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Two months into this year-long project and I'm already finding it difficult to document the work. Its scale is both small (the embroidered scenes) and enormous (the canvas scroll itself).

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Shoutout to my creative community! There was something in the air this month. I appreciate you.

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Theresa May reportedly plans to end rights given to EU nationals under freedom of movement rules when she triggers Article 50 next month, with a Government source claiming that "half of Romania and Bulgaria" might otherwise come to the UK before Brexit.

The Daily Telegraph reported the Prime Minister was expected to announce that EU citizens arriving after a "cut-off date" of around 15 March would not be entitled to live in the UK permanently.

However, under the plan, the 3.6m EU citizens who are already in Britain and others who come before that date would have their rights protected - providing the same was true for UK citizens living in the EU.

​Iain Duncan Smith, a Eurosceptic Conservative MP, said: "Theresa understands that if you want to take control you have to command the high ground.

"She will be giving clarity by setting a clear deadline while the European Union looks increasingly muddled and mean-spirited."

The European Union has apparently argued that the cut-off date should be the same date as the day the UK actually leaves the EU.

It is unclear if the Government's plan would be a breach of the EU treaties that guarantee freedom of movement.

UK businesses already facing recruitment crisis as Poles head home

A Government source told the Telegraph: "We have had some suggestion that the European Commission might attempt to force us to protect everyone who arrives up to the moment of departure.

"We could end up with half of Romania and Bulgaria coming here if we wait that long."

There are about 1.2 million British citizens living in other EU countries. It has been suggested that they could be offered EU citizenship individually.

How Brexit affected Britain's favourite foods from Weetabix to Marmite

British employers have expressed concerns about the prospect of finding enough staff in the event of a 'hard Brexit', particularly if EU citizens were required to leave.

The European Parliament has announced it is investigating the UK's treatment of EU nationals living here amid reports that some have been met by a "bureaucratic wall" when they have tried to secure a legal right to remain in Britain.

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May 'to end EU citizens rights to live permanently in UK within days'

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Theresa May reportedly plans to end rights given to EU nationals under freedom of movement rules when she triggers Article 50 next month, with a Government source claiming that "half of Romania and Bulgaria" might otherwise come to the UK before Brexit.

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Authorities in Kansas filed first-degree murder charges against a man accused of opening fire in a bar there, killing one Indian man, injuring two other people and causing fears about bigotry to reverberate across the globe.

According to witness accounts, the gunman reportedly told two of the people who were shot - both Indian men who work for Garmin, the technology firm - to "get out of my country" before opening fire and had also used racial slurs during the Wednesday evening shooting.

Multiple law enforcement agents launched an investigation into the deadly shooting inside Austin's Bar and Grill in Olathe, a city about 20 miles southwest of Kansas City. Even as authorities said they had not yet identified a motive for the attack, relatives of the Indian men said they feared the shooting was connected to a climate of fear and xenophobia in America.

The father of one of the people injured pointed to the election of President Trump, who has routinely described a threat posed to Americans from people outside the country's borders, and pleaded with parents in India "not to send their children to the United States."

The White House responded by calling the link to Trump's rhetoric absurd, according to Reuters.

JUST IN: White House, speaking about Kansas shooting, says any loss of life is tragic but absurd to link to president's rhetoric

- Reuters U.S. News (@ReutersUS) February 24, 2017

Police identified the suspected attacker in Olathe as Adam W. Purinton, 51, and said he was taken into custody in Missouri a little more than a day after the shooting.

One of the Indian men shot during the attack - Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32 - died in the hospital later from his wounds, the Olathe police said. The other - Alok Madasani, 32, of Overland Park, Kan. - was released from the hospital Thursday.

The shooting also injured 24-year-old Ian Grillot, another patron at Austin's, who apparently tried to intervene.

[Hailed a hero after Kansas bar shooting, victim said he did 'what was naturally right to do']

Witnesses told the Kansas City Star and The Washington Post that Purinton was thought to have been kicked out of the bar Wednesday night before the shooting took place. 

"He seemed kind of distraught," Garret Bohnen, a regular at Austin's who was there that night, told The Post in an interview. "He started drinking pretty fast."

He reportedly came back into the bar and hurled racial slurs at the two Indian men, including comments that suggested he thought they were of Middle Eastern descent. When he started firing shots, Grillot, a regular at the bar whom Bohnen called "everyone's friend," moved to get involved.

Authorities have not released many details about the attack. They have not said the shooting was a hate crime, instead saying they are investigating to see if it was spurred by bias. During a briefing Thursday, officials cautioned that it was still early in the investigation and declined to offer a motive for the shooting.

"As far as the motivation in this case and the facts surrounding it ... what we want to do is we want to be able to be sure of our facts versus speculation," Johnson County District Attorney Stephen M. Howe said at the briefing.

On Friday afternoon, Howe noted that Kansas has no hate crime statute, saying that such charges would have to be federal:

KS does not have hate crime statute-those charges have to be in fed court. If convicted in District Court as charged, Purinton faces Hard 50

- Johnson County KS DA (@JohnsonCoDA) February 24, 2017

Kuchibhotla and Madasani are both Indian nationals, a spokesman for India's Ministry of External Affairs said.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said in tweets that she had contacted Kuchibhotla's family, in the southern city of Hyderabad, and was making arrangements to have his remains sent there.

"I have spoken to the father and Mr. K. K. Shastri brother of Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Hyderabad and conveyed my condolences to the family," she tweeted. Two diplomats from the Indian Consulate in Houston were "rushing" to Kansas to assist, Swaraj said.

['I appeal to all the parents in India not to send their children' to the U.S., distraught father says after shooting]

The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi also released a statement condemning the shooting. Chargé d'Affaires MaryKay Carlson called it "a tragic and senseless act," adding that the United States is a "nation of immigrants and welcomes people from across the world to visit, work, study, and live."

Family members of the two men said in interviews that they feared the current atmosphere in the United States.

"There is a kind of hysteria spreading that is not good because so many of our beloved children live there," said Venu Madhav, a relative of Kuchibhotla. "Such hatred is not good for people."

Madhav said that "something has changed in the United States."

Relatives of the two Indian men shot Wednesday told the Hindustan Times that they were friends who had not antagonized Purinton, and that Purinton had instead "picked an argument" with them and suggested they were illegally in the country.

"They tried to tell him that they had done their [master's degrees] in Kansas in 2006 and had been staying there with valid work permits," a relative said.

[Three Kansas men calling themselves 'Crusaders' charged in terror plot targeting Muslim immigrants]

Madasani's father, Jaganmohan Reddy, told the Times he has recently begun to ask his son to return home, fearing that he might not be safe in the country's racially charged atmosphere, with ugly incidents and hate groups on the rise.

"The situation seems to be pretty bad after Trump took over as the U.S. president. I appeal to all the parents in India not to send their children to the United States in the present circumstances," Reddy said.

Eric K. Jackson, the FBI special agent in charge in Kansas City, said that authorities will work to determine if the attack was "bias motivated," but said they "need to have time to thoroughly go through the investigation."

Purinton was taken into custody late Thursday in Clinton, Mo., about 80 miles away, and by Friday afternoon he had been returned to Johnson County, where he was being held in a detention center four miles from Austin's.

Howe said Thursday that Purinton was charged with one count of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder. Purinton's bond was set at $2 million, according to court documents.

[Alabama police officer arrested after Indian grandfather left partially paralyzed]

It was not immediately clear if Purinton had an attorney. He is scheduled to appear in court for his arraignment on Monday afternoon.

Court records show that Purinton had faced criminal charges in the past for vehicular episodes, one in 2008 for speeding and another pair of counts in 1999 alleging that he was driving under the influence and made an unsafe turn. The Kansas City Star described Purinton as a Navy veteran, former pilot and air traffic controller who lives in "a comfortable suburban home."

Bridget Patton, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Kansas, said Friday that the bureau was continuing to work with local police to investigate and "determine if there were any civil rights violations."

In a statement Friday, Garmin said the company, which has an office in Olathe, was grieving over the incident and working to support the families of its employees.

"We're devastated by the senseless tragedy that took the life of one of our associates and friends, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, and injured another, Alok Madasani," the statement said.

The company also sent their thoughts to Grillot, "deemed the 'Good Samaritan' for his heroic efforts that fatal evening."

In a public video released by the University of Kansas Health System, Grillot spoke from his hospital bed about what unfolded. When he heard shots being fired, he crouched under a table. Hearing nine shots, Grillot expected the man's magazine to be empty, but soon realized he must have miscounted.

"I got behind him, and he turned around and fired at me," Grillot said. The bullets went through his right hand and chest, fracturing a vertebrae and his neck, and barely missing his carotid artery.

"I'm grateful to be alive," he said. "Another half inch and I could be dead or never walk again."

He spent the night in the hospital praying that the two other men had survived the shooting, he said. When he saw Madasani enter his hospital room Thursday morning, "it put the biggest smile on my face," Grillot said. He soon found out that Madasani's wife is five months pregnant.

"I was just doing what anyone should've done for another human being," Grillot said, his eyes filling with tears. "It's not about where he's from or his ethnicity. We're all humans. I just felt like I did what was naturally right to do."

The Kansas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called Thursday for state and federal hate crime charges to be brought against Purinton "in order to send a strong message that violence targeting religious or ethnic minorities will not be tolerated," CAIR-Kansas Board Chair Moussa Elbayoumy said in a statement.

Elbayoumy also noted that the same day as the shooting, two Kansas men were sentenced for their roles in an assault on a black Somali man in Dodge City, Kan.

According to the Justice Department, Armando Sotelo, 24, was sentenced to two years of supervised release in that case, while Omar Cantero Martinez, 32, was sentenced to 26 months in prison and two years of supervised release for committing perjury during the hate-crimes prosecution into that assault.

In the fall, federal prosecutors charged three Kansas men with plotting to attack an apartment complex, mosque and many Muslim immigrants from Somalia.

A picture has begun to emerge of the men who were shot on Wednesday. According to Kuchibhotla's LinkedIn account, he held a master's degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso and earned his bachelor's degree at the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in India. Madasani's LinkedIn profile said he studied at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and at Vasavi College of Engineering in India.

Kavipriya Muthuramalingam, a good friend of Kuchibhotla's, said in an interview with The Post that the two were part of a tightknit group of friends who all used to work at the aerospace company Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She said Kuchibhotla was a kind, levelheaded and technically skilled friend who was always smiling. She called him "one of the best people you've ever met in your life" and "the perfect example of a decent gentleman."

Muthuramalingam, who now lives in Irvine, Calif., said she and her fellow Indian friends had not yet begun to discuss any potentially racially biased motives of the shooting. She said "it affects us all on different levels," but for now, they were all "just focusing on the fact that such a good person was lost."

She started a GoFundMe account to help relieve medical and funeral expenses for Kuchibhotla's wife, Sunayana, and their family. By Friday afternoon, the page had raised over $385,000.

Bohnen, the regular at Austin's who was there that night and who has worked there in the past, said Kuchibhotla and Madasani would come in all the time. Though they kept to themselves, they were always friendly and willing to share a cigarette or take shots of gin with Bohnen.

Austin's staff gathered at an employee's house Wednesday night to help each other grapple with the night's events, and on Thursday, employees went into the bar to help clean up. Owner Brandon Blum wrote on the bar's Web page that he hoped to reopen Austin's by Saturday. Outside the bar, flowers were left at a makeshift memorial, the Kansas City Star reported.

"We are so sorry that this happened on our premises," Blum wrote. "We have never experienced any sort of tragedy like this in our 30 years."

From his hospital bed, Grillot said he had been planning on going fishing this weekend before the shooting occurred. So after recovering, that was the first thing he looked forward to doing. He also said he hoped to get together with Madasani, "the gentleman I've now become best friends with," and meet his son once he is born.

"After last night, we're definitely going to be spending a little bit of time together," he said. "Don't think it's going to be at the bar, though. Maybe some grilling in the backyard with a beer or two."
Annie Gowen and Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi contributed to this report, which has been updated since it was first published.
More reading:

'This is not Trump's America!': Passengers rejoice when man accused of racism is kicked off flight
Trump 'will get rid of all of you': Man allegedly attacks Muslim airline employee

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He yelled 'Get out of my country,' witnesses say, and then shot 2 men from India, killing one

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Authorities in Kansas filed first-degree murder charges against a man accused of opening fire in a bar there, killing one Indian man, injuring two other people and causing fears about bigotry to reverberate across the globe.

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PARIS - Henry Rousso is one of France's most preeminent scholars and public intellectuals. Last week, as the historian attempted to enter the United States to attend an academic symposium, he was detained for more than 10 hours - for no clear reason.

On Wednesday, Rousso arrived at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport after an 11-hour flight from Paris, en route to Texas A&M University in College Station. There, he was to speak Friday afternoon at the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study.

But things did not go according to plan: Rousso - an Egyptian-born French citizen - was "mistakenly detained" by U.S. immigration authorities, according to Richard Golsan, director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M.

"When he called me with this news two nights ago, he was waiting for customs officials to send him back to Paris as an illegal alien on the first flight out," Golsan said Friday at the symposium, according to the Eagle, a newspaper that covers the College Station area.

The university then sprang into action, the Eagle reported, with President Michael Young reaching out to law professor Fatma Marouf, who earlier this month had assisted in writing an amicus brief against President Trump's executive order banning refugees from around the world and travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations.

Marouf quickly and successfully intervened with immigration authorities, and Rousso was released and allowed to deliver his lecture.

After weeks of headlines related to Trump's travel ban, incident drew immediate attention around the world -- especially in a France on the eve of presidential elections this coming April and May.

Emmanuel Macron, the popular centrist candidate for the French presidency, used the Rousso affair to repeat his pitch to U.S. scientists and researchers who he has said would be better off in France rather than in the America of Donald Trump.

"There is no excuse for what happened to Henry Rousso," Macron wrote Sunday on Twitter. "Our country is open to scientists and intellectuals."

There is no excuse for what happened to @Henry_Rousso. Our country is open to scientists and intellectuals. #WelcomeToFrance https://t.co/grMSltIUVy

- Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) February 26, 2017

For his part, Rousso confirmed the details of his experience Saturday on Twitter: "I have been detained 10 hours at Houston Itl Airport about to be deported. The officer who arrested me was 'inexperienced.'"

I confirm. I have been detained 10 hours at Houston Itl Airport about to be deported. The officer who arrested me was "inexperienced" https://t.co/SdIKWKQbnr

- Henry Rousso (@Henry_Rousso) February 26, 2017

It remains unclear what about Rousso was identified as suspect by immigration authorities.

Egypt - from which Rousso and his family, as Jews, were exiled in 1956, after a slew of anti-Semitic measures imposed by the administration of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz - was not among the seven nations in the travel ban, which had been suspended by the time he arrived in the United States.

[Who is affected by the travel ban?]

Furthermore, France is a beneficiary of the U.S. visa waiver program, which permits French citizens to enter the United States without a visa. All that is required is an online ESTA application before departure.

For Marouf, Rousso's ordeal was indicative of a strict new U.S. border control regime: "It seems like there's much more rigidity and rigor in enforcing these immigration requirements and technicalities of every visa," she told the Eagle.

Rousso's scholarship focuses on the memory of the Vichy regime, the darkest chapter in modern French history, when the government of unoccupied France collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II. Vichy authorities are particularly infamous for assisting the Germans in rounding up and deporting tens of thousands of Jews from France during the Holocaust, which Rousso once called "the past that does not pass."

He spoke Friday on a similar subject in College Station, in a lecture titled "Writing on the Dark Side of the Recent Past."

Fellow historians took to social media after news of Rousso's experience, many pointing out what they considered the uncomfortable irony of the arbitrary detention of a Holocaust historian.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, said on Twitter, "His work on cost of forgetting past (Vichy) so relevant."

Soldiarity to my historian collesgue @Henry_Rousso detained by US Customs on visit. His work on cost of forgetting past (Vichy) so relevant https://t.co/XCNQaq4gpt

- Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) February 25, 2017

"Thank you so much for your reactions," Rousso posted Saturday evening on Twitter in response. "My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn't be defended as I was."

Thank you so much for your reactions. My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn't be defended as I was.

- Henry Rousso (@Henry_Rousso) February 26, 2017

"It is now necessary to deal with the utmost arbitrariness and incompetence on the other side of the Atlantic," Rousso wrote Sunday in the French edition of the Huffington Post. "What I know, in loving this country forever, is that the United States is no longer quite the United States."

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U.S. detains and nearly deports French Holocaust historian

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PARIS - Henry Rousso is one of France's most preeminent scholars and public intellectuals. Last week, as the historian attempted to enter the United States to attend an academic symposium, he was detained for more than 10 hours - for no clear reason.

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A state governor has banned his employees from cooperating with Donald Trump's policies on immigration.

Jay Inslee signed an executive order that bars the state of Washington's agencies from denying services to people based on their citizenship or legal status and from helping detain immigrants for breaking civil rules.

It came after memos were released by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly showing his department planned to prioritise the removal of undocumented immigrants who "have been convicted of any criminal offence", following directives from the President.

This will include those who "have abused any programme related to receipt of public benefits".

The controversial orders Donald Trump has already issued

Governor Inslee said: "Washington will not be a willing participant in promoting or carrying out mean-spirited policies that break up families and compromise our national security and community safety.

"Our officers are here to keep the public safe by enforcing the criminal laws, not to act as [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers or enforce civil violations."

He added that it reaffirmed "the state's commitment to tolerance, diversity, and inclusiveness" and the order was "designed to ensure that all state agencies under my executive authority carry out only those duties and responsibilities prescribed to them in state and federal law."

He said: "In Washington state we know this: we do not discriminate based on someone's race, religion, ethnicity or national origin. That remains true even as federal policies create such uncertain times."

Washington agencies must comply to the extent to which they are permitted under federal law, he said. The agencies are ordered not to collect any more information about people than is necessary to perform their basic duties.

Mr Inslee's office said immigrants make up 17 per cent of Washington's workforce and contribute some $2.4bn (£1.9bn) in taxes.

Mr Kelly has insisted there will be "no mass deportations" during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.

He told reporters in Mexico City there would be "no use of military force for immigration operations" and said enforcing new policies would be done legally and with respect for human rights.

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Governor signs executive order ordering people not to follow Trump's executive orders

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A state governor has banned his employees from cooperating with Donald Trump's policies on immigration. Jay Inslee signed an executive order that bars the state of Washington's agencies from denying services to people based on their citizenship or legal status and from helping detain immigrants for breaking civil rules.

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Income rules which stop thousands of British citizens bringing their foreign spouse to the UK are lawful "in principle" the Supreme Court has ruled.

But children's welfare must be promoted in immigration decisions, judges said.

As of 2012, Britons must earn more than £18,600 ($23,140) before a husband or wife from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) can settle in the UK.

Judges rejected an appeal by families who argued that the rules breached their human right to a family life.

Seven Supreme Court justices hearing the case said the minimum income requirement was "acceptable in principle".

But they criticised the rules around it, saying they failed to take "proper account" of the duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children when making decisions which affect them.

And they ruled there should be an amendment to allow alternative sources of funding, other than a salary or benefits, to be considered in a claim.

Taxpayer impact

The rules were introduced by the former coalition government to stop foreign spouses becoming reliant on taxpayers.

The minimum income threshold, which also affects people settled in the UK as refugees, rises to £22,400 ($27,870) if the couple have a child who does not have British citizenship - and then by an additional £2,400 ($2,986) for each subsequent child.

The markers replaced a previous, more general, requirement to show the Home Office that the incoming partner would not be a drain on public resources and that the couple or family could adequately support themselves.

They do not take into account the earnings of the overseas partner - even if they have higher qualifications, or are likely to be employed in higher-paid work than their British spouse.

And the threshold does not apply to spouses from within the EEA.
Visa rules "creating price on love"
"Just because she happens to fall in love with me and I have the wrong passport, she isn't allowed to live with me in her own country," says Spencer Russ, an American who may be deported from the UK, where he lives with his British wife, Laura Segan.
Read more about families split by the rules
Delivering their judgement, the justices said the government's rules had the "legitimate" aim of ensuring "that the couple do not have recourse to benefits and have sufficient resources to play a full part in British life".

But they said the rules fail because they do not treat "the best interests of children as a primary consideration".

Analysis
By BBC Home Affairs correspondent, Dominic Casciani
While the couples in this case have won their appeals it's not much of a victory when the Supreme Court has clearly ruled the system is compatible with human rights.

Campaigners say they are delighted. But the government now knows the principle of the policy has been endorsed by the highest court in the land as a legitimate way to control immigration.

So what does that mean in practical terms?

The Home Office will need to make sure that each decision takes into account the rights of children - and whether a couple have other assets - perhaps a home, savings or substantial financial support from family.

That will benefit some of the families - but it also means that in the long run some of the most affected people from poorer Asian communities may still be unable to get permission to bring their husband or wife to Britain.

The justices heard appeals in February 2016 from a series of test cases.

Two claimants, Abdul Majid and Shabana Javed, are British citizens who have partners who are Pakistani nationals.

The third is a Lebanese refugee who cannot find suitable work in the UK despite his postgraduate qualifications. He says his similarly-qualified wife has high earning potential and speaks fluent English.

A final case concerns another recognised refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo whose wife has been barred from settling.

In their ruling on Wednesday, the panel, led by Supreme Court deputy president Lady Hale, held that the minimum income requirement (MIR) "is acceptable in principle", but that the rules and instructions "unlawfully fail to take proper account" of the Home Secretary's duty under the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 to have regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children when making decisions which affect them.

The court ruled on the "instructions also require amendment to allow consideration of alternative sources of funding when evaluating a claim" under Article 8 (right to private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

'Heartless' rules

Satbir Singh is a British citizen who is unable to bring his wife to the UK from India, because his more than £60,000 a year income comes from more than one source.

He said the vast majority of those affected "won't get any respite from this ruling, don't have the resources to visit each other, who might have children who are growing up without parents".

"It's terribly frustrating to find that very important components of the quality of your life are dictated by a very heartlessly thought out set of rules which seem targeted at nothing apart from achieving a certain set of numbers that the government has set for itself," he said.

'Significant victory'

A Home Office spokesman said the court had endorsed its approach in setting an income threshold for family migration that prevents burdens on the taxpayer and ensures migrant families can integrate into our communities.

"This is central to building an immigration system that works in the national interest," they said.

The current rules remained in force, they said, "but we are carefully considering what the court has said in relation to exceptional cases where the income threshold has not been met, particularly where the case involves a child".

Saira Grant, chief executive at campaigning charity the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, also welcomed the ruling - as a "real victory for families".

She said the rules had been "tearing families apart and significantly harming children".

The ruling on considering alternative funding sources was "a significant victory" and the government must now "take immediate steps to protect the welfare of children in accordance with their legal duty".

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Income rules which stop thousands of British citizens bringing their foreign spouse to the UK are lawful "in principle" the Supreme Court has ruled. But children's welfare must be promoted in immigration decisions, judges said. As of 2012, Britons must earn more than £18,600 ($23,140) before a husband or wife from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) can settle in the UK.

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by Kiri Kankhwende Follow @madomasi

It almost sounds like the start of a joke: three migrants walked into a bar. One of us had received some bad news on the way to the #OneDayWithoutUs rally on Monday and we needed to stop and talk.

My friend, a non-EU migrant, had just found out that his work visa had been rejected because of an administrative blunder. I didn't have much to offer him except a hug and my understanding of what it feels like to have your future hanging in the balance in a system that's designed to frustrate rather than facilitate justice.

Wherever you sit in the system, there's usually someone worse off. My friend was daunted by the appeals process that lay ahead but expressed relief that at least he didn't have a family to worry about as well.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled on the case of three families who have been separated as a result of the minimum income requirement for non-EU spouses to join their other halves here in the UK. The court upheld the rule, which currently sets the minimum earnings bar at £18,600 and actually rules out more than 40% of the population based on earnings.

In her 2015 report, the Children's Commissioner estimated that 15,000 children are growing up in "Skype families," because their parents are being separated by the rules. The Supreme Court acknowledged as much, describing the policy impact as "particularly harsh" and declaring that the policy should be amended to give more weight to the needs of children.

We got more drinks. My other friend, an EU migrant, is relieved that she hasn't had to deal with Home Office immigration processes. Yet. But she talked about the tension of not knowing what lies ahead for her and her German husband, who have made a life here. I asked if being one of Theresa May's Brexit bargaining chips made her feel like an outsider.

No, that would be last year, around the time that the Brexit campaigning was at its toxic height, when she was told to "go home to Poland" by a woman in the street who heard her speaking Swedish on the phone.

Unlike her I have an accent that lets me blend in; between that and the fact that I have my papers now, I'm definitely feeling like the lucky one here but I'm also more uneasy than ever before. My citizenship has a provisional feel to it at a time when it seems like we're rolling back the clock on discrimination.

Last week, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants reported that unsurprisingly, the government's right to rent scheme, which turns private landlords into de facto border guards, is increasing discrimination in the housing market. It's not like the government wasn't warned repeatedly before implementing the policy.

After all, when it comes to policies aimed at migrants, who is more likely to be asked where they're from? (No, where they're really from?)

It's not like we don't already have a problem with racial discrimination in the housing market either, which is only being exacerbated by this. Or education, where the government is trying to gather data on the children of foreign-born parents - as always, justified as a way to tackle irregular migration.

The divisive hostile environment campaign affects migrants and citizens alike, bringing border control into our hospitals, schools and neighbourhoods.

"I've always felt like a foreigner, that didn't bother me," my Swedish friend said. "But I've never felt so unwelcome."

I've had variations of this conversation with different friends and colleagues over the years but it chips away at you a little every time.
All work published on Media Diversified is the intellectual property of its writers. Please do not reproduce, republish or repost any content from this site without express written permission from Media Diversified. For further information, please see our reposting guidelines.
Kiri Kankhwende is a Malawian journalist and blogger specialising in immigration and politics. She has a background in French and Chinese language studies and holds an MSc in International Political Communications, Politics and Human Rights Advocacy. An accomplished public speaker, she has also written for the Guardian and the Independent, and has been a contributor to BBC TV and radio, Al-Jazeera and Fox News. Find her on Twitter @madomasi
If you enjoyed reading this article, help us continue to provide more! Media Diversified is 100% reader-funded - you can subscribe for as little as £5 per month here or via Patreon here

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An unwelcome home: to be a migrant in today's Britain is a daily struggle

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by Kiri Kankhwende It almost sounds like the start of a joke: three migrants walked into a bar. One of us had received some bad news on the way to the #OneDayWithoutUs rally on Monday and we needed to stop and talk. My friend, a non-EU migrant, had just found out that his work visa...

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A grandmother who made headlines for being placed in immigration detention after living in Britain for nearly 30 years was forcibly removed from the country on Sunday.

BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month that Irene Clennell, 53, was being held in Dungavel detention centre in South Lanarkshire because the government wanted to remove her to Singapore.

She is the main carer for her sick British husband, John, and has two British sons and a British granddaughter.

Speaking to BuzzFeed News from the plane on the runway at Edinburgh airport, she said she had just £12 in her pocket, nobody to stay with in Singapore, and no change of clothes.

Clennell had been planning to see a new lawyer on Monday morning to discuss the potential for a fresh case. She believes her sudden removal was planned for a Sunday so she would have no chance of getting hold of a lawyer to stop it.

Clennell, from Ouston, County Durham, said she didn't have the chance to see her husband before being bundled off to the airport this morning. "I didn't even get to say goodbye properly," she said. She was allowed a phone call to tell him the news, but was barely able to speak. "I was just in tears, I wasn't able to say much," she said.

Speaking on a phone provided by one of her flight escorts, she described how suddenly events had unfolded: "They just came to get me this morning and said they've already given me a chance. Now I'm on the plane. Four people are taking me to Singapore.

"I don't know what I'll do when I land. I called my sister [in Singapore] and she said she can't put me up, so I just don't know. How can I stay anywhere? I don't have a wallet with me, I've got about £12 in my pocket. I don't even have my clothes, they're at home. I just have what they took from the detention centre."

Clennell said she was told that if she has no money and nowhere to go she should contact the regional office of the International Organisation for Migration when she lands.

She is the latest victim of the government's spousal visa system, which requires the British partner to prove earnings of at least £18,600 - and the couple being able to show long stretches of uninterrupted time living in the UK.

Clennell spent too long out of the country while looking after her dying parents in Singapore, which meant she lost her leave to remain. Her subsequent attempts to get a more permanent visa have failed and her last visitor visa expired in 2014. The Home Office said she lost her indefinite leave to remain in the UK because she spent time living in Singapore.

Her husband was still in shock at the news that she was already on a flight to Doha, en route to Singapore. "I went to see Irene on Friday. I didn't get a chance to see her this morning," John Clennell said. "Dungavel is 150 miles up the road and I had no idea this was happening."

He added: "She's got nothing with her; all her clothes are here. What's she supposed to do with £12? She's got no clothes, no fresh underwear and nowhere to go."

Speaking about the decision to remove her from the country at no notice on a Sunday, John said, "I think it was done deliberately so we couldn't contact a solicitor or go through the courts." The Home Office has been accused repeatedly in the past of removing migrants outside office hours to make it harder for them to put up a legal fight.

"I think it's trickery to come on a Sunday when you can't contact your lawyer," John said. "I need people to see what these people have done."

Speaking to BuzzFeed News earlier this month, Clennell talked of her fear of being forced to make a life in Singapore without her husband and children. She said: "I just want to be with my family. I don't have anything in Singapore. I don't have a house to go to, I don't have a job. I feel closer to my mother-in-law and sister-in-law than my family in Singapore. My parents are both dead and I only have one sister there and we're not that close."

She added: "I'm British. When I'm here I feel at home. If I go to Singapore nobody will accept me there because they see me as a British woman. I wear Western clothes and my whole culture is here."

Her only hope of a life in Britain now is an out-of-country appeal, which she has 28 days to lodge but no means to fund. BuzzFeed readers have already started pledging money for her legal costs on a GoFund me page.

A Home Office spokesman said: "All applications for leave to remain in the UK are considered on their individual merits and in line with the immigration rules. We expect those with no legal right to remain in the country to leave."

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A Grandmother Has Been Deported With Just £12 In Her Pocket Despite Living In Britain For The Past 30 Years

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A grandmother who made headlines for being placed in immigration detention after living in Britain for nearly 30 years was forcibly removed from the country on Sunday. BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month that Irene Clennell, 53, was being held in Dungavel detention centre in South Lanarkshire because the government wanted to remove her to Singapore.

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We see these wounded women everywhere:

Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress until it burns. The bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress. Belinda's hair gets cut-​ the sacred hair dissever[ed] / From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!-​and then ascends to heaven: thy ravish'd hair / Which adds new glory to the shining sphere! Anna Karenina's spurned love hurts so much she jumps in front of a train-​freedom from one man was just another one, and then he didn't even stick around. Mimì is dying in La Bohème and Rodolfo calls her beautiful as the dawn. You've mistaken the image, she tells him. You should have said "beautiful as a sunset."

Women have gone pale all over Dracula. Mina is drained of her blood, then made complicit in the feast: His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom ... a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk. Maria in the mountains confesses her rape to an American soldier-​ things were done to me I fought until I could not see-​then submits herself to his protection. No one has touched thee, little rabbit, he says. His touch purges every touch that came before it. She is another kitten under male hands.

How does it go, again? Freedom from one man is just another one. Maria gets her hair cut, too.

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can't look away. We can't stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.

Susan Sontag has described the heyday of a "nihilistic and sentimental" nineteenth-​century logic that found appeal in female suffering: "Sadness made one 'interesting.' It was a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad. That is, to be powerless." This appeal mapped largely onto illness: "Sadness and tuberculosis became synonymous," she writes, and both were coveted. Sadness was interesting and sickness was its handmaiden, providing not only cause but also symptoms and metaphors: a wracking cough, a wan pallor, an emaciated body. "The melancholy character was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart," she writes. Sickness was "a becoming frailty ... symbolized an appealing vulnerability, a superior sensitivity, [and] became more and more the ideal look for women."

I was once called a wound-​dweller. It was a boyfriend who called me that.I didn't like how it sounded, and I'm still not over it. (It was a wound; I dwell.) I wrote to a friend: "I've got this double-​edged shame and indignation about my bodily ills and ailments-​jaw, punched nose, fast heart, broken foot etc etc etc. On the one hand, I'm like, Why does this shit happen to me? And on the other hand, I'm like, Why am I talking about this so much?"

I guess I'm talking about it because it happened. Which is the tricky flip side of Sontag's critique. We may have turned the wounded woman into a kind of goddess, romanticized her illness and idealized her suffering, but that doesn't mean she doesn't happen. Women still have wounds: broken hearts and broken bones and broken lungs. How do we talk about these wounds without glamorizing them? Without corroborating an old mythos that turns female trauma into celestial constellations worthy of worship?

The moment we start talking about wounded women, we risk transforming their suffering from an aspect of the female experience into an element of the female constitution-​perhaps its finest, frailest consummation. The ancient Greek Menander once said: "Woman is a pain that never goes away."He probably just meant women were trouble, but his words hold a more sinister suggestion: the possibility that being a woman requires being in pain, that pain is the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness.

A friend of mine once dreamed a car crash that left all the broken pieces of her Pontiac coated in bright orange pollen. "My analyst pushed and pushed for me to make sense of the image,"she wrote to me, "and finally, I blurted: 'My wounds are fertile!' And that has become one of the touchstones and rallying cries of my life."

What's fertile in a wound? Why dwell in one? Wounds promise authenticity and profundity, beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by. They yield scars full of stories and slights that become rallying cries. They break upon the fuming fruits of damaged engines and dust these engines with color. And yet-​beyond and beneath their fruits-​they still hurt. The boons of a wound never get rid of it; they just bloom from it. It's perilous to think of them as chosen. Perhaps a better phrase to use is wound appeal, which is to say: the ways a wound can seduce, how it promises what it rarely gives. My friend Harriet put it like this: "Pain that gets performed is still pain."

So after all this, how can I tell you about my scars?

A Google search for the phrase "I hate cutters"yields thousands of results, most of them from informal chat boards. There's even a Facebook group called "I hate cutters": This is for people who hate those emo kids who show off there cuts and thinks it is fun to cut them selves [sic]. Hating cutters crystallizes a broader disdain for pain that is understood as performed rather than legitimately felt.It's usually cutters who are hated (wound-​dwellers!), rather than simply the act of cutting itself. It's the actual people who get dismissed, not just the verbs of what they've done. People say cutters are just doing it for the attention, but what's that "just" about? A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn't wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human-​and isn't granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?

There's an online quiz titled "are you a real cutter or do you cut for fun?" full of statements to be agreed or disagreed with: I don't really know what it feels [like] inside when you really have problems, I just love to be the centre of attention. Gradations sharpen inside the taboo: Some cut from pain, others for show. Hating on cutters-​or at least these cutter-​performers-​tries to draw a boundary between authentic and fabricated pain, as if we weren't all some complicated mix of wounds we can't let go of and wounds we can't help, as if choice itself weren't always some complicated mix of intrinsic character and agency. How much do we choose to feel anything? The answer, I think, is nothing satisfying-​we do, and we don't. But hating on cutters insists desperately upon our capacity for choice. People want to believe in self-​improvement-​it's an American ethos, pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps-​and here we have the equivalent of affective downward mobility: cutting as a failure to feel better, as deliberately going on a kind of sympathetic welfare-​taking some shortcut to the street-​cred of pain without actually feeling it.

I used to cut. It embarrasses me to admit now, because it feels less like a demonstration of some pain I've suffered and more like an admission that I've wanted to hurt. But I'm also irritated by my own embarrassment. There was nothing false about my cutting. It was neither horrifying nor productive. I felt like I wanted to cut my skin, and my cutting was an expression of that desire. There is no lie in that, only a tautology and a question: What made me want to cut at all? Cutting was query and response at once. I cut because my unhappiness felt nebulous and elusive and I thought it could perhaps hold the shape of a line across my ankle. I cut because I was curious what it would feel like to cut. I cut because I needed very badly to ratify a shaky sense of self, and unhappiness felt like an architectural plan.

I wish we lived in a world where no one wanted to cut. But I also wish that instead of disdaining cutting or the people who do it-​or shrugging it off, just youthful angst-​we might direct our attention to the unmet needs beneath its appeal. Cutting is an attempt to speak and an attempt to learn. The ways we court bleeding or psychic pain-​hurting ourselves with razors or hunger or sex-​are also seductions of knowledge. Blood comes before the scar; hunger before the apple. I hurt myself to feel is the cutter's cliché, but it's also true. Bleeding is experiment and demonstration, excavation, interior turned out-​and the scar remains as residue, pain turned to proof. I don't think cutting offers any useful articulation of pain, but I do think it manifests yearning, and it makes me wonder if we could come to a place where proof wasn't necessary at all.

A 2001 study called "The Girl Who Cried Pain" tries to make sense of the fact that men are more likely than women to be given medication when they report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives. The study makes visible a disturbing set of assumptions: It's not just that women are prone to hurting-​ a pain that never goes away-​but also that they're prone to making it up. The report finds that despite evidence that "women are biologically more sensitive to pain than men ... [their] pain reports are taken less seriously." Less seriously meaning, more specifically, "they are more likely to have their pain reports discounted as 'emotional' or 'psychogenic' and, therefore, 'not real.' "

In a book about her anorexia, Caroline Knapp describes standing in a kitchen and taking off her shirt, on the pretext of changing outfits, so her mother could see her bones more clearly:

I wanted her to see how the bones in my chest and shoulders stuck out, and how skeletal my arms were, and I wanted the sight of this to tell her something I couldn't have begun to communicate myself: something about pain ... an amalgam of buried wishes and unspoken fears.

Whenever I read accounts of the anorexic body as a semiotic system (as Knapp says, "describing in flesh a pain I could not communicate in words") or an aesthetic creation ("the inner life ... as a sculpture in bone"), I feel an old wariness. Not just at the familiarity of these metaphors-​bone as hieroglyph, clavicle as cry-​but at the way they risk performing the same valorization they claim to refute: ascribing eloquence to the starving body, a kind of lyric grace. I feel like I've heard it before: The author is still nostalgic for the belief that starving could render angst articulate. I used to write lyrically about my own eating disorder in this way, taking recourse in bone-​as-​language, documenting the gradual dumb show of my emergent parts-​knobs and spurs and ribs.

But underneath this wariness-​ must we stylize? -​I remember that starvation is pain, beyond and beneath any stylized expression: There is an ache at its root and an obsession attending every moment of its realization. The desire to speak about that obsession can be symptom as much as cure; everything ultimately points back to pain-​even and especially these clutches at nostalgia or abstraction.

What I appreciate about Knapp's kitchen bone show, in the end, is that it doesn't work. Her mom doesn't remark on the skeleton in her camisole. The subject only comes up later, at the dinner table, when Knapp drinks too much wine and tells her parents she has a problem. The soulful silent cry of bones in kitchen sunlight-​that elegiac, faintly mythic anorexia-​is trumped by Merlot and messy confession.

If using your body to speak betrays a fraught relationship to pain-​hurting yourself but also keeping quiet about the hurt, implying it without saying it-​then having it "work" (mother noticing the bones) would somehow corroborate the logic: Let your body say it for you. But here it doesn't. We want our wounds to speak for themselves, Knapp seems to be saying, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Different kinds of pain summon different terms of art: hurt, suffering, ache, trauma, angst, wounds, damage. Pain is general and holds the others under its wings; hurt connotes something mild and often emotional; angst is the most diffuse and the most conducive to dismissal as something nebulous, sourceless, self-​indulgent, and affected. Suffering is epic and serious; trauma implies a specific devastating event and often links to damage, its residue. While wounds open to the surface, damage happens to the infrastructure-​often invisibly, irreversibly-​and damage also carries the implication of lowered value. Wound implies en media res: The cause of injury is in the past but the healing isn't done; we are seeing this situation in the present tense of its immediate aftermath. Wounds suggest sex and aperture: A wound marks the threshold between interior and exterior; it marks where a body has been penetrated. Wounds suggest that the skin has been opened-​that privacy is violated in the making of the wound, a rift in the skin, and by the act of peering into it.

In a poem called "The Glass Essay," about theend of a love affair, Anne Carson describes a series of visions-​"naked glimpses of my soul"-​thirteen visitations: a woman in a cage of thorns, another stuck in a "contraption like the top half of a crab," another turned into a deck of flesh cards pierced by a silver needle: The living cards are days of a woman's life. Carson calls these visions the "Nudes," and each is a strange, surprising, devastating vision of pain. We aren't allowed to rest on any single image; we move itinerant from one to the next.

The first Nude is "alone on a hill," standing "into the wind":

Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman's body and lift
and blow away on the wind, leaving

an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle
calling mutely through lipless mouth.

What feels most resonant here, to me, isn't just the speaker's willingness to grant pain such a drastic shape-​ nerve and blood-​but to confess her shame at this vessel, its blood and gore, its bluntness. I think of the bulb of my skinned knee, badge of my heartbreak, and how I loved the clarity of what it spoke but felt utterly pained by how much I loved it. I am not a melodramatic person. I've never wanted to be one, either.

The general outline goes something like this: girl gets her period; girl gets scared; girl gets mocked. Girl's mother never told her she was going to bleed. Girl gets elected prom queen and gets a bucket of pig's blood dumped on her head just when things start looking up. Girl gets; girl gets; girl gets. Not that she is granted things but that things keep happening to her, until they don't-​until she starts doing unto others as they have done-​hurting everyone who ever hurt her, moving the world with her mind, conducting its objects like an orchestra.

Though Carrie isn't about anorexia, it explores the plausible roots of an anorexic logic-​to take the shame of that bleeding and make it disappear, to deny the curse of Eve and the intrinsic vulnerability of desire itself-​wanting an apple, or knowledge, or a man; wanting popularity, wanting anything. Getting your period is one kind of wound; not getting it is another. Starvation is an act of self-​wounding that preempts other wounds, that scrubs away the blood from the shower. But Carrie responds to the shame of fertility by weaponizing it-​she doesn't get rid of the bleeding; she gets baptized by it. She doesn't wound herself; she wounds everyone else.

At the heart of Carrie is a glorious inversion: What if you could take how hard it is to be a girl-​the cattiness of frenemies, the betrayals of your own body, the terror of a public gaze-​and turn all that hardship into a superpower? Carrie's telekinesis reaches the apex of its power at the moment she is drenched in red, the moment she becomes a living wound-​as if she's just gotten her period all over herself, in front of everyone, as if she's saying: Now I know how to handle the blood.

These days we have a TV show called Girls, about young women who hurt but constantly disclaim their hurting. They fight about rent and boys and betrayal, stolen yogurt and the ways self-​pity structures their lives. "You're a big, ugly wound!" one yells. The other yells back: "No, you're the wound!" And so they volley, back and forth: You're the wound; no, you're the wound. They know women like to claim monopolies on woundedness, and they call each other out on it.

These girls aren't wounded so much as post-​wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They're over it. I am not a melodramatic person. God help the woman who is. What I'll call "post-​wounded" isn't a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect: These women are aware that "woundedness" is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama, so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-​wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-​wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: Don't cry too loud; don't play victim. Don't ask for pain meds you don't need; don't give those doctors another reason to doubt. Post-​wounded women fuck men who don't love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it; they refuse to hurt about it or to admit they hurt about it-​or else they are endlessly self-​aware about it, if they do allow themselves this hurting.

The post-​wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-​pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-​wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-​pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-​absorption without self-​awareness.

I know these dialects because I have spoken them; I know these post-​wounded narrators because I have written them. I wonder now: What shame are they sculpted from?

In a review of Louise Glück, Michael Robbins calls her "a major poet with a minor range." He specifies this range to pain: "Every poem is The Passion of Louise Glück, starring the grief and suffering of Louise Glück. But someone involved in the production knows how to write very well indeed." His "but" implies that Glück can be a poet who matters only despite the limitations imposed by her fixation on suffering, that this "minor range" is what her intelligence and skill must constantly overcome.

Robbins frustrates me and speaks for me. I find myself in a bind. I'm tired of female pain and also tired of people who are tired of it. I know the "hurting woman" is a cliché but I also know lots of women still hurt. I don't like the proposition that female wounds have gotten old; I feel wounded by it.

I felt particularly wounded by the brilliant and powerful female poet who visibly flinched during a workshop at Harvard when I started reciting Sylvia Plath. She'd asked us each to memorize a poem and I'd chosen "Ariel," which felt like its own thirteenth line, black sweet blood mouthfuls, fierce and surprising and hurting and free.

"Please," this brilliant and powerful woman said, as if herself in pain. "I'm just so tired of Sylvia Plath."

I had this terrible feeling that every woman who knew anythingabout anything was tired of Sylvia Plath, tired of her blood and bees and the level of narcissistic self-​pity required to compare her father to Hitler-​but I'd been left behind. I hadn't gotten the highbrow-girl memo: Don't Read The Girls Who Cried Pain. I was still staring at Plath while she stared at her own bleeding skin, skin she'd sliced with a knife: What a thrill-​ / My thumb instead of an onion. Sylvia and I were still obsessed with the density of a wound-​ thumb stump, pulp of your heart-​ thrilled and shamed by it.

That same year of college, I took an all-​female self-​defense class. I'd taken a job as a travel writer and it was a requirement. We had to go around in a circle and tell the group our worst fear. These instructions created a weird incentive structure. When you've got a lot of Harvard girls in a circle, everyone wants to say something betterthan the girl before her. So the first girl said: "Getting raped, I guess," which is what we were all thinking. The next one upped the ante: "Getting raped-​and then killed." The third paused to think, then said: "Maybe getting gang raped?" The fourth had had time to think, had already anticipated the third one's answer. She said, "Getting gang raped and mutilated."

I can't remember what the rest of us managed to come up with (Sex trafficking? Snuff films?) but I remember thinking how odd it was-​how we were all sitting there trying to be the best kid in class, the worst-​rape fantasizer, in this all-​girl impersonation of a misogynistic hate-​crime brainstorming session. We were giggling. Our giggling was-​of course-​also about our fear.

Whenever I tell that story as an anecdote, I think about the other girls in that circle. I wonder if anything terrible ever happened to any of them. We left that gym to live the rest of our lives-​to make ourselves vulnerable to everything we'd just imagined.

The habit of imagining ways I might someday hurt-​of taking some pleasure in this imagining-​started early for me. I grew up under the spell of damaged sirens: Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, Björk, Kate Bush, Mazzy Star. They sang about all the ways a woman could be in pain: I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl. And when they're out for blood I always give. We are made to bleed and scab and heal and bleed again and turn every scar into a joke. Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon. Bluffing your way into my mouth, behind my teeth, reaching for my scars. Did I ever tell you how I stopped eating, when you stopped calling me? You're only popular with anorexia. Sometimes you're nothing but meat, girl. I've come home. I'm so cold.

I called my favorites by their first names: Tori and Ani. Tori sang "blood roses" over and over again, and I had no idea what this phrase meant except that pain and beauty were somehow connected. Every once in a while her songs posed questions: Why did she crawl down in the old deep ravine? Why do we crucify ourselves? The songs themselves were answers: She crawled into the deep ravine so we'd wonder why she crawled into the deep ravine. We crucify ourselves so we can sing about it.

Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" describes a secret military plan to design "a sound that could kill someone." From the painful cries of mothers to the terrifying scream, we recorded it and put it into our machine. The song would be lethal, but also a lullaby: It could feel like falling in love / It could feel so bad / But it could feel so good / It could sing you to sleep. Of course the song played just like the song it described. Listening felt so bad and so good. It felt like falling in love. I'd never fallen in love. I was a voyeur and a vandal-​flexing the hurt-​muscles in my heart by imagining myself into aches I'd never felt.

I invented terrible daydreams to saddle those songs with the gravity of melodrama: Someone I loved died; I was summoned to a car-​accident deathbed; I had a famous boyfriend and he cheated on me and I had to raise our child-​better yet, our many children-​on my own. Those songs gave me scars to try on like costumes. I wanted to be sung to sleep by them; I wanted to be killed and resurrected.

More than anything, I wanted to be killed by Ani's "Swan Dive": I'm gonna do my best swan dive / in the shark-​infested waters / I'm gonna pull out my tampon / and start splashing around. If being a woman is all about bleeding, then she'll bleed. She'll get hurt. Carrie knew how it was done; she never plugged it up. She splashed around. "I don't care if they eat me alive,"Ani sings,"I've got better things to do than survive."Better things like: martyrdom, having the last laugh, choosing the end, singing a song about blood.

I was listening to "Swan Dive" years before I got my period, but I was already ready to jump. I was ready to weaponize my menarche. I was waiting for the day when I could throw my womanhood to the sharks because I finally had some womanhood to call my own. I couldn't wait to be inducted into the ranks of this female frustration-​the period as albatross, lunar burden, exit ticket from Eden, keys to the authenticity kingdom. Bleeding among the sharks meant being eligible for men, which meant being eligible for hope, loss, degradation, objectification, desire, and being desired-​a whole world of ways to get broken.

Years later I worked at a bakery where my boss liked putting on a playlist she called our "Wounded Mix." We hummed along with Sade and Phil Collins. We mixed red-​velvet batter the color of cartoon hearts. My boss said that when she listened to these songs, she imagined being abandoned by some cruel lover on the shoulder of a dusty highway-​"with just my backpack and my sunglasses,"she told me, "and my big hair."

I started hunting for more ladies singing about wounds. I asked my boyfriend for suggestions. He texted instructions: "Google 'you cut me open and I keep bleeding.' Best bathos on the air."I found Leona Lewis: You cut me open and I / Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love / I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love / Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. Each chorus eventually returns, at its close, to the point: "You cut me open." The lyrics could be lamenting love or affirming it; trusting the possibility of falling for someone in the aftermath of hurt or else suggesting that love dwells in the hurting itself-​that sentiment clots and coagulates in bled blood, another version of the cutter's logic: I bleed to feel. Bleeding is the proof and home of passion, its residence and protectorate. This kind of bloody heartbreak isn't feeling gone wrong, it's feeling gone right-​emotion distilled to its purest, most magnificent form. Best bathos on the air. Well, yes, it is. Turn every scar into a joke. We already did.

But what if some of us want to take our scars seriously? Maybe some of us haven't gotten the highbrow-girl memo-​haven't gotten the text message from our boyfriends-​about what counts as bathos. One man's joke is another girl's diary entry. One woman's heartbreak is another woman's essay. Maybe this bleeding ad nauseum is mass-​produced and sounds ridiculous-​ Plug it up! Plug it up!-​but maybe its business isn't done. Woman is a pain that never goes away. Keep cutting me open; I'll keep bleeding it out. Saving Leona Lewis means insisting that we never have the right to dismiss the trite or poorly worded or plainly ridiculous, the overused or overstated or strategically performed.

In the Reading Group Guide to my novel, The Gin Closet, I confessed: "I often feel like a DJ mixing various lyrics of female teenage angst." I got so sick of synopsizing the plot, whenever people asked what it was about, I started saying simply: women and their feelings. When I called myself a DJ mixing angst, it was a preemptive strike. I felt like I had to defend myself against some hypothetical accusation that would be lobbed against my book by the world at large. I was trying to agree with Ani: We shouldn't have to turn every scar into a joke. We shouldn't have to be witty or backtrack or second-​guess ourselves when we say, this shit hurt. We shouldn't have to disclaim -​I know, I know, pain is old, other girls hurt-​ in order to defend ourselves from the old litany of charges: performative, pitiful, self-​pitying, pity-​hoarding, pity-​mongering. The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but love.

Once I wrote a story from that open wound W. B. Yeats calls the "rag and bone shop of the heart." In this particular case, my rag and bone shop had been looted by a poet. He and I had a few glorious autumn months in Iowa-​there were cold beers on an old bridge, wine in a graveyard, poems left on pillows-​and I thought I was in love with him, and maybe would marry him, and then suddenly we were done. He was done. I knew this wasn't an unusual occurrence in the world, but it hadn't ever happened to me. I kept trying to figure it out. A couple nights before the end, feeling him pull away, I'd talked with him for a long time about the eating disorder I'd had when I was younger. I honestly can't remember why I did this-​whether I wanted to feel close to him, wanted him to demonstrate his care by sympathizing, whether I just wanted to will myself into trusting him by saying something that seemed to imply trust.

After he was gone, I decided maybe this conversation had something to do with why he'd left. Perhaps he'd been repulsed-​not necessarily by the eating disorder itself but by my naked attempt to secure his attention by narrating it. I was desperate for a why -​at first, because I wanted to understand our breakup, and eventually because I realized any story I wrote about us would feel flimsy if our breakup had no motivating catalyst. Pain without a cause is pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

I was afraid to write a story about us because heartbreak seemed like a story that had already been told too many times, and my version of heartbreak felt horribly banal: getting black-​out drunk and sharing my feelings in fleeting pockets of lucidity, sleeping with guys and crying in their bathrooms afterward. Falling on Sixth Avenue in the middle of the night and then showing my scarred knee to anyone who'd look.I made people tell me I was more attractive than my ex. I made people tell me he was an asshole, even though he wasn't.

This kind of thing, I told myself, wasn't what I'd come to the Iowa Writers' Workshop to write about. Maybe sadness could be "interesting" but not when it looked like this. The female narrator I'd be depicting in my story-​a woman consumed by self-​pity, drowning her sorrows in drink, engaged in reckless sexual self-​destruction, obsessed with the man who'd left her-​didn't seem like a particularly appealing or empowered sort of woman to think about or be. And yet, she was me.

I wrote the ending first. It was an assertion: I had a heart. It remained. I guess I liked it because it felt true and optimistic (my heart's still here!) but also sad (my still-​here heart hurts constantly!). I put the eating-​disorder conversation into the story so that readers could point to it-​if they needed to point to something-​and say, Oh, maybe that's why he got out. I also meant the eating disorder to clarify that my protagonist's impulse toward self-​destruction wasn't caused so much as activated by the breakup, which had resurrected the corpse of an older pain: an abiding sense of inadequacy that could attach itself to the body, or a man, an impulse that-​like a heat-​seeking missile-​always sniffed out ways it could hurt even more.

I realized that this causeless pain-​inexplicable and seemingly intractable-​was my true subject. It was frustrating. It couldn't be pinned to any trauma; no one could be blamed for it. Because this nebulous sadness seemed to attach to female anxieties (cultural models of anorexia and cutting and women addicted to male attention), I began to understand it as inherently feminine, and because it was so unjustified by circumstance it began to feel inherently shameful. Each of its self-​destructive manifestations felt half-​chosen, half-cursed.

In this sense, I was aware that the breakup was giving me a hook upon which I could hang a disquiet much more amoebic-​and not so easily parsed. Part of me knew my story had imposed a causal logic on the breakup that hadn't been there. My ex had been pulling away before I ever confessed anything to him. But I recognized a certain tendency in myself-​a desire to compel men by describing things that had been hard for me-​and I wanted to punish this tendency. Punishment involved imagining the ways my confessions might repulse the very men they were supposed to bring closer. When I punished myself with this causality, I also restored the comforting framework of emotional order-​ because I did this, this happened; because this happened, I hurt.

In the meantime, I was nervous about workshop. Would I be lauded as a genius? Quietly understood as pathetic? I chose my outfit carefully. I still remember one of the first comments: "Does this character have a job?" one guy asked, sounding annoyed, and said she might have been a little easier to sympathize with if she did.

As it happened, that story was the first one Iever published. It's called "Quiet Men." Sometimes I still get notes about it from strangers. One woman in Arizona even got part of it tattooed on her back. Men say it helps them sympathize more with certain female tendencies. These men write to me about their relationships: Women who once seemed like reckless bitches, they say, start to seem like something else. A frat guy wrote to say that now he "got" girls better. I trusted he meant: understood. Another guy said: "I have always been curious of the psychology of women who tend toward a want to be dominated."

A Hawaiian real-​estate agent wrote about his little sister. He'd never been compassionate about her painful relationships with men. "I'm sure that your goal was not to educate men on the psychological nuances of women," he said, but he felt he understood his sister's self-​destructive tendencies better after reading the story-​"a little wisp of understanding." I was thrilled. My pain had flown beyond the confines of its bone shop. Now it had a summer home in the Pacific.

I wouldn't say writing that story helped me get over my breakup any faster; it probably did the opposite. I ended up consigning that ex into the realm of legend-​a sort of mythic prop around which I'd constructed this suffering version of myself. But the story helped me weave the breakup into my sense of self in a way that ultimately felt outward, directed toward the lives and pain of others.

And yet, in the end, it all comes back home. Do I still wonder if my ex ever read that story? Of course I do.

The summer after my freshman year of college, my mouth was wired shut for two months while my jaw healed from an operation. The joint hinge had been damaged in an accident-​I'd fallen off a vine in Costa Rica, twenty feet to cloud-​forest floor-​and certain bones had been drilled into new shapes and then screwed back together again. The wires held everything in place. I couldn't talk or eat. I squirted geriatric energy drinks into the small opening between my teeth and the back of my mouth. I wrote notes on little yellow pads. I read a lot. Already, then, I thought of documenting my experience for posterity. And I already had the title of my memoir in mind: Autobiography of a Face.

That's how I discovered Lucy Grealy. Her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, is the story of her childhood cancer and enduring facial disfigurement. I read it in an afternoon and then I read it again. Its central drama, for me, wasn't Grealy's recovery from illness; it was the story of her attempt to forge an identity that wasn't entirely defined by the wound of her face. At first she couldn't see her face as anything but a locus of damage to which everything else referred:

This singularity of meaning-​I was my face, I was ugliness-​though sometimes unbearable, also ... became the launching pad from which to lift off ... Everything led to it, everything receded from it-​my face as personal vanishing point.

These are the dangers of a wound: that the self will be subsumed by it ("personal vanishing point") or unable to see outside its gravity ("everything led to it"). The wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it-​that obstructs one's vision of others' suffering rather than sharpening empathic acuity. Case in point: Carrie doesn't do anyone any favors.

Grealy had been craving the identity locus of damage even before it happened to her; she was happy, as a little girl, when trauma first arrived: "I was excited by the idea that something really was wrong with me." Years later, Grealy still took a certain comfort in her surgeries. These were times when she was cared for, and when her pain was given a structure beyond the nebulous petty torture of feeling ugly to the world. "It wasn't without a certain amount of shame that I took this kind of emotional comfort from surgery," she writes. "Did it mean I liked having operations and thus that I deserved them?"

In Grealy's shame I see the residue of certain cultural imperatives: to be stoic, to have a relationship to pain defined by the single note of resistance. These imperatives make it shameful to feel any attachment to pain or any sensitivity to its offerings. What I love about Grealy is that she's not afraid to be honest about every part of her pain: how she takes some comfort in her surgeries and feels discomfort at this comfort; how she tries to feel better about her face-​over and over again-​and just can't. She can't make ugliness productive. She can't make that particular wound fertile. She can only take solace in how much it hurts, and in how this hurting elicits the care of others. In this confession, of course, the wound does become fertile. It yields honesty. Her book is beautiful.

As a little girl, Grealy learned to be what she calls "a model patient," but the book itself refuses this posture: She offers no false resurrections of the spirit. She insists on the tyranny of the body and its damage. Her situation was an extreme one, but it gave form and justification to how I was living then, silently: my own existence defined by injury.

Most of the negative Amazon reviews of Auto-biography of a Face focus on the idea of self-​pity: "Overall, she was a sad woman who never got beyond her personal pain," and "I found this book extremely sorrowful and drowning in self-​pity." A reader named "Tom" writes:

In all of the books I've read, I've never encountered such terribl[e] moaning and wallowing in self-​pity. I can easily sum up the entire 240-​page book i[n] 3 words: Woe is me ... In addition to a mess of crying, the author cannot seem to make up her mind on anything. First she says she does not want to be felt sorry for by anyone, then she proceeds to scorn others about their inability to feel an ounce of sympathy.

The woman Tom describes, "wallowing" in self-​pity and unable to decide what the world should do about it, is exactly the woman I grew up afraid of becoming. I knew better-​many of us, it seems, knew better-​than to become one of those women who plays victim, lurks around the sickbed, hands her pain out like a business card. What I'm trying to say is, I don't think this was just me. We all grew up doing everything we could to avoid this identity: self-​awareness, self-​deprecation, jadedness, sarcasm. The Girl Who Cried Pain: She doesn't need meds; she needs a sedative.

And now we find ourselves torn. We don't want anyone to feel sorry for us, but we miss the sympathy when it doesn't come. Feeling sorry for ourselves has become a secret crime-​a kind of shameful masturbation-​that would chase away the sympathy of others if we ever let it show. "Because I had grown up denying myself any feeling that even hinted at self-​pity," Grealy writes, "I now had to find a way to reshape it."

Reshape it into what? Into faith, sexual promiscuity, intellectual ambition. At the very last, at the pinnacle: into art. Grealy offers this last alchemy, pain-​to-​art, as possibility but not redemption. It seems likely that for all her wound has given her-​perspective, the grit of survival, an insightful meditation on beauty-​Grealy would still trade these wound boons back for a pretty face. This confession of willingness is her greatest gift of honesty, not arguing that beauty was more important than profundity, just admitting that she might have chosen it-​that beauty was more difficult to live without.

When I started writing this essay, I wrote tosome of my favorite women asking for their thoughts on female pain.

"Perhaps too obvious," wrote a friend in divinity school, "but the Fall?"

A friend described an upbringing "thoroughly, thoroughly obsessed with not being a victim." She typed not being a victim in italics. Another friend described her young devotion to the oeuvre of Lurlene McDaniel, an author who wrote about sick girls-​cancer-​ridden, heart-​transplanted, bulimic-​who made friends with even sicker girls, girls turned angelic by illness, and always eventually watched these sicker girls die. These books offer an opportunity for two-​pronged empathy-​the chance to identify with martyr and survivor, to die and live at once, to feel simultaneously the glory of tragedy and the reassurance of continuance.

One friend admitted that female pain often felt, to her, like "a failure of an ethic of care," and that her ideal of feminine pain might be the grieving Madonna: "the pain of care whose object of care has been removed." She was afraid this ideal made her a secret misogynist. Another friend, a poet, confessed that her greatest fear was that her poems would come across as solipsistic transcriptions of private suffering, and in this self-​concern would also register as somehow "feminine." Her secondary fear was that this first fear made her a secret misogynist. More women were afraid of being secret misogynists than I'd realized.

One friend got so worked up by my e-​mail that she waited until the next morning to reply. She was tired of an abiding societal fascination with women who identified themselves by their pain-​women who hurt themselves or got too drunk or slept with the wrong men. She was more than tired of. She was angry.

I think her anger is asking a question, and I think that question demands an answer. How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to. Here is the danger of wounded womanhood: that its invocation will corroborate a pain cult that keeps legitimating, almost legislating, more of itself.

The hard part is that underneath this obscene fascination with representations of women who hurt themselves and have bad sex and drink too much, there areactualwomen who hurt themselves and have bad sex and drink too much. Female pain is prior to its representation, even if its manifestations are shaped and bent by cultural models.

Relying too much on the image of the wounded woman is reductive, but so is rejecting it-​being unwilling to look at the varieties of need and suffering that yield it. We don't want to be wounds ("No, you're the wound!") but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having them, to be something more than just another girl who has one. We should be able to do these things without failing the feminism of our mothers, and we should be able to represent women who hurt without walking backward into a voyeuristic rehashing of the old cultural models: another emo cutter under the bleachers, another hurt-​seeking missile of womanhood, a body gone drunk or bruised or barren, another archetype sunk into blackout under the sheets.

We've got a Janus-​faced relationship to female pain. We're attracted to it and revolted by it; proud and ashamed of it. So we've developed a post-​wounded voice, a stance of numbness or crutch of sarcasm that implies pain without claiming it, that seems to stave off certain accusations it can see on the horizon-melodrama, triviality, wallowing-​and an ethical and aesthetic commandment: Don't valorize suffering women.

Lucy Grealy learned to be a good patient when she learned that it was possible to fail at being sick. "My feelings of shame and guilt for failing not to suffer," she writes, "became more unbearable. The physical pain seemed almost easy in comparison." She describes much of her artistic life as an attempt "to grant myself the complicated and necessary right to suffer."

I'm trying to map the terms and borders of that complicated right. I'm not fighting for a world in which suffering gets worshipped, and I'm not just criticizing the post-​wounded voice, or dismissing the ways in which female pain gets dismissed. I do believe there is nothing shameful about being in pain, and I do mean for this essay to be a manifesto against the accusation of wound-​dwelling. But the essay isn't a double negative, a dismissal of dismissal, so much as a search for possibility-​the possibility of representing female suffering without reifying its mythos.

In the end, I'm looking for the thirteenth Nude, who arrives at the close of Carson's poem:

Very much like Nude #1.
And yet utterly different.
...
I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind

was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman's body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.

This Nude is like the first Nude because she is nothing but ragged flesh, but here the "flesh [is] blowing off" and her nakedness signals strength. Her exposure is clean and necessary. There is no pain. The nerves are gone. The move away from pain requires a movement into commonality: "out of the light" of human particularity and gender ("It was not my body, not a woman's body") and into the universal ("it was the body of us all"). Walking out of the light simultaneously suggests being constituted by this light-​walking forth from the substance of origin-​and also leaving it behind, abandoning the state of visible representation. Once pain is cleansed into something silver and necessary, it no longer needs to be illuminated. Pain only reaches beyond itself when its damage shifts from private to public, from solipsistic to collective.

We aren't allowed to forget how this thirteenth Nude recalls the first one, that primal artifact of pain, whose bloody ghost limns these silver bones like an aura, reminding us that the cleansing cannot happen without some loss. Like Wallace Stevens and his blackbirds, we see pain from every angle; no single posture of suffering is allowed any monopoly. We can't see suffering one way; we have to look at it from thirteen directions, and that is only the beginning-​then we are called to follow this figure striding out of the light.

We follow this figure into contradiction, into a confession that wounds are desired and despised; that they grant power and come at a price; that suffering yields virtue and selfishness; that victimhood is a mix of situation and agency; that pain is the object of representation and also its product; that culture transcribes genuine suffering while naturalizing its symptoms. We follow this thirteenth Nude back to the bleachers, where a girl is putting on a passion play with her razor. We should watch. She's hurting, but that doesn't mean she'll hurt forever-​or that hurt is the only identity she can own. There is a way of representing female consciousness that can witness pain but also witness a larger self around that pain-​a self that grows larger than its scars without disowning them, that is neither wound-​dwelling nor jaded, that is actually healing.

We can watch what happens when the girl under the bleachers puts down the blade. Suffering is interesting but so is getting better. The aftermath of wounds-​the strain and struggle of stitching the skin, the stride of silver bones-​contours women alongside the wounds themselves. Glück dreams of "a harp, its string cutting / deep into my palm. In the dream, / it both makes the wound and seals the wound."

I want to insist that female pain is still news. It's always news. We've never already heard it. It's news when a girl loses her virginity or gets an ache in the rag and bone shop of her heart. It's news when she starts getting her period or when she does something to make herself stop. It's news if a woman feels terrible about herself in the world-​anywhere, anytime, ever. It's news whenever a girl has an abortion because her abortion has never been had before and won't ever be had again. I'm saying this as someone who's had an abortion but hasn't had anyone else's.

Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy slept with her and didn't call. But I don't believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes. You learn to start seeing.

I think dismissing female pain as overly familiar or somehow out-​of-​date-​twice-​told, thrice-​told, 1001-​nights-​told-​masks deeper accusations: that suffering women are playing victim, going weak, or choosing self-​indulgence over bravery. I think dismissing wounds offers a convenient excuse: no need to struggle with the listening or telling anymore. Plug it up. Like somehow our task is to inhabit the jaded aftermath of terminal self-​awareness once the story of all pain has already been told.

"For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman," is how Simone de Beauvoir starts one of the most famous books on women ever written. "The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. " Sometimes I feel like I'm beating a dead wound. But I say: Keep bleeding. Just write toward something beyond blood.

The wounded woman gets called a stereotype, and sometimes she is. But sometimes she's just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it. Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain. I think the charges of cliché and performance offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.

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We see these wounded women everywhere: Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress until it burns. The bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress. Belinda's hair gets cut-​ the sacred hair dissever[ed] / From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!-​and then ascends to heaven: thy ravish'd hair / Which adds new glory to the shining sphere!

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Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting & Domain Names from Heart Internet

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Reseller Hosting, Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Domain Names | Heart Internet

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This is a sitemap to www.WEBDuBois.org, a web site providing links and source material on William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the African American writer, activist, and scholar. The research is conducted by Dr. Robert Williams, who also created and maintains the site.

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Labour is planning a regionalised immigration policy that would allow higher immigration to London but tighter restrictions on moving to other parts of the country.

Deputy leader Tom Watson said on Sunday morning that Brexit presented the opportunity to fine-tune the UK's border controls and that the plan was under discussion by the party.

The approach could help resolve Labour's dilemma of keeping both its metropolitan support and its support in former industrial areas happy on the issue.

Brexit backers could get 'rude awakening on immigration'

Asked whether he thought immigration should be higher or lower across the UK, Mr Watson said: "I don't think you can say that. I think you can actually say London requires more liberal immigration policies but there are other parts of the country where immigration may be putting pressure on public services like schools and hospitals.

"That's why I think when we come out of the EU we can have an immigration policy that maybe addresses both those issues.

"These are nascent ideas, we're not ready to make them robust in a manifesto yet but they're certainly the debate that is going on in the Labour party right now and in wider circles."

The idea would likely require some kind of work or housing permit system to be introduced as the UK has no internal border controls to stop people settling where they want.

Labour has previously proposed an "immigration dividend" that would see areas of high immigration given extra Government cash to prop up public services. Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has also previously said he is not "wedded" to free movement of people with the EU.

The deputy leader Mr Watson made the comments about the new policy on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, adding that Labour had to respect the result of the EU referendum result.

"We're a democratic party, I don't think we had any choice but to respect the result of that referendum," he said.

Labour has struggled to strike a plausible tone on immigration over the last decade. In 2009, Gordon Brown was ridiculed for pledging "British jobs for British workers" - effectively co-opting a far-right slogan. He was later caught on camera branding a voter a "bigoted woman" after she subjected him to a rant about foreigners.

In 2015, Ed Miliband came under fire after the party sold mugs with the word "controls on immigration". However, polling and focus grouping following the 2015 election found that immigration - along with welfare - was one of the main issues that worried voters in marginal seats.

Despite the concerns of some voters, repeated studies have found no negative impact on public services, employment, or wages from immigration.

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Labour plans regional immigration system to tighten controls outside London

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Labour is planning a regionalised immigration policy that would allow higher immigration to London but tighter restrictions on moving to other parts of the country. Deputy leader Tom Watson said on Sunday morning that Brexit presented the opportunity to fine-tune the UK's border controls and that the plan was under discussion by the party.

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Few people ever saw the images of China girls, although for decades they were ubiquitous in movie theaters. At the beginning of a reel of film, there would be a few frames of a woman's head. She might be dressed up; she might be scowling at the camera. She might blink or move her head.

But if audiences saw her, it was only because there had been a mistake. These frames weren't for public consumption. The China girl was there to assist the lab technicians processing the film. Even though the same person's face might show up in reel after reel of film, her image would remain unknown to everyone except the technicians and projectionists.

For many years photo labs would produce unique China girl images; around a couple hundred women, perhaps more, had their images hidden at the beginning of films. As movies have transitioned from analog to digital, though, the China girls are disappearing.

China girls went by many names-leader ladies, girl head, lady wedge-but they were almost always images of women, and those women were almost always white. They were meant to show the person developing a film that everything had gone right technically; if it hadn't, the China girl's skin tone would look unnatural.

Film labs started creating these images back in the black-and-white era. The term "China girl" is thought to date back to that time, although no one has pinned down exactly what it's supposed to mean. (One popular explanation links it to the porcelain-like quality of the women's skin; another cites the flower-print shirts early China girls wore.) There's little information, too, about who these women were. Probably some were models or would-be actress; others were women who were dating people who worked in film labs or worked in film labs themselves.

"A lot of them are made up and done up, but some of them look they just pulled some ladies out of the hallway," says Rebecca Lyon, a film projectionist who runs the Leader Lady Project at the Chicago Film Society. "There are certain women who look grumpy or vaguely unhappy to be there, and I enjoy those. It reminds you that they're not meant for public consumption."

Back in 2011, the Chicago Film Society started collecting pictures of China girls and posting them online. Most of them were found by film archivists or working film projectionists. Once, projectionists might have snipped the images off the end of the film-they'd already served their purpose-and post them around the booth or keep them for a private collection. These days, it's possible to capture them with a phone camera.

Most of the photos follow unspoken rules. They show the woman from the shoulders up; sometimes her shoulders are naked. They almost always included blocks of grey or different colors, another tool for calibrating the color of the film. Usually they're looking off to the side. The Leader Lady Project has collected and posted around 200 China girl images, including some unusual specimens showing men, mannequins, and people of color.

There's little formal documentation of this practice, though. When Genevieve Yue, an assistant professor of culture and media at The New School, started researching China girls, she found that she had to search for terms adjacent to these images-"densitometry," a part of the quality control process, for instance-to find any information at all. Few film scholars had heard of the China girl; she went to interview lab technicians to better understand these images.

"It is strange, going into labs, where there are China girls everywhere," she says. Labs need many, many copies of these images, as they continually calibrate their equipment, so their spaces fills up with the same woman's face. Sometimes they used the same images for years; in one lab Yue visited around 2010, the image they were using had been shot in the '90s. (The woman featured in the image still worked at the lab.) "They're such a naturalized part of the lab culture," says Yue. "It's totally vernacular-one person will teach another."

Starting in the 1980s, though, it became less common for labs to create their own China girl footage. In 1982, Kodak's John P. Pytlak developed a standardized image, known as the "LAD girl" or "LAD lady." (LAD stands for Laboratory Aim Density.) He later won an Oscar for his work. By the 1990s, it was finally dawning on film creators and processors, too, that using a white-skinned person as the universal standard was short-changing people of every other skin tone.

Today, there are still images that might be unfamiliar to the public but are famous among technicians who work on creating images for mass consumptions. Kodak has a digital LAD images, and image software also often includes calibration images. But few labs create their own.

One exception is Colorlab, in Rockville, Maryland, which has been in business since 1972 and is one of the last full-service film labs operating in the country. For years, they relied primarily on Kodak's standardized LAD girl. But there's no standardized LAD girl for the newest version of Kodak film, and the lab has revived the practice of making in-house China girl images. The most important part, technically, is the grey patch, where the film's density can be measured; the person's face is a more subjective measure of quality. Does it look right? Are the shadow details right?

"In the lab, you're sitting there staring at the image so critically," says the lab's Thomas Aschenbach. "To know that your face is going to be up there and everyone's going to be looking at it ... It's hard to get people in front of the camera."

In labs where the China girl was used for years, Yue, the New School professor, found that there's a nostalgia for the practice that surprised her. "One very old lab person got kind of misty-eyed," she says. He said she was glad she was researching the topic. "Because it's a face, it's more than an instrument. If you're a lab technician, you're looking at the same face for every day."

"When I went into the research, I was ready to be kind of dismissive of the lab culture that produced this image," she says. "But talking to people-it's much more complex than a bunch of men leering at women. It was woven into the life of a film laboratory. Because I have been researching this right before and during the closing of many film labs, there's this sadness and feeling of imminent loss in all of my encounters."

For Lyon, collecting images for the Leader Lady Project means documenting that world, in one particular way. "So much work goes into this process that people don't really think about," she says. "The women were representative of this unseen world, and the collecting of these images has been a way to push back against the tide, the black hole where all this analog stuff is going into." By collecting the China girl images, she's both revealing these long-hidden practices and keeping them from disappearing entirely.

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The Forgotten 'China Girls' Hidden at the Beginning of Old Films

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Few people ever saw the images of China girls, although for decades they were ubiquitous in movie theaters. At the beginning of a reel of film, there would be a few frames of a woman's head. She might be dressed up; she might be scowling at the camera.

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I'll be honest, it's not the proudest time to be a US-UK citizen. Back in the late 90s, when I added a mauve British passport to my desk drawer alongside my American blue one, it felt almost embarrassingly over-cautious, a self-indulgent hedging of bets, like triple glazing your windows. Of course, I liked that I could now vote in the UK, and would no longer have to pay foreign fees to go to a British university. But surely the primary point of having multiple nationalities was that you always had somewhere safe to call home: having the US and UK felt like holding two trump (ahem) cards.

Also, as much as people like me - people including me, let's be honest here - like to ham up the cultural differences between Britain and America (ha ha, Marmite! Self-deprecation! What even is that?), we are only able to focus on the micro because the macro has been so homogenous and stable. When your two countries are among the world's sturdiest democracies, with a shared language and culture, and their leaders constantly bang on about their "special relationship" (which always sounded to me like the kind of euphemism a parent would use when telling their children they're in an open marriage, or on the verge of an especially acrimonious divorce), there's not much else to complain about but yeast extract.

Which brings us to today. It turns out that Britain and America really do have a special relationship, although I think psychologists would use a different "s" word - self-destructive, say, or flat-out self-harming. Because if Brexit gave Donald Trump hope that his nativist time had come, then Trump has proven how foolhardy Brexit is. We are leaving, to paraphrase LBC radio's James O'Brien, a flawed but stable relationship with the EU for an entirely uncertain one with a misogynistic race-baiter who we hope won't hurt us. If you had a friend behaving the way the UK is now, you'd stage an intervention.

It is quite something to watch this, as a citizen of both countries: both your homes descending into pandemonium, on the one hand enabling and, on the other, undermining each other, while the rest of the world watches in astonishment. Imagine if both your parents had a simultaneous sadomasochistic midlife crisis, and that crisis involved banning random people from the house instead of buying Ferraris.

What I find especially bewildering is the way both countries are betraying their most beloved and frequently cited self-image. No matter how badly they behaved in the wars of the past 70 years - Vietnam, Iraq - there was always the shining beacon of the second world war, casting a glow on both. Britain and America, the stout-hearted good guys, the countries that don't turn their backs on Europe or those in need. Take that, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys! Now we have a White House administration that spends Holocaust Memorial Day knocking out an executive order to ban Muslim refugees, and which refuses to mention the Jews in a statement marking the memorial, and a Britain where it is deemed elitist to call out racism.

And still, people in both countries are confused about why people would want to protest this. In America, anyone who objects to Trump is dismissed as "denying democracy", while in Britain they are dismissed as - to quote one broadsheet commentator - "anguished luvvies and angry tweeters [more interested in] feeling smug than changing anything". OK, Trump is playing the Joker and causing unconstitutional crises, but ha, look at the ladies in the stupid pink cat hats! Loser snowflakes! It's funny how it's always those who have nothing to lose who find the idea of protest so stupid.

Let me use my US-UK privilege for a moment. I am, after all, bilingual. British people who say the way to deal with Trump is through "respectful diplomacy"? Let me respectfully and diplomatically tell you that you have no idea what you're talking about. Those of us who grew up with Trump know that he has the attention-span of a tweet, and that while Theresa May is holding his hand and talking trade deals he's wondering whether Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting better ratings than him on The Apprentice.

Safeguard your values, Britain, don't chase American power. If I remember correctly, that didn't work out so well for Tony Blair. And America, if your politicians are looking to Brexit for inspiration, know that our politicians haven't a clue.

There's not much hope one can take from being British-American right now. The least I can do is use my double identity, to save my two homes from destroying each other - and themselves.
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I'm American and British. Can I save the special relationship?

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I'll be honest, it's not the proudest time to be a US-UK citizen. Back in the late 90s, when I added a mauve British passport to my desk drawer alongside my American blue one, it felt almost embarrassingly over-cautious, a self-indulgent hedging of bets, like triple glazing your windows.

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(doing press is very weird)

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Anna Brownsted and I discuss our Fermynwoods online exhibition with a-n News.

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A year-long online exhibition by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Northamptonshire, is raising new questions relating to the role artists can play in wider political discourse.

'Can You Hear Me?' is the result of an open call, the theme of which was whether digital processes can reveal new perspectives. It features two entirely digital works that exist solely on the organisation's website.

Jessica Harby's Referendum (Tell Me How Do You Feel) is an online voting form that turns her citizenship decision over to the general public. The work also features a flood of visuals that may or may not influence the vote.

The other art work, by Anna Brownsted, is a series of films capturing the sound of a warped LP. The record, issued in 1964, is a heat damaged memorial album for the then recently assassinated US president, John F Kennedy.

Although the two artists now live in the UK, both were born in America. Northampton resident Jessica Harby is originally from Chicago, while Cambridge-based Anna Brownsted grew up in Dallas, Texas. They moved to the UK eight years ago, separately, arriving within one month of each other.

Considering the current political upheaval facing their country of birth, the exhibition is certainly timely. So how did Donald Trump's election win inform preparations for the show?

"I'm angry," says Brownsted. "I've been incredibly emotionally affected by the election result. To be honest, it tipped me off guard. I remember waking up on that Wednesday morning and feeling devastated."

Harby adds: "I envy Anna's anger. I get flashes of it, but my feelings are more of despair and anxiety. I have loved ones in Chicago who will be directly affected by some of Trump's policies, particularly changes to health care. He even threatened martial law in my home town. It is truly horrifying."

Both artists' work appears overtly political, although this is not necessarily intentional. Harby explains: "I'm not totally comfortable making political artwork and some of my previous work has focused on drawing. But ultimately these are things you can't ignore. I feel a certain responsibility as an artist to engage with the current political situation. Yet I see it as simply an extension of how I'm reacting as a human being."

For Brownsted, making work is the best way of utilising that pent up anger. "For Diplomat I simply locked myself in the studio and embraced it. It was almost a purging of emotions, and it felt like I was doing something rather than just sitting there."

The resulting 100 short films are evidence that her approach was fruitful. "I shot none-stop for just over seven hours. I think I even forgot to eat but it was a case of putting everything I was feeling through this endurance test. It probably wasn't the healthiest thing to do mentally!"

One film was made for each of JFK's first 100 days in office - usually the period where a president outlines actions for their whole term in office. Brownsted adds: "Bizarely, Trump seems to be cramming the 100 days into his first couple of weeks."

The roots of Harby's work, Referendum, began with last year's project, YOUR RELUCTANT DIPLOMAT. "At the end of April 2016 I set up an installation and office space for three days in the Project Space of NN Contemporary Art [in Northampton]. The public were invited to come in and discuss Donald Trump. And this meant intense research and involvement with the news."

She says that in order to do the work justice she really needed to know her stuff. "I've had to almost conduct the same level of research as a political journalist. I thought, 'I don't just want to be another idiot spouting opinions.'"

During this process Harby met a lot of people who didn't necessarily share her views. "I attended a Leave rally in Northampton. It was strange feeling, like there was nobody else like me. From that moment I really saw Brexit coming."

She also claims it highlighted the different ideology of some people from her area in comparison to cosmopolitan cities such as London. "I do think there is a difference. Mind you, Nigel Farage didn't even show up due to people protesting the rally. So that says a lot."

The idea for Referendum came directly from discussions she had during YOUR RELUCTANT DIPLOMAT. " Visitor after visitor maintained that they wouldn't consider me British, even if I became a British citizen. To them, I would always be American. Which made me wonder what citizenship was for, then, and who gets to decide what it means."

Both artists seem unmoved that the exhibition is, by its very nature, temporal. At the end of the year it will be taken down and archived only as a text record.

Brownsted comments: "I come from a theatre background where there is beauty in the live moment. A picture never really does it justice anyway. For me, the two works on show are user focused. They really exist in that moment of engagement."

Nevertheless, the works do also exist physically, to a certain extent. Harby has demonstrated the project using a physical ballot box when students have visited her studio and at workshops; Brownsted also brought the JFK record to a recent talk on the show.

"It's just such a fantastic object and I find the warped thickness of it really interesting," she says. "It captures the fragility of analogue."

Harby is looking at ways to continue the project beyond the current show at Fermynwoods. "I've spoken to a number of galleries about how to take things further. Hopefully when the exhibition ends on 31 December that won't be the end."

Future exhibitions aside, at least Harby knows her work has a definite outcome - namely the viewers' decision on her citizenship.

When asked whether the public vote will actually influence what action she takes, Harby has an intriguing answer. "The real question is: will I be bestowing more weight and power to individual votes than the US and UK governments did last year. Trump actually got [nearly] 3 million fewer votes than Clinton in the election. The point is getting people to discuss this."
'Can You Hear Me?' runs until 31 December 2017. www.fermynwoods.co.uk
Images:
1. Anna Brownsted, Diplomat. Photo: Anna Brownsted
2. Jessica Harby, Referendum (Tell Me How Do You Feel). Photo: Jessica Harby
3. Anna Brownsted, Diplomat. Photo: Anna Brownsted
4. Jessica Harby, YOUR RELUCTANT DIPLOMAT. Photo: Jessica Harby

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Online exhibition sees US artists respond to Trump presidency - a-n The Artists Information Company

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The seventh edition of Fermynwoods' annual online exhibition features two UK-based American artists whose work has resonances with the current political situation in the US. Jack Hutchinson speaks to Anna Brownsted and Jessica Harby about the anger, despair and anxiety fuelling their approach.