Helen Morgan and Marchelle Farrell: In Conversation

Helen: It’s been just over a year now since you published your debut book ‘Uprooting’ and subsequently wrote an article around it for our magazine, New Associations. ‘Uprooting’ and your New Associations article are pieces of writing that are intimately tied to your identity and lived experience. How did you find the writing process?

Marchelle: Yes, it’s a strange move to write a memoir as a psychotherapist. It certainly wasn’t what I set out to do. I started writing as a way of processing the world around me and when we found ourselves in the midst of the pandemic, I had just moved to this new house and this new garden. Crucially, I found myself at home, home schooling. I was sort of looking at the dynamics of what was playing out in the world and a lot of it felt very mad. So, I started writing as a way of trying to make sense of it.

Quite a lot of it was fuelled by rage because there was so much injustice being highlighted. Things about inequality, of access to space, especially green space. Inequality of risk in exposure to COVID and of course, when George Floyd was murdered, the long-standing historical inequalities and injustices around race were also highlighted. So, I think publicly sharing my writing was fuelled by rage. But I had been privately writing, just as part of my nature, for a long time.

Fortunately, it seemed to resonate with people who were also feeling discombobulated and distressed by state of the world. Some of the links that I was making seemed to make sense to other people. The personal bit of it ended up feeling very relevant because of who I am and the different, intersecting threads of my identity. Being Black Caribbean but living in England and having lived here for a long time, for about as long as I had lived in the Caribbean, both places had shaped me and my sense who I was quite significantly. I’d developed an intimate relationship between England and the former English colony on which I had been raised. I realised how that was also linked to with the actual landscape in which we find ourselves in and actually this garden, the plants in this garden actually had a very similar history to the people of the Caribbean in terms of being moved around via these routes, around the world of Empire.

So, bringing my own story into it ended up feeling really important as a way of bringing an emotional truth to the things that I was trying to ask people to think about, which are really difficult. Sometimes those themes can be thought about in a detached, dispassionate, kind of academic way, but then I’m not sure that we fully engage with them. Whereas, I think when it’s something personal, it asks you to step beyond that, it asks you how it makes you feel. We know from the work that we do, that people can often intellectualise as a defence mechanism, meaning that they often don’t change. So, I was really trying to find a way to make people feel something. That was always one of my aims in my writing. Also, looking around the UK publishing sphere, there was just very little that represented stories of people like me. Certainly, within the realm of nature writing, there was pretty much nothing from a Black Caribbean perspective. So, it felt necessary.

Helen: Did you find writing from that perspective to be cathartic?

Marchelle: I suppose it was cathartic. I mean, it was also really painful because in order to write about the wound you have to reopen it.

Helen: I mean you quite literally grounded that rage and that emotion in your book and in the article, you grounded it in the ground, the garden soil. It’s quite literally there and what comes across is that the garden certainly felt cathartic. That working with the plants, the soil, the land was a very important process for you.

Marchelle: Yes, absolutely and I suppose that was definitely one of the things that made me curious, that I wanted to explore: what was it about the garden and that space that felt so healing and therapeutic? I kind of realised over time, that the more time I spent in that space, the more it felt akin to what goes on in a therapy room. The therapeutic process is one we associate with another human mind and so it was really intriguing to me that place could actually do that for us. Holding an intimate relationship with place can have that same role and might that be one of the things underlying the huge success of horticultural therapy, nature therapies, walking therapies and so on. I suppose it was that element that triggered my professional curiosity. It was also just literally being in my garden that grounded me in my rage. I suppose I have a fiery temperament, probably what might be thought of as a fairly stereo-typically Caribbean in some ways, and it’s hard to think when you’re very cross, your thinking isn’t clear. But I would find that I could go out into the garden and start doing some of these tasks and then my thinking would clarify. Being able to articulate exactly what I was so enraged by, why it was so important and why it mattered – that kind of clarity came from being in the garden and putting my hands in the soil.

Helen: I wanted to talk about a very striking fact you bring up in your book and your article, where you say: The risk of developing schizophrenia as a Black British Caribbean person was nine times that of a white British counterpart, and that applied to your children too, who were born here. There’s a sort of madness that you talk about. How much do you think that is due to the experience of racism? Also, how much is due to a problem of diagnosis, probably mostly by white psychiatrists who may not understand that culture or that experience?

Marchelle: Understandably, it’s an area that is under researched and it’s tricky to research. Nine times is a stat I was told when I was being taught about twenty years ago, as a junior doctor. I think in more recent research, they say it’s closer to six or seven times, but it’s still very high. From their analysis of the data, they try very hard to rule out things like racism and bias in diagnosis, whilst understanding that that is something that exists within the system and it may play a small part. They also ruled out genetics. Schizophrenia is often thought of as a highly genetic condition, one of the few. They looked at the data and ruled out genetics as the cause. So, it does seem to be about being in relationship with England as someone who has migrated from the Caribbean in a Black body, a body that has been racialised as Black. That relationship will of course include human elements like racism, ‘the death by a thousand paper cuts’ that people refer to. The constant, small, subtle ways in which someone’s personhood is undermined. But what was really interesting about the data was that there seemed to be very large risk factor attached to where you lived, in particular being in cities. This carried a twofold increase in risk, as opposed to living in the countryside. That was really interesting because not many Black people live in the countryside. They tend to live in cities.

Helen: It’s interesting because you’ve made the move from a city to a very rural village in Somerset. That’s quite a choice, quite a move. Talking to friends and colleagues who are Black, they often talk of their fear and anxiety of being ‘the other’, the fear of being so visible in the countryside.

Marchelle: Absolutely, and I think it’s a well-grounded fear. It’s one that that’s held with good basis. People do experience vile racism in the countryside and I think that has something to do with what the English countryside represents. This collective psyche of what pure Englishness is. There’s a very particular idea of the English landscape, one that has been manicured and landscaped and shaped in colonial times and with colonial money to look a particular way and that looks actually very different from what can be considered as the indigenous or native English landscape, which was apparently a temperate rainforest. That’s not what England looks like now and it’s not the idea that we have of the English countryside. So, we hold this false idea about what the pure English countryside is. But what that holds within it is an idea about what was noble and good about the colonial project. Meanwhile, all of the stuff that was painful and difficult and violent about it was projected out into the colonies. There was very little, relatively speaking, that happened here on English soil. So, when you actually put a Black body out in the English countryside, you’re troubling something quite deeply held within the English psyche. It’s the return of what’s been projected outwards and reintegrating that into the psyche is incredibly painful. Which is why, I think, you get these unconsciously motivated but very toxic and violent, racist outbursts against Black bodies that are bold enough to present themselves in the English countryside.

I suppose myself and my family have been very lucky in the particular village that we’ve landed in. It has an extremely rural feel, there’s still quite a lot of farming families and agriculture, that tradition is still very strong, but we are actually only ten minutes from a city. There’s a lot of people here who have moved from other cities. There’s already a culture of people coming together, wanting to build a community where we can feel accepted. We can all start afresh I suppose, in a different way of life that we held before.

Helen: A writing focus of mine in the past has been the topic of whiteness and thinking about what colonialism and racism does to the white psyche, what damage does it do us? I don’t want to in any way take away from the damage it does to the Black ‘other’. I was thinking about the landscape, reading your book and this sort of ‘white mother’ and that what you point out so movingly is this white land that has been ravaged and abused, through the enclosures and later the industrial revolution. So much damage has been done to it.

Marchelle: That’s really true, and I don’t write explicitly about whiteness because that’s not my experience, but what I really wanted people to think about from both the article and definitely from the book, was whiteness and what that means because that was where I landed when I was thinking about these links, the links between my home there and my home here. There was so much that was shared, actually quite a lot of the harm that was carried out to an extensive degree in the Caribbean and on Black bodies was also practiced here, on poorer white bodies and their land. So, that was a very shared experience and there is something about the denial of that that was painful and harmful. I wish there was more thought and exploration of whiteness and being racialised as white and what a false construct it all is and the positions that it puts us in and the harm that it continues to perpetuate. This kind of repetition compulsion that we’re all trapped in by these identities which were created to set up a power structure that serves so few.

Helen: I was thinking about the demonization that’s been going on for a while now of the immigrant. Especially ‘the bad immigrant’ or ‘the unacceptable immigrant’ and I was thinking about the riots and what you felt about now, a year on from your book. Where do you think we are as a country at this current moment?

Marchelle: It made me really sad, actually, looking at the riots. I suppose in one way, to start with your point about ‘the good immigrant’. That’s something that I have been very aware of as I’ve navigated my life in England. That is, in lots of ways, I have been inhabiting a good immigrant role. I came here with all my excellent A level results and went to excellent universities and was doing an excellent medical degree and yet, being Black was always an impediment to my progress. So, no matter how good of an immigrant you might be, that was still never good enough. However, it protected me from a lot of violent harm that I’ve seen happen to ‘the unacceptable immigrant’. Seeing the riots just reinforced to me how important these topics are, we need to bring them out into consciousness and examine them, talk about them explicitly, collectively. The more we avoid that, the more this keeps being repressed until something happens that causes it to bubble out in a violent outburst. That’s just going to be the continual ongoing pattern until we have some kind of real societal reckoning with Britishness, whiteness and colonialism, what that means, what that meant, what that continues to mean. I think in a way similar perhaps to how Germany had to reckon with its role in the Holocaust. I think we need a national healing process around this. It harms all of us and that’s what we really see when these kinds of riots emerge. A lot of those so-called ‘thugs’ are people in pain. They’re reacting to this ongoing collective trauma, they’re not going to do well either until this is all addressed.

Helen: In the healing process, where do you put nature, or ‘the land’, that we’ve been discussing?

Marchelle: I think it comes alongside actually, and I think it is very much in parallel. I suppose, the easiest way to conceptualise it for me is kind of remembering that we’re animals and this is our habitat and that actually, as our habitat is ailing, we will be ailing. The UK, I believe, is the most nature deprived country in Europe. It’s had the greatest losses in terms of biodiversity and the greatest problems when it comes to pollution and our water systems. But I do believe that it will be the community coming together, collectively, that will restore our relationship with our habitat. These will probably be the same kind of actions that will begin to address our wounds around colonialism, because they’re linked. A large part of the ills around nature in Britain is how much land is held by so few people, so most people aren’t allowed access to it. The relationship with our land is very much affected by that and the reason why so much of the land is held by very few people came from the enclosures, came from colonial actions. So, I think the two really work in parallel, one won’t happen without the other. I think they need each other actually.

Helen: Colonialism and the destruction of the planet are very connected. There’s a sense of entitlement that came from the Enlightenment in Europe. We go on thinking, in the white psyche, that we are entitled to dominate others and dominate the World, for their own good and of course, it’s the Global South that are mostly suffering from that.

Marchelle: Yeah, I agree. They’re certainly suffering the most acute impacts of it, but it is happening here. We’ve had, just in the last week, so much rainfall and flooding. You know it is already here. I can’t imagine how hard it’s been for farmers trying to grow in England this year because of how very difficult the weather conditions have been. We see it in the supermarkets, fruits and vegetables can be more expensive and hard to find because people haven’t been able to grow them and that’s just going to keep worsening and worsening for us.

Helen: How optimistic are you?

Marchelle: It comes and goes. Some days I am extremely pessimistic and I think we’ve made our bed so we just need to lie in it. Other times I look at the garden and how very quickly things can change, you know? In the course of a growing season real, rapid, restoration, reparation is possible. I remember that we are part of those ecosystems as well, and therefore actually, that same rapid change must be possible for us.

Helen: On an individual level, do you as a therapist work with the land with your patients?

Marchelle: I don’t have a clinical practise of my own at the minute. I do a little bit of supervision, but I’m mostly working through my writing. I keep toying with the idea of going back to direct patient work and I’d definitely want to try and find a way to bring nature into that. Working at a different level with my writing and speaking at events feels like where I need to be putting my energy at the moment.

Helen: Your book has recently been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing in 2024, how did it feel to receive this news?

Marchelle: Yes, it was shortlisted. A different extremely able and wonderful writer Michael Malay actually won. But just looking at that shortlist, it was an amazing honour to see ‘Uprooting’ up there with those other books.

Helen: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to myself and the BPC. Is there anything else you’d like to say to our community reading this?

Marchelle: I suppose I’d always want to invite other therapists to keep being curious about place and relationship with place. It was such an absent dimension in my training. Well, it was there, in terms of ‘the room’, to keep the room sacred, to keep the place in which you’re carrying out therapy, constant. But thinking about place outside of that room, about the patient’s relationship with place more widely, that just wasn’t there. Often, we focus so much on relationships with other people that we forget that we’re embedded in this much wider ecosystem and how important that is.

Helen: Every profession has a problem with race and racism. But I think in a way, our profession, the profession of psychotherapy, has particular difficulties. One of them, I think, is this division we have between inner and outer. I never know quite where the inner stops and the outer begins but talking about this topic, I’ve often met resistance, I’ve been met with the idea that that’s outer world stuff, that’s politics and nothing to do with what happens in the room. We’re taught to think about the room and the inner but what is the landscape outside of that, that our patients have lived in?

Marchelle: I understand why it is that many of us hold those views, that our focus is on the inner with a sense that the outer is not our realm. What that ends up doing is not recognising how many difficulties might be caused by and influenced by the outer. It ends up putting a sort of undue blame or focus on the inner and it can be really helpful just to acknowledge the fact that there are some things that we might not be able to change. The outer can have this tremendous impact on what happens in the inner world. That in and of itself can be really powerful and definitely as a Black person who had a white therapist for a long time, I’ve had times where I’ve brought up issues I thought were related to race and I was met with an invitation to think about universal problems of belonging. And of course, everyone has problems with belonging and identity and you know, these are universal issues. But also, there were quite specific aspects to my experience that it was very difficult for someone white to even acknowledge. I suppose that’s because they then have to acknowledge their own potential complicity in those systems. That’s hard but that’s the work we’re signed up to do, we’re signed up to do the hard things. So, we just have to think about the hard things. There’s no way around it. We just have to do the painful work.

Helen: I so enjoyed that in your book, the way you used the garden to think about the hard things was very grounding and very helpful.

Marchelle: I think the garden can be such a safe space for thinking about difficult things. I think that’s why I ended up using it as the lens through which to bring in so many of these themes. There’s something in particular about a garden, because humans have gardened throughout our evolution. We’ve always had a little space near to us that we tend and change and plant things and remove things and shape them and make them beautiful, we’ve done that for a really long time. I think there’s something about it being this liminal space that’s not the wilderness, you know, it’s not fully the wild. It’s partly tamed and it’s an extension of us. On the topic of where the inner and the outer lie, I feel like the garden sits in a sort of transitional space. Like play, that space in between two minds where something new can happen.

Helen: It’s interesting, you live amongst beautiful landscape but you don’t write about going for beautiful walks in that landscape, although I’m sure you do. There’s something around this transitional space that is so interesting in your book. Sometimes the garden fails or disappoints you, something doesn’t grow or there’s some flooding or something doesn’t go your way.

Marchelle: Absolutely and that’s why it’s so valuable. All of these painful feelings are there, you know, death and failure and suffering. We’re going into autumn now and I have to look at the garden die around me. But it will continue living underground in terms of roots, and dormancy has its own vibrancy. It does not look and feel as lush, vibrant and alive as it does in spring and summer. So, those themes of mourning and grief and loss are there every time I step out into it. So, it’s an invitation to work with those feelings but in a safe place.

But at the end of the day, it’s just a garden. It’s not a life or death scenario.

Helen: Well, thank you very much for the book and the article and this discussion. I’ve very much appreciated your work and your time today.

To learn more about Marchelle Farrell you can visit her website. To order a copy of her book ‘Uprooting’, click here.