Jim Aitken reviews Welcome to Britain: An Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction, edited by Ambrose Musiyiwa and published by CivicLeicester

In 2019 CivicLeicester published Bollocks to Brexit: An Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction. This was then followed by Black Lives Matter: An Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction in 2020. Last year they published Poetry and Settled Status for All: An Anthology, and this year they have brought out the ironically titled Welcome to Britain: An Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction. All anthologies have been edited by the redoubtable Ambrose Musiyiwa.

This most recent anthology is the culmination of all the previous anthologies, in that Brexit gets a fair mention in this new volume, as do the issues of racism, the dreadful way migrants are treated, and the colonial legacy of the UK that remains silent from mainstream political discourse. The failure to address that legacy enables what Munya Radzi, in her penetrating and insightful Introduction to the book, calls ‘the myths and fictions Britain likes to tell about itself.’ This book contests and subverts such myths in equal measure.

From the first piece in the collection by Sandra Agard entitled Welcome to Britain, we are reminded exactly what it was like for those of the Windrush generation (now 75 years old!) who arrived here and tried to find a place to live. As the man asks the ‘bespectacled English woman in a pink pinafore’ if she has a room, he is promptly told ‘my boarders won’t take to your kind.’

This level of racism has not gone away and that can often be because Britain’s colonial legacy is not addressed or taught. Children across the UK know more about the first half of twentieth century German history than they do about how it was Britannia came to rule the waves. The failure to address this has enabled the racism that accompanied imperialism to fester.

The poem Ola and Victoria by Jo Cheadle explains this perfectly as she notices Ola and her son sitting at the base of a statue to Queen Victoria – ‘its gilded roots running deep, through the Earth, touching every continent.’ For Robin Daglish in Cruel Britannia, ‘what a horror story the grab for empire was’ and he goes on to say ‘Black lives have always mattered.’

Brexit, for many, meant feeling unwelcome. The poem Disciplined by athina k tells how the poet was made to feel unwelcome during the time of Brexit. She noted ‘the repression of emotion’ in England and goes on to confess that ‘My home is here in Brexitland. I feel welcome and unwelcome’ and explains, having learned how to live here, she has herself become ‘emotionally regulated.’ For Fokhina McDonnell, her take on the Brexit negotiations were farcical as she says in Going Bananas – ‘Kafka would have been enchanted by a hard border in the Irish Sea.’

The government, of course, never even considered how their proposed Brexit would affect Ireland, a lack of consideration many would say had been going on for over 800 years. McDonnell puts it more succinctly when she says in the same poem ‘the yahoos are among us yanking us closer and closer to the edge.’ The choice of the word ‘yanking’ seems appropriate and in Max Terry Fischel’s poem England is a hard place, he tells us, ‘we are nearly America now.’

Rob Lowe, in his poem For The Good of Our Country, we are told that ‘For the good of our country/We preserve/ An imagined way of life.’ Such myths continue to abound in a nation that fails to address its history and in Zahira P Latif’s short prose piece The British Way, the myth ‘about a meritocratic British society’ is challenged when a student asks ‘the white middle-class faculty’ why they were passed over for a job that was given to ‘a less experienced British white student’ to be condescendingly told, ’You must be mistaken, because that is not the British way.’

Natasha Polomski continues this theme of a mythical nation when she laments in Pity the nation – ‘Pity the nation whose history is silenced/whose identity is bound up with lies.’ And Trefor Stockwell, in his poem Welcome to This Sceptered Isle, addresses this myth pertinently by saying ‘Sorry, dear migrants, it is such a shame/But you’ve become pawns in a political game/Wrong creed, wrong colour, wrong race.’

The Ukraine war is also touched upon. The poem A Flag Dilemma by Matteo Preabianca notices that ‘every garden has a Ukrainian flag’ but there are ‘no Iraqi or Afghan ones’ on show. Matteo sums the situation up by saying ‘Welcome Ukrainian refugees! /But if you’re Black – please!’ While Ambrose Musiyiwa in What a wonderful war, says ‘the energy companies’ are ‘doing well out of the Ukraine war’, Barrington Gordon noted that during the Ukrainian mass migration at the outset of the war, the trains were ‘only laid on for Ukrainians’ and not for black people. ‘Black children,’ he says in Black & White TV Sound Bites: A Colourful War, ‘now know they are not white.’

And in Tom Stockley’s poem Hummus on Matzo, he recalls ‘Aunt Barbara’ telling him that in the Ukrainian town of Chernigov a theatre now ‘takes the place/of the old synagogue/and laughter fills the space/that fear once knew so well.’ Clearly, there is not one angle only to this dreadful war and Cathryn Iliffe in I Don’t Hate Russians, says she ‘will always salute the battle tattered Red Army flag of victory over fascism.’

Arrogance and racism

This anthology is packed full with keen observation and angled comment and it is impossible to mention all the poems and writers – as I would love to do. I will limit to only a few more writers whose moving poems – along with all the others – make this anthology such an important book for our times.

Kimia Etemadi, in her poem Engelestân, addresses the reader directly by saying ‘You would too’ wish to leave your country if it meant that your six-month-old baby could grow up and ‘ride a bicycle despite being a girl.’ Sadly, after coming to Britain the baby had now become ‘seven years old’ and as she rides her bike she is told ‘by an elderly white woman’: ‘I don’t know what they do in your country, but here/ you’re NOT ALLOWED to ride on the pavement!

Such an arrogant and racist comment many migrants will have heard along similar lines. Implicit in such comments is the myth of greatness about the host and the barbarism of the newcomer. It is rooted in not just individual ignorance but in a state-sanctioned ignorance that perpetuates the idea of civilised norms while ignoring the historical realities of the state.

Kimia tells us she had to leave Iran ‘after five years of imprisonment for being a Marxist.’ She did not want to leave but had to leave, the story of the vast majority of migrants at all times. The Irish and Scots can both testify to this.

What was particularly moving about this poem was the arrival of Kimia’s Persian rug ‘passed from ancestor to descendant.’ The rug represents all the poet had left of her culture and to fit in, to assimilate to her new country she would allow her ‘English friends’ to keep their footwear on: ‘Come in. Keep your boots on. It’s fine./Drink your tea and just try your best to not think about it.

The custom of taking your shoes off in the home is a good one for all sorts of reasons. The fact that Kimia is now forced ‘not to think about it’ simply exposes the lack of value, the lack of cultural tradition of those who claim they are blessed with national exceptionalism and have no need to question the cultural traditions of anyone else.

The poems of Elizabeth Uter are written in stanzas of three lines each and these stanzas are packed full of commentary and insight. In Stitch Up she refers to the ‘hostile environment’ prevalent here with BNP and UKIP along with the Reform Party ‘tea partying/with strange bedfellows both across the pond, and, in Engaland,’ In ‘this green, unpleasant land’ she says ‘black is seen as deviant, not the norm.’ She refuses to be categorised or pigeon-holed and says ‘if it’s all the same to you I’m not BAME either.’

Uter’s poems not only reveal the nature of the racism prevalent here but also show how she reacts to it and deals with it. She says she will not be ‘stitched up by the othered song’ for she is ‘too clever by half to be needled by you, UK.’ Yes to that!

The collection also addresses the nature of a state that is essentially broken economically. Anna Blasiak in How to be an Immigrant speaks for all immigrants when she says ‘Remember that the black mould in the shower/Comes out to welcome you.’ Monique Guz in Helpline talks of ‘the death rattle of a collapsing system’ and in a memorable line Nicollen Meek, in She’s never had it so good, says ‘The oak of social security’ is now ‘reduced to a toothpick.’

What myths the UK has about itself are shattered in this anthology. This is a positive thing to have done because it means there is everything to play for, a new country could emerge. A new country where people are not othered, not classified or categorised by their colour or their faith, their race or their sexuality. This timely collection, as Elizabeth Uter so articulately illustrates, reaches ‘toward each other as we humans are supposed to do.’