I Belong Here by Anita Sethi review – a healing journey

In 2019, Anita Sethi was on the TransPennine Express train from Liverpool on her way to Newcastle when a man sitting near her began playing loud music. When Sethi asked if he could turn it down, he stood up and unleashed a torrent of vicious racist abuse that attacked her right to exist in the country of her birth. “Do you have a British passport?” he shouted. “Get back on the banana boat. Paki cunt. Fuck off!”

In a busy carriage, only one other passenger tried to intervene, telling the man to shut up. But Sethi decided not to let it pass. Having recorded some of his rant on her phone, she calmly walked past her abuser, through the train and to the door marked “Staff”. A guard appeared, accompanied her back to her seat and then quietly took down statements from other passengers about what they had witnessed. When the train arrived at Darlington, the police were waiting. Sethi’s abuser was removed and arrested. Later she learned he had pleaded guilty, though the knowledge that he had admitted his crimes in the face of overwhelming evidence did little to lift the depression that had descended.

This was not the first time Sethi, a journalist and author, had experienced racist abuse. Jibes about her skin colour had been a feature of life since childhood. In 2018, she had a fleeting encounter with Prince Charles at the Commonwealth People’s Forum where she was a speaker. When the prince asked her where she came from, she replied: “Manchester, UK.” “Well, you don’t look like it!” he exclaimed. Afterwards, Sethi wrote a powerful piece in the Guardian in which she revealed how she had travelled to Georgetown in Guyana to search for her ancestral history, only to find British colonists had mostly destroyed the records of the indentured labourers they had shipped in from India. She also noted how white people, the prince included, needed a history lesson about immigration, colonialism and the Commonwealth.

As Sethi makes her way across mountains, rivers and hills, her stamina grows, her resolve hardens, her confidence builds

But it was the incident on the train that propelled Sethi to pause and reflect in more detail on who she is and how she is perceived. Her memoir I Belong Here, the first in a trilogy, is a heartfelt examination of identity, place and belonging, and her discovery of greater peace of mind by drawing on the healing powers of nature. Determined not to allow a hate crime to stop her from moving freely, Sethi embarked on a journey on foot across the Pennines, the northern range of hills and mountains known as the “backbone of England”. In doing so, she hoped to turn ugliness and insult into adventure.

Sethi makes no secret of her novice status as a walker and naturalist, which makes her account of her expedition that much more relatable. City-dwellers are frequently viewed as interlopers in rural areas, dilettantes of the outdoor world. But, despite aching bones and sporadically waterlogged boots, Sethi is undeterred, finding pleasure in everything from picture-postcard waterfalls and ancient gorges to
woodland expanses and tiny pockets of moss, all the while intent on completing her walk and reclaiming her right to roam.

But it is the way Sethi’s connection to nature is refracted through her experience as a woman of colour that gives the book its rare power. Her analysis of language is particularly acute: “My journey of reclamation is one of prose as well as place, of both routes and roots,” she writes. She explores how the colour of a person’s skin invites judgment and cruelty, even though its function is as a protective layer, and how wounds can leave scars on skin and also on land. She examines the question “Where are you from?”, which she notes is “the question wrapped around the question ‘Why are you here?’” and provides a brief history of the words “paki” and “cunt”, deployed by her racist attacker. His reference to “the banana boat” prompts a further meditation on the history of banana plantations, the slave labour used to build railways to access them and the resultant devastation to the land.

Elsewhere, Sethi poignantly lays bare the aftershocks of the crime perpetrated by her abuser: the humiliation, anger and, later, anxiety, isolation and panic attacks. She recalls the memories stirred by the incident, specifically her feelings of otherness and unsightliness as a child, projected on her by her peers, and her resulting reluctance to speak in front of others. “Trauma can stun us into silence,” she writes. “Those who have been violated verbally, physically or sexually, victims of domestic violence, veterans of war, the beaten or bereaved, those who have experienced loss including the loss of a sense of safety and belonging can end up losing language too – we’re ‘lost for words’ by ‘unspeakable’ happenings.”

Amid these reflections, observations and calls to action, the author basks in the quiet and solitude of the natural world, finding much-needed space away from the noise of the urban environment and the chatter inside her head. As Sethi makes her way across mountains, rivers and rugged limestone hills, her stamina grows, her resolve hardens and her confidence builds. Nature does not cure her anxiety, but she learns how it can bring relief and a sense of perspective that can be lost amid life’s day-to-day clamour. “Walking through such wild, ancient landscape brings a strong awareness of how we are all temporary guests on this earth,” she observes. “We will take nothing of it with us.”

• I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain by Anita Sethi is published by Bloomsbury Wildlife (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.