ON BELONGING
Maybe it’s why we do it all, what’s deeply underneath the choices we make, the ways we make the decisions we do, take the paths we take, even when it ends up creating the opposite of our intentions, even when we accidentally push away what we really wanted to attract…everybody wants to belong. So many of our daily struggles, our yearly quests and the wide sweeps of our character arcs are about chasing the glow of belonging, of being part of something, a community, a crew, a family of whatever kind (including those crews made up specifically of those rejecting other crews).
(Also, I’m aware that it’s good to be wary when somebody says ‘we’ in such an unspecific way - who is this we? It’s dangerous to assume homogeneity where there are probably many layers of difference — of course, there are so many different kinds of overlapping/contradictory ‘we’s, that’s exactly part of it.)
And an icky question within this search is what to do if you belong to something you don’t want to belong to, because (to use a completely not hypothetical example) you belong to a culture which is destroying itself, and dragging everyone, and everything, along with it. How can you shrug off the glop of destruction when it’s the water you were born in, the air you were raised in, and the tar we’re all swimming in, the tarmacked, poisoned extractivism of, specifically, the industrialised global north world – more specifically, the white & consumerist, capitalist, colonising, eat your own young, world.
It hurts, strolling casually past the plastic rubbish strewn amongst the bushes, overwhelmed by the adverts for the junk that’s for sale, their embodied resources, emissions, the landfill, the violence in the supply chain, the violence in the political system, the violence seeping out of the majestic imperial stones and statues, the deep white-bodied supremacy that powers our politics and culture, gathers so many votes and claims so many lives.
It brings on in me, and I know in many, a feeling that it can’t be borne, it can’t be coped with. The dorsal lizard brain shutting down emotional response, the coldness, the can’t-care survival mechanism that so many of us humans are struggling under, to the detriment of our mental, emotional and spiritual health. The barbed oxymoron of trying to feel part of something – when the something that you were born into is tearing apart everyone in it and outside of it.
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And here, inside these dirty mirrors, you are always chasing your belonging, even if you are consuming everything which was dangled in front of you, seducing you into thinking that this is how you can belong at last to the world, this is how you can feel at peace in the world, this is how you can be strong and cohesive and shiny enough to fit — as you reach the brow of each bump in the hill, the horizon is constantly moved away.
The culture turbines whirr, pushing forward comparison, scarcity, hierarchy and lack, psychic alienation and constant economic growth.
Alienation and individuation are central pillars — Thatcher’s voice carried when she said there’s no such thing as society; systemic issues become personal pathologies, health and welfare systems become self-care to-do lists and personal responsibilities, people are expected to carry alone their grief, hopes, dreams, when for most of human history, we have carried these things together. All this is a driver of the creation, maintenance, and attractiveness of subcultures, as they provide much more of a satisfying form of belonging. Saying or realising you don’t belong somewhere specific can help you to belong elsewhere, and propel you there.
‘And I ain’t going nowhere, I’m just living in a dump like this.
There’s somethin’ happenin’ somewhere. Baby I just know that there is.’
(Bruce Springsteen, Dancing in the Dark)
Of course, the megalith finds ways to reabsorb all of these kinds of counter culture and sell it back to you, but that’s another story — ‘that anti-marketing dollar, that’s a huge market’, as Bill Hicks puts it.
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The word belonging comes from the old English langian (to pertain, to suit), and middle English: to be fitting, to be suitable. Langian’s other meaning is to long for, from the proto-germanic langna: to long, to yearn for, or to grieve for, pine, be pained by. And when I think about cultures, heritage and ancestors, it’s a very specific kind of longing, for sure. Like many 21st-century people, my ancestors were deeply invested in cultures which I’m now detached from.
Jewish refugees escaping Russia to join immigrant east London communities of tailors and hat makers, Scottish farmers growing crops in the same area and sharing the same small rotation of names traced back to the 17th century, and Nottingham coalminers (who I imagine had rich and localised folk histories, but these are all lost to me): the textures of these histories can get lost to you through time, urbanisation, post-structuralist modernity, different types of search for belonging – whether seeking out more safety, more excitement or more fulfilment.
This longing and pining is deep from one particular strand, due to a specific and sad kind of deliberate erasure. My paternal grandfather was born in 1921, the son of refugees from the Russian pogroms who had landed in the Jewish immigrant community of Whitechapel at the beginning of the 20th century. They lived in a series of cramped addresses around and inside this richly textured community of familiar language, food and families; a bubble of belonging and connection nestled in the middle of a difficult and unfriendly city. This was yet another ‘hostile environment’ with a rising far right, and the pan-European development of anti-semitic fascism. My grandfather was brought up a few miles from where I live now in East London (a handful of map miles and a million of any other kind of psychogeographic urban marker). He suffered such hideous racist bullying and assaults that, in 1939, six months before the start of the Second World War, he anglicized his name, moved to Nottingham, married an English woman with an English name, and pretended to everyone, even his own children, that he was never Jewish.
And I tell these stories to my son, as best as I can, using the names my father has gleaned from the archives and the census, without the details I would love to have, of the ancestors and the lands and the culture that came with them, that we carry in us somewhere, as I try to feed that longing, that langna, to be part of something, to be held through the years gone by, to not be so alone in the now.
On belonging/To the land
‘For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore? What happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home?’ (Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer)
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a tender, insightful and transformative exploration of the interplay between traditional native American wisdom and academic botany. They are framed as different kinds of knowledge, with contrasting attitudes and value systems, and different ways of learning; from scientific books and university tutors, or from plants, traditions and ancestors. But they ultimately echo each other in terms of understanding both plant behaviour and ecological systems.
One chapter is titled ‘In Nanobozho’s footsteps: Becoming Indigenous to Place’, and weaves Kimmerer’s experience of settling in a new home, with the Ashinaabe creation story of the original man’s arrival on earth. Unlike Adam, who was told that all the earth would be his dominion and all the creatures for his pleasure, Nanobozho follows the Original Instructions: ‘to walk in such a way “that each step is a greeting to Mother Earth.’” He is required ‘to learn how to live from his elder brothers and sisters’ (the animals and plants who were there already), to ‘learn the names of all the beings’, and ‘to sit quietly at the edge of the woods and wait to be invited’, and in all things, to follow the core tenets of the council of animals to never damage creation, and never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being. Kimmerer showcases this respectful and generative way of entering and integrating into a landscape, which is so unlike the way the colonizers and settlers entered the very same lands. She asks if we can, inspired by this, find a way to learn how to be native, to become indigenous, to step away from the colonizer/indigenous binary by practising the art of relational and respectful integration.
It’s a fascinating and inspiring modality to explore, and brings up many hopeful aspirations in those of us who, as part of a species apparently set on destroying its own and only habitat, are aching for another way of being, and another path to take. The idea that you can learn and enact a practice of being in the world based on the decisions you actively make and the choices you actively take also offers hope to those of us born into a culture of domination, imperialism, and the violence of white supremacy. She talks of indigeneity as being to do with how you relate to the land that you are on: how you honour its rhythms, show gratitude to its bounty, engage with its beauties and take notice of its offerings — how to tread softly and with intention, rejoice in the interconnectedness you hold within its ecologies, and really understand your part in the matrix of its life force.
Braiding Sweetgrass offers a hopeful vision of an alternate way for ‘second man’ – the colonizers and pioneers (broadly white Europeans) — to move away from the cultural norm of domination and extractivism that built the structures of the US. She advocates how a process of naming, attending to, building relationships, stepping gently, and learning from those already there can be a counterpoint to the violence of the pioneers, as well as offering a pathway of how to live lightly, respectfully, and generatively, a pathway that is sorely needed as biodiversity loss and climate change threaten life so cataclysmically.
As gorgeous as this vision is, we can’t use it as a template here in England.
‘If I were to single out the most persistent reminder of that sense of not belonging, it would be The Question. The Question is: where are you from? Although I have lived in five different countries as an adult, nowhere have I been asked The Question more than right here where I started, where I am from, in Britain.’ (Brit(ish), Afua Hirsch)
Inherent cultural assumptions of who naturally belongs, and what needs to be done in order to belong when entering a new land, have a different and uncomfortable resonance in the UK, amidst the current iteration of xenophobia, racism and anti-immigrant fervour that we are swirling in. Here, a narrative around immigrants and indigenous people reads differently. Here, the latent white supremacy and structural racism have come out into the open unashamedly over the last few years, as people’s dissatisfaction at the realities of life at this juncture of late-stage neoliberalism has been weaponized by politicians and channelled into the oldest trick in the book, scapegoating immigrants, fear of ‘the other’ and suspicion and slander on anyone who isn’t white. So it doesn’t feel possible to look to indigenous earth-based practices for guidance on ecological and cultural interdependence and grace, as the narrative around ‘natives’ is much more about nationalism and hierarchical dominance than it is holistic interconnectivity.2
Kimmerer uses the example of the wild plant Plantain (known as ‘white man’s footsteps’ as it popped up everywhere the settlers went) as an example of how to act in a new place, ‘as if we were staying ’. This looks like respectfully engaging in relational attention, in a way which, in the context of the white man’s genocide of Native Americans, offers a hopeful alternative, but in the UK, these behaviours of the plantain – ‘[to] be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds’ – take on a different timbre. To speak of the need for recent arrivals to learn from the people already here, to be respectful and quiet, is just another replay of the trope of ‘The Good Immigrant’,3 showing the deep conditionality of white English people’s ‘tolerance’. To speak here of the power of healing wounds reminds us of the state’s mistreatment of the Caribbean British Citizens who arrived after the Second World War to staff the NHS and support the nation’s healing and rebuilding.
This becomes even more explicit as Robin Wall Kimmerer then unwittingly echoes the grim middle-England narrative around ‘foreign’ and ‘invasive species’, where narratives around the behaviour of the grey squirrel, the rhododendron, the parakeet, are also painfully similar to the racist tropes around who belongs, and who deserves space, time and energy.4 Here she writes: ‘Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others’ homes and growing without regard to limits.’ This all too neatly ties up with the persistent narratives about fear and scarcity provoked by migration, where the apparent ‘neutrality’ of conservation language echoes the same anti-immigrant narrative as in the right-wing press.
However, there remains a hopeful path through this, revealed when Kimmerer writes about the underlying truths of what it means to belong, using the concept of naturalisation as a praxis, as opposed to an objective fact about your birthplace. This helps us start to think about ourselves as Nanobozho did — not as naturalised to a particular nation state, hemmed within artificial borders, but as attempting to become naturalised to the whole earth, to become aware of our place within the complex organisms of this planet, as part of its living systems, rather than an observer from the outside, as we humans are often encouraged to think of ourselves…5
‘Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.’
This becoming naturalized to place is a way of generating belonging. If we consider this process of cultivating indigeneity, of living as if we really do belong to, and come from, this land, then so many other shifts and healing consequences become possible…
What could it mean, what could it start to create, if indigeneity is something you earn, you develop, you reach into through the way you behave, rather than something immutable you have or do not have in a way that was decided for you before you were born? And so, what if being, becoming indigenous, could really be about how you interact with the place you are in, the relationships you have, create, and maintain with the place; the relational qualities of your experience of being there, how deeply intertwined you become, how carefully and consciously you care for the environment and its residents?
Then maybe the difference between being a host and a guest isn’t a binary between who was there first and who arrived later, but a spectrum of belonging and offering, marked out in steps and processes through degrees of tending and responsibility. Just as best friends or romantic partners can act out that slippage, the more familiar they are with your house, your living room, the more they make their own tea. The more they put things away, the more they eventually offer tea and coat-hooks to more recent arrivals.
ON BELONGING/TO THE CITY
A love letter to London
One of the great things about London is that you can become ‘from here’. I felt it really vividly as a child and teenager growing up here, feeling the absence of the coming-of-age ritual of moving to the big city – as I was already there, how could I mark time and growth in the same way? I felt it sorely as a loss: that I would never have that kind of protected belonging that only came from being born somewhere smaller; the smaller the place, the more you were really ‘from there’, in the way that people talk of moving to a village, and thirty years later, still being the newcomers from wherever you came from. That wherever you’re born will always, in some mythical, mystical way, be where you are ‘from’. And I felt that as I was from London, where anyone can become local, as it’s a big city, a glorious mess, I was somehow missing out. Now I see it in a different way; now it is one of the things I hold dearest; that this is a city of immigrants, a city of people becoming neighbours, becoming indigenous, a place so busy, complicated, frustrating, noisy, many layered, ever changing, that you can be or become anything, including, and especially, a local.
(It's important to note that as a white person I have the luxury of speaking theoretically about both racism and immigration, instead of through lived experience. I’m definitely not claiming that London is a safe place free of racism and xenophobia – and I recognise that I’m not qualified to speak on the intricacies of the interactions between racialisation and localisation.)
Often when people in London ask where I’m from and I explain I was born here, they are shocked, as so many people who answer that question came to London from somewhere else. Sometimes somehow, despite huge evidence to the contrary, people don’t think of London being the sort of place that you get born in. In this way living in London is sometimes seen as a temporary situation: you spend your twenties in London maybe, until you tire of it, until you have a family, and then you go ‘back home’ or to somewhere smaller, more rural, more peaceful, a more normal place to raise children &c. And of course this belies the truth of millions of people being born, living and dying within the same small area, in London just as in anywhere else, and a whole load of people without the means, access or white privilege to relocate to the country… But it’s happened often enough that it points to something.
Because what I deeply love now about London is the belonging, and the sense of home, that sense of recognition and connection, that shoulder untightening that comes with familiarity, that relief at familiar landscapes and modes of being, and the very fact that I think that this sensation can be available to people who are not, originally, ‘from’ here. That this sense of belonging is something that develops, something that can ebb and flow, something that feels more like a verb than a noun, something which is in flux, and can be shaped, and can shape you.6 What this means is that someone can arrive in London, confused and on edge from the rushing people, the confusing intersecting lines of the tube map, rabbit-eyed in the lights, overwhelmed by the options, exhausted by the stimulation and baffled by the possibilities, and then, through time, through repeated journeys, through discovery of quiet and cherished spots, through discoveries of villages, of crews of people who are interested in just the exact niche interconnectedness of themes as you are, through the joys of losing and finding yourself on a dancefloor, of soaking up the heart filling of art, of cinema, of theatre, through gaining a window into history in the palimpsest of existences that occurred over centuries on one particular street, through the experience of thinking about something else and suddenly spotting a blue plaque of one of your heroes on a wall, through the secret, joyful experience of catching someone’s eye on the tube with a wry shared smile about some kerfuffle in the carriage, through the times when you feel the cosiness and multiplicity and inclusivity of the city, you come to feel yourself a part of it, you can read and follow the currents, can be embraced by and accepting of the mess and the drama and the variations, you can feel like a Londoner.
Although I of course understand the challenges of London: I often struggle here, the rush, the consumption, the overwhelm, the competition. But I also want to stand in defence of London, and I want to speak out for it as people dearly love to slag it off, maybe feeling like it’s so big and powerful it can take it and it wouldn’t hurt. But it’s made up of a patchwork of millions of different, smaller things, and has been shaped and changed in millions of ways by steps, actions, unfoldings, romances, kindnesses, courage and solidarity. People sometimes criticise London in a brutal way that would be considered epically rude if someone was talking in that way about anyone else’s home. Maybe because they can’t see or appreciate the intricate human and non-human intimacies that make up so much of its swirl, and see only the looming elements and not the nesting ones.
And it hurts to stay in a place where so many people leave — to see so many of my friends be pushed out by the market forces which do a lot of crushing and flattening of these tender dynamics that nourish us here.7What does it mean to stay — to be always saying goodbye, and to remain, struggling to protect and water the delicate fronds chewed up by global capitalism and cynicism and the housing crisis. And here we are, being somewhere, full of people making their own paths over and through the paths before, with some who felt like they didn’t belong where they were before, some who are still struggling to belong, many who are surprised to be labelled the metropolitan elite just by virtue of living in a big city — surprised to be accused of having a load of power they don’t actually have, accused of being Theresa May’s ‘Citizen of Nowhere’, even though we’re all interwoven in our identity, citizenry, solidarity, within these streets and under these street trees.
London is:
· the grim and bloody seat of colonial power
· the extravagant and touristy home of the royal family
· one of the physical hearts of the brutal financial system which destroys lives, habitats and ecosystems
· loud and polluted and scary
· expensive beyond the point of satire
· a place of terrifyingly common violence amongst its young people
· constantly whirring with sirens
· increasingly inaccessible to people on a low income because of the housing crisis and rampant property speculation
· increasingly demonstrating the privatisation and selling off of public space
· full of corruption and greed and violence
· a place which people leave, endlessly, exhausted, burnt out or disillusioned
London is also:
· bioregionally, part of the Thames Valley
· based on a bedrock of clay
· the only known home to the Walthamstow Yellowcress
· a thriving ecosystem, with over 14,000 species of plants, fungi and animals
· a place mapped out, built, developed and deepened over thousands of years through many layers of migration
· a place people have gone to find the communities they couldn’t find ‘at home’
· a place people have gone to flee violence, war and persecution
· Made up of 47 % green space, including 3000 parks, 8 million trees, and marshes, woods, community gardens, plant nurseries, market gardens, Victorian graveyards, city farms, nature reserves, canals and rivers
· full of a rich history and thriving current flex of resistance, social movements, and collective power: Olive Morris, the Angry Brigade, Southall Black Sisters, feminist printmaking studios, anarchist social centres, squatted art spaces and collectives of all types
· steeped in the history of creative skint people creating art, music, joy, and unexpected connections traced all over by paths of political cultural resistance and rebellion
· full of gorgeous, well-dressed Londoners, with a way with colour, texture and style that gladdens the heart in a way I’m more and more comfortable with and delighted by
· a place which people come to, continually, looking forward with hope, excitement and tenderness
The motion of the river, the speed of the city – the eddying and moving… There’s a whole narrative of motion to the city; perhaps this breathes out its shadow side, transience. There’s so much movement, you have to move through it. The same shadow energy of movement is the power of gentrification, an apparently unavoidable through-line from cheap/immigrant/shabby, through arty/creative/exciting, to unaffordable/soulless/whitewashed/exclusive – apartment blocks, estate agent fodder, the once attractive scene eating itself[sb8] . That motion, however, also contains the possibility of an eddying towards belonging; that lack of stasis means a mutability of identity, the deepest and truest cliché of all things said about cities, that you can become anyone you want, you can find yourself in any way you need to.
For me this city has two particularly strong flavours, both of which drench the harshness of the concrete with the soft organic strands of relational warmth. One is the richness of living in the East End of London, so near to where my ancestors arrived, as part of some kind of strange, circularly disrupted homing instinct, and the complexities, comforts and specificities of living inside a multicultural environment inside of what is pretty broadly a racist nation in character, history and voting patterns. I grew up feeling like I was from London, not from England, and that’s part of it. Of course, that’s a brutally generalising brushstroke, but there’s also truth to it. It’s important to be clear about the fact that London is diverse directly because of England’s colonial and imperial adventures over the centuries, and there are many complicated and painful reasons why people have come here; I’m not romanticising and flattening these reasons, and I’m cautious of the sort of New Labour and liberal multiculturalism which hurt people while performing care, and in my whiteness I’m protected from the racism people will be experiencing here on all sorts of levels, but I don’t want to live in a white-dominated space, and I’m glad I don’t. And I’m grateful that as xenophobic intolerance and anti-immigrant fervour heightens, London feels generally different, as a little red blob in a sea of Tory blue, and that people have routes, welcomes and diasporic neighbourhoods and neighbourhubs to get here and be here.
The other taste is from my experience of living in a boat on the river Lea, and as a cyclist and a food grower – where in all things you cannot avoid an intimacy with the landscape, the elements, the river, the mud, the wind, the sun, the cold. I enjoy the paradox of living on the water where I can’t see or hear a car out my window, inside the biggest and loudest city in the country, and the physical experiences of the soil on your hands and the weather on your face in a time and place where so many interactions are mediated through a screen. In both of these aspects, and amidst the overwhelm and speed of the city’s erratic rhythms, I rejoice in and celebrate the muddying of binaries, the flow between yes and no, and the stubbornness of nuance in the face of the lazy and satisfyingly comforting desire for certainty. I also find refuge in the hyperlocal, in the relationships I can cultivate with the local communities, whether of the past – the stones and gargoyles and spatial histories, the shops and familiar routes and the people you recognise along them – or of the river bank: the dandelion, the yarrow, the cow parsley, the comfrey, the coot, the willow trees, the cygnets, the little shrimps, the bats.
ON BELONGING/TO THE LAND/IN THE CITY
If you can become indigenous to the city, or more realistically, to your small part of it, your river, your bioregion, you can also seek out a reciprocity with the land and the ecologies around you, endeavouring to be in relationship with the processes and the residents, and so harness both the chaotic, open tolerance of the city, and the intimate, quiet welcome of the seasons, to create a new sense of intimacy, appreciation and belonging. This could look like learning to recognize your local trees or your local birds – whether their taxonomical names or any name you choose, which describes them in some way. Or harvesting wild herbs for your teas and then making an extra cup to water the plants poking out of the concrete. Or honouring the magic in the shrubs through photographing, painting, or writing a song about them. It could be making syrups and brandies from the elder and hawthorn berries and then showing your gratitude with a litter-pick. Locating the sites of the buried rivers of your city and visiting their sources. Learning about the history of your local buildings: who met there, who resisted there, what part of the land the stone in the walls is from.
Perhaps the process of becoming indigenous is a healing one on many levels: turning indigeneity from a noun into a verb, becoming aware of yourself as a verb not a noun, and being attentive to the marvellous and ever shifting verbiness of what surrounds you. The gift it gives us as a concept is to traverse and muddy the boundaries between immigrant and native, just as it creates a map of how to move from one to the other, but a map which doesn’t read patriotism and xenophobia, a process which doesn’t dehumanize, impoverish and obfuscate, like the current immigration system does, but instead invites a hospitality of care — the knowledge that the house is yours if you care for it, that belonging isn’t an accident but an attitude. To move from national borders to the deep celebration and global interconnection of hyper-specificity and regionalism. An invitation to all of us, no matter our passports, our status, to intimately reconnect with the world around us, and to sensitively and compassionately relocate ourselves as a key part within this ecology; to tend to the tendrils, to know the names, to honour the processes, to greet the wild animals and plants, and hidden rivers, and the palimpsest of history, and in learning the names, in observing, attending to and feeling deeply grateful, that we may further sink into the interdependence of those that belong. Not through birth or chance or prejudice, but through action, care, and love.
1 This applies to class, gender, ability and sexuality too.
2 For indigenous earth-based cultures of this land we have to go back to pre-Roman times —detangle Christianity from the Pagan holidays &c and re-remember these islands’ own tribal cultures.
3 The Good Immigrant, ed. by Nikesh Shukla.
4 See Claire Ratinon’s writing for more on this:
https://claireratinon.substack.com/p/i-dont-belong-here
5 Nature and Native have the same etymological root, from the Latin ‘nat-‘, meaning to be born.
6 Thanks, as always, to Octavia Butler for this influential conception of change, from the teachings set out by Earthseed within her Parables series, centred around the inevitability, power and awesome nature of Change as a force, and the only source of the divine.
7 Which I’m protected from by living on a houseboat.