'The difference between my uncles’ story and the story of the refugees now begging for admission to Europe is one of power.' Photo: Luis Deliz / flickr CC.
Family, empire, migrant, refugee.
Alison Leonard writes about historical responsibility
When the refugee issue hit the headlines last autumn and became a crisis some words rumbled at the back of my mind and took shape in the phrase ‘chickens coming home to roost’. Slowly, I began to articulate, in a fumbling way, a line of connection between those desperate people who have lost everything and are begging for something – anything – and my own comfortable family history.
Before becoming a Quaker in my twenties, I grew up in a middle-class Anglican family in post-war Britain. My parents voted Conservative; it was taken for granted that one couldn’t vote any other way. My father worked in the small family business, stockbroking, and eventually took it over from his father. He didn’t choose this and wasn’t happy in it, but his two brothers had gone to live and work abroad and he was a good, responsible man who wanted to marry and have a family and support them properly.
Migrant status
The older brother lived in south India, working for ICI in Madras, and the younger one went to New Zealand, where he became a nurse and was able to follow his passion for amateur dramatics. Over my childhood years it became clear that each of them wanted to get away from their difficult mother, who disapproved of the older one’s marriage to a woman ‘beneath him’ and couldn’t even contemplate the notion that the younger one felt ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. He was homosexual; homosexual acts were illegal, shocking and subject to harsh punishments then.
In terms of their migrant status, how might we label my uncles today? Economic migrants? Certainly. Even if they had ambitions to be English stockbrokers, there wasn’t room for all three brothers in the business; an excess of sons in a family was always a trigger for peopling the Empire. Asylum seekers? That sounds like an exaggeration, but what if my younger uncle had been threatened with prosecution and fled the country? The countries of the Empire followed the mother country’s laws, but at any rate he would be unknown.
Seeking comfort and economic security
So, each was a refugee from a broken situation at home, seeking comfort and economic security in a new land. But for them, and for so many adventurous or desperate British people, there were vast open spaces in which to travel, to settle and to set up one’s flag. The Empire, those pink swathes of the world map on which I was probably one of the last to be told that the sun never set, existed for them to create new lives according to their natures or their dreams.
They didn’t have to resort to people smugglers or leaky boats: they paid their fares and even came home on brief visits. In India, as in Africa, men such as my older uncle were privileged by their white skin, their public school education and their origins in the mother country.
The difference between my uncles’ story and the story of the refugees now begging for admission to Europe is one of power. My ancestors, my family, my class, knew as indisputable fact that they were ‘superior’ and could settle almost anywhere they liked; the institutions that surrounded them enabled their plans, their passports and their progress from arrival to settlement and then their rise up the career ladder.
Empire
Meanwhile, from his modest office, my father facilitated the lifeblood of resources – financial, material and human – from the Empire and then the colonies to the mother country. He was not a natural businessman; my mother laughingly complained that he spent more time listening to his clients’ personal problems than he did buying and selling their stocks and shares. But he was part of a well-oiled machine that enabled the United Kingdom to reap huge and lasting benefits from the industry of those who managed or laboured in the Empire.
Through inheritance, I have gained from my uncles. This kind of family history will be familiar to many in Britain, and they will have benefited, too.
Since looking at politics from a Quaker perspective in my twenties, this benefit has felt uncomfortable, and a great deal more so since the recent refugee crisis exploded onto Europe’s shores. The language used by politicians and the media makes me wince. They imply that ‘economic migrants’ have no right to be here, while the term ‘asylum seeker’ is almost used as an insult.
Historical responsibility
The UK government is niggardly in its offers of help, even to those it defines as refugees. In Germany, where the welcome was initially most generous, the government is facing electoral difficulties.
I suspect that many Friends feel the same sense of historical responsibility as I do, and maybe the same sense of confusion as to what to do about it. It seemed worth articulating my story in terms of ‘who do you think you are’, in the hope of making the overall murky picture very slightly clearer.
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