Anita Sethi

This is a haunting and memorable exploration of the Pennines, the backbone of the title as Sethi walked it to try to understand and recover from the stress of being racially abused and then confronting her abuser while on a train journey from Liverpool to Newcastle. In the course of her walking tour through the northern countryside, she looks back on the incident, not the first of its type that she had endured and contracts our relationship with nature, wildlife and the countryside with how we treat each other. She draws on the healing power of the peacefulness of nature and discovers how a wide variety of people have occupied Britain form Roman times onwards, so that our roots are intertwined. From her meditation on her sadness, anger and fright, she comes to a greater understanding of the interconnection and interdependence of life in all its forms on the planet and leaves the reader with a message of hope for the future.… (more)

While travelling on a Trans-Pennine train near her home station of Manchester, journalist and writer Anita Sethi was subject to racial abuse by a fellow passenger, who aggressively shouted racial slurs at her and told her to ‘go back home’. But she was already home, very near the place where she was born and brought up on the outskirts of Manchester. Her attacker was arrested and convicted, but Anita still continued to suffer the after effects of the attack. In an attempt to exorcise its ghost she planned a walk through the Pennine uplands of Britain.

My journey is one of reclamation, a way of saying, to adapt the Woody Guthrie song title, ‘this land is my land too’ and I belong in the UK as a brown woman, just as much as a white man does. Journeying through the so-called backbone of England also feels symbolic, a way of showing backbone myself and that I will not let having been the victim of a race hate crime curtail my movements through the world, despite the trauma and panic attacks that followed.

I should have loved this book. The questions of national identity and who is English (or British come to that) are ones that I have been considering recently, especially given our current government’s attempts to whip up an unpleasant form of English nationalist sentiment. And I thought I would love the description of the journey as well. But it just did not work for me. On every page Sethi seemed to go off at a tangent from her theme: usually something I have no problem with in a book, but here it seemed too superficial.

An example: Sethi mentions that the number of ethnic minorities visiting National Parks is much less than the percentage in the population as a whole. There are many reasons why this could be, some definitely caused by racist attitudes and some perhaps not, and I was looking forward to an examination of this. But there was nothing: in the next few pages there was mention of Spider-Man, Catwoman, Achilles, Hercules, spider silk, Mary Anning, limpets, the creation of the NHS, shortages of PPE, and fainting at the sight of blood, but nothing about why there were so few ethnic minorities visited the National Parks or what was being done about this. Any of these topics might have been interesting to explore (except maybe superheroes) but they weren’t explored, just mentioned in passing, and the constant bombardment of unrelated facts and definitions got to me after a while.

I almost stopped reading on several occasions, but then there were sections which I enjoyed and these kept me ploughing through. Anita Sethi is a good journalist, but for me her writing doesn’t work well on this larger stage.… (more)