I Belong Here by Anita Sethi

3.5 out of 5 stars

Anita Sethi was on a train journey when she was racially abused for merely asking a fellow passenger to turn his music down. The man was arrested and was charged and then later prosecuted for his tirade. She was left to pick up the pieces and rebuild her life. She became afraid of being enclosed and longed for open space and big horizons. She know that she belonged in this country and didn’t want this experience to stop her from travelling.

What happened to her on that train journey was just horrific, and whilst justice was served, and the man punished for the cruel things that he said, she is left picking up the pieces. She does have help though from a variety of people that are there to ensure that she gets through it. What she also relies on is the crutch that is the natural world.

She decides to embark on the walk along the Pennine way to seek healing and but also to reclaim her place in this land. She is a little unprepared for something as strenuous as this and suffers from a number of minor ailments. She is joined on some stages by others for company and there are times when she has to rely on the generosity of strangers to help her to get where she wants to get to.

It is not a bad book overall. There are some really powerful parts to her writing, especially the response to the abuse she has suffered all the way through her life, culminating in the attack on the train. She is not the first to suffer in this way and this is her way of saying to those on the receiving end of it that there is a way through. Other reviewers have said that it can be a bit repetitive, and I can see where they are coming from. I didn’t find that irritated me, rather I felt that it was more of a book to support others who have been at the receiving end of similar racist abuse.

The walk along the Pennine Way along with the emotional buoyancy that it gave her, felt like a secondary element of the book really, which is a shame as I would have loved to have read more of the travels. It was reading this book that I realise that I have met Anita once at one of the shortlist events for the Wainwright Prizes, she had just come from the funeral of Sophie Christopher and we were introduced.

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1 Comment

  1. Liz Dexter

    A very fair review. I felt it could have done with a bit of an edit as the things that stopped me in my reading tracks were the long definitions of things mainly to do with the countryside as well as cultural ones. I thought it was a great resource for understanding racism and helping others, and brilliant to see her getting out in the countryside and realising it’s for everyone, but it was just a bit clunky here and there.

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