Listen to the past

The Museum of Immigration and Diversity off Brick Lane asks some uneasy questions. Yet it must be visited when it opens to the public this May, says ZIYA US SALAM, just back from London.

ALL OF us are immigrants or descended from immigrants, it just depends how far back you look. It is a simple message, written simply on a tattered suitcase at London's Museum of Immigration and Diversity on Princelet Street, just off Brick Lane. Not too far off is Altab Ali Park, dedicated to a Bangla victim of a hate crime some 25 years ago. The place has its own way of imparting lessons to posterity. And learning from the mistakes of the past.

The place, open to public only for a few days every year - on Sundays in May and June - is a symbolic if a decrepit building, a far cry for tourists who come to London with fancy notions of Buckingham Palace and London Eye, et al. On the edge of East London, the place from the main road is as easy to locate as a needle in a haystack. Venture a bit further, beyond endless Bangla and Indian cuisine restaurants, beyond Brick Lane's Jama Masjid, down Princelet Street and you come across a building redolent with history. It is a place where the past sits in an uneasy coexistence with more of the past. A place where Spitalfields Centre guys have sought to preserve the varied threads of history with Suitcases and Sanctuary exhibition, an exhibition where children ask you uneasy questions about your faith, urging you to shed prejudices. It is a sorrowful exhibition, also one that touches you. Pick up a phone receiver and a child asks you to listen to the past, make it a tool to understand your origin, not a weapon to fight those different.

Beyond a front creaky gate and damp floor that serves to heighten the London cold, you step into a small courtyard. Here you find many suitcases casually flung across. No, they only appear to be casual. They all have a purpose, the purpose of telling us about one segment of the humanity's shared past, shared troubles. On the walls, they have a message: Listen to the building. In almost all the languages. Hence, you find messages scribbled in Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu besides English and many European languages.

It was built in 1719 by the Ogier family, Huguenot silk weavers who had fled persecution in France. They were affluent refugees surrounded by poorer economic immigrants. The Ogiers moved on to better places and the house was subdivided into lodgings and workplaces. The weavers worked here, traders moved in. Then came the Irish who found refuge here due to the 19th Century potato famine back home. The Jews had earlier come in from Poland, Lithuania and Russia. In 1869, they built a synagogue. They prospered, moved on, in came Bengalis, Somalis, the Caribbeans. The building continued to play host to refugees from all over.

Until Tassaduq Ahmed from Bangladesh began the process of saving the building from further deterioration. It became a living museum for those looking for a window to humanity's past, a lifeline to real Britain, for the pulse of those who gave the essence of their culture to Britain's diversity. It is a site of national importance, in the top four per cent of all listed buildings in Britain.

As you begin to feel comfortable in the notion that all the misdoings are hopefully in the past, a voice, that of a child still in single digit years, stumps you. "If you are leaving your home, what is the one thing that you would carry," the voice asks you. You fumble for an answer. Will it be just memories? Will it be shared childhood? Will it be faith? Never mind. The answer can never be easy. Yet it is pertinent to have one, just as one must visit this museum even if stirs a few uneasy relationships.

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