#6 'Please know I love and miss you, oh dear uncle of mine'
On systemic erasure, remembering out loud and knowing neighbours by name
Among the tributes, drawings, tags and personal memorials on the temporary white hoardings that skirt the grounds of Grenfell Tower is a poem in two parts, by a young man called Omar El Baghdady.
Titled At The Bottom of the Tower. A Poem By Omar El Baghdady in Memory of Hesham Rahman, His Uncle, it is written in panels of black cursive text on coloured backgrounds, separated by painted figures.
El Baghdady’s poem begins on the left:
At the bottom of the Grenfell Tower
is where I learned to ride my bike
near the green grass area opposite in which the sun
would always strike
At the bottom of Grenfell Tower is where I loved to play
sometimes with a ball, on the swings,
or on the slide all day.
Never could I have ever imagined, the darkness that would
one day loom
upon my family, friends, community that night on the 14th
of June
Sculpted butterflies hover between the written lines. The outline of the block — which counted 120 homes and in which 70 people died and a further two people were so badly injured they later passed away in hospital — emerges pale blue and faintly visible, behind the letters. The author describes speaking to his uncle just days before the fire. “I wish I stayed with you longer,” he says, “oh dear uncle of mine”.
Separating this first column from the next is a tableau depicting a row of people holding hands like paper dolls. The two on the ground anchor the others floating (falling? People fell. I just cannot … it stops you breathing to think it) in the air.
The poem then carries on above and around a painting of a young boy and a taller man — El Baghdady and his uncle? — standing side by side, arm in arm. They have their backs to the viewer. They can see what we cannot: the tower, hidden from view since weeks after the fire, in 2017.
The grief, the youth, the impotence, the fury in the author’s words that follow are quite simply unbearable:
and you were on the top floor so helpless it just wasn’t fair
they promised help, they promised on the phone, I’m so sorry no one came
Oh how I wish I could have saved you and helped you down the stairs,
“Please know I love and miss you,” he continues, reprising this indelible refrain, “oh dear uncle of mine”.
The final report of the official inquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster was published yesterday. It comes, journalists Robert Booth and Emine Sinmaz specify, “seven years, two months and 21 days” after the fire. Reports have highlighted the costs involved in compiling it: 400 hours of evidence; over £200 million of taxpayers’ money.
But the primary, the incontrovertible cost as well as the root of all of this, is what the people living in and around Grenfell continue to live with: the societal invisibility, the systemic erasure. That this predated the fire is writ large in the report’s damning conclusion that so many people, from architects and builders to regulators and housing officials, simply didn’t care enough to ensure that other people’s actual, only homes were safe to live in. “All the deaths,” as emergency services expert Paresh Wankhade has put it, “were avoidable”.
When a coroner ruled, in 2022, that the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale, north-west England, was directly linked to his family’s landlord’s failure to resolve unacceptable housing conditions, housing expert Anna Minton underlined the disturbing echoes with what Grenfell residents had long reported.
Both cases, she wrote, “are characterised by the lack of accountability on the part of the housing provider and the landlord’s failure to listen to repeated warnings from the tenants affected. They have also seen allegations of racial bias and underhand tactics being used to dismiss tenants’ complaints.”
People not seen. People not listened to. People not seeing. People refusing to hear.
The image at the top of this post is of a different memorial panel. It is a piece of the Grenfell Memorial Quilt, a mesmerising project initiated in the days after the fire by local artist Tuesday Greenidge, which she has faithfully shepherded ever since.
Greenidge’s daughter was in the lift when the tower caught alight. She managed to escape.
Living in the shadow not just of the physical tower but of its awful legacy, Greenidge began processing what happened by making permanent — by hand, with cloth and thread — the messages and gifts people had started leaving at the site. That developed into the idea of making a patchwork that would eventually stretch to the width and height (67m) of the tower.
In an interview with the BBC in 2022, she said that it was only years after what had happened that it was possible to begin to find words to describe it. “That’s why I make art,” she said, “to find other ways to express how I felt.” In her beautiful piece on this project, fabric arts expert Lynn Setterington unpacks what makes quilting, specifically, such a potent tool in this regard:
“This power starts with the basic component of which quilts are made. Cloth is a potent physical reminder of people; the smell, the texture or simply the feel of a garment can help us to recall a presence.”
Sewing groups from all over now send in pieces to add to the quilt. Greenidge has already achieved the first milestone: a full row spanning the width of the building.
I went to meet Greenidge and some of her fellow sewers at their weekly sewing bee locale (every Tuesday at the North Kensington Library) in 2022. It was one of those encounters that will never let go of me.
So too, sitting with Shahanara and Sayaka and a group of strangers in the Serpentine Gallery, in complete silence, to watch Steve McQueen’s 2023 film, Grenfell.
Upon exiting McQueen’s screening, we walked into an empty space on the wall of which were listed the names of every person who died from the fire. Seeing all the names with the same surnames was a terrible, terrible thing.
In his artist statement for the piece, McQueen recalled what has always made that part of north London such a special place: “What I loved was the community. All the people with different backgrounds from all over the world.” The work he made in response to the fire, he said, came out of his fear that as soon as the tower was covered up, “it would only be a matter of time before it faded from the public’s memory.”
“In fact,” he added, “I imagine there were people who were counting on that being the case. I was determined that it never be forgotten. So, my decision was made for me. Remember.”
People remembering. Remembering out loud.
Every day I walk through a park called Hackney Downs, along a row of trees planted as a memorial. A delicate bronze leaf sculpture dedicates these to "the 13 children who died in the New Cross house fire in 1981". It is an earlier indictment of a system and a society that ignores too many people.
The memorial was put there by local music producer, club owner and legendary archivist Sir Collins, AKA Charles Constantine Collins, whose son, Steve Collins, was killed in that fire.
Until recent refurbishment efforts led by the Older Generation Younger Generation organisation saw an additional memorial added to the original in Hackney Downs, I would have needed to walk 7.8 miles to the south of the city to reach a rock in another park on which those 13 children's names are carved in full.
Who is invisible where you live? Whose safety ignored? Who is not counted? Who is missing? Do your neighbours know your name? Do you know theirs? Are you safe? Are your children safe?
Oh, please be safe, oh dear friend of mine.
Notes
For a truly beautiful bit of art that underlines what connecting — knowing and speaking and listening — can do, check out this, A View From a Bridge, by Joe Bloom (also on YouTube at Aviewfromabridge). Bloom puts an old-school red phone on a London bridge then interviews whomever picks up, from 500m away. Reminiscent of Itaru Sasaki’s Wind Phone, but also its opposite: in place of the conversation the Wind Phone facilitates with someone who has passed away, Bloom is there, listening, to these passers-by. A living conversation. There’s hope in that.
Thank you for bringing us closer to the ways we will continue to remember
Thank you !