Finding
My Way Home
My
belief in the evil of early mornings was roundly substantiated
this week. Nothing good ever happens before 10 a.m. —
the invasion of Poland, the destruction of the World Trade
Centre towers. And this week the 8 a.m. (Canadian time)
phone call to tell me that London was exploding. I’m
lucky. Most of my friends are artists. They don’t believe
in early mornings any more than I do (except the reverse
kind, when you’re coming back from somewhere at 7 a.m.),
and so they were soundly asleep while Mr. Blair’s chickens
were coming home to roost, and shitting all over the workaday
people who ride the underground and buses.
So
8 a.m. Fear, terror, a clutching fist around my heart. Phone
calls, emails, text messages, questions. Virtual hand-holding.
Feeble attempts at jokes. And the ferocious desire to respond,
to be part of it, to speak against it. Yet this column is
far from flowing in my usual facetious manner. I’ve
told my stories, mapped out the last time I was… what
I remember about… who lives in this place… Business
as normal resumes, just as it does after an explosion in
Baghdad, or Jerusalem, or Izmir. Part of me feels fiercely
that it shouldn’t, that everything should stop and
we should take the opportunity to say, "Hold up. What
are we doing that allows these things to happen? How can
we change?", to all look at each other. Then I get
mad at myself because that thought doesn’t run through
my head every time I read about AIDS deaths in Africa, or
protestors being killed in Uzbekistan, or Native sex workers
being murdered in Vancouver. As if London were more important
than those places and people.
As
a symbol, it is. It was chosen deliberately — the Tube,
lifeblood of the city that had just won the Olympics. The
red bus peeled open like a sardine can was a pointed rebuke
to the empire that once dominated the world with its tea-tray
images of buses and smiling bobbies. But as a death toll,
it is far less than a day in Darfur. It doesn’t compare
to the Srebrenica massacre, ten years ago today. Yes, London
is the city where I grew up. But it is also the media capital
of the world, placing itself front and centre in the news
as other deaths and lives get moved to the bottom of page
twelve.
It
is also, as one of the many hundreds of articles that I
have trawled obsessively pointed out, a city where almost
everyone, from every country, is likely to know — or
know of — someone. The Guardian had profiles of some
of the people still missing, which showed the diversity
of the city, and of the underground’s users. These
were not decision makers, or financiers. No high-profile
politician rides the tube to work. Some of the missing are
Muslim. Some were tourists. One woman is from the suburb
where I live. It touched me, and so many others, with a
chilly, personalised finger.
I
was filled with a love for London, an identification with
it, that I haven’t felt at least since I moved to Canada.
A pride in Londoners’ spirit. Half my self was there,
walking the streets with friends and strangers, suddenly
at home in a way that I haven’t been on my trips back.
The half of me in Toronto kept wondering why everything
was so normal and calm, why people were just blithely riding
the subway and chatting on their cellphones. I wanted the
eerie silence that descended over the city on 9/11.
And
then I didn’t. I don’t want to see retaliation
(and I am filled with anxiety for British Muslim and/or
Arab friends), or to agree that this event assumes momentous
proportions. Coverage is freaking me out. Last night, I
was eavesdropping on a conversation about one of the interactive
maps on news websites, as to whether a certain station was
near a certain landmark. Part of me wanted to jump in with
corrections, anecdotes, any proof that I ‘owned’
the city they were running their fingers over. Another part
of me wanted to stay silent, let the events belong to the
world that they were designed to address. But whether it’s
the Globe’s parochial "Canadian tourist tells
of underground hell" perspective or the micro-analysis
of the British press, the media reaction pushes back against
my brief desire for the world to stop in its tracks and
look. It’s time to move on, to open our eyes to every
part of the world. All politics is personal, not just the
politics that blow up your way home.
he