Art From London Markets, a-n feature

So to go with the lovely story of the “leaf come tree fruit” I have been working on some pomegranate images……

This is the story of a migration, of a child growing up in the sun and ochres and vibrant colours of Tunisia and of coming to London. Of the beginning of the adult who pays attention to the small and beautiful things around her, of someone with a visual sensibility apparent in childhood and not lost.

Sadly the recording of her words is lost but the sense of the story is not.

She told me of holding her mothers hand, a small girl in a grey London street, catching sight at eye level of the pomegranates on the stall outside the shops as her mother hurried past, and how they evoked the sunshine and colours of her life before they came here.

“We lived in Tunisia until I was about 4. While we were there my mum grew all sorts in the garden, including a pomegranate tree. I was very excited to see it finally sprouting and shouted ‘leaf come, leaf come’ – and ever since my family have called pomegranates ‘leaf come’ tree fruit”

 She talked about how pomegranates have the quality of hidden treasure, the outside like a clay vessel, the inside a tumble of jewels.

This is not the story of a Syrian refugee, or any kind of refugee, just the story remembered of a child who has been moved from one country to another by her family and in a small way how that early experience shaped her adult self.

Yet right now there are people fleeing Syria in panic at the terrible conditions of civil war.  I once met an Iranian woman and her husband who had got out of Iran just before the revolution, and her husband described her as heart broken by the loss of the landscape.  It needs to be  remembered that while the people coming from Syria now are escaping something awful, life threatening, dangerous and chaotic, most of them would have had normal lives before this turmoil.  That within the relief of reaching somewhere safe, for those lucky enough to have got to safety, we should pay respect to the grief they will have for all that they have lost.

And that is not the only emigration /immigration there is or has been from and to this region: There are the large numbers of British families working in places like Dubai and across North Africa and the Middle East, our own economic emigrants making a “better life” for themselves.  There always have been the diplomatic corps, and the adventurers like my friends from college who worked in a schools.  So how is it that we are free to live pretty much where ever we want, but resentful enough as a society for our body politic to feel the need to limit the help we offer to such an extent?