crossings

immigration is repetition

I walk into the centre, take a number, turn off my mobile phone, put all my possessions in a locker, have my photo taken, show my ears, my ankles, my palms, my wrists, my neck, and then enter the blank white room.

*

The shape of my migrancy is a past self – a ghost – endlessly writing to the woman she thought she might become.

*

Eight long years of new visas and changed statuses – no access to public funds, work restrictions, a lack of security, should I sign this open letter?, surveillance, surveillance, surveillance. At the centre, I take the test required for settled status only three days after the far-right organise an anti-immigration protest attended by 100,000 people.

*

The woman I want to become dissolves under this country’s gaze.

*

shoreline, Portobello, summer evening

*

In the waiting room, I feel strangely like I’ve been here before. For years, I’ve reimagined my family’s long history of displacement. All the ocean crossings of my ancestors. Lines of flight from India to East Africa. Tanzania to Canada. In the waiting room, I feel these intergenerational movements in my body. I recognise the process of being assessed, perceived, scored, welcomed, unwelcomed. My migration is an inheritance.

*

Immigration is repetition. It is recursive. A pond water reed wavering. It is the act of constant dreaming.

*

At the centre, I think about my father. (I am always thinking about my father.) I imagine him in a room like this one. A young person arriving in a new country with a long history of young and displaced ancestors behind him. Forty some years later, I become a part of this pattern of departure and arrival. I contort myself into the precise shape this country deems acceptable and the cost is a loss of self.

*

The problem isn’t that my preferred landscapes – homelands – are all dreams, but rather that I no longer recognise my figure among the figures of real trees.

---

Note 1: I passed my life in the UK test this week. The study guide does not mention indentured labour anywhere, but now I know what’s in an Ulster fry.

Note 2: I am on compassionate leave and very hard to get a hold of at the moment. I’m sorry if I haven’t replied to your messages.