'It's all God's earth'

So why are we obsessed with ownership?

I caught a really interesting long read by The Guardian last week. It was entitled, ‘We tried to be joyful enough to deserve our  new lives’: What it’s really like to be a refugee in Britain. When Zarlasht Halaimzai’s family is confronted by an assessor at a UK immigration centre who demands: ‘Why here? Why the UK?’, we read that after being shocked into silence, her mother finally responds: ‘It’s all God’s earth’. And since reading that, those four words have been stuck in my head. 

I’m currently staying in a wonderful penthouse apartment with incredible views over London and as I looked out the other day I noticed that there were signs of ownership on everything. There are floor markings everywhere with everyone from private car park companies to local councils claiming their spot. Mine not yours. You have to pay to be here. Tall commercial buildings engraved with their household name owners. We built this. I own this. Property developers stake their claim on boarded up sites with towering scaffolding. This is ours. You can buy from us. And it’s weird because as I looked down it started to feel very claustrophobic. No wonder Londoners are commonly tetchy, we’re all fighting for space!

Britain has a complicated history with ownership. The slow unveiling of its not-so-secret colonial past reveals a pattern of destruction and takeover, with many of its spoils creating the old money wealth of many landowners. I read a book recently which touched upon certain parts of England that consist of a huge estate and surrounding land on which residents are highly taxed as and when the landowner sees fit. They own the land, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But at some point it was just free land, right? God created it and humans ‘discovered it’ and made plans to live in it. The history of human ownership is basically just a long list of tenants.

I had this discussion with a friend of mine who made a good point: If someone has worked hard to buy land (from whoever happened to own it at the time of purchase) then why shouldn’t they enjoy that ownership; that piece of the earth that they claim as their own. And I get that, I totally do, but should we? Should we be working hard to claim land for ourselves? What gives us the right to claim exclusivity on land and exclude others - our fellow human beings.

I’m a Christian but I’ll be honest, there are definitely parts of the Bible that don’t make a lot of sense to me (yet…?), especially the many, many laws in the Old Testament. But I’m starting to understand Leviticus 25:23 which is part of a long list of instructions from God to the Israelites via Moses: 

‘The land must never be sold on a permanent basis, for the land belongs to me. You are only foreigners and tenant farmers working for me.’

Ouch, burn. But it’s true, how can we really claim to own a piece of land that we didn’t create?

In my recent nomadic season, where I’ve been the long-term guest of friends and family during this period of illness, I’ve seen people do the opposite of this marking of territory. I’ve seen people open their homes to me and welcome me as if it were mine. I’ve been given space in rooms that don’t belong to me and clothes to compensate for inadequate packing. My dietary needs have been accounted for in household grocery shops and my presence has not been seen as an inconvenience; more a welcome addition received with open arms. 

In theory I understand why immigration doesn’t work like that. Countries are “overcrowded”, we don’t have “enough resources”, there needs to be a “system”, people will “take advantage”. Blah blah blah I get it, I get it. But what if it did work like that? What if we treated it the same way we do when we have family members who have lost their own homes or friends who have nowhere else to go.

Idealistic? Perhaps. But for the little corner of the world in which I reside, this has taught me to be more conscious about sharing “my” spaces with my fellow human beings, every chance I get.

Doll x