A NATURALISATION

I was recently made natural. I needed to be dragged through something viscous with the mud of bureaucracy, the artifice of national acceptance, in order to become a part of this place called the UK. My citizenship ceremony took place shortly before the national lockdown in March 2020, which was why the chair of the council, who conducted it, was wearing black gloves. Possibly, they were velvet. She explained that she would not be shaking people’s hands as she normally would. There was a picture of the queen, blown up but unpixellated, mounted on an elegant wooden desk at the front of the room. The prospective citizens were escorted to our chairs, whereas our guests (two per new citizen) were shown to the side benches. It was explained that, although we couldn’t shake hands with the chair of the council, we were still welcome to have our picture taken as she handed over the certificate.

I hadn’t known this was a thing people did. I didn’t think I had particular views on it.

After the ceremony, Adam and I went to get some cake and took it back home. I was no longer an inserted element, no longer unnaturally home, but home truly, according to this certificate I had in my hand, with a message from the Home Secretary. The whole process, from unnatural (artificial?) to natural, had been finalised in a room with heritage furniture. The room assaulted anyone who entered with a historical aroma, which must be part of its naturalness, rooted in deep, inscrutable pasts, the kind you cannot know without a degree. The furniture was natural as certain squirrels are natural, meaning mostly not at all, as the majority of British squirrels are not native to these islands.

Back home, we celebrated by drinking coffee from my Colombian coffee cups, the same design my parents had when I was growing up. It was as if to say: this is far from over.

So many of my British-born friends are angry with their country. Them being my friends and them being angry with their country’s government, and half of their country’s population, are linked conditions. It says something, that I don’t have friends who are happy with their government at present — something about who speaks to whom, and what they allow themselves to speak about in each other’s presence. It’s as if sometimes the country itself reacts with raw flesh inside the mouth and the name comes out smoking. There’s been a collision in there, a breakdown. Not only has the government become synonymous with the country, but both are repelled by the self.

Often, when I told them that I was applying to become a British citizen, they would roll their eyes. It was never at me, but at the process and its reputation; some would laugh sympathetically and tell me about someone else they knew who’d gone through it, some complication there had been, and how, often, it was still ongoing. Some asked me why on earth I would want to become a citizen of this place which is ‘going to hell in a handcart’, and some joked about me heading in the wrong direction. ‘Aren’t people wanting out?’ They were applying for Irish or German passports based on family connections. They were attempting to be made natural elsewhere, rejecting a nation which, in turn, had rejected some of their most fundamental beliefs.

Over the course of a few months, I carried around a study guide, in preparation for my Life in the UK test, the passing of which is one of the requirements for being naturalised. The study guide includes a very short history of the UK, from the stone age to Brexit, as well as lists of famous artists, athletes, and musicians, and explanations of the UK’s legal system and devolved parliaments. People around me would ask to be tested on its contents. When questioned on the events leading up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the difference between Crown Courts and Magistrates’ Courts, they said: ‘no British person knows this.’ The inferred meaning, I think, was: ‘we’re sorry that you are required to know this in order to become British, when we are not.’

Supposedly, there’s no more natural way of being from a country than to have been born in it. If most people born in the UK aren’t able to answer the questions included in the Life in the UK book, a condition for naturalisation, what did this natural state, which I must be longing for, consist of? How could it be defined? What was I asking for?

At the time of my ceremony, face masks hadn’t yet become common. There were one or two people wearing them. When the Chair of the Council welcomed us, she made a point of congratulating us for having shown up, in spite of the situation. By being there, she said, at a time like this, we were ‘showing true British spirit’.

‘True British stupidity,’ Adam commented, afterward. He was born and raised in Yorkshire. His grandparents came over from Lithuania during the war, but his grandmother may have been Bulgarian. We don’t really know.

Sometime later, I think about how quickly that changed: what constitutes a ‘British spirit’, with regards to attending public gatherings.

Recently, I have been thinking of transplants. I’ve been waking up, folded between two kinds of restlessness, one sweaty, one dry, and thinking of how the new organ, if the timing is right and the doctor good, is embraced by its new surroundings, moving from crisis to survival. I’ve been picturing thousands of tissue strings and electric connections courting the new family member and saying:

‘Yes. You can stay!’

What makes the surviving body, changed like this, less natural than any other? What does it take to be accepted as whole?

It’s true, however, that I didn’t, technically, need to become a citizen of the UK to be allowed to stay, at least not at the time. After the Brexit vote, I was granted ‘settled status’ by virtue of being an EU citizen and having lived here over five years. I’m also married to a British citizen, which helps sometimes, though it’s far from always enough, especially if you’re a person of colour, especially if you have a low income or no income at all. For these reasons, there are countless layers of anxiety, horror, ignorance, and cruelty between my situation and that of those who risk deportation. I had to provide documents, but they were documents I could get hold of. It was a faff, but not impossible. There was some waiting but for months, not years. There was no intimidation and no threats, no abuse. The steps I was asked to take in order to become a ‘natural’ inhabitant of this chunk of land pale in comparison to the hurdles thrown in front of others, who come from places the government doesn’t want you to come from. These, in turn, are little compared to what they do to those they deem ‘irregular’, who aren’t supposed to be part of the same system as the rest of us. They are so unnatural that there’s not supposed to be a way in for them.

Does the fact that it was easier for me, for whatever reason, make me more natural to begin with? Does this suggest that I should leave or that I should stay?

When they said that I was going in the wrong direction, I thought (and didn’t always say): because I can. The day after the December 2019 general election, in which I had not been able to vote, I had dinner with some friends. They said they felt done with it. Their anger with the government, and the people who voted for it, had resulted in a rejection of nation as geography.

‘What about everyone who can’t leave?’ I remember saying to them.

I was trying to say that leaving because you disagree with your government is far from the same as being forced to leave. I meant that the people who suffer the most from austerity and isolationism are also always the poor and vulnerable — who can’t pack up and try pastures new. There seems, to me, to be a logical gap between knowing that you can and assuming that you should (leave) — or acknowledging that you don’t have to and assuming that you shouldn’t (stay).

Having said all this, I also left because I could, and because there were things in Sweden that I didn’t like. I also conflate disagreeable parts of that country — the things that always made me feel, as my mother used to say, like un mosco en leche — with the country itself, that elongated piece of land.

On the chair, to my left in the Guildhall chamber, was a man, possibly in his late forties or early fifties. I suspected he was smiling before looking at him, then noticed that he wasn’t smiling at all, or that the smile, if it existed, wasn’t on his face. The excitement lived in his posture: the feeling that if I touched his jacket, I’d be jolted by silent, static electricity. Shortly after they mentioned the rules about handshaking and photographs, this man leaned a little bit closer to me. He held up his phone half-way between my left and his right knee, and asked in a whispering tone if I’d take a photo of him when it was his turn to go up there. He looked ebullient, in a shy way, a jitteriness around the middle reaching out to me, perhaps expecting me to be just as excited and to meet him there, both of us celebrating the end of a chapter.

I said that of course I would. He then asked if he could do the same for me, upon which I motioned toward the far side of the chamber, where the top of Adam’s head was only just visible behind a row of other people’s relatives. My Person appeared to be looking intensely at the image of the queen. This time the man did smile. I would have liked to ask him how long he’d been waiting for this, to offer something equally tender, and equally simple, back across the gap between our chairs — to know if this, indeed, was a very good day.

When you’re granted citizenship, you are sent a letter inviting you to book a time for your ceremony. When I called to do this, from the basement at work, they told me that the next date available was the eighteenth of March. My mother died on the night between the eighteenth and the nineteenth of March. This would make the day of my naturalisation the second anniversary of my mother’s death. Casually, like this, I wasn’t sure what to think. ‘Does that work for you or would you like to wait till next month?’ the council person asked, and I replied that I’d like to book it. I discussed it with my sister and my dad over the phone, who both agreed that my mother wouldn’t have minded.

My mother went through her own naturalisation process, although in Sweden they don’t call it naturalisation. For a long time, she didn’t have Swedish citizenship, because Swedish law didn’t allow dual passports back then. Becoming a Swedish citizen would have meant giving up her Colombian passport, which she wasn’t willing to do. I can’t remember how she explained her stance. She might have said something about having a bit of yourself chopped off. Once the Swedish government changed the law, my mother got her Swedish passport, having lived in the country for twenty years. She wasn’t required to attend a ceremony; we didn’t have a picture of her next to a flag. More than anything, it was a practicality, because travelling with a Swedish passport was, and remains, much easier than travelling with a Colombian one. Customs officers are simply a little less racist.

These small booklets, with their thick, conspicuous pages, reveal themselves repeatedly as inhumane tools, controlling the most human experiences of moving and of being moved. To speak to my mother about my naturalisation may have gifted us something else: a way of speaking about her experience of being a young brown woman in Stockholm in the 1980s. I remember stories of racist microaggressions, of the people staring in queues and the family acquaintance who looked at my dad and said, ‘does she speak Swedish?’ She talked about her fear of skinheads. I remember how, in 1991 during the months when John Ausonius (known as Lasermannen due to his use of a rifle equipped with a laser sight) shot eleven people, mainly immigrants, she wore a dark coat to be able to spot the red dot. As a child I didn’t have a historical scaffolding, a structure of sense-making in which to place any of this — they were solely stories of evil, simpler for that. Speaking to my mother about our citizenships now would have meant building a new world together.

I haven’t had a Colombian passport since I was a child. When I asked, as a teenager, if I should renew it, my parents said that when visiting Colombia, a Swedish passport would be safer than a Colombian one. I didn’t question this — like nationalities, assumptions about one’s belonging, the attitude evolved around a home, can also be inherited.

This naturalisation business was always a question of practicality (more on that later), but never just that either. It was never easy and never something that grew, like a very innocent poppy, out of a grassy hillside.

I never knew this, but when a heart is transplanted from one body to the other, it loses all nerve connections, and remains thus, sometimes for many years. Of course. Yet I always assumed that the nerves grew back, and had to do so in order for any heart to function. I’m surprised when an article in European Heart Journal tells me that the ‘majority of patients remain completely denervated during the first 6–12 months following transplantation’. I question the validity of my source when I read in a 2002 study featured in ScienceDaily that reinnervation, the regrowth of nerves, ‘did not significantly impact survival’. I spend fifteen minutes trying to feel my own heart.

There is a fundamental comfort in this, that body recognises body — that the relationship between a part and the whole is far more complex than any individual bridges we can point to and say: that’s where it happens. It’s basic, yet monumental, that we can adapt this way.

The Home Office was formed in 1782. Before then, two secretaries of state dealt with foreign issues divided geographically: the Southern and Northern secretaries. The Home Office was created in order to focus on domestic matters. It deals with the ‘inside’, but it’s not all inside matters it holds under its wings; it doesn’t respond to broken bones or domestic abuse, and it doesn’t concern itself with what we eat or how we educate our children, or put into their bellies, the most internal of places. Other than migration, it’s also responsible for tackling organised crime. The pairing of these two things makes it, conceptually, more like a house-alarm system than a house meeting, called to decide whose turn it is to do the dishes. Its remit is only that aspect of the home which can be breached.

‘A man’s house is his castle,’ Adam declares, sadly, when I run this past him.

He has a history degree and, he says, that’s the only reason he remembers even a fraction of the stuff in the Life in the UK study guide.

As far as I can tell, the familiarity between crime and migration politics is far from exclusive to the UK. France’s Ministère de l’Intérieur tackles organised crime as well as migration. The US has its Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees the counteracting of terrorism; it was formed by George W. Bush after September 11, 2001. In Sweden, the police, although a separate unit, belongs to the Ministry of Justice, along with the Migration Agency. In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig described the contrast between his pre- and post-WWI travel experiences. Whereas before 1914 he’d been able to travel ‘to India and America without a passport’, after the war, ‘all the humiliations previously devised solely for criminals were now inflicted on every traveller before and during a journey.’ What would he have said about the fact that in Sweden, it’s the police that issues passports? In Colombia, on the other hand, migration is the responsibility of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as is diplomacy. What an outlier, in my small and highly subjective survey — connecting migration with being polite to foreign powers, instead of assuming foreigners will make the home less secure. I need to look into other countries with fifty years of civil war in their baggage, to find out how rare an example Colombia is, especially in the last few years, with the influx of Venezuelan refugees. How much diplomacy is awarded to them?

By using the word ‘home’, a government entity colonises it, deciding who it encompasses. It manipulates the already permeable space between the ecological and the bureaucratic, the organic and the artificial, moulding the relationship to its own agenda. It defines the very idea of ‘home’ as exclusive. Its policies separate those who can assume to sleep, cry, live here on the basis of being alive, from those who have to book an appointment first.

The name itself seems to say: if you belong here, you will be safe. We are the ones who decide if you do.

10.

Next, there was a speech, delivered by the chair of the council. It included an astonishingly quick run-through of British history, during which the union of England and Scotland in 1707 was described as the nations ‘coming together to form the UK’, before moving on to list some of the country’s most famous writers. ‘Came together,’ was Adam’s reaction to this, on our way out through the Guildhall corridor’s parade of portraits. ‘The signatories were chased by an angry mob down the streets of Edinburgh,’ he clarified. The speech reminded me of a passage about the Hundred Years War, in the Life in the UK study book. ‘In 1453 the English left France,’ the text said. The English, by the sound of it, were a little tired and didn’t care to stay any longer at a party. When did the English leave? They left around midnight. The mess of it is smoothed out so easily among heritage furniture.

The two countries ‘came together’. The ‘English left’. Language lays a soothing film over the burns of history and makes violence seem less, as it makes what’s artificial appear natural. What passes as natural becomes unquestionable, such as the ‘home’ in Home Office. It’s free to hide reality as it’s being lived — the atrocities of imperialism and everyday oppression as well as all the ties we really do hold.

11.

Before you attend your citizenship ceremony, they ask you if you’d like to either swear an oath or affirm your allegiance, the difference being that if you choose the former, you promise things ‘by Almighty God’; with the latter, you ‘solemnly and truly’ declare them. Not being on talking terms with any Abrahamic god, I went with the latter.

The declaration was printed on my letter, so that I could prepare for what I would be promising. Roughly half of the congregation read the oath, some muffled by their face masks (what if they didn’t read it at all? What if it was like me as a child at mass in Colombia, head down, mouth defiantly shut? I’d not thought of this before, but would face masks offer a loophole, a ‘yes but I had my fingers crossed behind my back’ kind of excuse?), others looking intently at the queen’s portrait, or at the ceiling. Some of the relatives leaned over in their seats, sniffing for the words themselves, perhaps for a change in body odour from one moment to the next. After the oath and affirmation, there was the pledge, which is read by everyone, and which makes you, officially, a British citizen.

This is what I pledged:

‘I will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen.’

Having affirmed this, having pledged thus, having paid £1,400 pounds plus the cost of travel to Cardiff to have my biometric data checked, having managed to contact old employers who agreed to testify that I was here, three or five or seven years ago, that they saw me and I was who I say I am, I was naturalised. My feet were ready to sink into the earth so that roots could take hold, like British dirt’s business was my business. We all sang the national anthem.

12.

It’s not so much the reality of a transplant — how it feels — that intrigues me, and I feel bad about this. I know people who’ve had heart surgery, but they still carry their old heart. My own memories of hospitals are too entangled with love, guilt, and confusion, with trying to care for someone and caring in the right way, to allow this to become a medical interest, one of detailed rights and wrongs, dos and don’ts. So, I make it symbolic. I’m drawn to the notion of one organ becoming an inextricable part of a new body, and how we can think about other kinds of transplant through the lens of that truth: that it works, and we are neither fixed nor impermeable.

Obviously, transplants — of self or of parts of the self — are never abstract, never only symbolic.

13.

One by one, people got up from their seats, approached the desk, then sat down for a few seconds as their names were verified by a clerk. One woman, possibly around my age, had a small child with her. They were both being made citizens at the same time. When I think of them now, I see them dunked into a pool of water, hauled up changed, even though nothing of the sort took place. It’s as if all this has made me go biblical.

There was someone who had to take off their mask so the clerk could hear them. When the man next to me got up and received his certificate, I took a picture of him standing next to the chair of the council, with the envelope in his hand, then I took another one as he was receding, just to be on the safe side. Hopefully, at least one turned out okay. It was midday and I declared, to myself alone, that above all I was hungry. It seemed ludicrous that people would ever get hungry in a room like this — hunger, like pain, wasn’t part of the process.

I walked to the front and reached out for my document.

‘Thank you,’ I said, then I turned back toward my seat, quickly glancing at Adam, who looked neither proud nor appalled. He’s not the reason I’m here, but he’s part of the reason I’m here. ‘No picture?’ said the chair, her head tilted. She smiled and looked out at rows of seats, in search of a phone, belonging to me and mine.

‘Nah, I’m good,’ I said, and shuffled back to my seat.

‘Your dad might have wanted one,’ Adam said afterward. I reminded him that my dad is very practical, and that during a pandemic, standing close to someone only for the purpose of a photo seemed highly unpractical. But of course, others did stay up there for the picture. I know nothing about them. I’m oblivious to how much they had to do, how long they were made to wait, which sections of themselves they were asked to carve out, give up, make obsolete, and say goodbye to in order to fit the mould of the naturally British. I know nothing about the pain or joy that brought them here, and I don’t know if they had a choice.

Which is to say, not that I should have stayed for the picture, but that the picture, the uncomfortable furniture (which by the way reminded me of a Swedish saying: att ha träsmak i rumpan, to ‘have wood-taste’ in your arse, when you’ve been sitting too long), the songs, and the ruffles are things we are made to want. It’s part of the artifice of belonging, that we are made to desire them. I didn’t want to have to desire them.

14.

‘The body is not national,’ writes Danish poet Pia Tafdrup.

She was an important poet to me, in the specific, stripped way that only poets discovered at the end of your teens are important, neither more nor less impactful, but never the same as later in life. I’m reading her in English now, which is not unnatural, but new. ‘The body is not national’.

I happen to read this poem around the time of a protest outside the Home Office. We’re there to highlight the connection between climate collapse and migrant rights. Some of the speakers are currently going through the immigration system, several as asylum seekers. One of them calls in from a detention centre. A mobile phone is held up to the microphone and we hear their voice from inside a far-away ‘somewhere’, the least homely place, organised and managed by the people who take it upon themselves to dictate our relationship, as citizens, to ‘home’. This stranger’s voice bounces off non-place walls, invisible to us on the street outside the Home Office. He speaks from a room we’re not supposed to look inside, into which people are disappeared because this spectacle called ‘home’ doesn’t include them. Soon, the police begin to move through the crowd.

‘The body is not national’.

I may have forgotten that poetry is about conjuring a reality the way you’d like it to be. I may have learned that the way you’d like it to be sometimes obscures the lucky circumstance that makes dreaming possible.

15.

When they asked why I applied for that piece of paper, I gave a few different answers. Sometimes, I swapped between them; most often, I offered all four:

I chose to come here meant that when I arrived in Scotland, I found people who made me feel chosen. I might have meant that there is love involved, but like love between people, love of a place is relational. It happens between you and a place, because of how it’s treated you, not as adoration of a calcified object.

Because in this climate, you never know referred to the political climate, as well as ecosystems collapsing, both of which may lead to my situation in this country becoming unstable. They, the ones who decide if this is my home or not, are prone to changing their minds.

So that I can vote.

So that I can get arrested. That one defused whatever sombre vibe had settled over the conversation. By this I meant that being allowed to stay is not the same as being allowed to live. It sounds both simple and ludicrous, it made people laugh, but when state powers are threatened by dissent, some people are picked out in a crowd because we’re already low-hanging fruit. Whereas a white person, or someone with no foreign accent and a British passport, someone who isn’t queer or visibly disabled, is seen as a nuisance when blocking the entrance to an oil-company headquarters (or staging a protest outside the Home Office), anyone who falls short of a state ideology’s version of what is ‘natural’ — which, really, becomes another word for ‘desirable’ — quickly loses their right to call Britain home.

We’re allowed to be in our home at their discretion, but not allowed to care enough about our home to improve it. ‘Home’, as defined by the Home Office, being an idea that does not survive well when it comes to a global crisis.

16.

I did a social-media poll while I was writing this: ‘Word play (humour me),’ I wrote. ‘What would the Home Office be called if we kept the word “office” (they do have an office) but replaced the word “home” with something more descriptive of what it does? Any brain-waves welcome.’

The responses, from within my bubble, included: the Heartless Bastards Office, the Palaver Office, the Office of Coercive Control, the Home Isn’t Here Office, the Not Your Home Office, the Divide and Rule Office, the Hostility Office, the Theresa-May-doesn’t-like-foreigners-and-worked-here-too-long Office, the ‘We don’t like 99% of the people in this country’ Office, the Alienation Office, the ‘Go back home and stay the fuck out of our office’.

The humour was cathartic. We can make fun of the rituals and the pomp. Perhaps some do because they don’t wish to look at what happens underneath, what is hidden behind the circus — others because they are so angry at what the rituals represent. My friend Pete suggested the Alienation Office. I wrote back to him saying I thought it was the most accurate reply I’d received: the Home Office’s veritable purpose is to create groups who are defined as aliens, whose bodies are an addition to the place, not part of it. ‘Pretty much, yeah,’ Pete replied. ‘But I think there’s also a double action in that it alienates the country from the rest of the world too, from any sense of global responsibility.’

Global crises — the diseases, the food insecurity, the extreme weather and political collapse — have the ability to stretch out ideas of ‘home’ beyond themselves, pulling them toward opposite ends. Facing a crisis which demands a global response — not as in eight or so elite governments telling the rest of the world what to do, but as in the only world we know, responding as the body it is — ‘home’ can shrink or it can expand. It can turn into its own dark nights, close the doors, and set the alarms, or it can stretch so far there’s no imagining where it ends. Borders can be used as shields against uncertainty or be recognised as the artifice they’ve always been. What’s natural is the mobility of life, the migration of us and of parts of us.

17.

We felt this should be celebrated, although we weren’t exactly sure why. It did have something of the adult baptism about it. I had half-expected people to put their hands on my head and say, ‘you’re a woman now’, if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic, if it weren’t for that visible crisis. As a teenager, such pronouncements would have made me feel equally uncomfortable.

If nothing else, perhaps my spending £1,400 on it, the hours collating payslips, and the tracking down of old travel dates made the end of it worth a little feast. They told us there would be a ‘small gift’ in our envelopes, but curiously there was only the certificate, and the letter from the Home Secretary.

‘Did you get a gift?’ a short person asked us in the hallway, and the three of us chuckled.

Adam and I went to get two slices of cake and brought them home. In the evening, we shared a dinner with my dad, my sister, and her partner over Zoom. It was at the very beginning of the pandemic. There were congratulations, a toast for my mother, her picture on the table, on the anniversary of her death, and no one brought up the fact that I was no longer, officially, from the same country as her, that some contact had been severed, without which we still belonged to each other.

Postscript, December 2021

Three days ago, the UK government’s proposed Nationality and Borders Bill passed its third reading in parliament. The bill will further criminalise the ways in which humans have always, naturally, moved for greater safety and wellbeing. By penalising the manner in which people reach this country, it goes against the UN refugee convention of 1951. A recent amendment also facilitates stripping citizens of their British nationality without the need to inform them, as long as they are ‘eligible’ for citizenship elsewhere, a move which will disproportionately put people of colour and other minorities at risk. The last year has also seen the progress of the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, currently in the House of Lords. It criminalises GRT (Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller) communities’ way of life, and increases stop-and-search powers. Its latest amendments include the creation of a new protest-banning order for those with ‘a history of causing serious disruptions at protests’; broader, more flexible definitions of what ‘serious disruption’ means; and the introduction of ‘interfering with nationally significant infrastructure’ as an offence, punishable by twelve months in prison, a fine, or both. In this nation, as it is officially and intentionally defined, few examples of infrastructure are more significant than the Home Office, a detention centre, or an oil terminal. These are also inseparable from the climate crisis, and global climate injustice.

These laws, movements in the direction of authoritarianism and protection of capital, were never separate, and they ride along an international current, felt in different ways in all my homes. They are tools of a racist, xenophobic state which, amidst intersecting crises, invests in confusion and fear, setting out not only to promote an oxygen-deprived version of home, but to deliberately disconnect us from our greatest, most vital responsibilities — those that tell us we are here to protect all of it.