Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (2015)

This article was first published in 2015.

I am delighted to announce the publication of my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which is the result of my outreach work with asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people in the capital and includes their testimonies alongside my own account. The publisher's page is here and the Amazon UK page is here.

My latest essay on this issue is called Changing Tides and was published by Counterpoint Arts and English PEN. For Books' Sake have already given Asylum and Exile an attentive and very generous 5 star review which can be read here and there has also been some great press in Nose In A Book, a long interview in Asian Culture Vulture, another for The Festival of Ideas and another in The Heroine Collective. I've covered the project in a recent Guardian article headlined I want to give asylum seekers in Britain a chance to tell their own story; two essays for Wasafiri which can be read here and two essays for the Free Word's Briefing Notes series, called Psychogeography of trauma: inside a UK detention centre and The reality of asylum and refuge in modern Britain. I've also discussed the issues in my introduction to Big Writing for A Small World (Scribd copy of English PEN publication) and the articles Rape, refusal, denial, detention: refugees dancing at the edge of the world and Asylum: no woman should be missed out. English PEN have written up the debate at one of my events on this issue in a wonderful piece here and The Nation have written an article on my work called 'I came to you for help and you treated me like a prisoner'.

Asylum and Exile follows the publication, in May 2012, of my fourth book Beyond the Wall. An extensive selection of 2012 and 2013 interviews and press can be found here and a March 2014 interview by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore can be found here. 

press release

I see books like Asylum and Exile as evidence of a deep seated refusal to tolerate the divisive politics that extend right across the political divide. Well done for speaking up and bearing witness. We must never stop telling the stories of those we consign to the margins.

Maurice Wren, Chief Executive, The Refugee Council

It’s a little book, but in its pages it manages to be wide in scope yet intimate, funny, warm, sad and horrifying. ...Asylum and Exile is a 4 star read, with an additional star because it’s so fundamentally important. 

Jennie Gillions, For Books' Sake

The result of Bidisha’s outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers since 2012, Asylum and Exile goes behind the stereotypes and scare stories to reveal the humanity, tragedy and bravery – and frequently the humour – of the individuals who’ve left everything behind to seek sanctuary from violence.

The men and women Bidisha worked with were of all ages from 19 to their late 60s. All had fled war, persecution, extreme poverty and civil unrest in countries as diverse as Cameroon, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Malawi, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. Some had been in the UK for months, others for more than a decade. All spoke at least two languages. Among them were mathematicians and criminologists, soldiers, students and teachers: the man who had lectured in Persian music at Tehran university and now works in the freezer room of a sandwich factory; the woman who had been a teacher but was asked, when she arrived in England, if she knew how to turn on a light switch; the woman who became a manager in an English company only to be pulled out by police in front of her colleagues and imprisoned, who loves her red dancing shoes above all her other possessions.

In England, with no money, no access to public funds and no papers authorising them to work they labour illegally as cleaners, factory workers, dishwashers, care assistants and in other unstable, unseen, underpaid and gruelling roles. Many have bounced between prison and detention centres. Their London life is one of trying to survive on five pounds a day, of interminable bus journeys across the capital, appointments with legal aid workers and reliance on near strangers to get a foothold on life in the city with little or no support. Despite this, their unerring vivacity, talent and will to survive are a testament to the strength of the human spirit. 

Asylum and Exile comes out at a time when immigration is one of the most passionately debated issues around, with a rise in anti-immigration, anti-asylum rhetoric both in the UK and elsewhere, particularly in western Europe and Australia. Asylum seekers and refugees are being argued over, demonised, scapegoated and disbelieved – or patronised and advocated for in heart-wrenching yet generalised terms – but are almost never given a chance to speak in their own words about their own lives. Bidisha gives space to their testimonies, which are by turns shocking, moving and hilarious. She gained rare access and was met with such trust and frankness that Asylum and Exile stands as a unique document|: an accessible, uplifting and humane book whose stories are as buoyant, noisy, confrontational and diverse as Bidisha’s classroom itself.

Poster greeting arrivals at Praxis

The outreach sessions were co-ordinated by the literary and human rights charity English PEN with the Migrants Resource Centre in Victoria and Praxis in Bethnal Green. Asylum and Exile began in the unheated rooms of severely underfunded charities in London. Yet its narratives and characters cross the globe, reflecting the consequences of some of the world’s most violent conflicts and fragile states. Stereotypes and generalisations disintegrate and what emerge are the stoical spirits, vital personalities, inner strength and defiant intelligence of the individuals themselves. The book is not an academic tract or a fierce polemic but a humane account based on personal stories expressed in idiosyncratic voices, not clichés from a newspaper. Asylum and Exile is a tribute to the honesty of raw experience, the power of personal testimony and the ability of the spoken word of truth to transform both the teller and the listener.

Shouting down the facts and militarising against refugees

The following essay was published in two parts by Wasafiri Journal of International Literature this year. 

I began doing outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers three and a half years ago, before what we now refer to as the refugee crisis, the greatest humanitarian emergency of the current era. Then, the women and men I worked with were from Uganda, Cameroon, the Congo, Rwanda, Malawi and many other central and southern African countries, as well as a significant minority who came from Iran, Iraq and Libya. We worked together in the unheated training room of an extremely effective but woefully underfunded major charity whose last two annual reports had warned of a bleak future despite the organisation’s necessary and specialised work.

The government, then the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, had begun implementing severe economic cuts which seemed to punish those who were already in need. They slashed – and continue to slash – funding to vital services which helped those requiring housing, early years family support, legal representation, rape crisis provision, disability assistance, protection from domestic violence, trauma counselling, support after being trafficked and prostituted, access to training, education and employment. It constituted a wholesale attack on the third sector, encompassing social services and innumerable charities, including many which were a vital lifeline for asylum seekers and a flimsy barrier against outright destitution. Those protections are no longer there and everyone in need, not just asylum seekers, is feeling the effects. Since the Conservatives’ victory in the 2015 elections, both the policies and the rhetoric have become even more inhumane and aggressive.

The charity I worked with, and others I’ve visited since, had a unique atmosphere of acceptance and industry. They were places where asylum seekers were believed and helped with a practical and unquestioning immediacy. It’s a very different experience from the brutal Home Office asylum system of denial, detention, disbelief and obfuscation, one which combines physical incarceration and control with the psychological terrorisation: asylum seekers have regular scheduled meetings with the Home Office. The system is designed to wear people down so that they give up. I have met asylum seekers who had been highly regarded political activists (or came from politically active families) who bore the marks of torture on their bodies, who were told they were lying. I have met asylum seekers fleeing utterly endemic male sexual violence, with perpetrators being from the government, rebels, militias and peacekeeping forces alike, who were told they were lying. I have met asylum seekers who were forced to strip to be searched or use the toilet with two guards standing on either side of them. I met a traumatised woman from Eritrea who was told by a detention centre nurse, ‘If you don’t stop crying and carrying on, I’m going to tell them you’re mental, and we’re going to lock you up in a mental hospital.’ The sexual and other abuse of women detained at Yarls Wood is now notorious. Cases like these demonstrate the sick cruelty of those in authority who will, for their own sadistic pleasure, abuse those who are clearly in extreme distress. Sadly, these cases and this behaviour are the norm, not the exception. They are actively supported by many governments’ funding, policies and rhetoric.

Recently, there has been an international increase in state-sponsored sadism towards those with nothing, who are fleeing everything and willing to risk everything for survival. The collateral damage is these millions of refugees who have witnessed the destruction of stable civil society, political accountability, urban and rural infrastructure including electricity and water lines, access to quality education, healthcare and employment. They have lived with surveillance, detention, torture, sexual violence. They have recognised that there is no future for themselves or their children, and so they have packed one bag and left. Instead of culpability, humanity and welcome they are encountering hostility, militarisation, suspicion and punishment. While some states, like Germany, have taken in asylum seekers with no fuss, others (especially England) have made their anti-asylum rhetoric ever louder and more xenophobic, inflaming panic about ‘marauders’ and ‘hordes’ of incomers, talking about putting up security walls and conflating asylum issues with other prejudices against migrants, foreign students, Islam and, ultimately, against the whole idea of multiculturalism. States including Greece and Cyprus have militarised against refugees, using army personnel, tear gas, incarceration in sports stadiums in the burning sun and other inhumane and abusive tactics. Hungary has acted shamelessly, like a racist nightclub bouncer protecting the rest of Europe, closing down its main rail stations and forcibly diverting trains to refugee camps.

To seek asylum is to ask for sanctuary, a haven, a safe place. It’s only the very first stage in regularising one’s existence and creating a new life in a different place. A refrain which I keep hearing amongst the asylum seekers I work with is, ‘I came to you for help and you treat me like a criminal.’

In the last two years, as the humanitarian refugee crisis has grown, I have been struck by the perversity of the ‘debate’ on asylum seekers. Rationality has lost out to fear of difference and fear of change. Mainstream political and media messages are out of step with both the facts about asylum and refuge and with asylum seekers’ lived reality.

Seeking asylum is a human right enshrined in international law, and the reasons for doing so include war, the breakdown of society, political persecution and torture. Currently, extreme poverty is not a grounds for seeking asylum, although I think it should be made one. Many people in the global south are also fleeing the effects of climate change, whose catastrophic and wide-ranging effects have decimated animal ecosystems, crop growth, waterways and harvests and made rearing animals or planting enough crops to generate a liveable income or ensure a stable existence impossible. The land is now simply too hot or dry, too wet or too flooded, or too unpredictable, for anyone to survive. That too is not yet classed as a good reason to become a refugee.

Sometimes I think the accepted reasons for asylum are only those which an elite westerner can imagine happening to themselves – military action, civil war, political persecution. If climate change is happening to ‘foreign’, different or other people, of another colour, speaking another language, possibly of another religion, in another country, it’s as though it is not real, not serious and not imaginable. The same goes for extreme poverty. Westerners can’t imagine what it’s like not to be able to feed your children, have water or electricity or provide your family with a roof that doesn’t leak or a school room that has blackboards, books and chairs. They negatively class people fleeing such conditions as ‘economic migrants’ as if these people are being greedy, when of course the reality is that nobody takes their children, their savings and one bag and risks death, drowning and detention unless they’re desperate. In a cruel underlying irony, many of the conflicts that asylum seekers are fleeing in southern Africa and the Middle East are due to instability, illegitimate governments, corruption, poverty and dictatorships which were a direct result of colonial (especially English and French) exploitation and meddling a century ago in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman empire. The chickens are coming home to roost and geopolitical karma is having its way; refugees are the collateral damage.

The daily existence of the asylum seekers I do outreach work with is a thousand miles away – a telling phrase – from the narratives so commonly peddled in the more conservative quarters of the media. While some had certainly fled war zones, many had abandoned their home countries decades after conflict. They had experienced the long aftermath of war and witnessed the emergence of fragile states ruled either by dictators propped up by corrupt bureaucracies and untrustworthy police and army hierarchies, or by armed militia, vigilante gangs, local thugs who have assumed power in the wake of a total breakdown of law and order. They had been tortured, raped (and I consider rape to be a kind of torture, including in peacetime) and threatened, and had witnessed such things being done to their own relatives.

In seeking asylum, legally they sought only to be recognised as refugees. At a human level, however, they sought protection, safety and the basic tools to restart life with dignity. That’s all. Asylum is, moreover, a completely distinct issue from migration, where people move – rightly and understandably – for work, for education, to strengthen family ties and to improve their lives. White Westerners do this too, all the time, but when they do so they call it being an expat or an international. A little over a century ago, they did it all over the world, shamelessly, proudly, exploitatively, arrogantly, with a view to taking whatever they could from it in terms of money and labour and land and profits and items to trade; and we call that colonialism.

Europe has failed to do its most basic humanitarian duty in accepting asylum seekers and housing them in places that are safe, dignified and fit for human beings and do not resemble punitive facilities for convicted criminals. In 2014, the UK government received around 30,000 asylum applications, of which it accepted less than half. More than 85% of refugees have been displaced to developing countries. Even given the current refugee crisis, with people escaping from countries including Syria, sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea, the overall number of individuals coming to Europe is less than 0.5% of the EU’s total population. These are just a few of the facts, all available on the UNHCR web site and the sites of countless charities like Asylum Aid and the Refugee Council. But nobody seems to care about the facts of asylum and refuge when the hateful, fearful rhetoric is so loud that it drowns out everything, including basic decency.

Psychogeography of trauma: inside a UK detention centre

A slightly different (worse) version of this essay was published by The Free Word Centre as part of its Briefing Notes essay series. Read the original here.

The detention centre was, hands down, one of the most frightening places I’ve ever been to. This was because of the sheer nastiness, anger and self-satisfaction of the staff – civilians and guards alike. It was horrifying, a sinister place, and it was clear to my colleague and me that nobody who worked there had even one dreg of basic human feeling for the individuals they were detaining or any understanding of, or interest in, what those people had survived.

The staff were suspicious even before we arrived, asking for written assurances that we wouldn’t name them or hint at where the institution was. The staff referred to the people inside as detainees and asked that “the workshop content is suited to a detainee context.” I replied via email, “I can confirm and guarantee this, having spent many weeks working with asylum seekers and refugees, a large proportion (about 50%) of whom had themselves been detained or imprisoned or both…I understand the sensitivity required to work in such environments and the necessity of not pushing individuals for personal stories or details… I have also worked with people of varying levels of psychological wellness, language skills, vulnerability and other needs. More than anything I want to foster an accepting and constructive environment…”

***

The detention – or ‘immigration removal’ – centre is in a part of England renowned for its landscape rather than its architecture or human-made sites of interest. It’s a minor, plain-enough town, ugly but bustling and not unpleasant on the morning we arrive. Even though the centre itself is a short taxi ride away, its atmosphere has seeped into the town itself, and its people. There’s a jovial, talkative woman driving our cab. “Are you a legal team?” she asks us. Local drivers are accustomed to taking legal aid professionals up to the centre, I gather. At first I think she must have sympathy for the detainees, what with “English not being their first language” and all. Then she surprises me by telling a crude rhyme, which comes out of nowhere:

There was a young lady from Rabat

Who gave birth to triplets Pat, Nat and Cat

Breeding was fine, but feeding wasn’t

When she found she had no tit for tat.

She throws back her head and laughs, with grotesque relish and mockery, and this macabre exultation – shocking two milksop Londoners with her rhyme – sets the tone of the day.

We draw close and I see the place. Darker, blockier, seedier, uglier than a prison. Prisons have a school vibe to them, a sense of pressurised containment. Some of them look like quite jolly red brick Peabody estates. They’re peaceful from the outside, thick with it. But detention centres are built to terrify and repel even from the outside. They’re designed to be visually disruptive, ugly; a psychogeography of trauma inflicted. There are more rolls of barbed wire outside this detention centre than outside the prison I visit: three rolls atop metal mesh fencing. Barbed wire runs up the muddy grass slope. There are yet more rolls of barbed wire, netting and cameras around the building, which is blocked across the old stone archway that was once the gate of the city. The place seems abandoned – as if everyone just ran out twenty minutes before we turned up. We don’t even feel as though we’re being watched. We feel as if there’s no-one around and nobody cares where we are, who we are or what we’re doing.

I go to the visitors’ centre where we’re supposed to leave our things in lockers numbered from 1 to 180. There’s a sign saying “Powdered baby milk/food is not allowed in the centre. Please ensure you have enough baby milk/food made up for the duration of your visit.” There’s a form I can fill in, headed “Violence reduction: reporting any incident of unacceptable behaviour.” It invites me to describe “what incident has cause [me] to feel intimidated, upset, threatened, humiliated, embarrassed or frightened.” At the bottom of the form, in block letters, it says, “Everyone has the right to feel safe here…. Unacceptable behaviour in any form will not be tolerated.” I’m assuming that this is a form for reporting on detainees’ behaviour, not guards’ behaviour. There’s even a drugs amnesty box where you can slot in those last few fronds of weed or whatever it may be. Although there are warning signs everywhere – like “passive sniffer dogs are in use here” and detailed instructions in how to body-search a “male subject” – the truth is that I could stroll in with some drugs, a gun and a camera. Nobody scanned me, checked me or searched my bag. 

We go to the main entrance, Fortress Gate 1, and the guy – the officer? The guard? Who are these people allied to? The police? – greets us with a strange combination of derision and indifference. He doesn’t question our purpose for being there. We hand over our ID and he barely glances at it. “Is there anyone else coming in with you? Just you two?” In prison you get a shrewd and searching look and the hard yet oddly reliable staff rebut any friendliness, leaf through your ID as if it’s fake, then write your name in little letters a little book along with the time you came in. Here, they don’t care, or don’t know, and that’s what makes it so frightening. One man makes an announcement on the communications system: “Call out. If anyone knows the whereabouts of Officer Ryder, can you call in?” Later I find out from a colleague who sits on asylum appeal panels that these detention centres are run by private companies, the same ones (like G4S) that’re making a killing from operating huge American prison complexes. The staff are private company employees, not public servants.

At this immigration removal centre there’s a “rec pitch” – a football pitch – a gym and an education centre, which is where we’re going. “Do you ever get trouble?” I ask the woman in charge of education, a brisk type who, like our taxi driver, seems full of uncanny, righteous anger. “No – no – there’s only one officer and that’s for our protection,” she says with a laugh that hits my nerves. The education centre’s like a modern school block with corridors and classrooms. I go in to meet some of the other staff and see a woman vigorously cleaning her hands with hand sanitiser, as though the detainees are dirty and whatever they touch is dirty. The staff laugh amongst themselves about how the detainees “sleep ‘til two or three in the afternoon.” I point out that sleeping so long is a symptom of depression and they nod blandly without a trace of empathy. “They do like their sleep,” they say, snidely. Other staff members, alerted to the novelty of us being here, sidle in and look us over with narrowed eyes and twisted smiles. After asking a few questions and painfully pulling out answers I learn that most of the long term staff work wholly within the detention system, moving from centre to centre. They make a career of it.

The woman in charge of the education centre takes us to the small classroom where the furniture, walls and supplies are in a better state that those at the charities where I do outreach work helping asylum seekers and refugees. The woman casually gives me three flimsy free-with-a-newspaper editions of an Ian Fleming novel, Casino Royale, and says I can give them to the detainees if I want. She doesn’t seem to give a damn either way. She goes out to find and harangue some of the detainees who’d promised to attend my session.

A few men come in – there are no women here – heads bowed, walking slowly and creakily as if weighed down, looking at me out of the corners of their eyes like mistrustful kicked dogs. They are from all over the world, southern Africa, eastern Europe, east Asia, with varying levels of English. One east Asian guy had a full life in the UK, running a business and making music, with a wife and baby, before he was picked up and slung in here. There are good facilities for making music at this centre, apparently. 

One man comes in on crutches. His leg has been amputated, or hacked off, just below the knee. He is completely silent and seems shattered, mentally.
“Aren’t there more coming?” asks the woman in charge of education.
The guys shake their heads heavily. They mention their friends’ names and say they might go and look for them again, they might be sleeping. The woman laughs at their slowness.
“It’s healthy and safety,” she says to me in front of them. “When I do it, I get them moving about looking for fire exits. Otherwise they sit there saying they dunno where the fire exits are. If they say they’re tired I get ‘em to stand up and jog on the spot. I’m cruel like that.”

I go through some bits of reading and some short writing exercises but don’t make much headway. It’s not that the men are disengaged or contemptuous, it’s that the oppressiveness of the environment itself, its fearfulness and energy sapping intimidation, has seeped into them and mixed with the horror that is quite obviously already there. We’re having some fun with different genres – Horror, Romance, Comedy, Western, Sci-Fi – and I start a sentence and get them to finish it in the spirit of a certain type of writing. 

“Comedy. Something positive,” I say. “‘If the man doesn’t catch his train on time then….’”

“Then he will die!” bursts out one of the men in the class, his eyes huge and full of tears, his dry voice trembling.

That is how it goes on. Many of the men at the back don’t want to speak because their English isn’t good. They are forcing themselves to be in the class and gruffly encouraging their friends. But they are all here for the same reason: whatever they went through to come to the UK, whatever they left behind, they weren’t believed, they tell me. Not the guy who’s crying, not the guy whose leg was chopped off, none of them.

The despair and a strange feeling of intimidation spread across the entire class. All the guards I’ve seen so far are short, heavy-set white men. Every so often one of them slopes into the room as though he owns it, trades sardonic looks with the education woman, looks at the detainees as though they’re scum, looks me up and down with glinting eyes and a smug smile and says, “So. You’re the author.” There is an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

The cynicism lifts slightly when we visit the library, which is empty. The librarian speaks with real care for the detainees, showing us the selection of films and books in different languages, the long stacks of dictionaries: Albanian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, even Tamil for Sri Lankans fleeing the aftermath of the civil war. She tries to make sure that every language spoken in the centre is catered for. 

When the session is up the men go off, slow and pained. The education woman seems fiercely pleased as she walks us out. “I’m reading Jane Austen’s autobiography at the moment,” she boasts loudly. Austen didn’t write an autobiography. “I don’t intend to read any of the novels. I’ve seen the films.” She says it with sharp, slashing relish, eyes glowing as though she’s put Austen firmly back in her place. 

We call for a taxi, twice. It doesn’t come. Perhaps the taxi firm thinks it’s going to be picking up detainees, illegal immigrants who won’t pay the fare. There’s a minivan parked outside the detention centre, full of luggage: cheerful, normal-looking wheelie cases, as if people are going on holiday. Staff members are pulling out the luggage and leaving it on the ground. It’s shift handover time and guards are coming out of the centre, swaggering, marching and righteous, jaws tensed. They’re so angry that they jerk their cars hard out of the parking spots, backing out sharply and speeding through the car park, tyres scraping, engines revving hard. One of them almost runs over my colleague, I think deliberately, backing straight into him as we idle about waiting for the taxi. As he drives past the officer’s face is hard and set and satisfied. 

***

On the way home I read a piece one of the detainess has written, entitled A Conversation That Changed My Life:

“The conversation that changed my life in the UK is the one I had in the Home Office during my first interview, because that conversation was one kind of a bad dream for me. After that conversation I found myself in the detention centre. Adding to what I faced in my home country, it seems like life is a scary movie which I would like to get out from.”

The reality of asylum and refuge in modern Britain

This essay was first published by the Free Word for its Briefing Notes series, pegged to my book Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London. 

Bodies in boats. Grateful, half-drowned people wrapped in blankets. Women dying of suffocation under plastic packages in long distance goods lorries while traffickers pocket their savings. Gangs of organised criminals terrorising Britain. Impoverished, illiterate moochers living off the state, filling up hospitals. Detainees being abused horribly by staff in UK detention centres like Yarl’s Wood.

Those are the images and horror stories that stifle any meaningful investigation into what it’s like as a human being with a name and a face, a life and a past, trying to survive as an asylum seeker in Britain. Some of the stories invite our pity, others are designed to attract our hatred and suspicion. None of them represent asylum seekers as complex, distinct individuals. The nastiest clichés are promulgated by some of the most powerful and pervasive forces in society — the media and politicians of all stripes — against those who have the least power and visibility and are concerned more with basic survival than gaining votes or readers.

Politicians both marginal and mainstream hustle for public support by fear-mongering and fudging, making sweeping statements about foreigners who they say are criminals, advantage-takers, callous and opportunistic illegals, troublemakers who do not know how to behave, who import regressive values, who refuse to learn new languages and muck up residential streets with their garbage. The stereotypes go unchallenged because those with the loudest voices and the greatest number of vested interests are shouting above (and about) those who have no public voice. The clichés pander to pre-existing prejudices about foreigners, incomers, the dangerous and malign ‘other’ who will take and sully. Nobody bothers to try and get to the truth because, at the end of the day, the people being slandered are largely invisible to them, being bounced between detention and prison, living near-destitute or with the meagre support of charities or working off the books in factories, building sites or cleaning firms.

An asylum seeker is an individual who is petitioning to be formally recognised as a refugee. Once recognised, refugees gain certain very basic and minimal rights to protection and support by the state, but that is only the beginning of a long journey towards starting a full and dignified life and establishing a support network, stable housing, employment or education in a completely new country. At the moment the situation, as described to me by the CEO of a major refugees’ charity, is “Fortress Europe”: there is a culture of systematic rejection of asylum seekers, of denial and disbelief of their stories (particularly women asylum seekers who have survived rape and other sexual torture), of brutally enforced deportation or detention in hellish incarceration complexes where detainees have even fewer rights than convicted prisoners. The most sinister place I’ve ever visited was a UK detention centre, which had more rolls of barbed wire around it than any prison and whose staff were universally angry and hostile.

Meanwhile, myths about asylum abound, the most pernicious one being that the number of asylum seekers is intolerably high, that most asylum claims are false and that the country is ‘full’ and can’t take any more. In continental western Europe boats have been refused permission to dock. Australia actually seems proud to advertise its antipathy towards asylum seekers, warning that anyone who tries to enter by sea and runs into difficulties will not be saved. I am shocked, as ever, by the sheer cruelty, the inability to see asylum seekers as human beings, the indifference about whether they live or die and the failure to imagine what these people must have experienced in their home countries, what they lived through which made them think that anything — even the prospect of drowning in a dinghy in a foreign sea — was better than that.

Three years ago, enabled by English PEN, I began doing outreach work in the form of writing workshops with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants from all over the world from Syria and Iran to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Malawi and Uganda. These experiences inspired my latest book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London, which features my students’ testimonies. I came to the conclusion that all the tabloid journalists, pundits and political bigmouths who rage against asylum seekers must never have met one. As I listened to my students’ experiences, read their writing and let myself be teased, mocked and berated by them it struck me that here were the warmest, funniest, most interesting people in the world, who had gone through unimaginable things: a man in Timbuktu witnessing a neighbour being disembowelled by an armed rebel as a warning to the other villagers; a woman who had been raped by rebels and then thrown out by her family because of it. “Please believe us,” said one woman to me, “if we go back to our countries they will rape us and kill us. Our leaders don’t care anything about us, only oil and minerals and power and money.” There was Claude, from the Congo, who had a degree in criminology and was forever ingratiating himself with the ladies — “Hello auntie, you know I am always pleased to see you. Can I get you some tea?” There was Manny, formerly a composer and professor of classical Persian music at Tehran University, who does odd days in a sandwich factory, in the freezer room, where people constantly fall ill from the cold but will be replaced if they miss a day of work. And there was Beatrice, who wants to be a writer and who described to me how, in England, it was assumed by many that she didn’t know how to read or write, turn on a light switch or wash her hands after using the bathroom. “I don’t say anything,” she said, “because I don’t want to offend them.”

Meanwhile, the country is being run by a club of white men who went to posh school and posh university and have experienced nothing of the real world: its diversity, its hardships, its chaos and violence. They decide on domestic and foreign policy, wars and aid money, arms deals and the euphemistic ‘austerity’ measures which have cut legal aid, public services, social services and charities’ budgets at the knees and directly imperilled so many people’s wellbeing including that of my students. They sit in their heated rooms in their expensive clothes, eating good food and drinking good coffee (all things which are out of the reach of my students), as they decide these things. They do not live with the physical consequences of their own policies, only the political consequences which affect their careers.

As the months progressed I felt ever more strongly the irony of being in a country where the most interesting people are the least heard, while those who are the most ignorant speak with the greatest volume and entitlement, making decisions in the full confidence that they will never have to experience the results.

Not every asylum seeker arrives dumped on a shoreline, barefoot, penniless and wrapped in a foil blanket. All my students arrived by plane. They fled international and civil war, fragile states in which law and order had broken down, extreme poverty and political persecution. Many of my students had been bounced between detention and prison or left in limbo for years between being refused leave to remain — that wonderfully Alice in Wonderland phrase which would grant them the right to stay in the UK — and receiving the final letter ordering them to get on the next plane.

One woman told me that she spoke such good English because her parents, who had been political figures, were repeatedly exiled abroad due to their work. All my students spoke at least two languages fluently and, like all people of a migrant background including myself, learnt new ones quickly. All were educated to last-year-of-school level and the overwhelming majority were educated to college level and beyond. Every single one wanted to work because while not all work gives dignity or an identity to be proud of, it gives a little money, it takes up time, it uses up energy, it involves other people, it gives a shape to the day. But asylum seekers have no right to any public money or services, no right to be housed or to work. So they labour as cleaners, packers, building site hands, relying on this shady, unreliable and exploited labour in which (one building site worker told me) a boss can promise money and then withhold it for days, or renege on an agreement and under-pay.

There is a crisis in the issue of asylum because there has been a crisis in world governance, war and conflict, poverty and inequality, which is not some accident but is the fault of violent perpetrators (whether renegade militia or rebels or national armies), selfish rulers, uncaring commercial interests, greedy power-holders and opportunistic political players. It is not the fault of the millions of asylum seekers and refugees who are fleeing the consequences of such parties’ actions. It is the nastiest kind of cynicism to scapegoat asylum seekers by saying that their testimonies are lies (or, to quote what the Home Office staff said to several of my students, “This is all just a fairytale you’ve made up,”) and that they have left everything behind, their identity, their life, their family, to take advantage of a foreign country.

Every asylum seeker I worked with was desperate to contribute, to feel like a part of society, to be seen as a person with something to offer, to not be invisible. Politicians at all points on the spectrum exploit the electorate’s fear, racism, insularity or simple lack of knowledge about the reality of asylum and there is no politician of any party who has dared to stand up and set the record straight about the numbers of asylum seekers in the UK, what they left behind and how they are treated here. It is as though asylum seekers’ stories begin the moment they arrive in a country and nobody bothers to ask what they have escaped.

Every human being has a personality, a social context and a past which make them who they are; but asylum seekers are not seen as human beings, so nobody is interested in those things. This is a failure, not of policy, but of common decency: the inability to see others as people just like ourselves. All it would take for prejudices to be broken down would be for politicians, the media and the public to stop shouting in fear and start listening with respect.