Compassion, the Compass

“All life on earth depends on the freedom to move”

I’m not the one who said it, David Attenborough did, on our Planet 2. In the sense that it’s our planet too!

Everyone has a beautiful story, nurtured by compassion or hurt from the lack of it. It’s free to make, as much as you like, and it can remedy so many things

It was celebrated as a theme for Refugee Week, across hundreds of arts, cultural and educational events across the UK and 16 other countries. Shout out to brothers and sisters in Greece, fighting fires raging higher, yearly and indiscriminately, like those over the border in Turkey, where I want to but cannot be, ever since the state penalized me and my family.

It’s a festival, Refugee Week, celebrating the contributions and creativity of people seeking sanctuary. For we always needed somebody or something, beyond our borders of reach,

for we are all subject to an overarching well-being,

For we are the ones who suffered for us.

Look down, it’s not your own two feet you’re standing on

But the shoulders of giants- you are carried, as all you see, from birth

by the care of others.

 

Today we celebrate this care for togetherness, for the freedom to share our love and space

break bread, exchange tenderness. International solidarity in the face of these interconnected planetary crises. From forced migration to climate breakdown, wealth inequality to wars.

Yes, many wondering the South Bank halls are refugees, does that make you uneasy?

At least one of us should be relatable surely, have a look see. Beyond Daily Mail’s fallacies, cross the bridge from those spilling from parliament and step right in, say hello to one of us, you’ll see, we’re not like what moguls make us to be. Refugee Week offers a more realistic alternative, told by people who chose to have a voice, not many can or do.

People will need to move ever more. I learned that in my first-year politics degree, class 101, “the biggest concern of the future will be the rise of people on the move, growing exponentially throughout history.” Fear doesn’t solve the issue, words like swarms and invasions to bolster defences, if people forced to move were all lined up against walls and shot, then what? Where does humanity go from there?

Then will they see the problems are not caused by us, but by rights taken away? Budget cuts mounting like hospital waiting lists, like sky high cost of living or lack of tomatoes and lettuce from poor trading laws.

 

No electric fences, bottomless seas or illegals flights can deter someone choosing from being killed, starving or worse,

which would you choose if you were pushed, gambling between life and death?

Compassion then becomes a compass, on which you depend.

 

II

 

It’s more like a flood than a swarm, as it results in ground quickly slipping under people’s feet and won’t distinguish between borders just poor infrastructures. Because history holds many stories of crisis foretold and a lack of proper preparation has impacted all. Also, people are born like clear water, they move through one another as through their city streets with ease, filling them up with life like rivers and creeks, unless they are sullied by the mud and its slinging. When allowed to channel through and given ample space, people like currents flow calmly, bringing bits of other lands in, fertilising, made from the hope that one day they’ll circle back there again, places as elusive now as the cloud’s kingdom.

What is a good person really? Compassion ranks highly, surely. It’s presumably how we want younger generations to be.  Outside the Southbank Centre building, children jump in and out of fountains sparking up in the air like their laughter scattered around the scenery. They are happy like everyone wants to be.  Like any piece of art or any human being, no dream is too frugal, none of us invalid. Look at nature, like Murugiah’s main artpiece,  a cyclone flower still smiles like one with two eyes, a brown tulip is as good a hugger as a purple one. Like children, who are inseparable like the water they dance in.

Across from the parliament building where their conditions of life are shaped, Refugee Week’s gallant participants hail from the Southbank. Each with stories of journeys worthy of tall monuments.

Across from the parliament where dancing is prohibited, here it’s embraced, you can take lessons in it, from brothers and sisters from Namibia, we already know where we are, in our Western ways, a thousand times over. Won’t we try and reach now to see into other cultures? How much of the world’s majority do we know about? What they listen to these days in China, for example or dance to in the DRC? How do people in those places take life on, do you wonder? Maybe you should try. The world’s true beauty eludes thick blinkers and stereotypes.

The more your body moves as you dance through life, the more you’ll want to move.

As you understand much can be taken but the path you walked in, the joy that spins in the gut as you clumsily twist to West African music. Agwaya, rumba and mutwshi. You swing to the left, two steps front and one back, shake the hips and hands, and most importantly, wear your smile like an Armour, unvarnished on your face, close your eyes, open your heart.

If survival skills  define the valor of a human being, than we should celebrate, not shame refugees. We should shame the billionaires, who thrive off inequalities they appease, not paying enough taxes and demonising people for claiming benefits, as they benefit from “affordable migrants”

 

We move on from all of this, sharing tales of tragedy and solidarity strategies, singing songs of love, we rebuild, with our legs walking paths long as pilgrims since birth, we bridge distances between people and geographies with our two feet.

 

I gaze at the program; Palm Wine from Sierra Leone and Seben Drum from the DRC here to sing over the chaos colonialism still wreaks. Another event is titled “You can see me but I don’t exist” at least legally speaking. Another is Artists Scratch where activists showcase skills, we’re 23 in the room, don’t expect a revolution too soon, though our friends are many and we’ll help each other through.

Don’t we all get compassionate, when we are given compassion?

 

III

 

Watching the murky waters of the Thames I remember the many who cannot be here with us today, like over 500 who went missing in one boat recently. I whisper to the clarity of the water within, the poison in my veins, in my society, with the words of Abdel Wahab Yousif, a young poet who tragically died on a similar boat, up until his last moments he was still writing these words;

“I’m calling you to my embrace, let me hold you to my breast, I will wash the dirt of misery, from your soul, scare away the darkness”

For all your selfish fears, may all the people who move clear your burdened spirit. For maybe they’re not happy, perhaps none of us are. But these bright faces you see here, refused to surrender their very being, relentlessly through terrors they wouldn’t wish on their worst enemies. To carry themselves here, so you can hear them and rise humbly through the gluttony of a system that scapegoats them as it rewards excess rather than those who work hard but can’t make more from less. Do we accept anybody as worthy as the rest? Compassion is people who roll up sleeves for the well-being of others, lawyers, judges, activists, doctors. Invisible systems hold our cohesion together at countless levels.

 

Be wary of those who split one’s pain from the next, as one day you may find yourself subdued, a compassionate face may be your only good grace. As the Comedian Fatiha Elghorri said hosting one of the day events, once going through dark days, a can of coke and popcorn randomly given on her birthday in a homeless shelter, made her day and she never forgot. She teared up telling the story and her tears were enough to move an audience of hundreds to theirs, sunk in their seats at the grand Southbank Centre Hall, contemplating the simplicity of how compassion works on the daily.

We can’t escape wars, climate change or wealth inequality. I come from a place where we are painfully paying the price of inequalities and natural catastrophes, where during an earthquake, in a minute and a half 50 thousand people died recently, searching each other’s fading voices under the rubble, as apocalypse upon their lives settled. Don’t wait until your roof falls on your head to support people’s right to move. Like Kenmure Street community’s effective protest against a dawn immigration raid, say, “These are our neighbours let them go!” Say it loud and say it clear, refugees are welcome here! We are the many, let us love. We can share the weight, if you feel you cannot, step aside and let us provide.

 

Further on the program Angela performs a ritual to bring Ancestors wisdom into the future.

Unity organiser and domestic worker, Angela Camacho,

not Angelina Jolie, the zillionaire.

No disrespect to her good work but we need to hear from more people with lived experience. People condemned cell blocks of rooms, rotting prospects, up against steep bills they can’t pay, families they can’t be with and homes out of reach, tongue twisted in the lack of language skills. While praising gratefulness, spare a bit from your feed for those who can’t eat. It’s the best kind of therapy for selfish pricks. Compassion, the compass for a world on the move, for the lost spirit.

 

IV

I don’t see Rishi Sunak when I look at British people not more than I see Erdoğan when I look at the Turks. There are some alike I bet and some that would like to be but the majority don’t want to be represented by a tribal greed, I feel it. Solidarity saves and expands kinship. In this crazy rat race where everyone’s chasing first place, only to realise, too often too late, that one can’t get there, without the rest building up a staircase. Perhaps sometimes heaven is not just the climb, but the walk down from fantasised heights.

Within no confines of borders and no national song but only part of a whole, do I belong. Only with everyone else, do I make any sense. Compassion is repentance, from this hyper-individualist rust.

 

One side of the world works to clean up the shit of the other said the great thinker, “all the people not here today are within us” said the priestess fragile body short legs, speaking from the belly of the beast said “thanks for being here in this building built not for us but on the backs of us. After 500 years we’re still here and resisting” She’s right we shouldn’t hang around in galleries for long but burst to the streets.

Then I remember who I had been; A puzzle piece easily bent and entrapped by a search for meaning without all the other pieces. What made us in retrospect, was countless minuscule pieces of everything around us, crisscrossed. From piles of astral dust, circling each other for ages past before sensing it. Now, we must break free from the orient of the self as special, internal and principal hence the rest as external, secondary and unworthy.

There’s huge graffiti on the side of South Bank building with a quote from the year 1371, it reads “It has taken the creation of the universe to make every single thing”– Julian of Norwich. Outside the children still burst with joy, bathing in the plenitude. Inside, we watch a short film from Taliban’s Afghanistan, telling the tale of a girl’s first full body veil. We hear of Beirut from Afghanis of London from Jamaicans and Turkey from Syrians, so we can see behind the curtains, of glorified national narratives recycled in repeat but increasingly we see, how tribalism will lead to our demise collectively. “All life on earth depends on the freedom to move” I love David Attenborough really.

On the tube earlier today, when I picked up a metro daily, it said “Grounded Hog Day for Rishi”, how long has the news been boats and asylum seekers put on Rwanda flights and not as much the issues that get to the heart of what most any citizen is suffering about? “The system is rigged against Britain, simple as that” says Suella Braverman, Home Secretary of the country that threatened the sovereignty of most countries in its history. Another lesson they taught me in politics 101. The teacher gave us all a world map on a white sheet with countless black dots and asked if anyone knew what they were. It seemed UK with Neighbours were the ones historically going to other places by boats, claiming things. Now to block people desperately trying to leave such deprived places, Europe pays the sultan Erdoğan hush money to stop them passing through. If the system is rigged for the UK, then it must be doing great for Turkey with near 10 million refugees. When people are locked in, troubles exasperate. We may have come far because we are smart as humanity, but without compassion we are ever more slavish machines.

The photo on the news piece shows a barge undergoing a refit as an accommodation block on the sea in Falmouth, Cornwall. Reminds me of the impending floods again, foretold through history, people huddled closer to live or perished as enemies. If we don’t come together, we’ll all be shipped out to the sea, the deadly sea of space, as the bard Leonard Cohen prophesied “every heart to love will come but like a refugee.”

ABOUT EGE DÜNDAR

DÜNDAR IS A GRADUATE OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AT CITY UNIVERSITY LONDON AND HAS BEEN WORKING AT PEN INTERNATIONAL FOR OVER SIX YEARS, MOST RECENTLY AS YOUTH ENGAGEMENT LEAD. THERE HE DESIGNED CAMPAIGNS WITH PEN CENTERS WORLDWIDE TO RAISE THE PROFILE OF ENDANGERED PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES. HE FOUNDED THE YOUNG WRITERS NETWORK ILKYAZ (EARLY SPRING) AND THE SOLIDARITY SERIES CREATIVE WITNESSES, WHICH ORGANISES ARTISTS TO SUPPORT PEN WRITERS AT RISK. HIS DEBUT POETRY BOOK “ALL THESE THINGS ARE NOT LOST” IS DUE FROM BLACK SPRING PRESS GROUP IN END OF JULY.

HE PREVIOUSLY CO-AUTHORED A FABLE BOOK TITLED DUVAR (THE WALL) WITH HIS FATHER, CAN DÜNDAR, A JOURNALIST WHO WAS UNJUSTLY IMPRISONED IN AND LATER EXILED FROM TURKEY. EGE WAS THE YOUNGEST SUNDAY COLUMNIST AT TURKISH DAILY MILLIYET AND WAS PUBLISHED IN OUTLETS LIKE BIRGÜN DAILY, LE-MANYAK, PEN TRANSMISSIONS, DW B AND BOSLA ARTS. HE PRODUCED A REPORT ON THE STATE OF EXILE MEDIA IN EUROPE, COMMISSIONED BY KÖRBER STIFTUNG, COVERING ISSUES OF JOURNALISTS DISPLACED FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY ACTORS WORKING WITH THEM.

AN AVID PUBLIC SPEAKER DÜNDAR PROVIDED WORKSHOPS AND SPEECHES AT VARIOUS EVENTS AND PANELS SUCH AS THE UNESCO YOUNG VOICES SYMPOSIUM, NOTTINGHAM CITY OF LITERATURE, REFUGEE WEEK UK, TATE EXCHANGE, FRONTLINE CLUB, THE GUARDIAN, REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS AND WILDERNESS FESTIVAL.

DÜNDAR ALSO RECENTLY RECEIVED A GRANT FROM THE ARTS COUNCIL IN THE UK TO DEVELOP HIS CREATIVE PRACTICE AND HIS WORK HAS BEEN COMMISSIONED BY COUNTERPOINTS, A LEADING ORGANISATION IN THE FIELD OF MIGRATION AND CULTURAL CHANGE.

DÜNDAR’S DEBUT POETRY COLLECTION, WRITTEN IN ENGLISH, DIVES INTO THE PAIN AND LONGING THAT LOSS BRINGS, CONTRASTED BY THE BEAUTY OF ALL THAT HAS BEEN FOUND. RELATING HIS EXPERIENCE WITH THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND A WIDER EXODUS OF SELF-DISCOVERY, HE HOLDS ON TO POETRY ‘WHEN A TITANIC DARKNESS DESCENDS AND LIGHTS SHINE THROUGH MINUSCULE CRACKS.’

‘SPACE UNVEILED AHEAD, A QUIETUDE AKIN TO DEATH, A BLUE COCOON BEHIND, VACUUMED, LIKE THE SHELTER THAT IS A BREATH.’

 

by Ege Dündar, commissioned by Counterpoints for Refugee Week main event at the South Bank Centre, 25 June 2023