Hearing the Voices of Grenfell Tower

The neighborhood was a lovely place to grow up, Wahabi remarked, as she made her way through a sliver of parkland that lay in the shadow of the Westway, a six-lane highway thundering overhead. “There was a community, and it was safe,” she said. After the fire, Wahabi and her family were housed in a single hotel room. The strain took a toll on her marriage; she and her husband, Salah, separated, and his health declined. Salah died from complications of diabetes last year. “We were together for twenty years, until Grenfell broke us,” she said. On a bank in the park, a sapling was almost in bloom. Beneath it was a plaque in English and Arabic memorializing three of the locals who died in the tower, including Wahabi’s sister-in-law Faouzia. It read “From God we come and unto him we return.”