Going viral.

Republished from the TLS, May 2020

I step out early. The light is blue and gold and waning. The air is fresh. This moment is my moment, a breath kept just for me; but then I usher the kids out to the front doorstep and watch others do the same across the empty stretch of road. There we all are, still in pyjamas and blinking like moles, until someone with a fast clock starts clapping and we follow their lead, at first sheepishly but then joyously, and in that fingernail-thin moment we put aside our stiff upper lips and death tolls, and endless stretches of Monopoly and money worries, and we cheer, and we clap, and we let out cathartic and very un-British whoops as the sun fades. Each of us isolated. Each of us united.

On Thursday nights at 8pm most of the country gathers on its respective doorsteps and leads a round of applause for essential key workers. We as a nation are rightly feeling a lot of goodwill, love and solidarity for the people helping to keep us – and our family and friends and neighbours – safe. 

But for some the ovation rings hollow. Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) key workers have reported feeling uncomfortable being cheered on by a country that for years has demonised their communities against a backdrop of austerity, the Windrush scandal, Brexit, and divisive government policies.  

Kuba Shand-Baptiste, a commissioning editor for UK newspaper The Independent, wrote:

‘I kept wondering what operating under a system that has actively restricted or ignored their rights, while being expected to work themselves to death for that system, must feel like – and for BAME and immigrant workers in particular, who are not only more likely to suffer structural inequalities exacerbated by coronavirus, but also make up the majority of doctors and nurses who have died because of the disease.’

I wrote a poem called You Clap For Me Now to remind the nation that while we cheer on our key workers no matter their ethnicity or origin, we must ensure the echoes of our thanks ring out long after the lockdown is lifted – and not allow the country’s narrative to return to the divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric of the last decade. 

My good friend and colleague Sachini Imbuldeniya – Creative Director, talented Producer, and youngest daughter of a ‘Windrush’ nurse – suggested we record the poem as a short film as a response to an open brief from the United Nations that asked artists around the world to create messages of kindness and solidarity. We asked key workers and first-, second- and third-generation immigrants to film themselves reciting a line each of the poem and stitched the results together into a short film.

Making a film under lockdown – unable to get behind the camera, having to direct via telephone calls and long-winded emails – is not the simplest process. Our key workers, who donated their time and energies and passions for free, had maybe five minutes between deliveries, and old phones with old cameras, and frankly more important things to do. Like saving lives. We did our best, and hoped we had done their voices justice.

We published the film on Instagram. Fast forward seventy-two baffling and exhausting hours later and MWW, a PR agency, tell me that 308 million people have watched the film all over the world.

You Clap For Me Now

So it’s finally happened:

That thing you were afraid of

Something’s come from overseas

And taken your jobs.

Made it unsafe to walk the streets

Kept you trapped in your home

A dirty disease

Your proud nation gone.

But not me.

Or me.  

Or me.

Or me.

No, you clap for me now

You cheer as I toil

Bringing food for your family

Bringing food from your soil.

Propping up your hospitals

Not some foreign invader

Delivery driver

Teacher

Life saver.

Don’t say ‘go home’

Don’t say ‘not here’

You know how it feels for home to be a prison

You know how it feels to live in fear.

So you clap for me now

All this love you are bringing

But don’t forget when it’s no longer quiet

Don’t forget when you can no longer hear the birds singing

Or see clearer waters

That I crossed for you

To make lives filled with peace

And bring peace to your life too.

Come all you Gretas

You Malalas

You immigrants

See what we have learned

It only takes the smallest thing

To change the world. 

**

Going ‘viral’ is a surreal experience, and especially so in isolation: juggling endless bleeping notifications and requests for interviews with home-schooling and tuna toasties. Sitting alone and watching a thought you had, such a simple idea, rush headlong into the world with tremendous force. I am thankful that the response has been mostly positive.

But as the love and gratitude pours in, so too does the backlash. Diatribes against the ‘woke’ liberals. Accusations of politicising a spontaneous act. And the flexing of racist muscles in the everlasting bin fire that is Twitter.

One Twitter user wrote:

‘Britain has always been open and welcoming to immigrants, why make a divisive film like this?’

My response could start with Brexit (and yes, I am aware that this article is like some awful bingo card reeling off your least favourite words).

It could take in former UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s diabolical ‘Hostile Environment’ policy – a phrase she coined during her tenure as Home Secretary in 2012. Official Government figures show that race or religiously motivated hate crimes increased in the UK by 111% between 2012 and 2018.

But these are just fragments of the same problem: the belief that identity trumps humanity.

We have been encouraged to hate the ‘other’ because they voted to Leave or to Remain. Because they are a lefty liberal or a hawkish libertarian. Northern or Southern, blue- or white-collared; dirt-poor or filthy rich.

We create our tribes and then circle the wagons against our supposed enemies. We are encouraged to forget that they might have their own thoughts and feelings, needs and desires, sources of love and of pain. For too long we had forgotten how to empathise, and replaced it with derision.

The coronavirus pandemic has given us all a chance to reset. We are rethinking what really constitutes an ‘essential’ key worker. We are surviving on the goodwill of others, and reaching out more to our neighbours, and longing for a sense of community. It is the barest pinprick of light in the darkness, but for the first time in so long I can see a future where humanity might win out. 

Another complaint:

 ‘How come you’re just clapping for black nurses? What about white doctors and nurses? What about white people. Don’t they deserve your respect?’

I am quite new to poetry writing, so this might be a common complaint. Perhaps through history poets have been lambasted for focusing their attention on something rather than on everything. Perhaps Wordsworth received pointed telegrams saying ‘why just daffodils, though? What about all the other flowers?’

It’s not a very long poem. It’s not the Encyclopedia Britannica. My message doesn’t – cannot – include every key worker that rightly deserves our admiration.

Our applause does.

And the third complaint, from a man that describes himself on Twitter, seemingly on purpose, as an ‘angry gammon facist [sic]’. He wrote:

‘When I see the wonderful NHS staff at my local hospital, I don’t even notice their colour. What’s your point here?’

Sophocles said that ‘every man can see things far off but is blind to what is near’, and too often not seeing colour means, well… not seeing colour. By April 12th 2020 every national newspaper in Britain had backed ‘Our NHS Heroes’. And by April 12th 2020 every single NHS worker splashed across their front pages had a white face.

Maybe the editors just didn’t see it.

 If every person in Britain were as positively blind to ethnicity as Mr Gammon then You Clap For Me Now would never have needed to be written. And I would trade every single view, every like, every retweet for that to be the case. 

After a minute or so the applause dies. Indignant blackbirds start chirruping from the bushes, reclaiming the soft night, and we shuffle back inside to our fears. But we are lighter, somehow. More connected to each other. We remember that we once were and will again be part of a community of people of every age and sex and skin colour and religion. Part of a United Kingdom.

We clap for them now. And, with a little bit of luck, the noise will resound long after COVID-19 is but a distant memory.