Burnt Offering (1)

The Fire Inside, Part One of Two

“This is our voice, we will not speak again.”¹

-Husna Begum

Grenfell Tower fire, 4:43 a.m., Natalie Oxford

In the early hours of the 9^th day of Ramadan, 1438 years after the Prophet Muhammad and his fledgling Muslim community fled persecution in Mecca for the sanctuary of Medina, an electrical fault became a fire in the kitchen of a small flat in West London. Within seconds that fire fanned outward greedily consuming all that it touched. Ten minutes after the initial flame, the local fire brigade was on the scene, but even with a team of firefighters fighting back, the fire could not be contained. It burst out of the kitchen window, its arms striking skywards. First, the fire crawled up the exterior façade and then wrapped its way around the other sides of the building at a “terrifying rate” enfolding the multi-storied tower in a horrific embrace.² Moving in and out and around and through the structure the fire became a conflagration. In less than 40 minutes the blaze had reached its fullest height engulfing the uppermost floors of the 24-storey living complex. In this terrible manner was the fire of Grenfell Tower brought into being on 14 June 2017. Its life was brief, but terrible. For more than 60 hours the fire raged, then sputtered, and finally smoldered before being brought to its demise on the 16^th of June. Before departing, however, the fire of Grenfell Tower took with it the lives of at least 72 people while injuring scores of others. The cost of the fire was grave and terrible.

In the days that followed the full extent of the lives lost gradually came into focus. As the news of the fire broke, the first loss named was Mohammed al-Haj Ali, a 23-year-old Syrian refugee. Mohammed had fled Syria in order to escape the escalating devastation of the Civil War in his homeland. Despite his flight in 2014 from his hometown of Daraa in southwest Syria to a two-bedroom flat on the 14^th floor of Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, West London, distance made no difference to the angel of death, malak al-mawt. As the Syrian Solidarity Campaign, a UK-based network of activists, poignantly described, “Mohammed undertook a dangerous journey to flee war and death in Syria, only to meet it here in the UK, in his own home…”³ In the chaos of the fire, Mohammed was separated from his brother Omar, who managed to escape. Mohammed had turned back finding two neighbors whom he would tend to until his eventual demise. He was trapped in the pyre of Grenfell Tower for another two hours before the blaze took his life. For two hours he waited for rescue as the flames ate through the structure floor-by-floor, flat-by-flat in its indiscriminate procession upwards and inwards. Mohammed spent those last two hours trying to reach and speak with his family and friends in faraway Syria.⁴ Although Mohammed’s body would spend its final moments in West London, his final words lingered in the ears of those from whom he had been separated more than 2000 miles away. This is life and death in displacement.

For many others who met their end in the Grenfell Tower fire, distance was everything and nothing. As the blaze raged, 5000 miles away in the town of Khoilshaura in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh Suzon Miah receives a frantic call from his cousin in London – “Uncle’s house is on fire, pray for him!”⁵ Suzon’s father, Komruh Miah, 82-years-old, having previously suffered a heart attack and two strokes, was physically unable to make his way out of his 17^th floor flat that he shared with his wife Rabiah Begum and their three grown children, Mohammed Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, and Husna Begum. As the fire worsened and the possibility of escape narrowed, Hamid, Hanif, and Husna refused to abandon their parents. Husna, who was only weeks away from her own wedding, left these final words for her loved ones beyond the encircling flames, “This is our voice, we will not speak again.”⁶ Relatives recounted that the trapped family spent their last moments together in prayer with the words of the Qur’an upon their lips.⁷

Sakineh Afrasiabi, from Abadan, Iran, lived one floor above them. She came to the United Kingdom in 1997 in order to raise her five children as a single mother after having separated from her husband. She had moved into Grenfell Tower a year before the fire. Despite requesting an accessible flat because of her walking disability, she was placed on the 18^th floor. The powers that be would not do otherwise. In this tower of the displaced, Sakineh opened up her home to fellow residents. In her year at Grenfell, her flat became a refuge for many refugees. Her doors were always open. On the night of the fire, her sister, Fatemeh, was visiting. Although they managed to make their way up to the 23^rd floor with the help of Afghan neighbors, the two sisters Sakineh and Fatemeh lost their lives to the blaze.

Sometime during their flight upwards, the sisters would have crossed paths with Mary Ajaoi Augustus Mendy (Mende) from Gambia and her British-born 24-year-old daughter Khadija Mohammadou Saye on the 20^th floor. Both mother and daughter had instead sought salvation in descent. In their hurried flight through escalating heat and building fumes, they were separated. The mother’s body was found seven floors down on the 13^th floor. The daughter made it down four more flights before succumbing to smoke inhalation and burns on the 9^th.⁸ In the months prior, Khadija, a gifted photographer, had been busy as her art garnered attention and acclaim. Indeed, while the fire raged in North Kensington, a series of her photographs were on display in Venice in the Diaspora Pavilion of the 57^th Venice Biennale, a renown international art exhibit.⁹ Despite the rising recognition of her artistry, larger structural forces of repression had been at work in her life. Just prior to the terrible fire, Khadija had been wrongfully arrested. Yet even after she was cleared, the police confiscated her phone leaving her without it on this fateful night.¹⁰ Instead she made use of social media on her computer to broadcast with urgency: “Please pray for me. There's a fire in my council block. I can’t leave the flat. Please pray for me and my mum.”¹¹ Sometime afterwards, she and her mother would wend their way down to their tragic ends.

Scores of others, at least seventy-two in total, lost their lives. As activist Daniel Renwick poignantly writes, “Britain is a country where deaths take place beyond the state’s count, bred by the processes of abandonment and callous indifference. It remains a possibility that there are names unspoken, who were lost in the fire.”¹² The fire took the young, old, and unborn indiscriminately. It took life regardless of ability. As journalist Mark Rice-Oxley observed the following year:

“The Grenfell lives closely mirror the complexities of modern Britain: young families scrambling for childcare cover and extra jobs to help pay the bills; people still living with parents well into their 20s and 30s; refugees who abandoned careers and status in perilous homelands for safe anonymity half a world away; the very elderly – there were seven victims aged over 70 – grappling with disability in a crowded health system.”¹³

The lives taken by the fire came from all walks of life.

Yet, when an account is made of the lives lost in the Grenfell Tower fire, it is not a matter of all things being equal. Not all segments of contemporary British society were equally effected. Grenfell Tower was a public housing complex. As local community organizer Pilgrim Tucker notes, “As social housing has been sold off, remaining tenants have come to be viewed as problems to be managed, not human beings owed respect and a voice.”¹⁴ The denizens of Grenfell were increasingly among the unwanted. Many other segments of British society were untouched and unscathed leaving a significant disproportionality evident in the ashes. Among the dead were a great number of immigrants, refugees, and their British-born children. Among the dead were a great number of those who claim kinship with the peoples of the global majority and the global South. Among the dead were a great number who identified as Muslim. Among the dead were a great number of the underserved, the overlooked, and the ignored. Among the dead were a great number of the marginalized and minoritized. These were the lives that were brought together in Grenfell Tower before the fire. Grenfell Tower is a complex that houses, contains, and obscures. Yet in the end, it was all reduced to fuel for the fire – a blanket of ashes without warmth, only grief. It was a burnt offering - a biblical holokautein, a qurbān - of darkened design by man and for man.

“Grenfell was a rupture, an event, which exposed truths otherwise hidden from view.”¹⁵

-Daniel Renwick, “Organising on Mute”

Burnt Offering: Controlled Burn, Part Two of Two

1. “Grenfell Tower: Global roots of fire victims,” BBC News, June 14, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44395591.

2. David Millward, “‘The whole building has gone’: Witnesses describe screams and tears at Grenfell Tower fire in London,” The Telegraph (June 14, 2017), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/14/whole-building-has-gone-witnesses-describe-screams-tears-tower/.

3. “London fire: Syrian victim Mohammed Alhajali family ‘can come to UK’,” BBC News, June 18, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40317674.

4. “London fire: First victim named as Mohammed Alhajali,” BBC News, June 15, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40294616; “London fire: First victim named as Mohammed Alhajali,” BBC News, June 15, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40294616.

5. “Grenfell Tower: Global roots of fire victims,” BBC News, June 14, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44395591.

6. “Grenfell Tower: Global roots of fire victims,” BBC News, June 14, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44395591.

7. Sandra Laville, Saiful Islam and Adil Mahmood, “The Lives of Grenfell Tower,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2018/may/14/lives-of-grenfell-tower-victims-fire.

8. Telegraph Reporters, “Five-year-old Grenfell fire victim died after his hand slipped from his neighbour’s grasp as they tried to escape,” The Telegraph, June 26, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/26/five-year-old-grenfell-fire-victim-died-hand-slipped-neighbours/.

9. David A. Bailey & Jessica Taylor, curators, “Diaspora Pavilion: May 13 – November 26, 2017, Palazzo Pisani S. Marina, Venice” (International Curators Forum, 2017), 42-43, https://static.labiennale.org/files/arte/Documenti/biennale-arte-2017c.pdf.

10. Alexandra Topping, “Khadija Saye: artist on cusp of recognition when she died in Grenfell,” The Guardian, June 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/17/khadija-saye-artist-was-on-cusp-of-recognition-when-she-died-in-grenfell.

11. Andrew Woodcock, “Grenfell Tower fire:24-year-old artist Khadija Saye named as victim,” The Independent, 16 June 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grenfell-tower-fire-victims-khadija-saye-24-year-old-artist-latest-update-a7793321.html.

12. Renwick relates earlier, “The conditions of the fire meant many bodies were incinerated. It was communicated by Fiona McCormick in June 2017 that ‘true death toll may never be known’.” Daniel Renwick, “Organising on Mute,” inAfter Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response, edited by Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins and Nadine El-Enany (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 29-30.

13. Mark Rice-Oxley, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/14/grenfell-the-71-victims-their-lives-loves-and-losses.

14. Pilgrim Tucker, “The Grenfell Tower fire was the end result of a disdainful housing policy,” The Guardian, June 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/20/grenfell-fire-housing-policy-social-housing-tenants.

15. Daniel Renwick, “Organising on Mute,” in After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response, edited by Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins and Nadine El-Enany (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 40.