itself and sometimes, out pops a stone, arcing through the air to scratch the paintwork of our five-door saloon. All of us round and round in these insane circles, the waltz playing warped and scratchy, eyes averted and screens burning overblue, all of us spiralling forever outwards from the centre and into the whipping rain and finally, to sleep.
===
Tuesday: Dinner at Omar’s
It’s a mild, windless evening in the so-called Jungle, and there’s a soft stink of urine and burning plastic. We pick our way around puddles and potholes, finding a path among the endless guyropes, patched-together tents and shacks towards Omar’s place. In the camp I have my bearings less than half the time, and the landscape changes so fast that even then I’m fumbling. The great raised eyebrow which arches over the camp’s entrance is the flyover which takes trucks and cars to the ferry port nearby, and the gap beneath it always seems to fix your gaze. French riot police, the CRS, swarm the eyebrow in their mock-sinister combat getup, their shoulder pads and hinges looking like Stormtroopers vs. Ninja Turtles. They are watching for trouble and waiting for nightfall, when a number of the people from the camp will go to The Chance (as Omar calls it with typical poetic skill) - the hiding, running, climbing, leaping ritual in which they try to get themselves aboard a lorry or train bound for the UK. The great majority of them will fail; many will be beaten by the Storm Turtles. Anecdotes of being hit with batons and verbally abused are two a penny when you talk with people here. In the CRS, all the hatred and intolerance that bubbles below the surface of our Civilisation finds its expression, and they stand proud and swing hard with the honour.
We wave to people as we pass: Darla has spent months here on and off and knows pretty much everyone. She gives me snatches of their stories as we go: that woman arrived from the Cameroon three days ago penniless, shoes destroyed by walking, and spent two days in the camp without eating anything, not speaking English and not knowing where to find food; that shy fifteen-year-old boy arrived from Iraq on his own and has no relatives or friends here; that man is the father of the small boy he’s with - the boy has a throat condition which is getting worse by the day, and his dad is desperate to leave the camp and find somewhere warm for his son to sleep. We stop often to talk to people, and greet others in passing - a group of men sitting round an acrid fire; a man trying to split wood with a hammer. Darla reminds me that as well as there being woefully inadequate resources here to make homes, a lot of the people come from cities where they worked office jobs or in retail - they have as much grasp of carpentry as I do (very little); most have never even put up a tent before and have to be shown how when they arrive at the ‘Jungle’. Being here was never part of anyone’s plan.
We have a brief conversation with Ahmed from Syria, who fled airstrikes and Isis brutality in his hometown, crossed the sea from Turkey to Greece in a dinghy with 62 other people in it, was attacked by the Greek special forces and had to swim the last stretch to Lesvos, was smuggled through Serbia by a Mafia man he paid 1500 euros for the privilege, almost suffocated in the back of a flour tanker and now has spent 43 days in the camp. If anyone has a legitimate claim to a breather, some calm and a comfortable bed, it’s Ahmed: but now he must find the energy and cunning to stow away on a lorry or a moving train with Swarm Turtles chasing, and stay hidden until England. He’s already been discovered and sent back to the camp twice doing this.
We move on, past the Jungle Books library, past the Eritrean church in its weird semi-permanence (corrugated iron with a plywood walled enclosure; crucifix on the roof), past the Theatre geodome where we spent all day doing workshops and speaking Music (the one common language in the camp), past a barrel in which someone’s burning a sleeping bag, which is fed in gradually like a lolling tongue retracting, black smoke crawling upwards into the still air; and now into the Sudanese area. The Sudanese area is tidier and better-built than much of the rest of the camp; many of the people here from Sudan, for whatever reason, arrive with enough practical skills to construct passable shacks.
Across the big puddle, over the pothole and we’re there - Omar’s place. It’s a tiny, sturdy shack which he built himself from donated wood and tarp; smaller than your garden shed. Omar comes to the door smiling: “you are most welcome”, and we’re gestured inside. There’s a candle burning, and just about space for a small camp bed, two rickety chairs and a butane stove. There are fifteen different varieties of beans in tins on a groaning shelf, and rice and pulses in a box below. Everything is impeccably organised. Omar’s friend Mohammed is chopping onions into a frying pan, and greets us warmly too. Omar and Mohammed travelled from the Sudan together - they’re old friends. Unlike Omar, Mohammed’s English is minimal, but he has a gentle, gangly presence that I feel immediately at ease in: one of those people whose company slows me down and stops me worrying. He shows me the palm of his hand which is bisected by a vicious scar. It’s a not an injury he got in Darfur, the civil war he escaped from, but a wound inflicted two months ago by the white fences of Calais. The sight of it brings tears to my eyes. The whole existence of the camp is a sad, stinking indictment of the state of the world, but something about Mohammed breaks my heart especially. I see my mate Dave in him, another gentle, loping human. Tall soft Dave, who was always yelled at by the P.E teacher for dropping the ball, and who was always the one I went to if I needed to talk something through. Dave, Mohammed. Some people are just not meant for running, hiding, climbing. Mohammed shouldn’t be here. He should be somewhere safe and warm, telling stories and reaching with long arms and making the vibes excellent. Fucksake. No-one should be here.
The onions begin to sizzle in a puddle of oil, and the at-home smell of that fills the darkness. Darla and Omar are sitting on the camp-bed talking about a poem that Omar wrote, which he’s showing her on his phone. Omar has begun to write his poetry in English since arriving at the camp, and at the theatre dome earlier he showed me a couple of pieces. They were properly good; lean observations of camp life written with the freshness and jumble that I love in writers who don’t come from English. Darla says this poem, though, is her favourite of his. She asks if he’d show it to me - he shrinks away and is reluctant. Omar is thoughtful and very soft-spoken, not a performer at all, and today is particularly quiet. He apologises: “I am not in a good mood. I’m sorry”. As sensitive as I am, Omar is, and he tells us that today he cycled into Calais to get something from the shops there. The police stopped him and asked “do you speak French?” He said No. “Do you speak English?” He said no; sometimes it’s better to be inaccessible. “Do you speak Arabic?” He nodded, and they stabbed the tyres of his bike with a screwdriver.
“Why would someone do that?” He doesn’t understand. “I was just walking, you know, in the town, not even near the trains…”
We offer some condolences, some useless apologies and indignation, and then fall silent. We often are struck dumb like this, in the camp. In the grand scheme of injustice this incident is minor, but the truths it represents are so huge and horrible, at times it seems impossible to do anything but shake our heads: this hierarchy of language and culture that you must be on the right rung of to be allowed through; the violence of the act itself; the vulnerability of someone in a situation where the men at the last line of defence are the perpetrators of the very abuse against which they should defend you. Worst of all, as if the terrors of Darfur from which Omar has fled were not enough, that he should be punished here, now, for trying to escape those terrors. ‘How dare you want a life as safe as ours’, the policemen say, ‘how dare you bring your difference to our town’…
A great whoosh of steam goes up. Mohammed turns to us and grins, the emptied tin of beans in his hand. Omar goes to the plastic box and picks out salt and spices, and shakes monsoons of both into the pan. We all stare into the stew, watching it become a rich swamp of goodness, smelling the horn-grabbing smells it’s sending up, brains alive with the impossible facts of the Camp, mouths watering. Before long it’s ready, but only me and Darla are served - “Omar, Mohammed, are you not eating?” No, no - “it is for you”, they say, “we have already eaten”… All of this, for us. It’s as powerful, warm and delicious as it smelled and we eat heartily while Mohammed smiles into his phone and plays Sudanese music on YouTube - women singing passionate duets, stately men in armchairs playing violins, and always a big chorus of singers joined together for the refrain. We eat while Omar sits back on the camp bed, his face unreadable.
After we finish, he hands me his phone and I read the poem on it: it is full of ghosts and wide open places, and it’s addressed to someone who is drowning. It is horribly beautiful. After the third time reading it I look up.
“It is for my best friend”, Omar answers quietly, “he died crossing with me to Europe”.
That silence again.
There is such a lot to do.
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Questions you might have in your mind…
[if !supportLists]1. [endif]Why have the people in the camp left their countries to come here?
No official census is really possible in the camp, and I heard different ideas of how many nationalities are present there. Someone told me there are 11. As I’m trying to bring you a strictly personal account of my time in Calais, and I personally met Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Iranians, Kuwaiti Bedoon, Kurds and a lot of Sudanese, here are links to some articles / resources on each of these countries to paint a small picture of why those people would need to leave.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26116868
Iraq http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/11/foreign-correspondent-stories-iraq-151118091847629.html
https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/related_material/afghanistan_7.pdf
https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/n-africa/iran
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/stateless-kuwait-who-are-bidoon
Sudan http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/sep/09/sudan-security-forces-killed-raped-burned-civilians-alive-human-rights-watch-report-darfur
2. Why is everyone in this camp trying to get to the UK? Why don’t they just settle in France seeing as they’re there?
Here is a good article from Free Movement which attempts to answer this:https://www.freemovement.org.uk/why-do-the-migrants-in-calais-want-to-come-to-the-uk/
3. What can I do to help?
It seems to me that the refugee camp at Calais is the culmination of a lot of the world’s idiocies and sickness: for one, our dependency on oil, which led the USA & Britain to topple the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1963 because he’d announced the nationalisation of the oil industry there, which led to the western-puppet Shah being reinstated, which led to the Islamic Revolution and the reign of torture, misogyny, homophobia and religious persecution that so many are still fleeing from… that’s just one example of bullying Western intervention that’s turned very sour; Iraq is another obvious one; Afghanistan too…
There is also of course the racism and cultural imperialism inherent in so much of our foreign policy and media representation; the strings-attached aid; the massive imbalance of power between global North and South; the relentless international pursuit of profit at the expense of stability and human life…
I’m rambling. Basically I was left feeling like nothing short of pretty major systemic change is going to refresh the nasty post-colonial soil that many of these conflicts are rooted in; so one thing I feel I can do is work towards bringing that kind of change about: I’ve got a couple of ideas of what that work will be, but any suggestions are very welcome.
On a more day-to-day level though, the fact is there are 6000 people cold and suffering in Calais, and at least another 2000 in Dunkerque just down the road (conditions at that camp are even worse). There are several networks of humans who are trying their best to provide the shelter, clothes, food and human warmth that is lacking there. They need donations and helping hands. If you want to find out how best to offer either of those things, try the links I’ll put at the bottom of this email.
And very importantly, look beyond the kneejerk FaceBook perspectives embodied in much of our media and many of our minds. There’s a human truth the other side of Fabien’s windscreen that will blow your mind.
Peace & Love, much needed.
Dizraeli.
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Calais People To People Solidarity:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/CalaisMigrantSolidarityActionFromUK/
Calaid:
A Home for Winter:
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/volunteering-with-homes-for-winter-in-calais
![Here it is! The poster for the first solo Dizraeli tour post-Small Gods, and the first time I’ve ever done my own artwork*. Since the final gigs with the Small Gods, it’s been a time of feeling small and overwhelmed, if I’m honest: after 6 years of being part of such a strong, talented crew of humans with all their years of musical training and insane creative gifts, I’m rewinding to where I was when I made Engurland, and going it alone… Of course playing with the Gods has taught me more than I can express about every aspect of music making, and I take all that with me. But still - there’s been a lot of vertigo, looking over this edge… A lot of pause for thought as well: what am I aiming for, as a person performing? There’s always a background assumption that as an artist you’re aiming for bigger and bigger audiences, but where does that logically lead to? The last thing you want is to be Famous, because that’d be a shit, unreal place to be. So what does progress look like if not just expanding the numbers who know about you?I’m meandering… sorry. But there’s the context to the news that when the spring comes, I’m going to rent a small car, fill it with potplants and tour round proper small venues. I want to strip what I do down to the very bones, just me and a guitar and a drum covered in gaffer tape, and play in rooms where it’s a conversation with the audience and not just a display. I’m very chuffed to say my dear friend, mindblowing rapper and psychedelic saucepot Jakaboski [https://soundcloud.com/jakaboski] will be with me to weave spells and support.*Big love to the legend that is Elisa MacDougall (www.elisamac.com) for doing the design bit.](http://41.media.tumblr.com/139bd5f632b68df883917da528adb1ad/tumblr_nxp8f0VGVw1uir2qdo1_1280.jpg)
