The possibility of a migrant backyard

Nikola Lero

Photo by Anton Borzenkov on Unsplash

Marinko keeps four white plastic chairs stacked against the back wall of his garden in west London. He owns the house and the fence. The chairs come down two or three times a year. Last summer's family gathering, the one with the lamb and the cousins and the music, happened in a village in central Serbia, in a yard belonging to somebody else. Marinko has a garden. What he wants is a dvorište, and he is clear that these are not the same thing. A dvorište is the yard of a Balkan house: ground held by a low wall and a gate that is usually open, where much of domestic life happens outdoors. The table, the cooking, the long coffee, the christening, the neighbour who walks in without ringing and stays two hours. It is a domestic space that is half public, and the English back garden is not its equivalent.

Serbs and other Yugoslavs have been arriving in Britain since 1945: first displaced persons and exiles who could not return to Tito's state, then labour migrants in the 1960s and 1970s, when Yugoslavia let its citizens work abroad as no other socialist state did, then refugees from the wars of the 1990s, and most recently people from countries that did not exist when the first group left. It is one of the older continuous European migrations to Britain and one of the least examined, partly because these are white, unmarked migrants who barely register in British immigration debate. My research at Sheffield follows eighteen of them across the three waves, through life histories, life mapping and the kind of long visiting that migration research has come to rely on. I treat home as a spatial question as much as a cultural one.

Home does particular work in displacement. It is where an interrupted life is reassembled, and for people whose country has ceased to exist there is no original left to check the copy against. Paolo Boccagni calls this work homing: the continuous attempt to recreate a lost home elsewhere, an attempt that never quite succeeds and therefore never stops. Homing runs backwards, towards the home that was left, and forwards, towards what Boccagni calls the aspired home, the one still wanted. My material suggests the forward direction does more than we usually credit it with. Imagining a home is an activity rather than a mood, and a sociospatial one, because what is imagined is an arrangement of ground, boundaries and people rather than a feeling. The dvorište is the clearest case I found.

It came up in two kinds of story, the house that was left and the house that might still be bought, and in three registers.

The first is the dvorište as zelenilo, greenery. Aleksandra, who arrived as a child in the seventies, described her grandmother's yard through what grew in it; the jars, the drying, the arithmetic of how much you plant for how many people. Half memory of a Yugoslav household economy in which the garden did real work, half claim about what a proper life looks like.

The second is the dvorište as leisure, described with the most tenderness: the table dragged outside for no reason, coffee at four, the white chairs. Milica told me about summers near Kraljevo where nothing in particular happened for weeks. This yard is unprogrammed, and nothing in it has to be planned.

The third carries the most weight, the dvorište as a social space, the outdoor form of gostoprimstvo. Gordana described her mother's yard in Belgrade as a place where the question of who was invited never arose, since people simply appeared. Svetislav has spent a decade redrawing the plans of a house he has not bought, and he draws the outdoor table before he draws the bedrooms. That is the aspired home in one gesture.

Then the part that made me want to write this. The participants who do have outdoor space here mostly told me it was not the same, and Marinko is the sharpest example, since he owns everything and it still has not happened. Some reasons are ordinary. Those in flats share outdoor space that belongs to everyone and can be claimed by no one. The English garden is built for privacy, fenced high and turned inward, while the dvorište needs a low boundary and sight lines, since being seen is how people are joined. And it needs a street where other households live the same way, which no single household can arrange. One yard on a London street, however well kept, is a garden with the wrong furniture in it.

So the dvorište neither disappears from these lives nor arrives in them. It stays in the aspired home, in the plans, in the house that might still be bought, in the drawings my participants made when I asked them to map their lives. That is where it is stable. Nobody can sell it, refuse it planning permission or price it out of London. As a possibility it survives everything that would finish it as a property, and it keeps working: shaping what counts as an acceptable flat, what people save for, why some buy something modest back in Serbia instead of upgrading here. This is the point at which imagination stops being consolation and becomes part of the housing. The migrant struggle for ontological security is a struggle for continuity of self, and here that continuity is carried by a place which has never been built and may never be. British multiculturalism has no instrument for seeing this. It is generous with culture and mean with space: it will recognise a church, fund a festival, celebrate the food, and never notice that a way of living needs a shape of ground to happen on, a low fence, an open gate, someone able to see you and come over. Recognition stops at the property line. Marinko's chairs stay stacked. The dvorište stays possible, which is the form hope takes once the country is gone.

Nikola Lero 

Nikola is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield's School of Architecture and Landscape, working on home, bordering and ontological security among Yugoslav-Serb migrants in London. He was born in Sarajevo, grew up in Bijeljina, and writes poetry.