The brand new Channel 4 programme Go Again to The place You Got here From is unsettling viewing, virtually insufferable at occasions. It takes six British residents – some staunchly anti-immigration, others extra open – and drops them into lives formed by battle and displacement.
The premise is to domesticate understanding of the refugee expertise, to make the unimaginable tangible. However in doing so, the present dangers turning compelled displacement into spectacle, lowering struggling to an immersive studying expertise for these with the privilege of ignorance.
The present opens with members providing their views – filmed of their houses or standing on the cliffs of Dover, the place one man declares: “What I’d do is, I’d set landmines up, after which any boat that comes inside 50m of this seaside, they’d get blown up.”
Then, two groups, two journeys. One is shipped to Somalia, the opposite to Syria.
In Mogadishu, Nathan, Jess and Matilda navigate a metropolis carved up by checkpoints, escorted by an American safety staff. Nathan surveys the streets like a person assessing a misplaced trigger: a “shithole”, he mutters. Jess, fiercely anti-immigration, feels uncovered – her concern magnified by the burden of unfamiliar eyes, the choreography of a life not her personal. She desires to go away.
At a camp for internally displaced individuals, girls communicate of gender-based violence, of feminine genital mutilation, of lives spent in areas by no means constructed for them. Jess listens, nods and information their phrases neatly into the folder of convictions she introduced together with her. She doesn’t query; she confirms. The mindsets of Somalian males, she concludes, are the issue.
In Raqqa, Bushra, Chloe and Dave choose their method by streets decreased to rubble. Chloe complains in regards to the garbage, as if it had been neglect relatively than obliteration. “They need to keep and clear it up,” she says. The kids sifting by particles don’t register. In a bombed-out house, a father speaks of security, the one factor he desires for his kids. The kids don’t communicate.
The violence of ‘refuge’
Watching the present, I considered the conversations I’ve had with asylum seekers and refugees on the island of Eire as a part of my analysis. Many communicate of the quiet violence of exclusion – how “welcome” is so usually a hole gesture, how refuge can really feel like one other type of exile.
Many recount racial hatred within the streets, the concern woven into each day actions, the gnawing sense that they’re barely tolerated, not wished. Some have informed me, with devastating readability, that had they recognized what awaited them right here – homelessness, suspicion, a life in bureaucratic limbo – they may by no means have fled in any respect. Not as a result of house was secure, however as a result of this isn’t dwelling both.
These experiences are usually not anomalies. They’re constructed into the asylum methods within the UK and Eire, the place deterrence is coverage. As of mid-2024, 122.6 million individuals have been forcibly displaced worldwide, but the UK hosts simply 1% of them.
And “internet hosting” usually takes the type of offshore detention, indefinite ready and insurance policies designed to make looking for refuge as inhospitable as doable. In Eire, the failure is simply as insidious: asylum seekers sleeping tough, vulnerability assessments in title solely, the quiet withdrawal of care till individuals merely disappear from view.
Learn extra:
‘Whenever you get standing the battle doesn’t finish’: what it is wish to be a brand new refugee within the UK
After the primary episode of the Channel 4 present, I’m left questioning: what’s the level of every participant’s journey? The documentary trades in empathy – monitoring transformation by how a lot the members really feel, be taught and alter. However empathy, when it stops on the self, is simply one other efficiency. It asks: how have I been altered? As a substitute of: what should I do with what I now know?
That is the entice of a style that packages struggling into one thing neatly consumable. As movie researcher Pooja Rangan argues, humanitarian documentaries usually render asylum seekers passive, their price measured by how a lot sympathy they will elicit. Go Again to The place You Got here From follows this script, focusing not on the company of the displaced, however on the ethical awakenings of those that proceed to look away.
The true query is just not whether or not the members really feel one thing, however whether or not feeling will ever translate into motion – by them, or by us as viewers. To carry governments to account. To insist that refuge is a proper, not a privilege. To refuse the quiet, grinding violence of neglect.
“Return to the place you got here from” is a phrase hurled not simply at refugees, however at anybody deemed misplaced. The programme inverts it, sending its wielders on a reckoning. However ultimately, they return. To security, to consolation, to houses untouched by struggle or exile. Or, as one put it, again to the pub.
And but, for these looking for refuge, the journey drags on – by border camps, detention centres, doorways, the freezing chilly and the forms of the asylum system – whereas the world watches, then turns off their televisions.
