Book 13 toppled – a tale of racism, nature and belonging

I Belong Here by Anita Sethi was sent to me as part of my monthly book subscription. It describes itself as a book about a journey along the Pennines which interests me as that is an area where I live and which I know reasonably well. On reading, however, it transpired that the book is more of a memoir of a particular time in the author’s life together with some musings about nature, racism, history and language. I am not completely convinced that all the different aspects worked well together and I felt that the book changed direction a little too often for me.

The author, who is from Manchester but of both Asian and African heritage, experienced a racial attack on a train. Among the invective thrown at her was the usual direction to “go back where you belong”. The author, of course, belongs in the UK and thinks of herself as a Northern woman. The attack shocked and upset her, although it appears to have been dealt with well by the train company and the British Transport Police, and so she sought to validate her right to exist in the UK with a walk along the range of hills which make up the backbone of England.

The author explains what happened during her attack and its aftermath. She describes how it made her feel, especially as she already suffered from anxiety and she hints at a history of childhood abuse. She talks about racism and her lifelong experience of it and also of the dismay she feels when others who witnessed what happened to her didn’t intervene. Some of this is quite hard to read, as a white person, but it is necessary to hear from and understand the racism which pervades our society.

There appears to be no structured plan to the walks that the author takes (and there is a scarcity of maps in this book) but she walks roughly from the south to the north of the Pennines in three trips, camping and staying in hostels where necessary. She describes how the walks made her feel, her natural wariness of other walkers, the nature around her and the people she meets on her travels. This is interesting enough, although I really wish that she had learned to map read before she set off as she gets lost a lot – she also admits to not having good equipment which doesn’t seem ideal as she is mostly walking on her own. The author also talks about the history of walking in Britain and especially the fact that minority ethnic walkers tend to be underrepresented in our countryside.

I found this book to be too fragmented for me and that the author moved from one subject to another too frequently to give the whole narrative coherence. I didn’t hate it, though, and I am glad that I read it. My copy is fairly new so I shall pass it on to my friendly Oxfam Bookshop for resale.