Speed reading - books about migration

Migrant Women’s Voices pays tribute to the numerous female migrants who contributed to the reconstruction effort post World War II and those who joined the British workforce in the following decades. Based on the oral histories of seventy-four migrant women (collected between 1992 and 2012) Linda McDowell charts how Britain was transformed into a multi-cultural society. The testimonies demonstrate “the huge commitment made to Britain, to its economy and to its population by ‘ordinary’ women… who made the decision to move across national borders and make a life elsewhere.”

In Refugee Tales, poets and novelists, including Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi and Marina Lewycka, retell the stories of refugees who have experienced Britain’s appalling policy of indefinite immigration detention. Inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, these accounts are told from the perspectives of a lawyer, unaccompanied minor and a deportee, among others. This impressive anthology illustrates the limbo often endured by those seeking a safe sanctuary. British citizens enjoy the basic human right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days, while asylum seekers can be detained for years before being granted leave to remain.

Caroline Smith’s haunting poetry collection is inspired by her experiences as an asylum caseworker for a London MP. Many of her characters’ fates are uncertain: Every week for seven years Dr Khan has walked to Hounslow’s immigration reporting centre. Arjan Mehta has spent seventeen years phoning the Home Office waiting for a response to his application:

He is now forty.

The sealed-up phone box

long out of service,

the black cradle

within its sepulchre,

silent as an obsidian urn.

Originally published by The Tablet