An American in Brexit Britain: Reflections After the Presidential Election

“Living outside of the United States isn’t an escape.”

I accepted a job at a British university a week before Brexit. On June 16th, I stood on a sunny sidewalk in Boston, shouting into my cell phone over the traffic noise: Yes, I will come to Britain, yes.

A week later, British people voted by a narrow margin in favor of leaving the European Union. My salary lost thousands of dollars of exchange value overnight, and I was suddenly faced with the questions of concerned friends and relatives: Would I still be able to go? Was it going to be all right? I learned afterwards that some of my new colleagues wondered if I’d back out. But it was a dream job in a country that my partner and I have always loved. And anyway, we were getting itchy feet. So we packed up our things and moved across the ocean.

What seemed like terrible timing now looks rather different, a week after the United States electoral system put Donald Trump in power.

It was the wee hours of the morning in Britain before the election results started coming in. We were huddled under blankets, switching between websites and text updates from our friends. I had imagined a celebratory round of phone calls and maybe a toast; instead we held each other, unable even to muster the energy to go downstairs and turn up the heat. I’m looking for jobs in Canada right now, one US friend wrote. Later in the week, I found myself on the phone urging another friend to renew her Italian passport.

*

I feel so far away from my home now. It’s a new kind of homesickness, knowing that the place I love is being damaged and maybe ultimately destroyed. “People were crying on Centre Street,” one friend tells me, and I picture the street where our friendship grew and deepened, where I went for countless coffees and beers and ice creams and strolls, where I bought my second-hand furniture at the place that benefits AIDS Action and got my hair cut by a bearded queer man with scissors tattooed on his arm. It was the place where I grew into my own queer identity and learned to accept myself. People are crying there, and I’m not there to cry with them.

Here, in the middle of England, people are kind and gentle. When they hear my accent, they know. Cashiers offer sympathetic glances. I walked into a meeting of the British Studies reading group the day after the election; we were discussing one colleague’s new book on a notorious con man from the early twentieth century. Another colleague gently touched my arm, saying: “I’m sorry, friend.” Later, he confessed: “It was seeing your face that made it real for me.” I remember the Shropshire cab driver, a tall white man playing American country music at full volume, who asked me: “Why would anyone want to vote for someone who sounds like Hitler?” I wonder what he’s thinking now.

*

My friends and family in the United States are planning what’s next. I know some of them are thinking, however tentatively, about exit strategies or escape routes or even just escapist fantasies. I’m posting jobs at my institution feverishly on social media. Part of me wants everyone I love to come here: because I’m homesick, but also because I can see a doctor and fill prescriptions reasonably and reliably through the National Health Service, because no one in government is talking about delegitimizing my marriage, because it’s green and pleasant. I don’t want the people I love to have to spend their time fighting for the things we’d already won.

But this is Brexit Britain. One new friend texted me, urging gentleness and self-care: If this feels anything like the Brexit vote, she wrote, it will feel like some form of bereavement. Another friend tells me of his inability to laugh at light-hearted jokes about French footballers after the Brexit vote; what he had taken for granted was harmless before now reminds him how deeply entrenched racism and xenophobia turned out to be.

Trump has promised to build a literal wall. Here, in my new home, the Home Office guards entry to Britain with a thicket of bureaucratic procedures that amount to a different kind of wall. I must report my working hours and travel to my employer in a special, migrants-only process; my employer must be able to produce these records to the government on demand. The cost of the visas to get here makes the process risky and prohibitive for most.

A man working on our home comments, casually, “People like you are okay—it’s the people who come here with nothing that are the problem.” I don’t want to be the exception that legitimizes a brutal, racist regime; to be allowed in to dream up a new life while thousands of refugees, many of them children, languish at the French border. I don’t want to be the “right” kind of immigrant.

There is no escape from politics, and no escape from American politics—living outside of the United States isn’t an escape from the fear and division haunting our world. An American friend asked on social media: Is the world laughing at us? From my little corner of the world, at least, the answer is no. People everywhere are scared and uncertain. Over drinks last week, a friend from India wondered: Why had the United States followed India’s path in electing a demagogue who stirs up ethnic and communal mistrust? The next four years hold dangers that could affect the entire planet: Climate change, war, and hatred transcend boundaries.

*

In the wake of the election, I want to work toward demolishing the borders and walls that divide our understanding of the world and help to foster the fear that, in part, put Trump in office. I don’t know what that looks like yet, or how to engage sensitively with the politics of my new local community while trying to make a larger vision of environmental and racial and gender justice a reality. Right now, I’m joining mailing lists and trying to show up where I can. I’m going to a meeting of a local refugee action group, signing up to serve lunch to the refugees who have managed to make it to Britain. This weekend, my partner and I are hoping to join our local community garden, a set of allotments off an old railway line just north of our new home. It’s not much, but I hope it’s a start.

Last week we ordered some frames to be delivered, part of trying to settle and nest in our new home here. One large frame arrived with the glass smashed. The company sent a replacement and scheduled a time to pick up the broken frame, which they asked us to repackage. I’m usually on top of this sort of thing, but after the election, it fell through the cracks.

On Friday, there was a knock at the door: the delivery man wanted the frame. The three of us stared at it: the opened box; the big smashed frame; the broken glass held in with plastic wrap; the thin, inadequate Scotch tape that was the only packing material we had. “May I help you?” he asked us. It took all three of us about ten minutes, but eventually, patiently, he helped us put the broken thing back together and send it safely on its way.