No country owns me

Mood: Cut people out of paper and have them hold hands around the globe.

Flying through open skies where clouds become motorways and a glimpse below gifts me with cerulean sea, broccoli forests or dusty desert carpets; there are no borders. No signs that alert you to the beginning of a new country and the end of another. If there are fences, your eyes can’t strain far enough to see them at 35,000 ft. Just one land. One planet.

Maybe that’s why the only place I feel like I belong to is Earth. The same passport that I used to get on those flights doesn’t mean much to me. The burgundy passport that will transition into navy blue upon expiring in five years, tells all who sees it that I’m a British citizen. Born. Raised. But, what do those two words bring up within me? What does it mean to be a British citizen? The multitude of emotions swell within me like the aftermath of a mosquito calling my shins home. I simultaneously feel nothing and everything.

The empire, incessant colonialism and present-day racial gaslighting by the Conservative government (who will hopefully not be in power by next week’s letter) is something I can’t ignore, forget, let alone wave a flag for. While existing in a Black body holds similar realities in many countries, the knowing that you can get on a bus and receive a “go back to where you came from” comment, doesn’t exactly make you feel a sense of belonging to the land you were born on.

Conversations around what British culture is, always land on dinner tables next to the salt and pepper, when I’m with my friends. Friends who were also born here. Friends who weren’t. Friends whose skin looks like my own. Friends whose skin doesn’t. We laugh about if the low-level depression and stoic misery that seems to be the average emotion of Britishness is due to the unabating rain. We question why anyone would want to play for the English football team when tabloids and so-called supporters annihilate players, especially Black ones, if they don’t “perform” well enough. We ask ourselves what it is we stand for. Is there a culture? Does pub culture count? What if like me, you don’t drink? Then, what? The Royal Family? What if like me, you don’t believe in the monarchy? Then, what? What is Britishness? Especially, if you’re not white.

When I travel, I always tell people I’m from London, not England. The city that raised me. The one I know just as I know myself. A multicultural city of people, some who were born here, others who travelled across those borders invisible in the sky, came, stayed and raised families here. My mum came to the UK in 1972 from Trinidad when she was seventeen, to join my grandma who had arrived six years prior. She came to England where cafés had a not-so-welcome-welcome mat, that read, “No blacks. No dogs. No Irish”.

This is not the land I know, now. In some places I go to in the UK it sometimes feels like that sign is still baked into the weathered furniture, but not in London. It’s home. We make homes out of bricks and our own experiences, wallpapering it with our truth, the truth of those who came before us and trying not to cause cracks in the foundations from our assumptions. I made a home out of London because it is my home. London has me bathing in its dynamic soup of chicken bones ornamenting the streets and sweat-soaked underground seats. London has me on rainy days running into cafés I’ve always felt safe enough to go in. It has me in parks where I lay on picnic blankets with sandals cosplaying as paperweights, with people scented in street food and summer-induced joy. London has me.

Yet, I am from London, but I am not London. I was born in England, but I don’t feel British. No country or city owns me in the way that trees do when I stand under tinsel-like willows. No country or city owns me in the way that breathing with the ocean does. I am not owned by passports and borders, citizenship tests and places of birth. I belong to the soil beneath my feet, the cotton clusters of clouds above me, the universe so sensationally far beyond me, and my mother whose womb housed me before any land could.

I know the countries I feel at home in. I know the cities that I can see my life in. But, I belong to nowhere other than Earth. Where my spirit is my compass. My heart the GPS and the whispers of my intuition tell me of the places where I need to be at any given time. I belong to the things that we all belong to. I might be in a complex, long-term situationship with an emotionally unavailable lover, named the UK but I am fucking grateful for it. I know that I won. I didn’t choose this land, but I am thankful that it was chosen for me.

I am safe. I have free healthcare. I don’t have to pay for my MS treatments. When mum and I were made homeless we were provided for because we have a benefits system. I have been educated. I have always had access to clean water. There are laws to protect me. I can vote. I have never worried that my bedroom would be bombed when I go to sleep at night. There are no militia outside of my house restricting my movements. I have never worried that if over 38,000 people in my country were killed the rest of the world wouldn’t do anything about it. I know that my passport can grant me entry into most places in the world. Here, children are waiting in line with their iPhones at ice-cream vans, instead of mining for the cobalt used to make those phones. I know that the odds of me being caught if I were to fall are higher than if I were to live in a lot of countries on this planet.

I know. Damn, do I know and I am eternally grateful to this country because of it.

Let’s face it it’s a lottery. A lottery that I have won because my mum just so happened to give birth to me here. We are all citizens of countries that we “just so happened to be born on”. There are 195 countries in the world. Each holds its own story. Different outcomes. Languages. Climate. People. Nature. In my utopian imaginings, I dream of the erasure of borders while yes, knowing there are of course legit reasons why we have them. Where we can all travel and explore freely. That it’s not a privilege for only the few who can afford it. That we all get to take in the magnificence of this planet that we are all part of. Our only home. I wish for all of us to taste the fruits of existence in places that we wouldn’t otherwise see. To see a volcano. I want us to dip our toes in oceans that parched skin has never met. I want us to belong to this planet, not just to countries. I don’t want to be separated by invented borders that prioritise taxation, promote xenophobia and create distance in a human race that belongs to each other.

Can’t we all just frolic together and get along in peace, man.

Yes, I will mention frolicking in every single thing I write. It is my one word mission statement.

Do not mistake these sentiments for the aspartame brand of love and light that’s lacquered in naïveté. For as long as humans exist, there will be folk who get hard at the thought of oppression and wet for control and subjugation. We will always do like the lions, sharks and hippos do. Animals aren’t just there to be stroked, they rip each other to shreds. Nature isn’t just calm and pretty, it’s violent and will fuck you up too. We will always do as nature does. As we are nature. There will never only be what we perceive to be ‘good’ here. We will always hold both. Doesn’t mean that I’ll give up on us though. If ya see something. Say something and all. And, what I see is that borders are bullshit.

Whenever I pass through border control at an airport with security decorating vast rooms and guns that are the opposite of the welcome, bienvenue, willkommen, bienvenidos that stencil the walls; I feel on edge. That I’ve done something wrong. Have to prove something. Sorry, but why must we beg to enter part of this planet that not a single one of us owns? At this point, I volunteer as tribute to ask that exact question the next time I hand my passport over and wait for the stamp to drop. Well, I’m not doing it in the U.S, because I’ve been to that scary little second location of a room and I ain’t trying to go back in there.

Help me to understand why if I fall in love with another human on this planet, I have to enter into the archaic institution of marriage and convince an official of our love, by answering banal questions like what’s their favourite colour just so I can cross borders to be with them. When you really sit with that, the layers of foolishness will hit you. This is why I’m not prime minister because I would do away with things that make zero sense to me and answer everything with a shrug and, “just let people live.” Being pro people doing whatever they want is apparently not a trait of most elected officials, so I shan’t enter into this arena.

There have been untold cruelties in the name of protecting borders and national pride, land has been stolen and fought over, millions of people have been killed over land that literally no-one owns. In 2022, The UN Refugee Agency reported, “that the number of people forced to flee due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order had reached more than 100 million for the first time on record”.

That’s 1 in 78 people on earth.

1 in 78 people who have been displaced. Displaced in a world where they can’t just go to the nearest country to seek shelter and safety. Where across the globe politicians spend most of their time speaking about our fellow Earth Citizens who simply want to stay alive as if they were inhuman, because they live in a part of this planet which looks different to ours. Or, more accurately because the people themselves might look different to us.

I don’t have the solutions or strategies to remedy this. I don’t have the numbers. I’m not here to put this in a spreadsheet and come up with a plan. All I know is that how we think, feel and what we believe about one another and our collective home here, has got to change.

I romanticised moving to the US. I felt more at home when I lived there than the UK. I know because I’ve witnessed and experienced it, and people constantly tell me how much more my work would be valued in countries other than my own. That I wouldn’t have to convince as much, that I’d be paid more, that it would just be easier. Now, I don’t see myself in any single country anymore. I simply yearn to be peripatetic. I want to travel from place to place, not in the rough backpacking kind of way, because I’m the kind of woman who worries about where I’ll dampen my Beautyblender and if I can steam my linen shirt. But, in an experiencing the land and its people, to write, immerse, create art and feel into the cultures that make my insides exclaim. Nesting for as long as my soul wants to nest. Places for different versions of me. Chapters of me. Maybe one place will linger until the end of my days, it will not own me, I will just spend time in the arms of it. I don’t yet know where that will be and I am no longer desperate to.

England doesn’t own me. Trinidad doesn’t, I’ve only been there once. I don’t think any country will. I don’t want it to. I will abide by the laws, pay my taxes and TV license, I will contribute and scream until my throat itches during England’s next match. I can’t agree with everything this country does, I can’t forget its past and often present, I can’t pretend that all parts of this culture feel like they make sense to me. As a curious, free-spirited and difficult woman who has dedicated her life to unlearning and savouring every last drop of her stay here, there will never be one person, one way of living or one country that I will belong to. I cannot be owned. I will pick and mix what I belong with, it will be multifaceted just as I am.

I belong to culture not countries. I’m a babygirl of the Internet. I’m a love child of Sephora. I’m lovers with men. Soulmates with women and girlhood. Intimate with Blackness. Friends with pigeons. I go to the river to feel alive. A week is not a week unless I’ve been to the park. I am energised in the presence of skyscrapers. I’m lullabied by bookshops and kissed on the forehead by bakeries. I want greasy pizzas in paper plates on the sidewalk and dipping bread in olive tapenade overlooking the sea. My body slips into fluffy slippers when surrounded by people who love like it’s going out of fashion and talk so profoundly that I want to live in each thought they think. And, yes I might talk shit about Britain sometimes, but give me a Walkers Crisp, pyramid-high levels of sarcastic dry wit and a trolley dash at M&S and I am yours.

It’s culture that I belong to.
People that I belong to.
Community.
Nature.
Life.
This gorgeous fucking planet.
No country, no borders, but all countries.