Two Months of Hell
What living in InLawStan taught me about immigration, epistemology and power
TRAVEL WEEK CONTINUES…What is it like to move countries? To be an immigrant? A stranger? To live under another’s power?
ARTICLE 1 (Cymposium):
ARTICLE 2 (Richard Neat):
“Two Months of Hell” by Daniel Clarke-Serret
It’s nearly over. Two tortuous months of living with my parents. Two tortuous months of fitting a square peg in a round hole.
It was never meant to be like this. We were meant to be buying a house. We were meant to be out as the New Year dawned.
It was always going to be like this. No amount of delusion could deny the oncoming storm. No amount of hope could get the twain to meet.
This isn’t a diary, a personal reflection or a rant. It isn’t an outlet for rage. Guerre & Shalom is public intellectualism, not private pain. Neither is it designed to impugn the absent – those who haven’t the words to defend themselves nor the self-awareness to see their faults if objectively they have them). Rather it is an abstraction from the particular - a brief summary of what I learnt, politically and philosophically, from two months of hell.
Hell, here understood, is not want, squalor or violence. Nor is it Lucifer with his firey furnace. To reference Sartre, Hell is other people. It is the Gaze of judgment; being seen as an object by those that reserve freedom for themselves and judge according to their own categories.
Hell isn’t intention. We all know to where that road is paved; how it was designed and why. Some may act maliciously, but most do so ignorantly. From living in a small world of their own making. This isn’t merely personal reflection, but an inductive truth open to the falsification of contradictory experience. The evidence isn’t gleaned from one data point or a single family. Empiricism must be repeatable –and by golly it is,
We are not talking about the Hell of one InLawStan but a veritable United Nations of global recollections. Neither are we talking about this family on this road in this country. We are talking about villages, towns and countries themselves. Religious groups and cultural ghettos.
We are talking about what it means for one family, nation or cultural group to submit to the power of another. We are talking about immigration; and intranational cultural relations.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once wrote about multicultural Britain, describing it as The Home We Built Together. How apt that metaphor was. For nothing describes national cohesion like a house, nor penetrates the hell of attempted co-existence.
Immigration, multiculturalism, navigating inter-cultural and religious relations: these are not, as is often assumed political topics. They have a political element to be sure: how much immigration, how far to be multicultural, a ratio of importance given to one group compared to another.
Indeed, Mass immigration, Restrictions, Open Borders: such policy is talk of the taverns, right here, right now. But immigration as personal experience isn’t political; rather it's a question of social human nature.
Let me explain: Even the most tolerant “pro-immigration” liberal, those who stamp their feet about racism and campaign, let’s assume sincerely, for its elimination, can despise immigrants as a “lived experience”: Their habits, their cleanliness, their “foreign ways”. They want them here, but far from their back yard.
Their most hardline opponent may be different; individually charming, kindly and welcoming, even to the extent of marrying a foreigner, speaking 5 foreign languages and living half the year abroad. Yet they may be politically implacable, calling for indiscriminate deportations and a truly hostile policy.
Thus la politique, that arms-length, estranged pontificating on policy, is an ill-suited device for construction; creating that home we built together.
Living with another, two families together under one road with shared resources, isn’t akin to politics, but real-life: the actual experience of uniting two philosophies in a single house under the ownership of the first occupant. The host may see themselves as welcoming, kind-hearted and generous. Liberals and advocates for society “where we all get along”. And they may well be when viewed in a particular light. But declarations, even seemingly praiseworthy actions, aren’t a substitute for averting The Gaze, negating judgment and mutually respecting the freedom of another.
Agency is mutual; the observed as the observer and the observer as the observed. The host has no monopoly on vision and normality. There is no checklist of objective rectitude in the petty; each must respect the comfort of another who does no harm. Does it matter how many washing loads one does? Who uses the kitchen and when?
Why must the host ask and the “guest” justify?
Why must the host control and the “guest” acknowledge?
Why must obedience to host-defined set of norms be the standard of judgment —to be met with looks, frowns and opinions?
Oh yes, I know. We all do. It’s because we are “living under their roof”.
Here we see the fate of the immigrant –and the home-grown who deviates from the norm. Not this type of immigrant or that kind of “deviant”. These are political debates which the nation must legitimately conduct. (The terrorist who would blow up the house must be arrested and their sympathisers must be hunted out –quite rightly so.) Rather the immigrant as class; as an individual; whatever their culture, from wherever they come.
Hercule Poirot was an “outstanding citizen” was he not? A pillar of European society that not even the racist could condemn. Yet he closed the windows when the English opened them. He dined in this manner, with these habits in this pre-prescribed way. He was useful. He was “welcomed”. But he was foreign. In common with his less fictional Belgium refugees, the liberals welcomed them in (correctly), but couldn’t bare to live with them. His struggles, his agonies, his adventures: none of these were of import –until and unless he found the murderer.
In these Two Months of Hell, we lived the life of Hercule, similarly welcomed, similarly struck by that ill-cool feeling of difference. Wanted in theory, shunned in practice –because we were foreign; not fulfilling the test of normality that the host had set. If Chief Inspector Japp had been asked, he would have seen no evil, heard no evil. He was as tolerant and as welcoming as they came! The immigrant is always wrong. The native original thinker likewise.
This is not a question of respect for your hosts. Did Hercule ask for the English to change their lifestyle? Did any right-thinking foreigner ask their host to change their ways? And when the Islamists did, was not the common, “foreign” reaction one of horror and condemnation? Did not the Indian and Nigerian immigrant join us in indignant anger?
Bar the terrorist-sympathiser, no immigrant wants a changed host nor an unrecognisable nation. They ask for mutual respect — the right to the kitchen once the host has had their turn; to share the water bill then use the washing machine as they wish.
More than that, they ask for recognition; to see the mutual acknowledgment of freedom in the other’s eyes. Finally free of all-seeing control and released from gratuitous gratitude, they are liberated to play their part in the betterment of the household. And not through a slavish obedience to “normality”, but unshackled and innovative.
The host is careless. They never ask. They didn’t even ask the native-born —he who abstained from Christmas, cursed promiscuity, avoided the rugby and said no to drunkenness. So, how were we to expect engagement with the foreign? With empathy and curiosity? With a thirst for knowledge and craving to learn? So much was hoped for, but never received.
Receipt was never an option. Though she had fled from the Gulag, braved the Tibetan plateau, survived through the Himalayas and emerged to those little-glimpsed Indian wonders, she was not to be asked a single question. Not an inquiry passed their lips. The host’s horizons were the extent of their world. They already knew “normal” and normal was all that mattered.
It is easy to laugh at those philosophers that doubt reality; those who are sceptical about the body, speak of the “world of appearances” and admit eternal ignorance of “things in themselves”. How could they say (without a smile) that categories were in the mind or that language was the scope of reality? I laughed too –the implausibility of it all, the lack of common sense, its dubious application. But now I laugh no longer. For I’ve seen it. All too real. All too humiliating.
The “real” of the host isn’t an objective real or a description of truth. Rather they are imprisoned by categories of their own making; normality is their prison cell, experience their horizon. They cannot observe their ignorance because seeing is to categorise and categorising is to see beyond — beyond their world of experience.
There is Truth; Objective Truth if you will. But its horizons are endless, it steppes beyond the reach of Man. Only those who venture beyond - the immigrant, the stranger, the wanderer and the thinker - can approach it. And approach it they have. But even though they glimpse upon its back from afar, at least they have glimpsed! At least they are aware of their manifest ignorance! The ghettoised host knows little and is aware of their ignorance even less. They are incurious –for they never knew there was anything to be curious about.
They could be challenged; argued with or scolded. But with what? Un-understood words and purposeless rage. They wouldn’t even hear the reprimand (still less moral revelation), rather unmerited ungratefulness and an underling’s disrespect.
‘If they don’t like it here they can go home! If they “despise our country”, they are free to leave! We have done so much for them —and they are under our roof!’
‘We are unxenophobic “liberals” totally attached to our “normal way of life” (read highly conservative people who want praise for their worthiness). How dare they criticise us! How dare they call for change! We have the power, and to that words are no answer.’ Ask Jeremiah.
So where we seek to explain, they seek to categorise; placing the incongruous sounds in their own categories.
Where we “speak truth to power”, they impose their power and, should they decide, expel us.
It’s a power game masquerading as kindness. It’s confusion seeking to lash out.
So to apportion blame is foolish, unproductive and cruel. We are angry, but they understand our anger not. We are ignored, but they have seen no wrong. Instead we must continue the long journey; strangers forever, expelled from the ignorance of the Garden of Eden. We accept our fate, but we weep, for communication is impossible and our loneliness is witnessed only by God.
This is the precise opposite of being too online. It’s “touching grass” but for real. Builds character like nothing else.