Where women dare to tread: the act of reclaiming space

As a tourist, I’ve always judged the places I visit by one measure: not the quality of the restaurants or the beauty of scenery, but whether I could walk freely, without fear or obstruction. To be threatened or made to feel unwelcome in a strange place is harsh enough; when this happens in your own homeland, it leaves a searing scar.

Some years ago, writer and journalist Anita Sethi was travelling on a TransPennine Express train from Liverpool to Newcastle, when a stranger yelled that she was a “Paki ****” who did not belong in Britain. She recorded her abuser and reported him to the authorities.

Some time later, looking at a map, her eye was caught by the Pennines, the beautiful range of hills known as “the backbone of England”, and it inspired a desire to walk through the landscape as a way of reclaiming the space as her own.

The result is I Belong Here: A Journey Along The Backbone of Britain, the first volume in a planned trilogy from Sethi that combines nature writing and an exploration of roots and identities with personal memoir. “Humans have long hungered for footpaths, and that summer so did I,” she writes.

Sethi was born in Manchester. Her mother, born in Guyana, was part of the Windrush generation, one of the roughly half-million people who came to Britain from the Caribbean. Whenever she is asked, “Where are you from?” — or worse, told that “you don’t look like you come from here” — Sethi is firm: she does look like she belongs, because Manchester is home to so many people of colour. As she walks, she retraces the history of imperialism, slavery and empire that determined her place in the north of England — and in doing so, she makes a fierce plea for this painfully earned right to belong to be taught and explained.

I didn’t want to be a boy; I wanted the freedom I saw belonged to boys but not girls’

For many years, the catalogue of literary explorers, walkers and flâneurs — from Soren Kierkegaard and Henry David Thoreau to Charles Baudelaire and Ernest Hemingway — was mostly male and mostly white. Even the more recent genre of nature writing has tended to continue this demographic trend, and yet within the last two decades there has been a shift.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Open City by Nigerian-American writer, photographer and critic Teju Cole. This remarkable novel follows Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatry student whose night walks around Manhattan and the wider city grow longer and longer, introducing a moving cast of New Yorkers, many of them immigrants. Open City reclaimed the streets for different groups of writers, and I remember the thrill, as a reader, of walking invisibly alongside Julius, invited inside the lives of people who rarely found their way into fiction.

But in 2018, Cole was moved to write an anguished Facebook post after two black men were arrested in a branch of Starbucks in Philadelphia, an incident that was widely seen as an example of glaring racial bias: “We are not safe even in the most banal place . . . This is why I always say you can’t be a black flâneur. Flânerie is for whites. For blacks in white terrain, all spaces are charged. Cafés, restaurants, museums, shops. Your own front door. We wander alert, and pay a heavy psychic toll for that vigilance. Can’t relax, black.”

Gender, as well as race, has played its role in creating what Sethi calls “barriers of place”. I felt an instant jolt of recognition when reading “Power Walking”, the brilliant 2018 essay by Scottish-Sierra Leonean writer Aminatta Forna, in which she wrote about the act of walking alone and female down a street: “I didn’t want to be a boy; I wanted the freedom I saw belonged to boys but not girls.”

It’s a theme that underpins works including Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000), Rebecca Solnit’s magnificent study of cultural, political and spiritual quests — and also Lauren Elkin’s Flaneuse: Women Walk the City (2016), her account of women, from Virginia Woolf to Agnes Varda, who asserted their right to wander like men. But it has been explored in a number of recent novels too. In Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, for example, the women protagonists claim their own cities or the places they visit with their feet, their restlessness, their urge to explore despite resistance or hostility.

On her walking journey through the Pennines, Sethi encounters a warmer welcome than she or the reader might expect: a hug from a small child on a railway platform, kind advice from an elderly couple. As she takes in details along the way — ancient lichens dating back to the Ice Age, for instance, or the Horton Women’s Holiday Centre, built in 1980 as a place of rest and refuge for women who might not otherwise be able to afford a holiday — Sethi slowly but surely finds her way home.

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