Stevenage

While for my entire childhood Stevenage was the only place I really knew, it was not a place I would claim until I was much older. In Gender and Nation, Nira Yuval-Davis describes how Palestinian children in Lebanese refugee camps would call ‘home’ a village which may not have even existed for several decades but from which their parents were exiled. Stevenage was no refugee camp and my mother was no exile. Yet that sense of displacement, the rift between where you happen to be and where you understand you are from, was always familiar to me.

Until I was seventeen if anyone asked me where I was from I told them Barbados – a country I’d spent just six weeks in as a four-year-old. My mother was from elsewhere and proud of it. There was a flag of Barbados on our door and a map on our wall. The mantra was that when we walked into the house we were in Barbados.

This is an extract from ‘Stevenage’ by Gary Younge in Granta 119: Britain. You can pre-order a copy or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.