From There to Here

by Menaka Raman, Cosh Omar, Vesna Maric

In February 2007, we asked people from any background to send us their true personal accounts of immigration to Britain. The response was significant, and the range of entries overwhelming. Six judges - including Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty and the novelist Kate Mosse - selected the best, most illuminating and most powerful entries to be published in this book. The result is the widest-reaching contemporary survey of the immigrant experience published in many years. In these pages you'll discover sixteen very different voices, each one presenting a very different point of view. In taking us around the world, each account shows a new side to the most complicated journey of all: finding a place to call home.

Genres: Nonfiction

260 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 29, 2007

About the author

As a child Menaka Raman used to write far-fetched stories about birthday parties, water parks and floating cake disasters. Since then, her life has been a series of fortunate events that led her far away from becoming a software engineer and set her back on the path of writing. She is a former advertising copywriter who chucked creating ads for plastic chairs and time share holidays to write about other things. She has been a newspaper columnist for over a decade now and enjoys working with non-profits. She is the author of nine picture books for children including Gappu Can’t Dance, Lenin’s Guests and I Love Me. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies published by Talking Cub, Scholastic India and Penguin UK. She lives in Bangalore with her husband, two children and dog. When she is not killing plants and walking Woody the dog, she is eating Nutella straight from the jar.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book - the stories of 16 different immigrants to the UK - rather variable. At the end of the book was a potted life story of each of the sixteen contributors to the book, and I very much wish that these histories had been split up, and put at the beginning of each piece of writing. It would have given a nice background to each story. The stories were often descriptions of quite short spaces of time - and it was very good to get a fuller picture of each writer - as given at the end of the book. The stories were about immigrants, mostly about their fresh arrival to the UK, but the descriptions at the end were about British citizens - people who had often lived here for many years, and were now part of the living tapestry of Britain.

As it was, some of the writing felt a bit disjointed.

There were however a few of the stories that I really learned a lot from, found deeply moving, and I am very glad that I read them. All of these deserved four or five stars.

*Culture Shock by Kirti Joshi

*A Leaky Roof in London by Nina Joshi

*We are in Heaven by Toni Jackson

*My Painful Journey by Jade Amoli-Jackson

Elements of the book that I will take away with me:

Racism. I was young when a lot of these writers were coming to the UK, and didn't notice the popularity of the National Front, the placards at airports telling immigrants to go home, the people who were beaten up, and the innumerable lodgings that advertised "No blacks, No Irish, No dogs". This was in spite of the fact that at the end of the 1940s the UK had actively been recruiting in places like the West Indies for workers. By the 50s and 60s there were many in Britain hostile to immigrants. Fortunately, as time went on, this greatly lessened.

Weather. Darned weather! The cold was often a bad shock to people coming from hot climates. I personally enjoy our cold, overcast and wet climate - but time and time again immigrants write about how incredibly shocking and uncomfortable they found it.

Love of one's country of birth. In spite of many of the immigrants in this book being refugees, and having to leave their country's of birth in difficult circumstances, the love for the country and culture where one is born seems incredibly strong. More than anyone else, perhaps nostalgia belongs most of all to the immigrant.

The work of The Medical Foundation and Refugee Council. The first is a British charity that helps victims of torture. One writer had the most horrendous and tragic experiences before leaving Uganda, and she writes inspiringly of the help she received from both these organisations. It was good to read something positive about help that is being given to people who arrive here with nothing, and that there are people prepared to offer the hand of friendship.

I would like to end by saying that for anyone interested in immigration issues, I would recommend the book Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World. This book was more a set of disparate cameos of different people's experiences, but with The Final Migration I felt I got access to a really strong investigation and overview into the current situation of immigration in the world (although it was written before the current situation in Europe came into such focus, so that is not covered.) Or lets put it this way - I'm glad I read both books, but I would definitely read Arrival City first.