Bodies, Affects, Politics. Steve Pile
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and their two primary school‐aged daughters, Luana and Megan – lived in Flat 183. Like many residents, they enjoyed living in the tower. The flats had big rooms for the family, but the kids would also play in the tower’s communal spaces. Marcio and Andreia are first generation migrants from Portugal. They had lived in the tower for 10 years, but still considered themselves ‘newcomers’, as many of their friends had been in the tower more than 20 years. Marcio works in IT, while Andreia is a supervisor in a clothes shop. In the tower, Marcio observes:
The diversity was great, you’d meet all sorts of different people – Irish, English, Arabic, Muslim, Portuguese, Spanish, Italians. You’d get to see different cultures. You’d go up in the lift with lots of different people; you’d talk; the kids would play. The tower itself was a community; it was very family oriented. It’s been portrayed as a poor tower, a broken tower. It was far from that.
The Gomes family escaped because they were woken by Helen Gebremeskel and her 12‐year‐old daughter Lulya, who lived in Flat 186, a two‐bedroom flat diagonally opposite Flat 183. Helen Gebremeskel was born in Eritrea and arrived in the United Kingdom as an asylum seeker when she was a child. She had been living in the tower for 20 years, but only moved into Flat 183 in 2014. She had spent the last few years renovating and decorating her new home. Helen Gebremeskel is the managing director of, and hairstylist at, H&G International Hair and Beauty Salon. Lulya’s best friends were the Choucair family, which lived on the twenty‐second floor. On the night of the fire, they had called Bassem Choucair to tell them to get out. The Choucair family did not get out; all died in the fire.
Helen Gebremeskel decided no one was coming to help, so made the decision to leave, against the advice of the emergency services (following accepted procedure). By the time she and Lulya went to the Gomes’ flat, the fire had already been burning for over half an hour. Thick black smoke forced them all back into the Gomes’ flat. For two hours, they attempted to keep the smoke out: they opened the windows, ran the bath and shower water. At around 3.30 a.m., the Gomes bedroom caught fire. The six of them wrapped themselves in wet tea towels and sheets to make their escape. Although they made it down through the horror of the stairwell, Lulya, Luana, Megan and Andreia were put into induced comas and treated for cyanide poisoning. This is when (as we heard above) Andreia’s baby boy, Logan, was stillborn.
In Flat 182 lived the El Wahabi family, which had turned their flat into what neighbours described as a ‘mini Morocco’. The father, Abdulaziz, worked as a porter at University College Hospital, while his wife, Faouzia, worked for the Westway Trust, which seeks to utilise the space underneath the Westway flyover for community benefit. They lived with their three children: Yasin, a part‐time accountancy student at Greenwich University; Nur Huda, who had just completed her GCSE exams and loved football; and Mehdi, who attended a local primary school and enjoyed judo. Helen Gebremeskel had seen the family escaping at around 1.30 a.m., but then the family had opted to return to their flat. They called the emergency services, which told them to stay in the flat. All five died in the fire. Abdulaziz’s sister, Hanan, and her family lived in Flat 66 on the ninth Floor, but they all made it out.
On the twenty‐first floor, there were two one‐bedroom flats. According to Razzall, Moralioglu and Menzies, the occupancy of Flat 184 was uncertain. They reported rumours about a woman from the Philippines, illegally in Britain, living there. It later emerged that the flat was occupied by Mustafa‐Sirag Abdu (see news.channel4.com/2017/grenfell‐tower/). He is a civil engineer from Ethiopia. He left the moment he heard about the fire. Ligaya Moore, a 78‐year‐old grandmother, lived in Flat 181. She had lived alone since the death of her husband, Jim, several years ago. She had moved to London from the Philippines in 1972 and had worked as a nanny and a waitress. No one saw her that night. It only adds to the tragedy that her absence became the stuff of rumour; rumour with a racist tinge.
Flat 185 had been bought from the Council under the right‐to‐buy scheme in 2000 by the tenant Nigerian‐born Tunde Awoderu. A few years later, Awoderu moved out, and the flat became private rented accommodation. He was now vice‐chair of the Grenfell Leaseholders’ Association. Flat 185 was one of 12 privately owned flats in the tower. Eleven days before the fire, Stewart Lee, a 29‐year‐old IT engineer, and boyfriend Julian Ng, a 30‐year‐old management consultant, moved into Flat 185, paying the over £1700 a month rent between them. Both Stewart and Julian were born in Britain. On that night, Julian was working in Crawley. It was Stewart’s birthday, so he decided to take the day off and to stay with Julian at his hotel. At 3 a.m., Tunde called them, very concerned about their safety. In shock, they watched the tragedy unfold on their smartphones (as reported in the Pink News, 14 June 2017).
These are stories about previously unheard voices, speaking in unfamiliar ways. Tower blocks are overwhelmed stories of poor housing, unemployment and social deprivation. Indeed, as Ida Danewid has shown, placed in an international context, Grenfell can be seen as a consequence of wider forces of racial capitalism that is reconfiguring colonial and postcolonial relationships within London (2019). From this perspective, Grenfell is more than just ‘Empire coming home’, it is about the way racial capitalism is shifting people and capital around the world, involving a racist global necropolitics in which the lives of black people do not matter. Indeed, the relationships within the tower were diverse, geographically; they stretched to places far away, to Morocco and to Ethiopia, to Italy and to the Philippines. Yet, Grenfell also domesticated the global: showing how migrants had settled in London, revealing migration to be homely and familiar, ordinary (www.bbc.co.uk/news/world‐44395591). The testimonies of those living on the twenty‐third floor, whether they intended to or not, made it clear that these homes were beautiful, the people in the blocks were hard‐working, and they had created bonds of friendship and community. Evidently, too, this was not true for everyone: some people were isolated, not able to turn to friends, their families far away. Grenfell holds more than one story, at the same time.
People had settled into London life, working nearby, going to school, moving within the tower and within the neighbourhood. The tower block was diverse, socially: alongside young urban professionals were public sector employees and charity workers. A system of ‘self‐evident facts’ (as Rancière puts it, 2004, p. 7) about tower blocks was being systematically shaken: the block’s many jarring stories were demanding to be heard. In Rancière’s terms, this amounted to a challenge to the distribution of the sensible: that is, a regime of perception and understanding through which people, ideas and things are assigned a ‘proper place’ in relation to other people, ideas and things. In particular, dominant narratives of class and race – intimately connected to notions of social housing, refugees, migrants and tower blocks – were being directly challenged. Not just through stories about community and hard work, but affectually through stories of love, family, hope and unassimilable trauma and grief (see also Doherty 2018).
Following Rancière (2000), we can also argue that, in the aftermath of the fire, bodies were torn from their assigned places and a form of free speech and expression emerged. For a few days, these bodies caused a disruption in the ordering of relations of power, not by revolution or riot, but by affect: that is, affect was having political effects (following Massumi 2002, p. 40). The hurt and pain and loss and anger simply overwhelmed the political response, with its focus on emergency services, its desire to convert the fire into a set of technical questions of fire‐proof properties of cladding and architectural design, and into amounts of money (£5 million, up front). These affects cut across forms of cultural and religious identity, altering questions of belonging and hierarchy: the Grenfell Tower fire brought new subjects into the field of perception. Working class, migrant and refugee, and community voices were being expressed, heard and spread. Grenfell, then, is a story about voices lost – and voices gained. More, perhaps most importantly, the story of the tower is also a struggle over what justice looks like.
As Political as It Gets
Grenfell’s stories of loss, pain and grief are exacerbated by another story: the failure of the council and government to respond adequately to the tragedy, both in the days after and the following months,