identities
A TASTE OF HOME
Animated GIFs, based on drawings from screenshots of an ethnographic fieldwork interview on Zoom with research participant Haamid, March 2021.
Haamid is a refugee from the Middle-East in his thirties and lives in the South West of England. Haamid was asked to bring objects that reminded him of home. The coffee cup and associated aroma of cardamom coffee were deeply nostalgic. The drawings came to symbolise Haamid’s work with homeless people and the handing out of free food and drinks during the pandemic.
i cook fresh cafe for people.
Haamid: So, yes so, this is very young coffee which is a smell with cardamon and a coffee has a different smell which is like the smell when you make the piece of the café when you cook them before you make them soft, you make them powder it gives you a smell when you cook them like slowly. I don’t know what you call it in English. You have small pieces, the pieces of the seeds of the café.
Helen: And you grind it.
Katharine: Oh, the beans.
Haamid: Yeah, the beans when you grind, when you make to cook them to try to change their colour.
Helen: Roast.
Haamid: So, roast them the smell with the cardamon so, people like to drink this café because I always like to share my café which is my favourite café… So, I yeah, so I cook fresh café for people there and give them to try...
Screenshot from ethnographic fieldwork interview with Haamid on Zoom
THE TRUE BRITISH SPIRIT
I thought we genuinely could get this…I don’t know, that Covid would bring out the true British spirit. This is what I said about the governments: this was an ideal opportunity to show how strong a country we could be, rather than arguing between ourselves that, you know, ‘this is wrong’, or ‘that is wrong’. So I saw it as an opportunity to actually push forward as a country and make Britain great again, where we all worked together, rather than sniping on the side, I thought this could be an opportunity for Britain to actually come out of this Covid and say ‘look, we’re prepared to go on, let’s get trade deals done! Let’s show how we can come out of this’, you know? To say that ‘yes, we’ve managed it. Yes, we’ve had to borrow money, but we can work our way out of it’. So that’s what’s disappointed me and, as far as Covid, I just think come next year we’ll just be drifting back to normal. I think we’ll all forget about it, the death rates will slow down etc., and once again we’ll just go back to a load of whinging Brits!
Quote from Tim, November 2020.
Tim is a white British man in his 50s. He lives in a market town in the East Midlands. Tim voted to leave the EU.
Atlas from 1987. Photo contributed by Andrew.
Andrew describes himself ‘first of all I am British and second, I am European’.
british first
and
european second
Andrew: And the reason I picked it was I was a bit frustrated because within about eighteen months my atlas had gone completely out of date, and I didn’t have the money to buy another atlas, so I had to put up with the fact that my atlas said ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ and didn’t have all these new little countries on it… I guess I picked it because … of that sense of how quickly things can change, how quickly the world can change, which I think is something that Brexit and Covid have got in common… With Covid a year ago our whole day-to-day existence just completely shifted, and we found ourselves in a different world. And I think equally the Referendum ... is a real kind of break-point, there was a kind of world before that and a world afterwards. And people found themselves perhaps in some cases on a different side politically and certainly our arguments yeah, what how politics was talked about changed, you know the conduct of it changed for the worse. So, it was yeah, I thought that would symbolise that sense of a world disappearing and reappearing in a different form, and I thought that was something the two of them had in common…
Quote from interview with Andrew, April 2021. He is a white man living in the South West of England. He is in his 50s. Andrew voted to remain in the EU.