Anita Sethi - I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain

In memoriam Sophie Christopher (19902019)

To everyone who has ever felt like they dont belong

Contents

I watched the wings as they soared through the sky so sure of itself, so confident was the curlew as it caressed the clouds, so in its element. Where do I belong? Such a perennial question of existence and I remember the flight of that curlew I saw in the Pennines when I consider the quest for a sense of belonging. The bird belongs in its fine feathers and in its nest and in the air, flying through the sky with such ease and grace. The fish belongs in its spectacular scales and in its watery habitat. The bulb belongs in soil, in its state of becoming, growing towards the light. How could I feel a sense of belonging in my own body, in my own self, in the world?

What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to feel like you dont belong? How can nature help us to find a greater sense of belonging, and how can we ensure people care enough to realise that nature and wildlife belong as much to the world as humans do?

A definition of to belong is to be in the right place; we all belong here in the world, our shared home. If the conditions that make up our belonging on earth are removed completely, we will ultimately perish. Belonging is a need, like water and air and food vital elements in the natural world that every living organism needs to survive, making us realise that we are not apart from but a part of nature; nature flows through our very veins, fills our lungs, and pulses in our hearts. As well as water, air, food and shelter, we have felt more than ever what else we need, what is essential and what is not. Is it possible to survive without friendship and community? Without love and language? Without basic care and respect for each other and for wildlife? Without civil rights? These elements also make up our belonging. This book was born during a time when our primal need to belong and ways in which some of us are brutally denied the basic elements of belonging has been evidenced in the extreme.

Everyone needs to feel a sense of belonging, and without it arises a deep loneliness and isolation that can affect the mental health and such loneliness has seeped through my life since childhood.

All my life I felt like I didnt belong, and I grew used to that sense of unbelonging; being an outsider has shaped my life in many ways and made me become a writer. But there comes a time when its necessary to say: I belong here. It might come when someone is trying to push you from a place, to eradicate you. It might come when your basic rights are being denied. It might come when you are struggling to breathe clean air, when you are struggling to breathe at all. Its exhausting having to prove and explain why we belong, yet so often have I had to do so on account of multiple macro and microaggressions. Ultimately, I hope for a world in which every creature great and small is accepted and I dont have to say it at all.

I was on a journey through northern England in early summer 2019 when I became the victim of a hate crime, when a man attacked my right to belong here, with words that hurt the very heart of me. The North is my home, having been born and bred in Manchester the TransPennine Express train even passed through the city on its route from Liverpool to Newcastle. The hate crime was a vicious attack on my right to exist in a place on account of my race. I was called Paki cunt and told to get back on the banana boat and go back to where youre from and yet this country is where I belong.

Hate crime is on the rise in our hostile environment. After the attack some advised me to stop travelling alone due to the dangers, and I experienced panic attacks and anxiety at the thought of travelling by myself. But I was intent on not letting a hate crime stop me moving about freely and without fear in a country where I belong. I was eager to continue travelling alone as a woman, asserting my right to exist.

One day I was looking at a map of the North and there, along the route of my train journey, falls the Pennines, the backbone of England, with its nature reserves, national parks, and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (an area of countryside designated for conservation due to its significant landscape value). My heart quickened as I looked at the miniature mappings of its mountains and rivers. The TransPennine Express journey had run a route tantalisingly close to such Pennine areas, but it would take walking and local railways to fully explore it. I longed to journey through the natural landscapes of the North, transforming what began as an ugly experience of hate and exclusion into one offering hope and finding beauty after brutality.

Go back to where youre from . This is where Im from. Im from the North. The glorious North. Our emotional connection with certain places runs deep and forceful as a river, and during and after the hate crime I felt how profound my connection was with the North. Although a racist had viciously told me to leave, I felt a magnetic pull drawing me back not to get further from it but even deeper into it.

My journey is one of reclamation, a way of saying, to adapt the Woody Guthrie song title, this land is my land too and I belong in the UK as a brown woman, just as much as a white man does. Journeying through the so-called backbone of England also feels symbolic, a way of showing backbone myself and that I will not let having been the victim of a race hate crime curtail my movements through the world, despite the trauma and panic attacks that followed.

The nature of trauma is that it lives on after the traumatic incident. The man who racially abused me was arrested, charged, pleaded guilty and was convicted of a racially aggravated public order offence, using threatening, abusive, insulting words and behaviour. After I heard my abuser had pleaded guilty, I felt the oxygen return to my lungs. But in the days and weeks that followed, I still experienced anxiety attacks, feeling the room closing in on me as my breathing became rapid and my heart pounded. I saw the mans face flash through my mind. I felt a crushing pain at the suggestion that I had no right to exist in a place that is my home. At my lowest ebbs I wanted to cease existing. When I walked up through the carriages, the man had threatened to set fire to me. I had nightmares about choking on smoke. Sleeplessness left me exhausted. Even walking the streets of the city, I felt a sense of claustrophobia. That year Id been racially abused twice while walking the streets, in Nottingham and London.

As my claustrophobia grew, I began to long for wide open spaces, to breathe freely in the great outdoors. I hungered for greenness.

I began to devour more and more maps of the Pennines and plot out a route, reading up about the Pennine Way, Britains oldest long-distance footpath, which runs for 431 kilometres through the backbone of Britain. This path was the idea of the rambler Tom Stephenson who, in 1935, wrote about how he yearned for a long green trail like those of the John Muir Trail through the Sierra Nevada mountain range and the Appalachian Trail in the eastern mountains of the US. I also saw that the Pennine range is not confined to the Way but stretches from the Peak District, up through the Yorkshire Dales and into the North Pennines, fringed by the foothills of the Lake District, with a westerly outpost in the Forest of Bowland.