Listening to the silence of asylum-seekers
Daniel Nelson
Silence Heard Loud ought to be a happy film, because it’s about people who have escaped harrowing — in some cases deadly — circumstances and lived to tell their tale.
But it’s a sombre experience. In some cases, that’s because the traumas that lead people to flee, to become refugees, are so severe that they blight lives forever.
There’s another tragic reason, too. The country that has given them a safe arbour, Britain, can disappoint and shatter hopes.
“I used to think that I could make a home here in Britain but, then, dealing with the hostile environment policies, the xenophobia, I just realised that I don’t see the UK being my home in any near future,” says one of the seven people featured in the film.
“I was always hoping for a world where everyone is a citizen of the world and appreciated for what they do and who they are.... [Yet] wherever I go they’re like: ‘This isn’t your home, you’re not our colour, you’re not our nationality, you’re not our culture,’” says another, Merwa Zen.
One recalls that on the morning of his release from gaol he was handed a piece of paper: “It said I would not be released on that day and that the Home Office was detaining me inside the prison. My next question was, ‘So when will I be released?’. And the answer I got was ‘We don’t know’.”
Detention for an unspecified period is torture.
Of course, the seven are happy and grateful to have escaped war, violent husbands, discrimination, ethnic hatred. Their stories, quietly told, are upsetting, sometimes gruesome. (“I’m only 34 years old, but the experiences I’ve been through … I often feel like I’m 60.”/ “ I felt like I wasn’t really meant to be alive or born.”) Their reactions vary. So do their lives here, the ways they find to deal with their situations. Several are conflicted: “I feel abandoned but [London] is the only city I can call home.”
They talk about negotiating the asylum process and dodging missiles thrown up by the hostile environment. (What a shockingly mean mindset that phrase encapsulates.) One says despairingly: “The law says that no-one should be punished for seeking safety.”
Where a member of the group draws strength from her religious faith, another says he will never become a father because it would be cruel to bring a child into such a toxic world.
Director Anna Konik keeps the film simple: she sticks to the words of Angela, Janahan, Merwa, Michael, Mohamed, Nirmala, and Selamawit, sometimes spoken direct to camera, sometimes over images of London. Their recollections and opinions are woven together. Devastating quote follows devastating quote.
”Endless asylum procedures, with no permission to work in the meantime, uncertainty about the future, and longing for family and home,” Konik has said, mean “no one can tell what the future holds for them”.
* Silence Heard Loud is screening online at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London (17-25 March) and in person, with a Q&A on 17 March at the Barbican. Info: https://ff.hrw.org/london