Lips Tight Shut

Photo: El Lane Calais Hunger Strike

​​I read three pieces about Calais yesterday, and all the time in the back of my mind I have this image of your lips with the thread clearly visible where you have stitched them shut. I think of how much it must hurt – I remember terrible pain when I had stitches in my tongue – and so I know how desperate you are feeling, to add this hurt to the other hurts you are suffering. 
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The first article was Nick Hayes’ description, with drawings, of ‘The End of the Road’ for the ‘Jungle’. Like many I’ve spoken to, Nick went ‘for a week over Christmas… and stayed for a month.’ Everybody mentions the squalor, and Nick’s account doesn’t shy away from the varieties of pain and distress, not least the presence of the police ‘combing through the camp, masks on their faces, plastic bags on their boots, armed with pistols, tear gas and batons’. I know all this – I’ve been there, seen them, but I still find myself lurching between tears and anger as I read. What are we thinking, I wonder, to pile on the pain when people have come so far to escape pain and look to us for help, and all we can do is make life even more impossible? So impossible that you are driven to hit back, to resort to cruelty and violence also – but towards yourself, rather than to anyone whom you might reasonably hold at least partly responsible. We know about self-harm these days, and perhaps this is something of this order: like Lear, who chooses to be out in the storm because it will not give him ‘leave to ponder/On things would hurt me more’, perhaps for a moment your self-inflicted pain takes away the deeper wounds?
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I’m thinking of Shakespeare I suppose because the second piece I read*, about the history of the camp and its destruction by the authorities, was based around a resident from Syria who had taken almost a year to reach Calais. As well as speaking fluent English, we learn he has ‘a degree in English literature and a Master’s, plus an uncle in London and a cousin in Wales…’ Such madness, such a wicked waste: if it were no one’s fault, it would be bad enough. But the thousands like Baraa Halabieh are not victims of some random act of god or nature. They ‘have fled countries where in recent years the French and British have dispatched troops or bombed from the air. Others have escaped from regimes armed by France and the UK…’ Halabieh speaks with the same quiet dignity as you do when you explain the hunger strike: ‘We are not criminals and we are not terrorists. We are just trying to find a safe place. We’re here because of the actions of European governments in our countries. We are the outcome of your actions.’ 
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Your silent protest seems to me every bit as much of an accusation as this. It’s as if you are saying, ‘This is what you have done, to starve me and silence me. You have destroyed the kitchen where we gathered to eat and left us to line up like children at the back of a van for enough food to get through the day. You have done your best to make us invisible, shrinking the small spaces we have found. And your ears have been deaf to our cries.’
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The third Calais account is Glenys Newton’s ‘Have we lost our Elgin marbles?’ It hits home with her characteristic mix of searing anger, heartfelt compassion and humour. Like the other two writers, she finds laughter in the Jungle, and hospitality and, even in these terrible times, hope, whether in the Greek philosophy of Filotimo –  gratitude, generosity and humanity – or in ’Rise Of The Give A Shits’, all those who are ‘stepping up to fill the gaping holes left by our governments’. 
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All three accounts deal in figures. Glenys’s final statistic is the shocking 24,000 a day – (a day – I make that almost 9 million a year) – who die of poverty. Nick’s article ends with the arrival in the camp of an Iraqi family, ‘a journey of 5,000km that ends here, 40km from its destination’. Ben Ehrenreich’s report contains two numbers which pulled me up short, though why I should be surprised I don’t know. The first, a detail of the Anglo-French ‘comprehensive action plan’ signed in September 1914, a British pledge of 5 million euros a year (a year) to strengthen port security and build ‘robust fences’ to keep migrants away from motorways. I think of other ways that this sum (I make that almost 14,000 euros a day) might be spent for your benefit instead of your bane. The second, even more chilling: according to Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart, now that the southern section of the Jungle has gone, the northern half is the next target. Once that’s gone, work can begin on a 675 million euro expansion of the port.
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So it’s all down to money. As Glenys said last night at the special screening of ‘Hora Chilena’, it’s shameful. Our greed, or selfishness, was thrown into sharp relief by the story which the film told, of Cambridge’s welcome to Chilean exiles from Pinochet’s brutal regime in the 1970s. I found this a particularly poignant evening as one of my friends, Argentinian Elisa, was both in the film and in the audience. I first heard her story some years ago, part for me of an exploration of the horrors of the Argentine junta and the thousands (somewhere between 8 and 30 – thousand – depending on whom you listen to) of the Disappeared. Yesterday evening focused instead on the good news, although even this came with the familiar sting in the tale: now we live in a time when selfishness has become respectable, according to one couple interviewed.
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I first met Elisa through tango and as usual I’m writing with the sound of tango music in my head at least, if not actually in the background. ‘Lo pasao paso’ is a current favourite: ‘what’s passed is past’, Famá sings. ‘Let it go.’ We can’t go back, although those I sat with yesterday evening spoke of their time in the Jungle with some shared sense of loss. Unlike Dan, I don’t need to go back for a haircut, but there is something about being there which feels more – real? Is that it? Is there something about our Cambridge comforts which, like a cushion over the face, restricts our breathing, dulls our senses?
 

I can go back to the Calais Hunger Strike facebook page, though. There’s a new photograph, with a caption. I press for the translation: ‘Today was 14 days’. I run my fingers over your lips, feel the ridge of the thread through my skin; make myself not look away. We can’t get that 1970s welcome back but we can fly in the face of the prevailing monetary wind and listen to your pleas for action, use the template to write to our MPs,  and make sure that somehow our doors stay open. Indirectly at least, maybe this will help you take out those cruel stitches.

Photo: Reza Hassani Calais Hunger Strike

Ben Ehrenreich's 'Diary'* appeared in the London Review of Books for 17 March 2016. I took the liberty of  sharing it on my timeline, where I hope you can read it in its entirety.

You can listen to Francisco Canaro's orchestra with Ernesto Fama singing 'Lo Pasao Paso' in a 1939 recording here. Meanwhile I'm thinking my rough translation should read 'what's past is past' - should it? Now I'm not  sure...

​And you can read more about the Calais Hunger Strike on their facebook page