Talismans of migration
Toxic debates around migration overlook the fact that it takes enormous courage to upsticks and travel thousands of miles to begin a new life in a foreign land. Migration may be a passport to a better future, but what do you leave behind when you migrate to a new country, and what do you carry with you physically and emotionally wherever you land? Nine writers with migrant backgrounds reveal the secrets of their talismans of migration.
Edited by: Colin Grant
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Editorial
Colin Grant
Something that helped the soon-to-be migrants on their journeys and for the first daunting moments of their arrival – in what seemed for many like a perennial fog – were parting words of comfort, gifts and treasured objects.
Nine writers who are migrants or descendants of migrants share the secrets of their treasured objects of migration and their talismanic properties.
The List
Snežana Ċurčić
"I landed at Heathrow airport, loaded like a mule, my worn-out Samsonite brimming with Serbian delights."
Following the sometimes hazardous journey of home-made Serbian delicacies as they are carried back to a young family in England.
The last ritual
Eric Ngalle Charles
"Wherever my travels took me, my ancestors would bring me back to her while she was still alive, and not when she was navigating the corridors of her grave."
An ancestral ritual is performed by a young man's mother to ensure his safe passage overseas and his return to her again in Cameroon.
The most wonderful object in the world
Maria Jastrzębska
"I’d never had a toy like it. I clutched it happily, this magic gift I’d received in the sky as we sped towards the unknown."
A memory from 1957 of a small child’s migration to England from Poland and her acquisition of the most magical toy she had ever seen.
A sick note
Suzanne Harrington
"Self-absorption, emotional immaturity and fearlessness born of cluelessness would see me through."
A journalist recalls how she came to London from Ireland at the age of 19 with an official letter suggesting that she was not entirely of sound mind.
Month One: the source and the poem
Roger Robinson
"Objects and images took on weight and meaning beyond their use or vision."
Recollections of the bleak cold and seeping sadness of the first years in the UK from Trinidad in the 1980s.
Haunting melodies
Maggie Harris
"The need to make music was always around us, from harmonicas to steel pans."
A guitar, once a father’s prized possession, provides a physical manifestation of a family’s journey and loss and of his creative inspiration.
Kafan
Ishy Din
"I was fascinated. Why had this woman kept such a visceral reminder of her own mortality for so long?"
Reflections on the emotional and spiritual significance of a burial shroud that was brought by a mother to England from her village in Pakistan in the late 1960s.
Rolling luggage
Amanda Vilanova
"I feel like a princess for all of two seconds, then am relegated to peasant status as I roll the heavy bags onto relentless trains and down streets that didn’t make it onto London postcards."
A stylish mother sends her daughter off to England from Puerto Rico with a set of luggage fit for royalty and a precious family heirloom.
Summer Wear
Colin Grant
"There wasn’t much glamour in England then. Summer Wear, Tidy Boots, Anxious, all a-dem had style."
Conjuring memories of his parents’ generation and the significance of the nicknames they acquired as new arrivals in England.