From Refuge To Freedom, Thursday 28th August 2008
This session involved a group of refugees and people seeking asylum, mainly women and from a variety of backgrounds, who meet at the Mosses Community Centre, and took place at The Met performing arts venue in the centre of Bury.
I felt this was a really interesting and strong discussion though it was difficult for various reasons. For example, the topics were emotionally difficult for the participants, travel to the venue created logistical problems (I wonder if the session would have been better at the Mosses community centre where the group normally meet?) and the sense of creating something from complex, personal and tough subject matter in such a tiny amount of time was ambitious.
From an initial stimulus from me, the group of about ten participants began by discussing the length of time they have to wait for a decision from the Home Office and the conditions of their lives and how thay can deal with it during that time. There were a range of very moving accounts along with some participants who found it too emotionally difficult to recount their feelings and experiences.
The question arose as to whether they could feel able to raise their concerns and issues, which felt impossible for fear of being penalised. Outside Manchester as a centre there are no public expressions of support, and the tone of the localities in the outer boroughs defaults to an assumed anti-refugee mentality. The possibilities of a collective voice in combination with local supporters seemed to be worthwhile, such as a well-attended demonstration or dedicated public festival (this theme was also previously mentioned by Ray Collett at the Bolton Teahouse discussion). A smaller and simpler possibility would be to create some imagery which could be displayed or distributed, and a brief workshop exercise involving photographer Miselo Kunda was squeezed in at the end (after most participants had left) to try and explore this.
The final discussion which created the theme for this was to do with dignity. The participants felt that the bigger issues were out of reach, yet there were state practices that they felt simply unnecessary and designed to undermine them as human beings, removing any sense of dignity they may have. For example, shopping vouchers restrict their shopping to just one supermarket, and mean they can not make use of good prices between different shops which should be a basic facility for people on such low incomes. To give them cash would make no difference to the Home Office (in fact may be cheaper) and would make a big difference to them. The effect is to make them feel second class or lower, and this affects their own self image and sense of worth. Another example was regular signing at a police station, making them feel criminalised. They felt raising such things could be useful beginnings to try to effect some influence, and the theme of dignity became the basis for the workshop exercise.
Despite the various difficulties, I felt that to try and develop an expression from a combination of the personal and collective experiences of the group informed by wider contexts is a valuable process and would lead to worthwhile outputs for the participants as well. Unfortunately, I have a concern that as a one-off session it may have come across to the participants as the same discussions they have had before and with no worthwhile benefit from it. Sue Arnall may well clarify this for us. When some initial images are shared with the group, they may give some ideas as to how such discussions could develop into worthwhile statements and expressions that can have some valuable influence, but of course this ideally would need further development. KC
