Blog

Alex Holmes has once again, recently returned from Calais where he supports destitute asylum seekers.   In his latest blog 'Fire' Alex describes life in the BMX camp in freezing conditions.  

‘BMX’, the Eritrean camp, Calais. Minus 6 degrees. The mud is a frozen cross hatch of foot prints; humans, birds, rats. Fireside, the flames offer some comfort from the bitter cold. Saare places small cartons of milk in the orange embers and, once heated, they’re passed around the fireside circle. A charred-black kettle balances precariously on the burning timbers; soon there'll be sweet, warming tea. Nights; plastic jerry cans filled with hot water, two sleeping bags apiece plus blankets make the long freezing hours bearable.

Fire. Over the space of twenty-four hours the temperature has risen by 15 degrees and with the change comes relentless rain. The logs are sodden. Paper handkerchiefs, plastic bags, cooking oil; all are needed to combust the wet wood. At last the wood catches but to keep it burning requires the regular addition of plastic. Acrid black smoke swirls downwind. Saare pokes the melting jerry can, draws his poker upwards and creates a string of plastic spaghetti which he loops into the shape of a heart. Upwind a pallet is wedged against two chairs, a buffer against the strong wind. Aaron takes a burning timber from the fire and holds it close to his wet shoes in an attempt to dry them. Teodros places two tins of lentils beside the fire, takes off his shoes and socks and delicately resting a heel on each tin, he warms his feet

Fire. La Gymnase Gauguin Matisse is just minutes from BMX. The five fire-coloured dancers in Matisse’s 1910 painting ‘La Danse’ are a glorious evocation of life, of energy, of communion. It’s a painting that captures the essence of fireside life in the Eritrean camp. As the bitter wind chills, there’s chicken in a pan on the fire. ‘Tell me when ten minutes have passed, Mr Chef says it needs ten more minutes’. Music is playing on someone’s phone, Eritrean singer Bereket Mesele. Abel gets to his feet and begins an animated dance, his arms raised high in the air. A new energy pulsates around the fireside.

Fire. Gauguin arrived in Tahiti in 1891 to experience Tahitian tribal art and pagan religion only to discover that the French colonisers had suppressed the native traditions that fascinated hm. So he set out to recreate in his painting what had been destroyed. Upa Upa was his first attempt "to recover a trace of this so distant, so mysterious past; to rediscover the ancient hearth, to revive the fire amidst all these ashes." Having no knowledge of it, he expressed it through flames and dancing.

Fire. A brilliance of enlivening energy. But fire burns. Mikaele carries a flaming plastic jerry can from one fire to start another. His fingers are a patchwork of burnt flesh. Filimon’s fire-burnt wrist is marked by a swathe of pink scar tissue. Fire too is metaphor. Fire is the colonial trope that Gauguin encountered 130 years ago; the colonial trope is to control, to negate, to dehumanise. Today it is mirrored in the dehumanising refugee projects of so many former colonial powers. The UK government’s proposal to offshore asylum seekers, to foist its responsibilities under international law onto a third world country, Rwanda, is steeped in this mentality. Rwanda: the ‘R’ word. It seers into the psyche of those around the fire who dream still of reaching the UK. It is the flame that harms, that burns, the very antithesis of the warming, welcoming hearth.

Fire. ‘It’s now ten years since I was at home in my village in Eritrea’, says Girma. ‘We always had a fire outside our house. It was beautiful. On one side there were sheep, on the other, cows, and children playing everywhere. We drank coffee and chatted around the fire’. Dark is falling fast; the flames light up Girma’s face which breaks into a smile. ‘Calais life is hard but I am always happy. I am happy because God is my power.’ He pauses, his smile widening. ‘God is my fire!’ His eyes sparkle.

Alex Holmes updates his fireside tales series from Calais with this new blog - Dead Wire, Live Wire - depicting the hardship and hope he encounters as he accompanies those seeking sanctuary.  

Eject - Expel – Clear – Remove – Oust – Boot Out. It all comes to the same thing: Rejection – ‘We do not want you here in Calais’. It is the norm; systematic. Expulsion from one of Calais’ refugee camps can be temporary, an every-two-day event to undermine, to unsettle, or it can be permanent, an expulsion followed soon after by the erection of high metal fencing and razor wire. Dead wire.

‘Green Hotel’, ‘Binto’, ‘Rue des Muettes’, Eritrean camps that have become lifeless zones, the human communities that brought vitality to these places cleared away. Less than a hundred metres from the fenced-off ‘Binto’, the bridge under which many Eritreans used to sleep,  caught in the cross-glare of the football stadium lights and those along the ‘security wall’, the Stadium camp, for three years, the heartbeat of the Eritrean exiled community in Calais. Now it is empty; even the rats have gone. The residual paraphernalia of daily human life is scattered and aging. Black wood ash and rusting nails mark the site of the daily fire. On the makeshift shelf strapped to the fence sits a solitary blue mug and a near-empty jar of Maxwell House instant coffee. A silver shard from a broken looking glass lies on the frame of a metal ironing board; alongside it, the chrome lines of a coffee table mirror the rigid geometry of the nearby concrete ‘security wall’. Soon, perhaps, the Stadium camp will be sealed off by fencing and wire. Dead wire. What the authorities kill off by their expulsions is life, humanity at its very best. Stripped back to essentials what emerges amongst the exiled communities pushed to the periphery of Calais is endless tenacity and courage, the warmest embrace of hospitality, a continual outflowing of love. 

BMX camp. Live Wire. Wire strewn with drying clothes and blankets. Wire adorned with crosses and small statues and paintings of the Eritrean flag. Two sets of rosary beads click against the fence and swing in ever wider arcs with the rising wind; rain is coming. In preparation, the guys have erected a framework of pallets and strapped a tarpaulin to the framework and the wire. Beneath the tarpaulin, a homely domestic scene. Negisti is cooking injera on the fire, the large frying pan sitting on four tin cans. Russom is fingering his newly acquired recorder; gingerly putting it to his mouth he begins to play a tune. Keren is straightening a cigarette paper; with the few remaining flakes in his tobacco tin he rolls a nail-thin cigarette. Negisti’s two year old, Bisrat, pockets filled with peanuts, moves from person to person around the fire to gift or to deny them a single nut. Heavy drops of rain begin to fall on the tarpaulin, a percussive addition to Russom on the recorder and the voice of Eritrean singer Semhar Yohannes coming from Meron’s phone. The guys grab a second tarpaulin to reinforce the first one and create a foil to the rain driving in horizontally. A second fire has been lit and onions sizzle in a big pan over the flames. Now the staccato drumming of the rain drowns out all other sounds. The tarpaulin balloons inwards with the weight of rainwater and has to be repeatedly pushed upwards to drain the water away. Other guys rush in to shelter. Sodden shoes and socks circle both fires in an attempt to get them dry. Hands and feet compete with the food for heat. 

The downpour eases as dramatically as it began. Peering out from the tarpaulin into the evening light, Negus delights in a murmuration of starlings, a shape-shifting cloud that swoops and swirls above the willows. Russom is now DJ. His choice of music, ‘More than I Can Say’ by Leo Sayer. He first accompanies the song with his recorder, then in a second run, he sings along, word perfect, “I miss you every single day, why must my life be filled with sorrow, I love you more than I can say”. There is appreciation and banter; dinner is minutes away.

Fireside Tales;  The latest installment from Calais, frontline of the refugee crisis, by Alex Holmes. 

‘Do bees have taste buds?’ Negus, ever pondering, answers his own question, ‘I don’t think so’. Bees and wasps in uncountable numbers swarm around the fireside in the Eritrean camp, a frenetic swirl of perpetual motion drawn to the discarded food. No one appears concerned, or to have been stung. ‘Look at their energy,’ continues Negus. ‘I have none. I am tired. I want to go back to Africa to see my mother. I miss her. I’ve been in Europe for too many years’.  Uncountable bees and wasps; the burden of uncountable lost years.

Most significant numbers are of a lower magnitude. Nahom has been in the camp just one day. He’s youthful, smiling, and passionate about football. ‘I want to play for Chelsea’. ‘Chelsea’ I laughingly groan, ‘there’s only one team, Manchester United.’ ‘Sir Alex Ferguson, great manager, but what is ‘Sir’?’ My explanation of the British honours system triggers further discussion. ‘You know about Field Marshal Montgomery?’ It’s the seasoned Eyob, an excellent English speaker, who’s been one year in Calais. I tell him that as a young school boy I marched in a parade and we all saluted Field Marshal Montgomery.  ‘I love history’, he says. ‘Do you know there were 25 German Field Marshals in World War two?’

The two-legged chair propped up on a tree trunk. The two camp kittens, ‘Soldier’ and ‘Salam’. It’s evening; the low sun casts long shadows across the campsite. Guys are sitting on blankets in the shade playing cards. Emerging from the undergrowth, the kittens summon immediate attention and each is given a tin of tuna. Soldier needs no encouragement; Salam is more wary. Eyob gently loosens the compact tuna with a plastic spoon, and the reluctant kitten begins to eat with relish. His meal over, Soldier playfully snatches at insects, then climbs first onto Maria, then onto Eyob. ‘Yesterday he fell asleep here’; he indicates the crook of his neck. ‘You want a cappuccino?’ A saucepan of milk is gently simmering on the fire. Using a stick, he scratches something into the skin above both his knees. ‘This’ he says pointing to the first of the scratched symbols, ‘is how you write ‘one’ in Ge‘ez, the old Eritrean language.’ He points to the other, ‘and this is ‘two’’. How many sugars do you want in your cappuccino, one or two, or perhaps three?’

Three legged Sheshy. It’s more than half a year since he was run down by a car and had his leg broken. He’s still using a single crutch. There’s a pained edge to his smile these days. Behind where he’s sitting, two paintings of the Eritrean flag hang on the fence that borders the camp; they’re surmounted by a small statue of Mary, mother of Jesus. A rosary hanging from her neck oscillates in the wind. The flag is composed of three triangles. It’s ‘four-legged’ Samer, Samer who fell from a lorry, who explains the flag. He points with one of his crutches at the upper triangle, a green triangle signifying agriculture. The lower blue triangle signifies the sea. The central blood red triangle has a 30-leaved golden olive wreath in it: the 30 years of bloodshed fighting for independence from Ethiopia. Explanation over, Samer’s attention is caught by Channa’s skateboard. Undeterred by his lameness, he mounts the skateboard and using his crutches to propel himself, he disappears down the road.

Negus watches from the fireside. Despite the summer warmth, he fixedly keeps on his hat to hide his receding hairline  ‘I’m getting old’. He’s in a wistful mood, nostalgically remembering Africa. ‘In Europe, everyone is out for themselves, they don’t care about other people. In Africa, we look out for each other. I hope society in Europe will change. I watched a Charlie Chaplin film once and in his day it seems people did care about others’. I ask him if he has any good memories of his uncountable years in Europe. ‘I have met kind people. I will always remember them. Do you know the song ‘Memories’ by Maroon 5? It’s my favourite song. Give me your phone!’ I pass him my phone and, side by side, sitting on the worn and polished tree trunk in the setting sun, we listen intently to his favourite song: ‘Here's to the ones that we got, Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not, 'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories of everything we've been through. Toast to the ones here today, Toast to the ones that we lost on the way…..’