'What is the calculation a family and individual must make?' Photo: Book cover of We Are All From Somewhere Else: Migration and survival in poetry and prose, by Ruth Padel
We Are All From Somewhere Else: Migration and survival in poetry and prose, by Ruth Padel
Author: Ruth Padel. Review by Melvyn Freake
Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet who teaches at Kings College, London. She is also a traveller who spent time when writing this book at the migrant camp on Lesbos. Here, she writes in both prose and poetry: each section begins with a prose description, which is followed by poems on the same theme. She writes beautifully, with great clarity and feeling.
The first part of the book looks at migration as an innate and universal element of life, using metaphors from the natural world. Plants and animals move on through cultivation and seasonal migration, towards a better, safer life. Padel says there is nothing unusual or unreasonable in human beings migrating when conditions become difficult. It’s instinctive behaviour. It’s survival behaviour. Here’s what she says about one journey in ‘Barnacle’s Love Song to Humpback Whale’: You’ve only one shot; I hitched my wagon to everything I’m not. Life on the move.’
The drowning of yet more migrants crossing the channel happened as I was reading the book. What leads a family to risk the lives of their children in a craft that may not be much more seaworthy than a garden paddling pool? What’s the comparison with a migrating animal?
Here is one from the book. Padel went to Kenya to witness the annual migration of wildebeest, zebra and gazelle from the Serengeti. Behind them are dried grass and lions; ahead is the lush grass of the Mara river. In between are the biggest crocodiles in Africa. Most will make it when they travel together, but many will die. In ‘How does a Zebra Decide?’ Padel writes ‘He paws the beach-sludge, splashes; stops/at one flash-memory of slaughter… The weak, the hesitant won’t make it./He plunges, a reel in the eddies,/a stagger in rust coloured mud’.
What about the human journey? What is the calculation a family and individual must make? In ‘The Desert and the Sea’ Padel writes: ‘I might not survive. I knew this… Is it worth the risk? I cannot say yes/or no. It depends how your soul/buckles under the burden/of months – no, years – of almost.’
Migration is complicated. There’s always someone making a profit – people traffickers in this case. But for some people, the journey is a risk they must take. The rest of us take smaller journeys (Padel, while writing the book, is moving house, and talks of that as another example of migration). The journeys are smaller, often, because there is less need.
This is a beautifully written book. It took me through a process of understanding how essential movement and migration are. It put me in the shoes of the cell, the tree, the barnacle, the gazelle, and the person in flight.
We are all migrants. Let’s support others as they have to travel.
