How it feels when the heart of the city you love is broken #BrusselsAttacks

The location of home is a movable feast. For some it is a cosy image of a childhood house where their heights through the years are pencilled on the wall. For others their minds will forever return to those formative university years. For some it is an adoptive city where they finally found their place in life. For me, I left my heart in Brussels. I only lived in the city for seven years, but it is where I had my first kiss, first heard the words ‘I love you’, first had my heart broken and first learned that life goes on despite this. 

Brussels is not just any city to me, but my city. I awoke on Tuesday to the radio blaring that it was under attack, that bombs had ripped through Zaventem airport, smashing and pulverising travellers just like me. Perhaps on their way home to see beloved grandparents as I had been so many times, or simply harried commuters who were glued to the email on their phones seconds before that life was destroyed. I could feel the howling pain of a city so small that any attack would touch someone, somewhere, you knew. 

When a second explosion blew out the doors of a silver metro train, vapourising dozens of lives in its foul wake, it was at a station that I had travelled through daily on the way to and from school. It was a station whose name flashed past my eyes on my commute as I yawned away the morning, as I wondered if I had done all my homework, as I excitedly anticipated seeing my boyfriend. Maalbeek was part of the wallpaper of my morning journey. 

As smoke belched out bloodied commuters on to the street, I felt the tears begin to flow. Why? I hardly know anyone who lives in the city anymore, and those that I did know were not likely to have been travelling in the morning rush hour. But while I could weep for every family crushed and shattered by death and loss, the familiarity of this tragedy made it hit home much harder. 

Brussels is a like a familiar teddy to me, a well worn comforter that makes me feel at home. Walking across the cobbled Grand Place, its soaring gothic confections surrounding me is like a hug from my childhood. The antiques market of the Sablon, a babble of the monied denizens of Uccle poring over heavy oil paintings and glitzy ornaments, was what drifted through my window as I tried to enjoy that teenage privilege of sleeping until 2pm. 

The Midi station was the unsavoury starting place for trips home to London, the Bourse, where now candles flicker to remind us of the dead and injured, was where I would grab a post drinks McDonald’s burger. The trams and metro were my network of freedom, taking me to parties and nightclubs, to assignations and break ups, to gossip with friends and to get to school. 

I cannot compute the comfortably bourgeois city of women in fur coats and children in preppy chinos, of chocolate shops displaying their sweet wares like precious jewels, of the salty, greasy joy of chips and mayonnaise, of waffles crisp and vanilla sweet, with this city of dust, destruction, twisted shrapnel and nails of hate flying and piercing it to the core. 

I suppose I shouldn’t care about the mayhem unleased in Brussels more than anywhere else in the world, but I do. Having lived in London for the past couple of decades since leaving Brussels, the concept of bombs, horror, terrorism and innocent blood shed is hardly alien. There have been attacks on the tubes, beheadings in the streets and the treat of a spewed outpouring of bile and bombs is never far away. 

But Brussels is different; it is cosy, sedate, perhaps even smug and pompous, but for it to become a hot bed of terror is inconceivable. Though I, and many contemporaries, will admit perhaps it should’t have come as quite such a surprise. Disenfranchisement is the currency of Brussels. As French speakers squabble with Flemish, and tie themselves up in the impenetrable tangles of red tape, a whole community of North Africans was left to fester for decades, creating a culture ripe for brainwashing. 

Despite living in a smart square in central Brussels I was often confronted with the spray painted words, ‘Maroc dehors’ (Morrocans Out). There was no sense of integration, instead these dark skinned immigrants were ignored and demonised. 

Racism was a part of everyday life, perhaps because no one who had spent any time on the night time streets of Brussels had avoided a casual mugging or, as a girl, groping from the sullen clusters of North African youths, who longed for the trappings of a comfortable life, but wouldn’t dare to aspire to it in this fragmented society. 

Everyone in Belgium carries a carte d’identité. When I lived there in the early 1980s acquiring one as a foreigner was a humililating and alientating experience. You would arrive early, before the office opened, and queue along the pavement for hours before being greeted with a brusque yes or no as to whether you were someone the Belgians wished to become a part of their country. Belgian civil servants are renowned amongst residents for their surly approach to customer service. 

This was the days before Schengen took effect in 1995, so we Brits queued alongside everyone else. It was not pleasant to feel unwelcome in a country you wanted to call home, but at least we knew that our ID cards would be issued once we reached the head of the queue. I’m sure this wasn’t such a dead cert for those whose colour ensured their faces didn’t fit so easily.

Even once Moroccan immigrants were granted their cards they would need them far more than I. Belgian police are not the friendly bobbys on the beat I knew from my life in England. They tout machine guns and have the right to stop anyone to ask for their papers. 

They would regularly trawl the Rue Neuve, one of the arteries of night life, on a Saturday demanding ID from random revellers. Well I say random: for white teenagers we could wave our slip of green card and be on our way; brown youngsters would be smashed against the side of the police van and frisked. There was no sense that there should be any fairness in stop and search policies. If you were brown you were fair game. 

I would love to say I cared, but at the time this was just life. Moroccans didn’t mix with regular Belgians, even less so with the monied ex-pat crowd I was part of. They preyed on us, stole from us, grabbed at us in the street, made us feel uncomfortable with their dark brown stares. There was no attempt to assimilate them; instead they were hidden in ghettos, fear and loathing keeping them in segregated schools and low paid jobs. 

These were not a section of society that we chose to recognise, but instead sought to ignore. Belgium is not a progressive society. Perhaps that is what I loved so much about it. This is a place where one style of jacket remained in fashion for a full 25 years — from the early 70s to the late 90s. Where bars, restaurants, architecture and shops are prized for traditon and longevity, not innovation or change. 

But this slow pace of change also means the feuds are never settled, and that bureaucracy moves at a snail’s pace. The tradition of closing for lunch, a plethora of bank holidays, keeping the hours that Britain ditched back in the 50s, are all prized above actually solving problems. 

It is also a tiny place, that has, admittedly through some fault of its own, become guardian of the peace in a bloody war between ISIS and everyone who disagrees with them. With a population of just over 170,000 people, the equivalent of a single small London borough, Brussels has now been tasked with acting as the gatekeeper of Islamic terrorism. 

While Belgium may be to blame for not keeping its house in order, when cities like Paris and London cannot keep their populations safe, how on earth could Brussels be expected to? 

This is a tiny and provincial country rife with divides — a country that cannot decide the identity or language of its own people — so it is perhaps no wonder that it failed so spectacularly at assimilating a culture with whom it had nothing in common.

So as my old home rebuilds the devastating damage inflicted by these bombs, my only hope is that by smashing its heart to smithereens, there is some chance to rebuild it free from the racial fault lines that have always threatened to tear it asunder. 

#jesuischarlie

Tonight I can't sleep. Now insomnia and I are no strangers to one another. I have wasted many a witching hour tossing and turning, reading, piecing together jigsaws with bleary eyes trained on the clock watching the hours tick by until I need to be up again. But tonight the reason for my sleeplessness is much more real than a racing mind caught up in knots over its own inability to capture the silken web of slumber.

Yesterday saw terrorists gun down a group of journalists as they held their editorial meeting and I can't help but picture the scene on and endless, horrific loop. I imagine it was the first time the team will have met after the New Year. The would shamble to seats in a cramped meeting room, coffees and notebooks in hand, exchanging the odd Bonne Annee, discussing food eaten, parties attended, nights spent slumped in front of the television rather than revelling to celebrate the arrival of 2015.

Then down to business, this was a satirical magazine, so I imagine the order of the day was which political or religious bubble would be burst by their rapier pens. Now I make no claim to have known about Charlie Hebdo before today, and after a cursory glance at its work its not a publication that would particularly appeal to me.

The cartoons are too graphic, gross and yes, offensive for my taste. But what resonates with me is the familiarity of the circumstances in which this magazine would have come to life. I spent most of my 20s working for magazines. They weren't as high profile and or as contentious as Charlie Hebdo, but I can't help but think that the environment would have been pretty similar to the one into which bullets came flying and blood was shed.

Magazines are laid back places to work, the people who work on them tend to be pretty cynical, iconaclastic - if not they would probably have got proper jobs working as accountants or management consultants. Instead they were the ones messing around at the back of the class, refusing to take what they were told at face value and poking fun at those who did. They are bright, quick witted and more than a little bit disaffected.

This was my happy home for over a decade and even after I left I continued to work as a freelance journalist so I feel a kinship that makes what happened in Paris somehow more personal and painful, more difficult to forget in favour of a good night's sleep. The idea of those slacker writers and fastidious subs being ripped to pieces by a rain of bullets from a military trained terrorist just jars my brain. The juxtaposition between these acerbic cartoonists armed only with their wit and a smart drawing pen and combat ready maniacs wielding AK-47s just doesn't make sense to me.

While I have never raised my head above the parapet to do anything remotely worthwhile with my own career I have admiration for those who have chosen to use their exposure in the press to push forward an agenda that forces us to continue to look beyond trite philosophies spoon fed to us by those in authority. It was what I meant to do, but never really had the balls to follow through on.

It is heartbreaking that anyone would want to see that way of life smashed and silenced by a rain of bullets. That the way such warped thinkers wish to repay a country whose very tolerance is the reason they and their families were able to make a life there is by trying to extinguish it.

Of course I am aware that life is not always easy for immigrants and their descendants in any society, but what I find so confusing is that rather than try to find a way to work within the country that they have made their home, they seek to destroy it and all its values. This surely makes them as guilty as the 'infidels' who they despise so much, as the very reason they hate the West is that it meddles in the affairs of countries that are really none of its business.

While I suspect logic plays no part in it, perhaps we are reaching back in to the medieval way of thinking where an eye is demanded for an eye. But even if can accept this rationale I still cannot understand why the lives of innocent journalists, who almost undoubtedly held no more respect for their political leaders who dragged them into foreign conflicts than they did for religious fanatics who opposed them. These men were not the establishment, they were anything but. They didn't reserve their scorn for one religious or political faction, everyone was fair game and this is as it should be in a country where freedom of speech and of the press is a cornerstone of its society.

I am sure that the ramblings of a half asleep woman waiting for the pills to kick in so I can get some shut eye add not an iota to the debate that will rage about the implications and causes of this atrocity, but perhaps I can find a little peace for having blurted my thoughts out onto the glowing void of the internet.

A good night to you all and may those killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack rest more peacefully than I tonight.

#jesuischarlie