In the 239-year history of the United States, the closest this would-be nation has come to accomplishing that largely unfulfilled promise of immigration at Ellis Island is letting in the multitudes of Europeans who have arrived on its shores in several waves since the earliest decades of its founding. Like the Statue of Liberty itself, a gift  from one occidental community to another, most arrived in the United States with little more than the shirts on their backs as their sole worldly possession, but a path to possible acceptance and integration nevertheless.

Other would-be immigrants from elsewhere: the Orient, the non-western world, and nether regions have found the fabled “golden door” of America firmly shut to this promise.

Look no further for the evidence for this assertion than the uninformed, yet calculated statements of Donald Trump, the man who might easily become President of the United States were the presidential elections to be held today. In announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination on June 16, 2015, Trump boldly declared to global media that “…when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…they’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems…”

Is that not, in fact, the promise enshrined at the feet of Lady Liberty? If Trump’s inarticulate and rather unfortunate assertions had any element of truth in them, why should Mexico not send their worst when America, arguably the most prosperous country yet in the history of human civilization, boldly promises to welcome “…poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” and make better citizens out of them?  How does this country conceive of immigrants, and of the idea of freedom itself?

Opinion polls have since shown that Trump’s contemptuous attitude towards would-be immigrants is actually a pervasive sentiment across the contemporary American political landscape and within the cultural mainstream, one shared by many respondents in opinion polls around the country.

Trump’s claims were not only outrageous and divisive, they were also largely untrue. When most countries around the world today send their immigrants, Uncle Sam demands that only their brightest, their most talented and most diligent be allowed to remain.

Except for the State Department’s Refugee Admissions Program and the Diversity Immigrant Visa Lottery Program, current immigration laws of the United States demand that visa applicants and travelers demonstrate binding ties to their home countries such as property and family. It is expected that legal immigrants be educated with at least a high school diploma. Most of those who come through legal immigration channels, in fact, arrive with far more than that, comprising the upper echelon of society in their countries of origin.

Statistics from the United States Census Bureau  and Data from the Department of Homeland Security show that the more substantive percentage of immigrants to America are legal immigrants and not illegal immigrants, as falsely claimed by Trump and believed by most of his sycophantic followers.

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, Fortune 500 companies and other major economic stakeholders are staffed with some of the most educated and talented immigrants anywhere in the world.

The denial of entry to those most in need is not exclusive to the United States. Across the Atlantic, the ignominy of the current immigration discourse in Europe is sadly similar to that championed by the far-right in America.

This summer has seen perhaps the highest mass transnational migration of human beings the world has seen this century. From the war in Syria, the post-Gadhafi instability in Libya, and the continuing political and economic crises in several parts of Asia, central and North Africa, refugees have fled by boats and land routes in desperate bids to reach the relative peace and stability of European shores. The Syrian refugee crisis alone has generated over 4 million refugees in neighboring countries, with over half of the country’s population displaced.

Their mass arrival in many parts of Europe has been met with scorn akin to that faced by the most outcast of minority groups in Europe, such as the Romani, have faced in their history of transmigration across Europe.

From train stations to open fields, refugees and migrants[1] have been left to perish in the elements while European politicians dither in deciding what to do about and with them. Only recent coverage of children’s bodies washing up on European shores and deaths of dozens of migrants on a truck in Austria have spurred enough outcry to generate a more organized response from the EU.

Ironically, the greatest migrants the world has ever known, Europeans, now refuse to countenance those caught in similar predicaments and circumstances as thousands of their ancestors.

From the revered Pilgrim Fathers who arrived in the so-called “New World” to Boer Trekkers in the Veldts of Southern Africa, Syrian, Asian, and North African migrants are now undertaking the same perilous journeys for similar reasons –religious freedom, economic opportunity and safety.

Everywhere they arrived across “new worlds,” from the Americas, through Africa, Asia, Australia to New Zealand, European migrants supplanted autochthones, transforming the very definition of citizenship in the process: If you brave oceans and arrive anywhere in the world, if you fancy your destination, if you plant roots and make it your own, you may belong and claim a place…but only if you are European!

Look no further for affirmation of this perverse doctrine of citizenship than the fates of native communities– Aborigines, Maoris, and Zulus, and Native Americans in the Americas, as they continue to fight for recognition in their native lands.

Yet, whereas the exploits of the Pilgrim Fathers or the European explorers are lauded as brave, intrepid and adventurous in historical accounts, those of the current boat migrants and refugees who are in similar circumstances are described as desperate, and even foolish, for jumping on rickety boats and risking all with their families to disturb the peace, tranquility, and  more critically the economies and narrowly defined national characters of Europe. The regard for the quality of an endeavor, and the humanization of those involved, still depends on the place of origin of the subjects in question.

The hypocrisy of “open borders” is unfathomable when you contrast how migrants have been treated in the summer of 2015 with discourses of global trade and economic exchange. “Globalization is inevitable!” “To trade…everyone!” “Open borders!” Weaker countries in the developing world are constantly harassed, bullied, humiliated and reprimanded by the World Trade Organization, the European Union and other hegemons of neoliberal reforms to open their borders to global trade, as long as their people always stay inside those borders.

Had Cecil the Lion’s murderer been denied a visa to enter Zimbabwe, you can bet your last dollar that the State Department would have been furious at the Zimbabwe government for being foolish and petulant over a “few travel bans” on Zimbabwean authorities for “human rights violations.”

As soon as conflicts erupt or are instigated through the interventions of European powers or their American counterparts in the postcolonies, however, those same advocates of the “free movement” of (European?) people and goods change their tone and cry out for their borders to be closed. “Keep the hordes at bay,” they weep, “lest Europe collapses under the weight of the problems they bring with them.”

Thus, we now have arrived at another shameful milestone in the history of the human community. Future conflicts will be deadlier precisely because belligerents will be reassured by the fact that the Europeans and Americans who have long dominated the economic and political landscape will stand by and do nothing as countries are ravaged and civilians displaced. They also know no one will directly intervene to stop them and, more disturbingly, they know Europeans will promptly shut their borders to innocents trying to flee the atrocities.

On Wednesday, September 2, 2015, body of a dead boy washed up on the beach of a popular tourist destination in Turkey. Only in death was the boy recognized as a human child in crisis. There cannot be a more symbolic reminder of the world’s failure to offer refuge to those who seek it, just as Pilgrim Fathers once sought refuge from their oppressors in Europe. The boy was found face down in the sand as if the innocence of his young life that was prematurely extinguished had proclaimed a big “shame on you Europe…I have left your world for a much better place!”

The post Braving Oceans: Migration and Subjective “Illegality” from the Pilgrim Fathers to Boat Migrants appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Image 1: Bus stationed in Frontera Comalapa, Chiapas, Mexico in expectation of a journey to the U.S.-Mexico Border. – Photo Credit: Rebecca B. Galemba

Mexicans ride these buses, but Central Americans also seek to blend in. At the southern border, a history of cross-border marriage, social networks, and refugee flight and return during the height of Guatemalan counterinsurgency conflict (1980-1981) make distinguishing Mexicans from Guatemalans difficult. Mexican adults in the region told me that most could not trace their families any further back than their parents or grandparents to Mexico. They all had Guatemalan roots. Yet Mexico’s official attitude towards such fluid identities is anything but. In this region many poor residents lack documents and the border has been historically porous. Meanwhile, at the southern border, the municipality of Frontera Comalapa has developed into a hub to purchase any document you want. Official surveillance in this context often takes on ethnic and classist tones. I asked one immigration official how she could ascertain the difference between Mexicans and Guatemalans in this context. In addition to dress and dialect, she mentioned, “we can often detect by the smell.”

One February day in 2007, I purchased tickets for this trip at a “Travel Agency” in Frontera Comalapa. I was not planning to travel until the end of March; advance purchase did little to secure my reservation. When my husband and I attempted to travel north on one of these buses one March Wednesday morning, many buses refused to let us board. Operators claimed they were full. While some buses were hired directly by maquilas, or border assembly plants, at the northern border, it was also clear that many were neither full nor contracted. What I learned from the one company that allowed me to ride was that many were wary of human rights reporters. I had bought my tickets to Tijuana, where I intended to visit contacts from field research in 2004. While many people said they were going to Tijuana, in reality few buses had Tijuana as their destination. The drivers told immigration agents they were headed for Caborca, Sonora. Only as we approached the border did I learn that the bus was destined for the desert border town of Altar, Sonora. Why were these buses so openly advertised, yet also disguised? A Mexican bus operating in Mexican territory should be free to operate without fear. The tourism or travel label was partly designed to get around Mexican bus companies’ monopolies over particular routes. Yet this label also disguised the purpose of the journey since a deeper suspicion of illegality surrounded the buses due to their destinations and passengers. This bus ride from Mexico’s southern to northern border provides a window into how Mexico is implementing border security through interior checkpoints, as well as to how the U.S.’s security agenda casts a specter of illegality over these buses and their passengers even within Mexican territory.

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This piece focuses on the problems of trying to prevent undocumented migration to the U.S. by investing more resources and assistance into Mexican border policing in order to fulfill a U.S.-designed security agenda. Mexico has recently escalated border enforcement to stem what the U.S. termed a “border crisis” of undocumented Central American youth arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2014. In July 2014, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto implemented Programa Frontera Sur (Southern Border Program[1]) to improve border security and to protect migrants entering Mexico. To solve this crisis, according to many politicians and dominant media renderings in the U.S., Mexico must enforce its own southern border. U.S. assistance is implicit and explicit in this solution as the U.S. embraces Mexico as a key partner for establishing hemispheric security (Benítez Manaut 2003). Alan Bersin, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security recently stated, “The Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border” (Isacson et al 2014: 5). Recently, Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior Miguel Angel Osorio Chong similarly articulated Mexico’s “new” approach to the border, “Never before has Mexico announced a state policy on the border… now [it is] absolute control of the southern border” (Archibold 2014). Yet these statements are somewhat misleading while they also lack historical depth. The southern border has never been consistently well patrolled, but periodic crackdowns have been common throughout Mexico’s recent history.

This article reveals the historical continuity that the discursive construction of a “border crisis” has played in justifying increased, yet often ineffective, counterproductive, and perhaps even destructive, border enforcement. As recently argued by Gabriella Sanchez (2014), the construction of a “border crisis” is a powerful narrative to justify the escalation of criminalization, militarization, and violence.[2] It entrenches the political status quo: fear of a “crisis” derails immigration reform and justifies more resources for controversial U.S.-backed Mexican and Central American security initiatives. In this narrative, enforcement, rather than human rights, the right to mobility, and the failures of broken immigration and labor systems, becomes the dominant policy and media focus.

The justification of heightened security to combat a purported border crisis has older roots. The suspicions and surveillance surrounding this bus’ journey, for example, highlight Mexico’s subservience to the U.S. border agenda seven years prior to the 2014 crisis. To claim that a crisis has simply emerged obscures the ability of historical analyses to temper current approaches and to offer alternative solutions. Specifically, the crisis discourse, and the enforcement policies it legitimizes, shares much in common with the U.S. approach to the U.S.-Mexico border, which became especially prominent during the 1980s War on Drugs and the 1990s border enforcement built up.[3] Peter Andreas identifies the similar power of the narrative of “loss of [border] control” at the U.S. Mexico border. According to Andreas (2000: 7):

The stress on loss of control understates the degree to which the state has actually structured, conditioned, and even enabled (often unintentionally) clandestine border crossings, and overstates the degree to which the state has been able to control its borders in the past…it obscures the ways in which the state itself as helped to create the very conditions that generate calls for more policing.

In the historically porous Mexico-Guatemala borderlands, the rhetoric of border security has intermittently risen to the fore to justify increased surveillance; state officials have often used ethnicity and dialect to signal otherness and exclusion.[4] Mexico first militarized its border with Guatemala to contain the refugee flow during the Guatemalan conflict in the early 1980s (Cruz Burguete 1998). More recently, Mexico intensified border enforcement and interior inspection points in line with a U.S. post-September 11, 2001 hemispheric security agenda. In July of 2001 under Plan Sur,[5] Mexico signed onto a U.S.-backed plan to not only strengthen its southern border with Guatemala, but also to implement militarized internal checkpoints. According to Miguel Pickard (2005), “the measure had the effect of ‘displacing’ tasks of the U.S. southern border to southern Mexico.”[6] Plan Sur increased migrant vulnerability as migrants sought out more dangerous routes and sophisticated smugglers to avoid the checkpoints (Birson 2010). Migrant desperation has become lucrative for cartels and criminal gangs who bribe their way through the bolstered security system (Birson 2010).

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On the bus, the mood was light as passengers joked with one another, music switched somewhat seamlessly between Mexican Norteña bands and Britney Spears, and passengers requested different DVDs. Some DVDs were bootleg copies of comedies; bus passengers laughed when the amateur bootlegger also captured audience members walking in and out of the theater when trying to film the actual movie. Most of the DVDs did not even have Spanish subtitles. However, most passengers seemed content to focus on something else besides the barren hillsides. The bus journey, however, was impeded by multiple checkpoints staffed by immigration, customs, the police, or the military. Checkpoints were more frequent at the southern border in Chiapas and again, as we neared the U.S.-Mexico border. At each checkpoint, the atmosphere shifted as passengers were instructed to get off the bus and to file into separate male (over 40 individuals) and female (4 individuals) lines as their papers, faces, and ways of talking were inspected.

Outside of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, we came to a temporary inspection point in the form of a tent set up on the side of the road with a small plastic table for food and a television. An immigration agent boarded the bus yelling, “Gather of your belongings [when you get off]. Please gather all of your belongings.” She didn’t give anyone time to speak. We were never given a reason why three men were kicked off the bus after the agents inspected every passenger. The agents suspected that the men were Central Americans. One passenger, who others referred to as their “guide” or “boss”, urged people who knew the men to defend them, but many people were afraid that this would render them suspect as well. One passenger told me that he was traveling with five friends, but that two were from Guatemala. The men told officials at the Mexican checkpoints that they were traveling separately because, as the passenger explained, “I don’t want to be accused of being a coyote [human smuggler] if they [Guatemalan friends] are caught. We don’t want to be associated.” He continued, “Sometimes Mexicans are being taken [off the buses] at the checkpoints while some Guatemalans pass fine. They [officials] will confuse [Mexicans] as being Guatemalan. It is very strict now.” Sometimes people were unsure if others were Mexican or Central American. The above passenger was uncertain, “They are from Guatemala, but have lived in Mexico for a long time. They are more Mexican.”[7] The “guide” believed that the men were Mexican and that the immigration officials “just want money. They often behave badly. If they have money, the [officials] will let them pass. They [officials] don’t have the education to know who is Mexican and who is not. They also don’t seem to care.” He continued to explain that people “often do not know how to defend themselves…Even when they are Mexican, the migra [immigration agents] will remove them [from the bus].” The three men had been taken off of the bus, but at later checkpoints, officials instead collected money from individuals or from the bus drivers who then collected from the corresponding passengers. Some men told me they believed that people who anticipated a problem could sometimes pay an advance fee to the bus drivers to help them through checkpoints. One man told me that he refused to succumb to this practice; “If you don’t pay, they take you off the bus…[But] I am Mexican and I would rather get off the bus than pay.” When this man was stopped for further questioning at one checkpoint, he related, “They asked for everything, all my documents…” He laughed…“And then, what are my parents’ names, how old are my parents, where was I born, how old am I, what day was I born, why did I leave? …If you answer just one question not to their liking, they take you off the bus.”

Ironically, Grupo Beta,[8] a Mexican unit dedicated to protecting migrant rights in Mexico, stopped the bus a few miles after the men had been removed from the bus by immigration. As they delivered pamphlets addressing the right of Mexicans to travel freely within Mexico, we recognized the terrible irony that the men had just been kicked off the bus. A Grupo Beta representative inquired if any immigration agents had asked for money from anyone or if anyone had been kicked off of the bus. They told the passengers that no one should be able to infringe on their rights to travel as Mexicans or to take money from them; if this occurs, then they should report it. Yet, the passenger who identified as a “guide” explained, “If you are Mexican you can go to human rights, but it’s often too late. They [human rights] should be watching the migra since it is complicated to denounce them. But they [human rights] are often located where they cannot do anything to resolve anything. Then you lose time and money.” When passengers mentioned that three men had just been kicked off of the bus, the Grupo Beta representative responded, “If you know they are Mexican… from your communities, defend them.” Yet the representatives also admitted that this could lead to problems since they knew that many people carried false documents and “if you do not know, you can be accused of being a coyote.” The potential for illegality rendered all passengers vulnerable to the whims of authorities operating under a U.S. security lens that is suspicious of all travelers heading north. Surveillance in northern Mexico is often racially marked against not only Central Americans, but also against southern Mexicans and the indigenous, who northern Mexicans have historically stigmatized as backwards and as posing a potential threat to the socioeconomic order (Vila 1999: 80).

As we approached the U.S.-Mexico border, the bus drivers gave gifts of DVDs and cigarettes to immigration inspectors to ensure a smooth passage through various checkpoints. The drivers knew the agents well; then the agents would wave, “see you next week.” As we neared the border, the bus drivers also urged passengers to hide their cell phones in overhead compartments. They knew officers might confiscate phones since they suspected they would be used to call coyotes waiting at the border. Some passengers had made the journey to the U.S.-Mexico border in groups and planned to call coyotes to help them with the long trek through the desert into the United States. Less experienced passengers were accompanied by the Mexican “guide” on the bus, whose task was to deliver them at the U.S.-Mexico border to a partner more familiar with the next leg of the journey. When we arrived in Altar, Sonora, everyone got off the bus and seemed to disappear into the desert dusk. My husband and I entered one of the few taquerias in an otherwise desolate town to wait almost two hours for a bus to Tijuana.

The bus journey illustrated the unpredictability of surveillance and the anxieties, as well as opportunities, this generated for passengers. Immigration agents might detain and deport someone, collect a bribe, or choose to ignore or fail to recognize false documents. While many bus passengers were apprehensive about the journey, more experienced migrants knew that they would eventually succeed. One passenger who was friends with the men who had been kicked off the bus received a phone call from them as we approached the U.S.-Mexico border. His friends would be joining him at a hotel in Altar, Sonora to wait for their coyote.

The Mexico-Guatemala border has long been selectively and unpredictably enforced. The actual official border is often easy to cross. At an official inspections post at Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Mexico and La Mesilla, Guatemala, I often found confused tourists wondering where to get their passports stamped when they crossed the border. Border officials generally remain in their offices as people easily walk across the border and board vans to their destinations. However, semi-permanent, as well as unpredictable, checkpoints increasingly break up interior highways. Makeshift checkpoints may emerge overnight and vanish the following day. However, at the same time, a lack of sufficient and trained personnel, historically porous flows, the necessities of trade, and the fact that border security is costly and often counterproductive, lead the government to promote one image—of total control—while the reality is otherwise. As one customs official explained, “There are only 30 fiscal inspectors in all of Chiapas. Look…[he beckoned out of his office window to the expanse of mountains that constituted the international border]. This is a big state. With only 30 [inspectors] what are we supposed to do?” Unpredictability at once engenders fear and hope, which fuels the ability of corrupt state officials and smugglers to take advantage of migrants. Meanwhile, an image of control, rather than its actual implementation, enhances state legitimacy by demonstrating the state’s commitment to border management (Andreas 2000: 11; Nevins 2002). Similarly, at the U.S.-Mexico border, Peter Andreas (2000: 9) argues, “successful border management depends on successful image management, and that does not necessarily correspond with levels of actual deterrence.”

One customs official in Chiapas explicated the function of the image of control:

What the government wants to do most is show an image of control…but of course…if you actually see, you know that isn’t true…To actually exert control costs…the government is often not willing to spend the money…The government has sent more forces, but they are the same….They could send ten more units and it would be the same.

This disjuncture between image and reality has proven true in the past; when Mexico created a new border police force (Policía Estatal Fronteriza-State Border Police) in 2007, border residents I knew soon realized that many of the officers were the same men they knew from the state police force. The officers had received new uniforms, but otherwise nothing had changed. This buildup of the border security apparatus is a product of the state’s desire to show a public presence of force, while simultaneously realizing the inability, and impracticality of, fully controlling the border (Andreas 2000).

Recently numbers of undocumented migrants at the U.S. border have declined and the rhetoric of crisis in the U.S. media has subsided. However, Mexico continues to confront much of this flow. A priest who works with the Casa del Migrante in Tecún Umán, Guatemala told me in 2007, “To work for immigration is dirty work…Bush asked Mexico to help detain migrants going north and Mexico is doing its dirty work.” According to Migration Information Source, Mexico has deported over 30,000 Central Americans in 2014 (Archibold 2014).  Can this really be termed a successful solution to a crisis? When migrants are caught within Mexico’s web of enforcement, they’re more likely to be preyed upon by gangs, officials, and cartels, especially in border cities where migrants may desperately wait, become stranded, or try to gather funds to try again or return home. The hostel worker related, “And from these same migrants the officials feed themselves, taking their money and then they are allowed to proceed.” One migrant described the symbiosis between migrants and officials, “If there weren’t migrants, the migra [immigrant agents] would not have jobs. The migra are corrupt, they take your money and beat you.” To him, officials and bandits belong on the same continuum. He was deported because he had no more money to pay officials-the maras gangs had already taken everything.[9]

Mexico recently committed to patrolling the freight train called “La Bestia”/ “the Beast”, which migrants jump on and cling to as they attempt to make the journey north.

Image 2: Flyer warning migrants of the dangers of “The Beast” if they decided to travel north. Translation: “If you go… ‘the dignity and human rights of migrants do not have borders.” – Photo Credit: Photo taken by Rebecca B. Galemba at the Casa del Migrante in Tecún Umán, Guatemala.

In Tapachula, Chiapas, I met double amputees whose limbs were crushed by “the Beast” when they fell from the train. Yet for many the risks of “the Beast” were preferable to alternative routes, where they believed they would encounter more official corruption and criminal groups.[10]Amputees at the Albergue Jesus El Buen Pastor in Tapachula, Chiapas, a shelter for injured migrants, have fashioned wheelchairs out of plastic chairs.[11] One man, a double amputee, realized the irony behind his higher quality wheelchair. He told me that in 2006, Maria Shriver, who was married to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California at the time, came briefly to the shelter to donate fifteen wheelchairs. He told me “It was nice of her to donate the chairs,” but he disliked Schwarzenegger’s politics, especially concerning immigration.[12] “No he didn’t come,” he said. “We wouldn’t accept him if he did.”

Image 3: Photo of a make-shift wheelchair at Albergue Jesus El Buen Pastor in Tapachula, Chiapas – Photo Credit: Rebecca B. Galemba

The lesson from the U.S.-Mexico border is that the militarization of enforcement does not stop unauthorized border flows (Andreas 2000). When security escalates, smugglers become more sophisticated, violent, and demand higher fees, migrants pursue more dangerous routes, and officials increase bribes (ibid.). In turn, the border policing apparatus expands to combat it in a spiral of mutual escalation (ibid.). In 2012, the U.S. budget for immigration enforcement was $18 billion, larger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, despite evidence that such escalation may be counterproductive (Preston 2013). A similar border security approach is exported to Mexico, without enough consideration of judicial and policing reform, corruption, causes of migration, and a lack of transparency and accountability in policing institutions (Isacson et al. 2014). In this context, further feeding the current security and migration infrastructure has led to an escalation in human rights abuses. For example, human rights activists point to concerning implications for migrant rights as Grupo Beta, whose purpose is to aid migrants, has now been enlisted to help Mexican authorities conduct migrant raids (Stanton 2014).

In 2014, The Merida Initiative,[13]a security agreement established between the U.S. and Mexico in 2008 to combat drug trafficking and transnational crime, directed increased funds and attention to  “creating a 21st century border” and securing Mexico’s borders (Isacson et al.: 24). As of February 2014, The Mérida Initiative allocated $112 million in technology for border security including training, inspection equipment, and infrastructure, including additional small amounts for Navy/Marine training and facilities from the Defense Department’s counter-narcotics budget (ibid.). Most of this funding has gone to the northern border, but the southern border is now also becoming a priority (ibid.). Yet militarizing security forces in Mexico and Guatemala through U.S.-backed initiatives like Merida and Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI[14]) has not only failed to stem the drug war, but Mexico’s war on the cartels has also left 80,000 dead, 27,000 disappeared, and thousands displaced and since 2006 (MAWG 2013: 3; Abrego 2014). Such approaches are worrisome in regions where the military continues to be associated with human rights abuses and impunity. The United States cut off funding to Guatemala’s military in 1990 due to human rights abuses. Despite this, conditions have loosened and these restrictions do not apply to Defense Department funds, from which $27.5 million was given to Guatemalan security forces for counter-narcotics control form 2008-2012 (Isacson et al. 2014: 29; MAWG 2013). As David Bacon (2014) warns, “giving millions of dollars to some of the most violent and rightwing militaries in the Western hemisphere…is a step back towards the military intervention policy that set the wave of migration into motion to begin with.”

Mexico’s current approaches to tackling border issues, such as the Southern Border Program, do not contain sufficient measures to protect migrants or prosecute corrupt officials. While the program stresses migrant protection as a key component, Jorge Urbano, Director of the Program on Migration at the Iberoamerica University, expressed doubts that “if there is no qualified human capital…professionally trained to do a job that requires expertise in the subject of human rights, the measure…will result in little more than merely good intentions” (Langner 2014, translation mine). The program also does not address the concerns of migrants in transit (Langner 2014).[15] Rubén Figueroa, Coordinator of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement in the Southern Region, asserts that:

the federal government has applied the Southern Border Plan as a police action to detain and deport the largest number of migrants…within this plan there are no provisions to prevent crimes…In the last decade more than 70,000 migrants have disappeared in Mexico and there are no mechanisms to denounce these disappearances when family members are in Central America[16] (Blanco 2014, translation mine).

Tasking Mexico’s migration institutions and enforcement agents with bolstering border security, regularizing migration, and protecting migrant rights raises additional concerns as critics doubt the ability of Mexico’s National Institute of Migration (INM) to implement immigration laws and respect human rights. In 2013, the INM ranked 8^th in the number of human rights abuses reported to Mexico’s National Human Rights Ombudsman (Isacson et al.: 32). The federal police and military ranked even higher in terms of abuses. According to Casa del Migrante in Saltillo in 2013, the federal police received the most denunciations for migrant abuses, even ahead of the Zetas cartel and maras gangs (Ureste 2014a). It is evident that strengthening security does little to make people feel secure. One merchant complained to Mexican journalist Manu Ureste, “as there are more checkpoints, there is more corruption” (Ureste 2014b, translation mine). As soldier demanded money to look through her bags, the merchant laughed when asked if the additional checkpoints made people feel more secure (ibid.). Instead, she saw the checkpoints as an opportunity for officials to distribute money amongst themselves (ibid).

To further understand Mexico’s approach to Central American migrants, it is important to note that Mexico accepts very few refugees–last year only 208 Central Americans (Kahn 2014). Many migrants are deported before they can pursue claims or they are detained indefinitely in INM’s poor facilities while filing (Isacson et al. 2014: 33). Once detained, migrants have a miniscule chance of advocating for an asylum case (IAHCR 2013). At one Mexican detention facility I visited in 2007, the women told me the men were denied water. Visits with their husbands in a different cell depended on the discretion of individual agents. One woman said the only reason the immigration delegate in charge came to check on them that day was because I was present. “Normally,” she said, “they yell at us and insult us.” Most detainees did not know how long they would remain in INM facilities or when they would be sent home. Mexico has recently made some efforts to decriminalize migration in 2008, as well as to enable migrants to seek justice for abuses regardless of status under the General Population Act in 2010 (IAHCR 2013). Nonetheless, detention remains the norm and protections have been insufficient to stem abuses. A recent Washington Office on Latin America report cautions:

Given the widespread and well-documented involvement of Mexican authorities with human smugglers and organized crime, increased immigration enforcement in Mexico is likely to accomplish little, and will only contribute to the further enrichment of corrupt officials and criminals, and to the victimization of innocent migrants (Meyer and Boggs 2014).

We need to become attuned to the reasons why people migrate and why they go where they do; this forces us to look in the mirror at foreign intervention, devastating trade policies, and inconsistent and insufficient immigration and refugee policies.[17] Pushing the crisis elsewhere through increasingly militarized means not only does not work, but it also leaves death and violence in its wake. Moreover, just as the crisis imagery obscures the fact that such problems have long been in the making, it also makes the issues seem to disappear once media and policy attention dissipate. Instead, Joseph Nevins (2002: 171) points to how the political-economic context and political elites shape our perceptions of crisis even when actual conditions may remain similar.

The power of the U.S. to control the border has become a normalized response to larger economic, political, and global anxieties (Nevins (2002: 37). Laying bare the social, historical, and political processes by which border policing has become a normalized mode of nation-building can help us question the implications of extending such exercises of power beyond and within national borders (Nevins 2002; Nevins 2014). As witnessed by the suspicions of illegality surrounding the Mexican bus’ journey, the U.S. has extended its border surveillance practices to Mexico, effectively undermining its sovereignty. Mexico and the U.S. have also instituted internal borders like the checkpoints depicted along the bus trip while the U.S. has implemented various practices of governance (e.g. E-Verify, Secure Communities, workplace policing, and the denial of driver’s licenses in various states) that increasingly delimit and criminalize the movement and existence of immigrants, creating what Nuñez and Heyman (2007) term, “entrapment processes” (also see Nevins 2014).

The restriction of rights based on national borders, coupled with the presumption that border policing can effectively guarantee these rights, relies on an assumption that threats to a nation come from outside of its borders and that such threats should therefore be combatted at the border. The normalization of this logic has made the granting and withholding of basic rights conditioned on national borders appear beyond reproach.[18] Such national frames of concern further contribute to the exploitation and abuse of migrants in transit as well as in the U.S., as their rights are either outright devalued or all too easily suspended in the name of security.

Image 4: Mural of the difficult northward journey, which depicts an imposing border with a narrow entryway between the United States and Mexico at the Casa del Migrante in Tecún Umán, Guatemala. - Photo Credit: Rebecca B. Galemba

The post Mexico’s Border (In)Security appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

There’s no never-again ending to their stories of displacement: From Congo to Burundi, from Iraq to Syria, From Darfur to Tripoli to Tunis, to New Haven.  They’ve had to flee persecution on foot, by boat, by air, moving under duress with the traumas of forced migration.  They are walking with scars, and yet they are marching, in protest of yet more violence near their new homes in Connecticut.  The struggle for justice can be as hard as trying to march on crutches. But every hop-step we take with another is a movement towards solidarity.

…

Last spring, sitting beside an Afghani grandmother whose name means Moon in Farsi at the Criterion Cinema, I got a taste of the beloved community Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned.  Moon and I were among a group of IRIS clients and volunteers who went to a screening of “Girl Rising,” a documentary film about nine young women who were deprived of a basic education in their home countries.  It was Moon’s first American movie. She only speaks a few words of English.  When the tub of butter popcorn came around to her, she took a handful and then dropped the kernels in the cone shape she’d made of the movie flyer, a small, make-shift tub of her own—I should say our own.  Every few minutes, she would look at me and smile, pushing the cone-tub of popcorn towards me, saying khosh, khosh. I was not hungry, but I took the popcorn. I don’t know a word of Farsi, but I could tell khosh, khosh, means something like “Take, Eat.”

The following week, Moon came to participate in a cooking group for refugee women to pool their culinary skills using Connecticut Food Bank Food to prepare a meal to share together.

The food-bank item most left behind in the IRIS pantry, the iron-chef secret ingredient of the week, was artichokes.  “Ard shawqy,” a woman I’ll call Zeinab said, Arabic for “thorn of the earth,” I recognized.  I’d never learned the word for artichoke before.  But I’d learned earth, and I’d learned thorn, from my Uncle Latif, my dad’s brother, who taught me how to speak Arabic.

“Ma feesh ard shawqy fiy Eritrea, mish kidda?”  (“There are no artichokes in Eritrea, right?) I asked a woman I’ll call Aamina, one of the few Eritrean refugees with whom I can communicate.  I don’t speak a word of Tigrinya, but Aamina speaks the Arabic dialect most familiar to me: She lived in Sudan for nine years, and Sudanese Arabic sounds much like the Upper Egyptian accent of my dad’s side of the family.

Talking to Aamina is like going back to a place where I was from, a home that never was my home, in a language foreign and yet strangely native to me.  Talking thorns of the earth with Aamina is an inkling of what I imagine speaking phrases in Tigrinya must be like for her.  Though my experience growing up with an Egyptian father in an affluent suburb of Birmingham, Alabama is not comparable to Aamina’s coming of age as a refugee in Sudan, our disparate stories converge in the guttural cadences, the slang phrases, of the dialect we half know by heart.

“Aiwa, bas fiyha fiy Malta,” she told me, they have [artichokes] in Malta. It was the artichokes that got Aamina telling her migration story.  She’d spent her first nine years in Eritrea, the next nine in Sudan.  Then, like many Eritrean refugees, she crossed the desert by jeep to get to Libya.  From Tripoli, she took a boat to Malta.

We took a walk with Zeinab through the irises, opening wider by the day, in the garden outside the church kitchen we use for cooking group.  I saw a loose, half-built, empty bird’s nest in the crook of the limbs of small dogwood tree, and I took a few pictures with my phone.  Zeinab looked up, to the place higher in the tree where the sound of a bird was coming from.  “We can hear her, but we cannot see her,” she said.

Aamina was exploring another tree. “Shufty!,” she said, “Look! Beit al asfoor, house of the birds,” she said, showing me a complete nest holding three blue robin’s eggs.

I remembered, from my days of learning Arabic with my Uncle Latif in Alexandria, the root word for bird, safara, means to travel, journey.  My father, aunts and uncles have all passed away.  That day, Aamina and Zeinab helped me remember them. That day, we had journeyed from thorns of the earth to house of the birds.

We could have sat out there under the dogwood trees all day, but we were called inside.  It was time to eat.  The feast had been laid out on the table: spinach-potato latkes, cabbage-apple slaw, a cake and muffins made of the canned carrots that always get left behind in the food pantry.

On her way up the stairs, to the kitchen, I heard Moon whispering with each and every step, gingerly, B’ism allah al-rahman, al-raheem, “in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate” the beginning of every Muslim prayer.

While the women were serving themselves, one of my fellow volunteers was putting the muffins she’d baked in Zip-lock bags for the ladies to take home to their families.  She was cutting the cake she’d made with the same batter, saying “Here, we eat from the same cake.”

We didn’t know what to do with the fennel leaves, so Zeinab put them in a vase of water at the center of the table next to a white flower Moon had improvised out of paper towels.  Our grace that day was B’ismallah ya rahman ya raheem, Amen.

IRIS Community Liaison Ashley Makar shares stories about refugees in her presentations to congregations and community groups. This piece is an excerpt of a sermon entitled “Making the Shapes of Justice,” which was published in full on the website of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Hartford: http://www.ushartford.com/sermons.html.

The post Refugees, Language, Family, and Cooking: Sermon Excerpt by Ashley Makar appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The sequence offers a sense of space, time period and, in some ways, the transitory theme driving Sydelle Willow Smith’s short film. Smith is an award winning freelance photographer and filmmaker. A South African born in Johannesburg and based in Cape Town, Smith studied at The Market Photo Workshop and The University of Cape Town, focusing on Social Anthropology and Cinematography. She travels widely to produce her photographic works, which have been recognized in South Africa and beyond. Smith describes her artistic practice as focused on “memory, place and home making with a strong focus on migration” and “as intrigued with how people who are a minority, such as African ‘migrants’ in Barcelona, navigate the city” (Africaisacountry.com).

In Neighbours, Smith follows three African migrants as they navigate the urban space of Barcelona. The project was produced as part of an International Artist Residency in ‘Urban Creativity’, a program inspired by the idea of “establishing a creative and sustainable relation between neighbours in a district” (jiwarbarcelona.com). Smith’s stated theme comes in the form of a question: “How does one hold on to a deeply rooted sense of self, a cultural identity, and make new paths whereby lines of ethnicity, race, and nationality begin to shift and become malleable in order to adapt and make new forms of home?”. To address these issues by visual means, participants were offered disposable cameras, with which they made pictures of what they wanted to show in the city of Barcelona, Spain. This mode of image making and collection enables the participant to show—in terms of their unique personal experience of navigating and negotiating the city. Smith calls this working method ‘neighbourhood making’, part of an overall project that includes several working modes, including documentary portraiture and participatory photography.

This article takes the picture offered by Neighbours as a point of departure. It brings the participatory narrative into conversation with a politics of diaspora that works to disrupt links between nation and knowledge. The dynamics of this conversation may appear by asking: How may we understand the relationship between the black traveling self, the photographic and filmic image, and the dynamics of African diaspora? What happens when we linger on such images? In the context of a short film or brief essay like this, some features may be mentioned but not elaborated upon. However, the impact on understanding the complex conditions of black people everywhere may form grounds for cultural resistance.

Photographs and films are media through which complicated processes of desire, projection, and identification come into view. The mediums frame the embodied self in self-evidentiary ways and, at the same time, open it to interrogation.[1] In Neighbours, there are dynamics of difference, specificity, and belonging in operation. The participants share an investment in showing and seeing spaces of belonging—neighbourhoods, in this case—as both geographic spaces and as active ideas that may cover over less approachable issues of difference among peoples.

Dynamics of difference that include self-hood, culture, race and ethnicity are viewable through photographic and film-based media. In particular, documentary and participatory filmic modes provide a unique vantage point from which to consider issues of connection. In Neighbours, the focus is on collaboration among people of African descent living beyond African soil.

In Neighbours, three people of African descent now living in Europe are interviewed and filmed: Xumo Nunjo, a musician born in Cameroon; Mamadou Dia, a writer and educator born in Senegal; and Gelia Barila Angri, from Equatorial Guinea. These participants offer viewers an opportunity to consider notions of home and belonging in Black Europe.[2]

Neighbours features and follows people of African descent, framing its narrative around a real or symbolic return to Africa. In this way, the film invokes discourses of internationalism and coordination of the interests of peoples of African descent around the world. These are dynamics of black diaspora.

Neighbours registers a particular moment in the history of the African diaspora in Europe. The Africans pictured in the film describe their lives as they unfold on European soil. Noting these practices of everyday life troubles any nationalism and racial essentialism suggested by the film’s premise or narrative. It also piques my interest in the film—the short documentary indicates productive moments of tension in the emergence of racialised and ethnicised subjects.

Such moments of tension may be openings: windows through which articulations of black diaspora may be seen and explored. The three subjects that appear herein are Black, of African descent, and settled in European territory. The people here celebrate contemporary African diaspora in ways that challenge a viewer’s available markers of identity. Diaspora as a term of analysis allows for an account of black transnational formations that attends to their differences in make-up. Brent Hayes Edwards describes this as “the political stakes of the organization of the ‘African abroad.’ The accepted risk is that the term’s analytic focus ‘fluctuates.’”[3]

The present analysis is part of my thinking about what it would take to see black people as central to “the landscape of everyday life” in Europe and beyond.[4] A different view or filmic premise to that in Neighbours might show the three participants as central and internal to everyday life in Barcelona, not marginal, foreign, or aberrant. Such a view means giving more attention to the participant’s communities, exploring interactions between people and spaces of Barcelona, and featuring participants engaged fully and actively in authoring European everyday life. Neighbours does not have room to elaborate this alternate view.

Instead, Neighbours provokes its viewer to consider what it would take—that is, to make room for the possibility—that African diasporic experience is emergent. Cultural contact happens on different terms and contingent interests, and may take place independently of social, economic and political marginalization. A picture of what is required to realize this sort of cultural politics does not fit the frame of this film—in fact, such a picture is a different challenge to black African visual production than that presented by Neighbours. However, the participant’s comments underscore the possibility for just this different sort of scene. Xumo Nunjo warns African travellers must be “universal, you have to be planetary. Home is the cosmos, home is this planet. Don’t accept anything else.” Nunjo comments: “I feel comfortable here [in Europe]… at home with problems, but I am home.” Nunjo continues: “Today, many African people want to go to Europe, because with the propaganda, people think Europe is the place where the knowledge is happening… but it is not true.” Nunjo seems to struggle with conventional understandings of belonging and cultural identity, refuting the paradigm in which Europe is the “centre of knowledge.”

As a term for knowledge production, the use of diaspora comes out of Pan-Africanism and black Internationalism. This discourse of internationalism aimed generally at the cultural and political coordination of the interests of peoples of African descent around the world. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1933: “Pan-Africa means intellectual understanding and co-operation among all groups of Negro descent in order to bring about at the earliest possible time the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro peoples.”[5] Du Bois’ interest was part of an ideological “return” to the figure of Africa, as a figure for the question of origins. The problematic of return and cultural retention has, since then, animated a series of black ideologies. If Neighbours does not initially aim to theorize black Internationalism, it does so in its assembly of participants from across the continent.

One participant, Mamadou Dia, notes the impulse to move, to walk, to discover and to explore is human, but in reality, people travel for a better future. Filmed while on a beach, Dia appears in a red jersey sweater with two white stripes and blue jeans, strolling along the shore. He recounts, in brief, his experience of traveling to Europe—a precarious and traumatic boat journey across the Atlantic during which he lost many brothers. It is an elegiac narrative that recalls his experiences, but also his sense of being-in-the-world. Dia calls for justice, equal opportunities, equal rights. Dia describes his life, including his 3052 km long journey to Europe, as a life of practice, little theory. Dia’s life practice is described as one of integration, encounter and learning in order to be part of a community and culture encountered on arrival.

In some ways, the film motivates a desire to explain, challenge, or consider the racialised experiences of individuals like the three participants pictured herein. In the film, black Africanity dictates their appearance and belonging, and thereby chart their life’s course. More than a document that works as evidence, the film asks the viewer to question its subject’s humanity in terms of racial and ethnic authenticity. What is more, it urges a search for tools that dispute the participant’s lives as they take shape in Europe. The basis for the dispute depends upon our (the viewer’s) own ability or inability to see her/him as European and thereby evaluate the legitimacy of her/his claims to racial victimization. How might we register this particular moment where black Africans appear, impossibly, as Europeans? How might viewers come to terms with a national idiom that shows the black participants as undeniable members of European society?

What emerges in the short film Neighbours is a subject that simultaneously rearticulates european-ness, blackness, and diaspora.[6]

The images in the film work together with biographic detail and the viewer’s own understanding of what constitutes human being. Black, African, European converge in the participants pictured herein.

Gelia Barila Angri explains she travelled to Europe to “fight for [her] future, to make a better future,” and debunks the negative views of Africa that appear in the media. Angri arrived in Europe to study. In the first year she felt alien and alienated—until she formed her own circle of friends. While she accepts and believes racism exists where she lives, she claims to have never experienced racism. Like Dia and Nunjo, Angri also feels at home living in Europe, and she is able to experience daily life without a sense of loss. She remembers her birthplace, but is able to live, feel and make meaning beyond such boundaries.

The folks interviewed and pictured in Neighbours are shown on the margins of society, at the seaside or on a rooftop, on a street corner or in appearing as reluctant and inauthentic members of groups that can only be poor substitutes for remembered (or imagined) communities in Cameroon, Senegal and Equatorial Guinea. Basic facts of birth and the circumstances of travel act as historical captioning that attempt to make sense and meaning of the lives pictured.

The fifth minute of the film shows young black males selling faux designer handbags. The bags are displayed in rows, placed on a sheet. The four men stand close to each other, each holding a set of stings, displaying their wares to passers by. In a crucial moment, they yank the strings they hold in their hands, an action that gathers together the four corners and edges of the cloth. In an instant, this pull brings the full stock of handbags together within the sheet, which is slung over a shoulder and quickly carried away—all in the moment before a Spanish police officer arrives on a motorcycle.

The viewer watching Neighbours is given license to question the participant’s ethnic, racial and national identity, to juxtapose European being and African existence, and evaluate the participant’s claims—to community or autonomy, to being at home or feeling irredeemably estranged, to a right to earn a living. As I suggested earlier, the strength of the film may be the pressured challenge it presents to conventional terms of identity and to analyses of diaspora, even as it puts those analytical tools to use.

Featured image credit:  Screen capture from Neighbours. Director: Sydelle Willow Smith

The post Vecinos. Neighbours. Film Review: “Home is the planet, don’t accept anything else” appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

********

Egregio Sig. Presidente della Repubblica,

A seguito di nostre richieste alla presidenza della Repubblica per avere dei fondi con i quali finanziare la manifestazione culturale Lampedusainfestival, che si svolge dal 2009 a Lampedusa, abbiamo ricevuto, nel 2011 e nel 2012 due medaglie al valore, per la stessa manifestazione.

Dopo i drammatici eventi avvenuti a Lampedusa negli ultimi giorni sentiamo l’esigenza di inviarLe questa comunicazione. Era da tempo, in realtà, che molti di noi sentivano il bisogno di comunicarLe quanto segue; ma il dolore, la rabbia e lo strazio di questi giorni hanno fatto sì che non fosse più possibile indugiare oltre.

Rifiutiamo la spettacolarizzazione mediatica con cui il naufragio del 3 ottobre scorso è stato rappresentato e diffuso dall’industria dell’intrattenimento: dietro la morbosità con cui la fabbrica delle lacrime e del cordoglio del “lutto nazionale” provano a confezionare il format della rappresentazione della tragedia, dietro i riflettori, le conferenze stampa, le visite ufficiali, crediamo ci sia molto altro che vada denunciato.

Di fronte ad una strage come quella appena consumatasi, di fronte alle centinaia di corpi ancora ostaggio di un mare che certo non ha colpe pari a quelle della società umana, non accettiamo che ci sia chi venga sull’isola promettendo e assicurando. Non accettiamo più che ci si riempia la bocca di promesse, che si diano in pasto alle televisioni le lacrime di circostanza, le commozioni di rito, le figure degli “eroi” e dei salvatori, lasciando poi che le prime pagine si occupino d’altro, che i riflettori si spengano, che i giornalisti ripartano, lasciando tutto così come era prima.

A partire dalla legge 40/1998, legge che sicuramente Lei conoscerà bene dato che porta anche il Suo nome, l’Italia ha avviato una prassi di vero e proprio stato di eccezione, sancendo la detenzione ed il trattenimento di quanti non avevano commesso alcun reato. Con l’inasprirsi delle norme in materia di immigrazione la situazione è andata via via peggiorando. Il business dell’ “accoglienza” si articola oggi lungo una rete di strutture e di centri detentivi che, appaltati a strutture varie, rendono i migranti materia prima di un processo di produzione di profitto che ha luogo in una costante dinamica emergenziale. Come all’Aquila, come in Val di Susa: militarizzazione, gestione di emergenze alimentate ad arte, sospensione dei diritti e stato d’eccezione per creare laboratori di controllo sociale e di repressione.

L’ingerenza imperialista e neo-coloniale dei paesi cosiddetti occidentali destabilizza e rende subalterne intere aree geopolitiche, generando così fenomeni di emigrazione sempre più consistente. Una emigrazione necessaria al capitalismo finanziario dei nostri giorni, il cui conflitto con il lavoro vivo necessita che si impongano nuove forme di governo e di istituzioni e che il mercato stesso del lavoro delle società europee venga stravolto. Occorrono dunque gli immigrati, come manodopera di riserva, clandestina, sommersa, ricattabile, come marginalità sociale su cui far poggiare una riforma in senso neo-oligarchico delle società europee. Accanto alla marginalità migrante si colloca infatti il disagio sociale di quanti, italiani, vivono ormai processi espulsivi di subordinazione, di impoverimento, di negazione della dignità, di quanti lasciano il nostro paese vestendo ancora una volta, anche loro, i panni che in passato abbiamo dovuto troppo spesso vestire, quelli degli emigranti. E come ben saprà non si tratta solo della famigerata fuga dei cervelli: qui parliamo di migliaia che ogni anno lasciano il paese per poter anche solo avere la speranza di un lavoro che garantisca la sussistenza.

Così, sullo stesso scoglio di terra, nel canale di Sicilia, il migrante detenuto in un centro indegno, destinato a divenire un ingranaggio del motore del grande sfruttamento continentale, respira la stessa area della donna di Lampedusa che non può partorire sull’isola, perché non vi sono le strutture sanitarie adeguate, di chi rischierà di morire durante un disperato trasferimento in elicottero sulla terraferma per una emergenza che un ospedale avrebbe potuto benissimo affrontare, del bambino costretto in strutture scolastiche inadeguate, di un cittadino che è costretto a pagare i carburanti più cari d’Europa e che magari, essendo pescatore, è costretto a demolire la barca, perché il carburante è troppo caro.

La tragedia del 3 ottobre fa allora venire al pettine moltissimi nodi politici dei nostri tempi. Chi è che governa davvero questo paese? Quale quota di sovranità ancora mantengono le sue istituzioni? Assistiamo ad un continuo scarica barile tra i vari “rappresentanti delle istituzioni”. Quegli stessi che negli ultimi anni sono stati colpevolmente muti rispetto alla situazione di Lampedusa, che solo dopo il grande fatto di sangue è stata oggetto di una qualche grottesca attenzione, così come lo era stata esclusivamente in occasione delle emergenze più eclatanti come la vergogna accaduta nel 2011.

Riteniamo che la crisi politica delle società europee stia sempre più privando l’Italia della propria sovranità. Abbiamo perduto quella monetaria e siamo sempre più esposti ad un’erosione dell’autonomia e della capacità decisionale delle nostre istituzioni politiche. Una governance economico-politica, espressione delle élite tecnocratiche finanziarie e bancarie, impone ormai le proprie direttive e i propri selezionati referenti alle società europee ed alle loro istituzioni, senza che i loro cittadini siano in grado di opporvisi. Per di più l’Italia è succube ed asservita agli interessi militari e di ingerenza imperiale degli USA. Il nostro territorio, alla stregua di una colonia, è disseminato di istallazioni e basi militari e la vicenda del MUOS di Niscemi è solo l’ultima grottesca dimostrazione di uno svuotamento di senso dell’intero apparato politico-istituzionale del paese.

A cosa servono e che senso avrebbero queste medaglie, dopo aver sottoscritto un golpe costituzionale, voluto dai poteri economici e finanziari, quale quello del pareggio di bilancio, che strozzerà qualunque possibilità di un futuro per il paese intero? A cosa servirebbero dopo aver appoggiato la criminale aggressione della Libia, dopo aver condiviso e avallato un’operazione criminosa come la destabilizzazione della Siria, dopo aver sottoscritto il commissariamento da parte dell’oligarchia finanziaria di un intero paese che era un tempo la seconda forza manifatturiera del continente?

Quelle stesse istituzioni che vorrebbero appuntarci medaglie sul petto sono quelle che alimentano la macchina infame dei CIE, della militarizzazione della Val di Susa, della dislocazione coatta de L’Aquila, delle infinite emergenze dei rifiuti, dei legami organici e strutturali con le mafie, del pareggio di bilancio, della politica neo-coloniale che produce migrazioni, delle missioni di guerra spacciate per umanitarie e delle riforme del mercato del lavoro che generalizzano precarietà e marginalità.

Noi proseguiremo sul nostro cammino, convinti che la crisi epocale che stiamo vivendo può ospitare, in sé, i germi potenziali di un futuro altro e diverso, di una società rinnovata. Ma non abbiamo bisogno né vogliamo che siano queste medaglie a poter fungere da conferma e da riconoscimento di quanto da noi tentato. Perché se ad appuntarle è la stessa politica che, dopo una tragedia come quella di giovedì scorso, invoca rafforzamenti di Frontex, approfittando ancora una volta della questione migratoria per implementare la stretta militare sul Nord Africa, siamo convinti che la nostra strada vada in tutt’altra direzione.

Original Article available here

The post Lampedusa: Lettera al Presidente della Repubblica (Letter to the Italian President) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

On August 19^th I observed as some three hundred people — migrants, activists and a few officials — gathered outside a morgue in Rabat to mourn the death of a twenty-four year old Senegalese man who had been murdered the week before. According to a migrant rights activist affiliated with the Conseil des Migrants Subsahariens au Maroc, the Senegalese man was stabbed after refusing to give up his seat to a Moroccan man on a bus traveling from Rabat to Fez. Local and international articles reporting on the man’s death the following week focused on whether or not the murder was an isolated incident or indicative of a larger human rights problem in Moroccan society. One only has to look at the string of violent attacks emanating from Northern coastal cities and from the border with Algeria over the past several years to be sure that this was not an isolated incident. As this article will explain, this perceived increase in the number of attacks and human rights violations toward migrants is a direct result of increasingly stringent Western migration policies, which are transforming Morocco and other Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) states into countries of settlement ‘by default.’[1]

The closing of legal routes and methods of spatial control

The treatment of migrants once they have arrived on Western countries’ territories has improved over the last three decades. Western states are bound by ideologies that dictate the equal treatment of migrants once they reside on host territories and the extension of citizenship-like rights to non-citizens – immigrants, refugees and even ‘illegal’ migrants—is now commonplace in most Western democracies.[2] Yet at the same time, Western states have also taken steps to further control which persons manage to reach and successfully cross their borders. States are accommodating and welcoming of migrants once they manage to penetrate a Western state’s border, but in order to prevent unwanted migrants from doing so, Western states have found new means of fortifying their territories. This process manifests itself both physically (such as the United States’ amplification of the wall along its Southern border with Mexico) and through technological means (biometric scanning systems, enhanced passports, etc.). New means of immigration control have even extended beyond the state itself, in both concrete forms (such as zones established for policing illegal migrants within the territory of another state), as well as through more subtle ‘soft power’ mechanisms (coercing or threatening other states to more effectively counter unauthorized migration).

Goldschmidt (2006) argues that when the EU created the ‘Schengen space,’ an internal zone of free movement, in 1985 it also barred legal entry to migrants from developing countries. Since this time it has granted continually fewer visas for migrants coming from developing countries in all immigration categories, despite an increase in the number of aspiring immigrants (ibid). European governments have also been pressuring North African countries to bolster border security in order to curb illegal migration, instigated primarily by the Italian Berlusconi government in 2008 (Boubakri 2013). Concurrently, after the embargo had been lifted on Libya, EU states used the incentive of increased trade and the normalization of relations to compel the Gaddafi regime to adapt its migration policies to fit EU objectives, resulting in the establishment of Italian-Libyan joint patrols in Libyan and international waters in 2008 (ibid). Tunisia and Morocco also conformed their immigration policies during the same time period, and it has subsequently become extremely difficult and costly[3] for ‘irregular’ migrants, as well as legal migrants, to successfully cross into Europe.

Post-9/11 the United States has also reduced the number of migrants it is willing to accept through its formal immigration process. Additionally, migrants hoping to pursue political asylum in the United States must reach its territory or already be present in order to apply, and post-9/11 immigration-related security have made gaining access to American soil more difficult (Kerwin 2011). These events have implications for migrants attempting to apply for immigration via formal avenues, as well as for refugees attempting to successfully navigate the official UNHCR resettlement route. It is important not to entirely conflate recent trends in European and North American migration policies as there are important ideological differences affecting the citizen-state dialectic in both regions that have implications for migration policies.[4] Nonetheless, those states generally considered to be the world’s primary ‘immigrant receivers’ – namely, the US, Europe and Australia — have enacted a series of progressively restrictive migration controls over the past decade that are affecting migration patterns elsewhere.

Stuck in Transit

In 2011 the OECD estimated that ten to fifteen percent of the world’s total migrants are ‘illegal’ (OECD 2011). This is indicative of the fact that the hardening of borders and the imposition of new intensive security measures do not successfully deter migrants from passing into their desired destination territories. While Western countries continue to restrict access through new, enhanced methods, migrants continue to leave their home states, often becoming ‘stuck’ in countries that they only hoped to pass through for transit purposes. In the North African case, states that have traditionally been considered countries of emigration are now being transformed into migrant-receiving countries. Thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans who hoped to reach Europe or to be resettled with the aid of international agencies attempt to pass through this region, but rather than return home if they are unable to reach Western countries, they remain in these host states indefinitely. Many cannot return due to persecution, but others simply cannot afford the return journey or they find that the socio-economic situation in the transit host country is still relatively better than that in their home state.

While many migrants settle without the permission of host governments, these states unofficially permit the continued presence of migrants on their territories through both their inability to successfully prevent migrants from entering their borders and through their ambivalence and neglect of those migrants who choose to settle. Consequently, several MENA states are now among the countries with the highest percentages of non-citizen immigrants in the resident population. This transformation – from emigration to immigration country – may prove particularly challenging for migrants to MENA states because citizenship policies are highly stringent. In most other countries around the world, children born on a territory can access citizenship even if their parents are not able to do so. However in MENA countries, citizenship is effectively closed to non-Arabs because of the extremely limited role of jus soli – in most cases, nationality can only be passed through paternal blood descent.

Bargaining for Rights

Despite limited access to citizenship in MENA host states, there are factors that may prove to work in the favor of Sub-Saharan migrants. In the example of Morocco, the government is a strong advocate of rights for Moroccans residing in Europe, consistently lobbying the EU government to protect its nationals abroad. Could this currently hypocritical policy of advocating for rights on behalf of its nationals but denying rights to migrants on its own territory eventually necessitate that the government of Morocco take steps to assist Sub-Saharan migrants? In a meeting on September 10, 2013 between King Mohammed VI and several political officials there was discussion of drafting a new ‘comprehensive policy on immigration’ that will attempt to normalize the situation of all migrants in Morocco, whether from Sub-Saharan Africa or elsewhere (North Africa Post 2013). There was even use of the term ‘integration’ during the meeting, and thus acknowledgement that these migrants will not be returning to their home countries in the near future, though the King’s Office also noted in its press statement that it would not be able to provide integration for ‘all’ migrants wishing to settle in the country. The statement also denied the use of ‘systematic violence by the police,’ directly contravening the findings of the final report released by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) before the group shut down its Moroccan operations in March of 2013 in objection to the violence.

This meeting on a new immigration policy may have simply been ‘cheap talk’ in the face of allegations over migrant abuse emanating from various NGOs, especially considering that organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) claim the Moroccan government has been discussing such reform for years without any tangible action. Yet another factor that migrants may have on their side is that the government of Morocco, like the governments of all countries receiving ‘unsolicited’ migrants, is in fact heavily reliant upon such migration to fill gaps in its labor force. The Moroccan economy benefits hugely from the presence of migrants who fill positions in the informal economy – primarily in the fields of construction, farming, homecare (for females), and security (car watch) – because papers are not checked and the jobs are non-contracted. While the crucial economic role that migrants play may not be an incentive for the Moroccan government to regularize the status of Sub-Saharans, it certainly constitutes an important bargaining chip for migrants and the advocacy organizations working on their behalf to use when lobbying the government for access to public services and human rights protection.

Misguided Policies

As de Hass (2007) notes, an often cited ‘smart solution’ to the ‘problem’ of migration is to increase development aid to poor countries in the hopes that this will curb the desire to migrate, despite the fact that empirical evidence strongly suggests that economic and human development tends to increase peoples’ aspirations and thus increase emigration. Such policy choices, along with the implementation of new forms of spatial and territorial control, are indicative of the total absence of understanding why people choose to migrate. As this article has discussed, increasingly restrictive immigration policies and the militarization of external border controls are not curbing migration but are instead transforming transit countries, including those of North Africa, into countries of settlement. Regardless of the desires of either EU states or the governments of North African countries, migration is likely to continue unabated. The important question at present is how new countries of settlement will respond to these patterns, and whether they will learn from the mistakes and false assumptions of older migrant receiving countries in developing policies of immigration and integration.

The post EU Territorial Control, Western Immigration Policies, and the Transformation of North Africa appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Dans le domaine plus spécifique du théâtre, l’esthétique immigrée postcoloniale est généralement associée à  l’émergence du mouvement « Beur » au début des années 1980 : de jeunes troupes de théâtre comme La rose des sables, Les enfants d’Aïcha ou encore Ibn Kkaldoun, composées de fils et de filles d’immigrés, se développent sur l’ensemble du territoire français, en explorant la situation douloureuse vécue par la « seconde génération » de l’immigration. Elles s’y construisent comme des héritiers de l’expérience coloniale en explorant les liens qui les unissent au passé de leurs parents ou grands-parents. Pourtant, comme le souligne Mamadou Moustapha M’Boup, c’est « au lendemain des « indépendances » des pays africains et, plus particulièrement au cours des années 1960, qu’une tradition théâtrale typiquement immigrée commence à se faire reconnaître »[5] et au moment même où l’immigration en France rentre dans une phase de stabilisation, cette activité devient « la plus répandue tout en étant la moins spectaculaire »[6]. Peu connu, victime des ravages du temps qui tend à effacer les traces de cette production artistique florissante ; le théâtre immigré de la fin des années 1960 et du début des années 1970 s’est effacé aussi vite qu’il s’est créé et reste aujourd’hui encore largement marginalisé dans le domaine des études théâtrales même si plusieurs textes scientifiques existent sur ce mouvement[7].

Au moment de son apparition, le théâtre immigré formule « un espace de création propre à l’immigration avec son répertoire et ses références, ses lieux de représentations et ses réseaux[8] ». Toutefois, les troupes, groupes, ou compagnies, bien que reflétant une aventure collective, paraissent à première vue éparses et clairsemées, surgissant de manière sporadique sur l’ensemble du territoire. Il est donc complexe de quantifier le nombre exact de troupes de théâtre immigré (dont on date l’explosion vers 1972 ou1973[9]) car leur caractère amateur, éphémère et marginal rend difficile l’établissement d’une liste exhaustive : « les premiers résultats des recherches documentaires montrent un espace culturel et artistique émietté qui ne se revendique pas d’une définition commune et qui ne dispose pas de formes d’organisation identifiables »[10]. Pourtant, comme le démontrera en 1975 la première édition du FTPTI, un lien très fort unit l’ensemble de ces troupes : c’est toujours sur le terrain de la lutte que se constituent les différentes troupes, pour qui le théâtre devient un prolongement naturel de l’activité politique et militante. À l’instar d’un Kateb Yacine, pour qui le théâtre devait remplir une fonction politique et sociale, les troupes de théâtre immigré considèrent l’acte militant et l’acte de création comme les deux versants d’une même action, et ce, malgré les divergences et les différences (idéologiques, esthétiques) des différentes troupes. La première édition du FTPTI, en 1975, va agir comme le révélateur de la vitalité artistique des immigrés, en réunissant ces troupes en un seul lieu, trois semaines durant, mais également comme un fédérateur, en les rassemblant autour d’un discours et d’une esthétique communs, indéniablement liés à la construction d’une identité « immigrée » et à la lutte contre les nouveaux rapports de force établis après la décolonisation.

Les organisateurs du festival, par l’intermédiaire d’une plateforme de revendication, partent de l’idée que l’immigration est la « fille de la colonisation »[11], c’est-à-dire qu’il existe des analogies dans les relations de domination pré et post indépendance : l’immigration postcoloniale occuperait dans notre système la place qu’occupait hier la colonisation.

Le postcolonial implique une forme d’éclatement du récit dominant et « la possibilité de penser, imaginer, écrire et raconter autrement »[12]. L’objectif de la première édition du FTPTI est de permettre aux immigrés de se dire dans l’histoire, de reconsidérer l’histoire coloniale mais à partir « du point de vue de ceux qui en ont subi les effets et à partir de l’analyse de son impact culturel et social sur le monde contemporain »[13]. Théâtre du quotidien, reflétant l’aventure collective des travailleurs immigrés en France, les créations du théâtre immigré vont plus loin que la simple volonté de témoigner d’un présent. Les troupes jouent sans arrêt sur l’hybridation, la dissonance et le décentrement en formulant des spectacles aux espaces, aux temporalités et aux références culturelles multiples. Le FTPTI nous fournit une clé de lecture et de compréhension sur le poids du passé, et ses résurgences dans le temps présent. La mise en écriture, la mise en scène et « la mise en corps » du passé permettraient alors de reconstituer les « trous de l’histoire » nationale, de combler le vide laissé par l’impossibilité de l’écriture d’une histoire commune.

L’immigration en scène

L’apogée du mouvement théâtral immigré en France est marquée par la création, en juillet 1975, du premier Festival de Théâtre Populaire des Travailleurs Immigrés (FTPTI) à l’initiative de la CIMADE[14] et de la Maison des Travailleurs Immigrés de Puteaux (MTI)[15]. Au fur et à mesure des différentes éditions, le festival prend de l’ampleur et se décentralise. En 1976, la deuxième édition du festival se situe d’abord à la mutualité à Paris puis dans la banlieue parisienne et enfin en province. Après une pause en 1977, il reprend en 1978 et continue de s’étendre, avec 200 manifestations dans une trentaine de villes. En 1979, il s’étend dans l’Europe entière. Le festival se fait le représentant des cultures immigrées au sens large et programme des films, des groupes de musique et des danses folkloriques. Néanmoins, le théâtre constitue le moyen privilégié d’expression de la communauté immigrée. Les programmes des quatre éditions du festival regroupent des troupes de théâtre de diverses origines : maghrébines, africaines, portugaises, antillaises, espagnoles, turques ou encore italiennes[16]. Les troupes maghrébines (marocaines, algériennes et tunisiennes), moyennement présentes lors de la première édition, y seront rapidement les plus nombreuses.

Pendant les différentes éditions du festival, une trentaine de troupes, d’origine algérienne, tunisienne ou marocaine se succèdent. Elles relèvent pour la plupart du théâtre amateur et militant (seule la troupe Nedjma est semi-professionnelle) : leurs membres sont des ouvriers, des étudiants ou des animateurs socioculturels. Parmi elles, nous pouvons citer le Théâtre arabe dans l’immigration avec El Meddah ou il était une fois et Fais pas le guignol J’ha , la troupe Al Jalya avec Il était une fois l’immigration, la compagnie Ventôse avec L’Exil, la troupe Al Assifa avec Ça travaille, ça travaille mais ça ferme sa gueule, la troupe Imesdurar avec Llem Ik , la troupe Zaït et Baït avec On y va Zaït ?, la troupe Nedjma avec Barka ou la vie barisienne, la troupe des Comédiens Immigrés avec La charrette, la troupe du Douar avec Ech magsah yalaryan et la troupe La Kahina avec Pour que les larmes de nos mères une légende.

Les troupes mettent en scène les problèmes économiques, sociaux et politiques auxquels les immigrés sont confrontés. La trame dramatique représente des situations quotidiennes, qui ne sont ni vraies ni fausses mais « vraisemblables », c’est à dire considérées par les membres des troupes comme valables politiquement, socialement et dramatiquement. C’est une condition préalable pour que le spectacle se transforme en témoignage collectif et universel. Guidées par une volonté de représentation biographique, les mises en scène permettent de témoigner de l’immigration dans laquelle « s’inscrit la peine des hommes[17]», de représenter le déracinement et la solitude.

Les représentations sont parfois une traduction dramatique de l’observation de la réalité ou de faits vécus par les membres des troupes. Pour la troupe Zaït et Baït[18], la réflexion et l’observation précèdent le témoignage, comme le précise Belkacem, l’un des membres fondateurs de la troupe, dans un entretien accordé à Joseph Ruisselet en 1977 :

« Tout notre travail est basé sur l’observation de la réalité. Par exemple, qui n’a pas vu des immigrés en difficulté dans un bureau de poste ou à la sécurité sociale ? [...] On s’est mis dans la situation d’un immigré qui parle très mal le français, et nous avons cherché jusqu’où pouvait aller l’incompréhension[19].»

Leur spectacle On y va Zaït ?, créé en 1976 et présenté lors de la seconde édition du FTPTI, est une traduction dramatique de cette situation à la fois vécue et observée. Composé d’une suite de « sketches[20]», il présente les péripéties ordinaires de deux immigrés algériens en difficulté face au système administratif français. La même année, la troupe Nedjma[21] (fondée par Moussa Lebkiri et Annie Rousset) présente un spectacle au canevas similaire. Barka ou la vie Barisienne est une suite de scénettes dans lesquelles évolue à chaque fois un personnage différent dans un très large spectre de situations réalistes et quotidiennes : au travail, réclamant son salaire ou cherchant un logement. Il s’agit de représenter les journées « types » d’un travailleur immigré tout en montrant avec un langage dramatique approprié, une situation d’injustice et d’exploitation.

Les conditions de travail sont également le socle dramatique de beaucoup de créations, qui décrivent l’amertume de l’ouvrier, considéré uniquement pour sa force de travail : « Dans une tentative de se décrire eux-mêmes, des maghrébins empruntent le regard des ʻcivilisésʼ qui les entourent et avec un ton sarcastique, ils se définiront comme des ʻÇa travaille et ça ferme sa gueuleʼ »[22], titre-slogan de la première création de la troupe Al Assifa[23], présentée au FTPTI en 1975. Les pièces créées sont en quelque sorte une utilisation dramatique du stéréotype « métro, boulot, dodo ». Mais au-delà de la représentation du quotidien, la première édition du FTPTI marque l’apparition d’un « front culturel des immigrés »[24] : le mouvement théâtral qui prend forme et sens dans cette manifestation se place sous l’aulne de la revendication politique et militante.

Théâtre postcolonial : une esthétique hybride

Le festival adopte très vite une plateforme revendicative, articulant à la pratique du théâtre le désir de relayer les luttes politiques des travailleurs immigrés en France. Elle contient six points majeurs : l’un d’entre eux rejette les tentatives d’assimilation et d’intégration de la part de la « bourgeoisie du pays d’accueil » et cela par la préservation de l’identité culturelle et de la culture du pays d’origine des immigrés. Le 2 juin 1979, lors de la clôture du 4^ème festival à Strasbourg, une charte revendicative des droits des travailleurs immigrés[25] réitère cette volonté en invoquant un droit à la différence culturelle et linguistique couplée d’un droit à l’exercer. Ces revendications s’inscrivent dans la lutte menée par les travailleurs contre « l’impérialisme nouveau », celui qui s’applique dans la France postcoloniale, notamment à travers le marché de la main-d’œuvre étrangère.

Le FTPTI cherche à définir sa propre conception de la culture. À l’ouverture de la première édition du festival, en 1975, le discours prononcé au nom des organisations de travailleurs immigrés du comité de coordination dit ceci :

« Ce rassemblement culturel ne cherche pas à prouver que les travailleurs, d’une manière générale, et les travailleurs immigrés en particulier, sont ou ne sont pas cultivés. Son objectif n’est pas de prétendre à un accès à la culture dans l’abstrait. […] Ce festival cherche à démontrer que les travailleurs immigrés ont leur point de vue sur la culture et réalisent dans ce domaine des activités propres, selon leur conception du monde, selon leur place d’exploités et d’opprimés dans la société capitaliste, selon leur condition de travailleurs expatriés des pays dominés par l’impérialisme[26].»

L’idée que le théâtre immigré relèverait simplement de l’activité politique et militante est réductrice. Comme tout mouvement et comme tout théâtre, le théâtre immigré développe une esthétique qui lui est propre. Les moyens financiers très limités des troupes vont conditionner leurs options esthétiques. C’est un théâtre nu, avec très peu de décors, très peu de costumes, très peu d’accessoires mais qui mise beaucoup sur l’imaginaire et le symbolique.

Depuis l’apparition des premières troupes de théâtre immigré, de nombreux éléments et traits appartenant à différentes cultures s’interpellent, s’interpénètrent et se télescopent dans l’univers scénique. Cette esthétique se définit par rapport à trois paramètres qui interagissent entre eux : le patrimoine culturel populaire issu du vécu avant l’immigration, les réalités quotidiennes de l’immigration liées au nouveau contexte socio-économique et socioculturel et l’échange avec la culture du pays d’immigration [27]. Les créations prennent forme et sens par une hybridation permanente des références culturelles et identitaires et la préservation d’une identité culturelle devient l’un des objectifs pour les organisateurs et les troupes présentes aux différentes éditions du FTPTI, comme l’explique la troupe du Théâtre Arabe dans l’Immigration :

« Pour résumer, je dirais que notre rôle consistera à combler un vide inhérent aux conditions mêmes du déplacement. Vide culturel bien sûr mais surtout dérapage progressif de l’individu expatrié sur le socle de son identité. Il s’agit en d’autres termes de contribuer à éviter une perte collective de mémoire. Notre action doit aboutir à la pratique d’un théâtre au service des revendications socioculturelles de l’immigration et qui permette à celles-ci ainsi qu’à nous-mêmes, en tant que comédiens émigrés, de trouver une fonction active à nos expressions culturelles authentiques et de les intégrer dans nos rapports avec notre milieu de vie »[28].

Le théâtre immigré possède donc ses symboles, ses codes, ses gestes, ses langages, ses caractéristiques textuelles et scéniques propres. Espace de préservation des « expressions culturelles authentiques », le festival revendique une identité culturelle immigrée, notamment à travers l’utilisation de la langue maternelle, et cela contre les tentatives d’assimilation du pays d’accueil : le choix d’une langue immigrée, ou encore l’utilisation exclusive de la langue d’origine, sont autant d’éléments essentiels qui investissent l’espace de la création.

Si dans un article dédié à la première édition du festival Georges Banu souligne les effets du contact linguistique et le « rapport de familiarité libéré de tout complexe[29] » dû aux choix de la langue, la proximité avec le public (majoritairement immigré) n’est pas la seule raison de ce choix par les troupes ou par les organisateurs du festival. L’emprunt linguistique et l’utilisation de la langue d’origine permettent de combler les manques culturels et identitaires rencontrés par l’immigration en France : les troupes se tournent vers des langues et des dialectes populaires à fortes valeurs identitaires. La langue s’inscrit alors dans le sentiment d’appartenance à une communauté et procède d’un retour aux origines. L’utilisation de l’arabe algérien[30] ou du berbère[31] renvoie à un autre espace-temps, à savoir celui d’ « avant » la colonisation française[32].

Les troupes utilisent toutes le trilinguisme, souvent un mélange de français, d’arabe et de berbère. Elles inventent un « parlé immigré », parfois jusqu’à l’exagération volontaire. Dans Barka ou la vie barisienne de la troupe Nedjma, Moussa, un ouvrier accidenté utilise un langage fortement algérianisé : « ji droit à l’argent », les « e » deviennent « i », les « r » sont roulés. La langue maternelle intervient parfois par petites touches. Des expressions populaires et des accents interviennent comme des restes de la langue : des miettes, résultantes de l’histoire de l’immigré, de l’histoire de la colonisation et de l’histoire de la langue elle-même.

Les créations du théâtre immigré puisent dans la source du populaire et du traditionnel. Dans son article Un festival pas comme les autres, Suresnes 1975, Georges Banu s’intéresse tout particulièrement au spectacle de la troupe tunisienne du Théâtre Arabe dans l’Immigration (fondée en 1975) El Meddah (le conteur) et considère cette utilisation d’une forme traditionnelle de « divertissement » comme une mise en vie de l’appartenance ethnique :

« À travers lui et à l’intérieur de la ronde, le cercle imposé par tout conteur traditionnel, le spectacle débat de la situation des travailleurs agricoles arabes. La lecture sociale se renforce par l’inscription dans la structure du conte oriental. La mémoire du public se réveille : le spectacle, tout en lui adressant une parole sur le présent, l’aide à récupérer son espace et son temps culturel »[33].

Dans la tradition des conteurs populaires du Maghreb, El Meddah ou il était une fois raconte l’histoire d’un village de paysans en lutte contre des propriétaires terriens. Le spectacle réutilise les procédés scéniques des séances de contage traditionnel. La réutilisation du conte et de la figure du conteur est l’occasion de renouer avec l’espace de la narration circulaire de l’Halqa (cycle ou cercle). Comme dans les séances traditionnelles de contage, le lieu physique et concret de la scène disparaît et le public se rassemble autour de la performance du narrateur. L’espace scénique n’est ni délimité par une scène ni par un rapport frontal mais suggéré par le jeu.

Dans les créations immigrées, il est également courant de retrouver des personnages directement issus des contes comme Djoha[34], un personnage populaire bien connu dans les pays du Maghreb, plus largement dans le monde arabo-musulman. Traditionnellement, Djoha est un personnage bouffon que l’on retrouve dans un corpus très diversifié : de la simple blague ou de la simple anecdote aux histoires plus complexes des contes et des récits merveilleux. En Algérie, Djoha est le personnage principal des histoires racontées aux enfants, mais il fait également bonne figure dans les anecdotes racontées lors de réunions amicales ou familiales et parfois même lors de réunion plus solennelles. Il sera réutilisé à de nombreuses reprises par les dramaturges algériens, non seulement pour sa force comique certaine, mais aussi parce qu’il est l’épicentre de la tradition orale.

Kateb Yacine l’utilise dans plusieurs de ses pièces. Déjà présent dans son texte satirique, La Poudre d’intelligence, publiée en 1959, on retrouve Djoha dans la quasi-totalité de ses pièces écrites pré et post indépendance : L’homme aux sandales de caoutchouc, La guerre de deux mille ans, Palestine trahie et enfin Mohamed, prends ta valise, jouée en 1972 en France. Dans cette dernière, Kateb Yacine introduit la figure de Djoha sous les traits de Mohamed Zitoune, figure « creuset » et incarnation de l’algérien tour à tour émigré ou immigré. Personnage central, il devient volontiers narrateur, parlant de lui, se présentant, donnant des explications ou commentant les évènements, tout en s’adressant directement au public :

• « - Mohamed, au public :
• C’est moi, Mohamed Zitoune,
• Autrement dit Mohamed-les-olives.
• Mon grand frère a des oliviers,
• Et moi, pauvre orphelin,
• Je suis là à voler des olives ! ^[35] »

Comme dans les histoires de Djoha, très peu de caractéristiques lui sont conférées : on lui reconnait certains traits de caractère (il est naïf, rusé, agile) mais aucune description physique ne s’y rattache. Il est dans une position de victime, constamment rejeté par ses interlocuteurs : soldat français ou balayeur, il est soumis au racisme, à l’exploitation, au déni d’existence, par les français, la police, son propre frère, au gré de ses allers retours entre Alger, Marseille et Paris.

Le personnage de Djoha est une forme de réceptacle capable d’épouser toutes sortes de situations. Il n’appartient à aucune temporalité ni à aucune époque, ou plutôt il est de tous les temps et de toutes les époques. Dans Barka ou la vie barisienne, présenté lors du second FTPTI, la troupe Nedjma modifie légèrement les traits et les formes de ce personnage populaire en le replaçant dans un contexte quotidien et contemporain. Comme dans les aventures traditionnelles de Djoha, que l’on retrouve au marché, à la mosquée ou dans sa maison : on retrouve, dans Barka ou la vie barisienne, sa traduction immigrée à la sécurité sociale, cherchant un emploi ou dans un foyer de travailleurs. Youssef, le personnage balayeur s’y présente devant le public, tout comme Mohamed Zitoune :

• « Je m’présente, je m’appelle Youssef !
• Je suis balayeur municipal et je vois tous les événements dans ce village de Barris ! »[36].

Pour les comédiens du Théâtre Arabe dans l’Immigration, la réutilisation de la culture traditionnelle ne correspond pas à une volonté de projeter l’image d’une Afrique du Nord folklorique ou exotique :

« Nous faisons appel à nos expressions culturelles authentiques, entendez par là la richesse de la culture populaire maghrébine débarrassée de tout folklorisme pour véhiculer des thèmes sociaux et politiques qui se situeront au-delà des stéréotypes d’usage, des affirmations abstraites et des danses forcenées autour d’images fétiches stériles »[37].

La langue maternelle, la figure du conteur, l’espace traditionnel de l’oralité ou encore le personnage populaire de Djoha matérialisent le rapport au pays d’origine tout en le décontextualisant et en le transposant en contexte contemporain. L’hybridation entre la tradition et la modernité, entre la langue du colon et la langue du colonisé, permet de signifier symboliquement les rapports de force qui existent encore après la décolonisation. Ce rapport conflictuel est la base des créations, une mise en image des luttes à mener pour dénouer la dialectique oppresseur/opprimé. Cette esthétique induit le recours à un espace-temps complexe : tout en représentant le travailleur immigré dans le présent, les troupes investissent l’Histoire et les événements du passé.

Quand le présent se fait anachronique 

La théorie postcoloniale fait apparaitre l’impossibilité de séquencer ce qui renvoie à un « avant » et à un « après » la colonisation. Le postcolonial engloberait selon Marie-Claude Smouts « toutes les phases de la colonisation »[38] : de la conquête à l’indépendance, sans oublier le temps présent et son au-delà. Antonella Corsani, dans un article intitulé « Narrations postcoloniales »[39], reprend également cette idée :

« Si le “post” ne renvoie pas à une lecture linéaire de l’histoire, ni à une postérité par rapport à l’époque coloniale, la condition postcoloniale ne peut être pensée en dehors de l’expérience coloniale. […] Plutôt que d’indiquer une fracture ou une séparation nette par rapport au passé, il signifie, dans une sorte de rétorsion épistémologique lyotardienne, exactement le contraire : l’impossibilité de son dépassement, étant donné les dynamiques néocoloniales qui ont caractérisé la plupart des processus historiques de décolonisation formelle. Il est donc le symbole de la persistance de la condition coloniale dans le monde global contemporain »[40].

Dès 1989, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths et Helen Tiffin, dans The Empire Writes Back[41], soulignaient le fait que le « post-colonial » désigne l’existence d’ « une continuité de préoccupations qui court tout au long du processus historique initié par l’agression impériale »[42] et qu’il peut être utilisé pour désigner toute culture affectée d’une manière ou d’une autre par le processus colonial et impérial et ce à partir de l’avènement du phénomène colonial jusqu’à nos jours. De nouvelles cultures, au sens large (politique, sociales, militantes, littéraires, artistiques, etc.), émergent alors « à partir de l’expérience de la colonisation et s’affirment en mettant en avant une tension à l’égard de l’[ancien] empire colonial »[43].

Cette persistance de la condition coloniale en contexte postcolonial est violemment dénoncée dès la première édition du FTPTI. Comme l’explique Frédéric Maatouk, le festival « devait favoriser la réflexion d’événements plus ou moins éloignés dans le temps »[44] : il joue sur la déconstruction/reconstruction d’une mémoire et d’une histoire collective et « sur une situation d’enchevêtrement des temps et des territoires »[45]. La scène devient le réceptacle d’un défilement des événements qui ne tient compte ni des temporalités ni des repères spatiaux. Les personnages se déplacent dans un « fatras d’histoire »[46] et de temporalités. La mise en scène des conditions de vie de l’immigration algérienne en France entre en résonance avec certains événements douloureux, et formule l’étalement d’un destin au sein d’un processus historique donné.

La troupe d’agitation-propagande[47] Al Assifa s’inspire[48] du théâtre politique de Piscator et « veut mettre le théâtre à l’heure du journal, ce dernier pouvant arracher le premier à l’engluement psychologiste et le projeter sur la scène de l’Histoire en train de se faire »[49]. Pour le spectacle Ça travaille ça travaille mais ça ferme sa gueule (1^ère édition du FTPTI), la troupe représente les conditions de vie et de travail des ouvriers immigrés en France comme un legs du système d’exploitation de la période coloniale. Une corrélation est établie entre le présent quotidien du travailleur (l’usine) et le passé (les colonies).

L’objet de la représentation chez Al Assifa est une constante démonstration du lien que la France « entretient avec le passé colonial et la dénonciation du néocolonialisme de la société du début des années 1970 »[50]. La fable s’établit dans un va-et-vient entre une Algérie tout juste indépendante et la France. À l’instar de Kateb Yacine, qui en 1972 avec Mohamed, prends ta valise, utilisait les personnages de « Pompez-tout » et « Pompez-doux » (respectivement grand patron français et algérien), la troupe Al Assifa réitère la dialectique oppresseur/opprimé :

• « - MF[51] : Ecoutez, vous êtes sûr vraiment qu’ils ferment leur … bouche ?
• - MA[52] : Là, mon cher ministre, ceux que je vais vous proposer, on les a classés, triés, sélectionnés. Il ne reste que l’emballage à faire.
• - MF : Ah ! Bon, non parce que je me permets de vous poser cette question parce que les années précédentes, mes prédécesseurs ont eu beaucoup d’ennuis avec certains de vos ressortissants : grève de la faim, grève d’usine, grève-bouchon à Renault, par exemple ; et nous nous voyons contraints certaines fois de vous les rendre sous des formes qui ne sont pas toujours des plus agréables. Je pense à Avignon dernièrement : 15 expulsés. [...]
• - MF : Nous sommes dans une période très difficile, le chômage, etc. Enfin, 200 officiels. Pour les clandestins, nous procédons comme d’habitude. Bien ?
• - MA : Comme d’habitude, mon cher ministre.
• - MF : Entendu, mon cher collègue.
• - MA : Les affaires, c’est les affaires[53]. »

Le personnage du ministre français, opprimant l’immigré, est ici représenté en compagnie de son frère jumeau dans la pratique, le ministre africain[54]. Les deux personnages ont sur scène, face à l’immigré/émigré, le même langage et le même discours. Les événements ne sont pas appréhendés dans leur singularité mais vus comme des conséquences logiques du système d’oppression du passé.

Avec le théâtre de l’immigration, explique Olivier Neveux, « l’Histoire trouve ses répercussions dans la synthèse des histoires particulières (indispensables à l’établissement d’une fable, d’une fiction, d’une représentation), pour s’incarner dans un internationalisme trans-historique. [...] C’est la profonde continuité des révoltes, leurs profondes invariances qui trament la pièce[55]». La représentation de l’exploitation économique d’aujourd’hui dans le pays d’exil prolonge l’exploitation coloniale du passé. Ces scènes permettent de réveiller la mémoire collective de l’immigration, elles sont un facteur d’unité : « un langage au-dessus des langages[56]».

Les créations présentées  aux différentes éditions du FTPTI, sont représentatives des grandes interrogations d’une époque donnée. Par le recentrage des événements narrés et des situations jouées au sein d’un processus historique déterminé, les troupes témoignent de leur temps tout en définissant l’immigration dans une perspective historique plus large. Les spectacles embrassent tous les temps et sont envisagés « dans l’épaisseur et la continuité des événements[57]». L’immigré sur scène est « celui qui reçoit en plein visage le faisceau de ténèbres qui provient de son temps[58]»; il contemple ses propres traces et saisit les parts d’ombre du passé.

La troupe La Kahina, fondée en 1976 par des femmes d’origine algérienne d’Aubervilliers, traite principalement du rôle des femmes dans l’aventure de l’immigration et des problèmes, notamment culturels et identitaires, rencontrés déjà par la « seconde génération » d’immigrés en France. Au FTPTI de 1978, la troupe présente sa première création[59] Pour que les larmes de nos mères deviennent une légende. L’objectif y est de traiter de la condition contemporaine de la femme arabe : les traditions prénuptiales, le rôle de l’argent dans le mariage, la toute-puissance de l’homme, la position marginale de la femme arabe en général. Les jeunes filles qui composent essentiellement[60] la troupe vivent ou observent ces problèmes au quotidien et s’en font les relais. Parallèlement, la troupe utilise la scène comme un moyen de faire ressurgir des événements du passé, en particulier le rôle des femmes dans la guerre d’indépendance de l’Algérie :

• « - Déshabillées, frappées, insultées, humiliées, violées par des tortionnaires sadiques.
• - Elles aussi ont subi l’électricité,
• - Elles aussi ont donné leurs vies.
• - Qu’en reste-il sinon des noms sur des trottoirs,
• - Sur des trottoirs et des boulevards,
• - Et toutes les autres ?
• - Que devenez-vous[61] ? »

Dans cet extrait de Pour que les larmes de nos mères deviennent une légende, la scène se passe en Algérie, pendant la guerre d’Indépendance. Un adjudant de l’armée française et une femme y sont représentés : sous son habit traditionnel, cette dernière est habillée en militaire et cache une arme de gros calibre. Cette scène est une référence aux femmes qui prirent le rôle de combattantes et de militantes aux côtés des hommes dans la guerre de Libération nationale et est l’occasion pour les membres de la troupe d’interroger ce qu’il reste de cette lutte et de ces combats dans la société des années 1970.

L’histoire de l’immigration se dessine à l’intérieur de l’espace scénique qui devient l’espace du surgissement des mémoires parallèles et clandestines : il s’agit ici de sonder une douleur et un passé hérités par les enfants, voire les petits-enfants des victimes. La figure de la victime s’affirme dans un récit-témoignage qui célèbre la lutte d’un peuple opprimé et le combat des pères et des mères. Nous sommes face à une mise en scène de la filiation qui permet de lutter contre l’oubli et le silence. Se reconnaitre comme enraciné dans une lignée, comme héritier d’une histoire, est un préalable nécessaire à la légitimation d’une mémoire longtemps niée.

Conclusion 

La colonisation et ses conséquences incarnent des moments centraux de l’engouement mémoriel contemporain : leurs écritures n’ont pas pu, encore aujourd’hui, trouver une expression apaisée et dépassionnée. Dans les créations des troupes de théâtre immigrées présentes aux différentes éditions du FTPTI, le télescopage permanent entre des situations quotidiennes contemporaines et des événements douloureux du passé, plus ou moins éloignés dans le temps, permet de penser le présent : « C’est le préalable de la reconnaissance : se reconnaître soi-même comme enraciné dans une lignée, comme héritier putatif d’une expérience de l’histoire dominée [62]. »

Au Festival de Théâtre Populaire des Travailleurs Immigrés, le recours aux événements troubles du passé obéit moins à une logique de réparation qu’à une logique de compréhension et de légitimation. Le festival permet aux troupes de se fédérer autour d’un discours et d’une esthétique communs. L’immigration y dessine la fresque qui la représente et se construit en héros de sa propre expérience. Les troupes parviennent à inventer, à partir d’éléments de la culture traditionnelle, une nouvelle expression théâtrale adaptée aux conditions mêmes de l’immigration. Si le recours aux cultures traditionnelles et aux événements du passé permet un retour incontestable aux sources de la mémoire, leur réutilisation par les troupes immigrées dans les années 1970 leur donne une fonction nouvelle et circonstancielle. La scène matérialise le rapport à l’origine tout en adressant aux spectateurs une parole sur le présent.

Dans cet « entre-monde » que sont à la fois le phénomène d’immigration et les lieux de l’art naissent un langage et une esthétique centrés autour de la lutte contre les nouveaux rapports de force établis après la décolonisation et de la construction d’une identité immigrée. Pourtant, pour reprendre les propos d’Edward Saïd, si l’un des plus grand fait de ces dernières décennies est « la vaste migration humaine qui a accompagné la guerre, la colonisation et la décolonisation »[63], l’espace créatif et le renouvellement des formes esthétiques qui en résultent « sont une expérience qui n’a pas encore trouvé ses chroniqueurs […] »[64]. Le théâtre immigré des années 1970 continue aujourd’hui encore de pâtir d’un manque de théorisation et d’un manque d’intérêt dans le domaine des études théâtrales. Le caractère éphémère de ce mouvement (à peine quelques années), et amateur (seule la troupe Nedjma est semi-professionnelle à cette époque) a contribué à faire retomber ses acteurs dans l’anonymat qu’ils n’avaient peut-être jamais quitté. Au contraire de Kateb Yacine, le théâtre immigré n’a pas eu la possibilité de mêler structure traditionnelle de diffusion et réseau militant, « pour la simple raison qu’il est né en dehors de ces structures »[65]. Il se situe ainsi en marge de la scène théâtrale traditionnelle, en marge des réseaux d’éducation populaire et même en marge de certains mouvements militants ouvriers[66], ce qui entraine un difficile passage à la postérité et un douloureux déficit de mémoire qu’il convient aujourd’hui de combler.

The post Le 1er festival de théâtre populaire des travailleurs immigrés de Suresnes : naissance d’une lutte et d’une esthétique postcoloniales appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

* Translated from Lampedusa protest sign for Letta’s visit: http://www.giovanilampedusa.it/notizie/681-immigrati-barroso-letta-contestazioni-lampedusa.html

Why should we care now? Now that it makes American news? Now that it’s translated into English?

Another tragedy in Lampedusa. The week before, one in Scicli: 13 migrants died while beachgoers saved the rest.[1] But this isn’t new. Not for Lampedusa. Not for those whose lives have been touched by all the migrants who have landed, been rescued, brought to Lampedusa. And returned to Lampedusa.

Outrage. I wake up to too many notifications on Facebook. Something has happened. Even my American friends are sending me links. And yet this is not something new. Migrants have been landing on and been rescued from Lampedusa since the 1990s. They’ve been dying trying to reach land since then.

You call this “interception” at sea? You call this “interdiction” at sea? You call this refoulement? You use other fancy theoretical words that don’t matter.

This is about rescue—or, more precisely, a failure to rescue. They were so close. They are not clandestini, they are human beings. They are women, men, children.  They are not seeking to “evade capture.” There are no smugglers on board, no scafisti. They are a group of migrants—Eritrean refugees[2]—thrown together, given no supplies, and told to go a certain direction by Libyan human smugglers. Smugglers who stayed behind to count their money and plan more trips. Smugglers migrants are forced to use because there is no other way to get to the EU and ask for asylum.[3]

They saw people. Did they see land? They wanted someone to come rescue them. Others have been rescued over 70 miles from Lampedusa. They were so close–about a mile away. An idea to set fire to draw attention, to be saved. Because they likely knew the stories. Told by migrants who have already crossed. Boats that have been ignored by NATO, ignored by fishing boats. Ignored by states fighting over who “should” take in these migrants. All while boats drift, without supplies, without help.

Fear strikes, the petrol catches fire. The migrants move to one side and the boat capsizes. Fishermen and Italians on vacation are their first responders in the early dawn,[4] followed soon after by the Coast Guard.

The mayor of Lampedusa declared an island-wide day of mourning. Lutto comunale. Pro-immigrant parliamentarians called for a national day of mourning. Soon it became a lutto nazionale. The Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, declared that those men, women, and children who died were now Italian citizens. Dying close to Italy, in large number, confers citizenship. Does that citizenship comfort the families who have lost loved ones?

After Letta’s visit to Lampedusa, he calls for state funerals for those who died that day.[5] But when? The caskets sat  in the airport hangar while doctors noted the sanitary issues and the government still didn’t set a date.[6] Then, suddenly, the caskets are moved and buried.[7] No state funeral. No local, Lampedusa funeral. The state took away the caskets, took away the chance for mourning by family members.[8] It took away the chance for identification by more than a number. Instead the remains are scattered around Sicily: two in Mazzarino, in Delia, some in Mussomeli. Many without a funeral. Some with prayers at the graveside. Sciacca plans to bury ten with both Catholic and Muslim rites.[9] And the families? Those looking for their loved ones? Forgotten. Political promises made to be broken. Migrants, their plight briefly highlighted, are quickly forgotten. Lampedusa, the island thrust back into the limelight, is also quickly forgotten.

Why Lampedusa? Because everyone likes to use Lampedusa. The politicians fighting for power, fighting for resources and money that never trickles down to the island. The few local residents who resent the migrants for decreasing tourism. Academics who look at one place, at one island, and ignore the complex picture of rescue, reception, detention, and repatriation in Italy. The detention center directors who make thousands of Euros “welcoming” migrants. Migrants who sleep on foam mattresses.[10] Outside. In the rain. Because transfers are not happening and the center is overcapacity. As usual.

Lampedusa is sexy. It’s where the UN brings Angelina Jolie for a visit. It’s so beautiful and iconic–the first bit of EU land migrants often see. So geographically tragic and strategic: closer to Tunisia than to Sicily or mainland Italy. What happens when we only look at migrants processed through Lampedusa?  We forget about all those who must hide in cargo ships and trucks, who lose their lives crossing from Greece and Turkey through the Adriatic. We forget the landings and rescues that happen on Sicilia’s shores, Sardegna’s shores.

But most importantly, we forget the people. Another big shipwreck. It’s become too common now. There was the May 8^th, 2011 one that sparked Jolie’s and the UNHCR’s Guterres’ visit.[11] The one early in June 2013 that sparked the Pope’s visit to the island[12] –a visit that began to change the conversation about migration and responsibility. A visit that received little to no coverage in the U.S. We forget the bodies that regularly wash up on shore, are caught in fishermen’s nets. The bodies buried in Lampedusa’s tiny cemetery. The bodies that are found so often, they must be scattered. Sent to other cemeteries in small Sicilian towns that have space.

And now the October 3^rd shipwreck. Too many bodies. Too many people that could not be saved.

(Photo Source: Arthur Urbano)

Photos of young men, survivors, peeking under the gold emergency blankets used during migrant landings that have become temporary shrouds and body bags, looking for someone. Small, white caskets. Children, including a newborn still attached to its mother, who could not be saved. L’hanger della morte. The survivors visit, sobbing, praying, crying. The caskets increase as the sub-aqueous teams return with more and more bodies. Three hundred and eleven at last count.[13] And fifty still missing.[14]

One tragedy makes world news every so often, while the daily tragedies of migrants—their passages, the boats that sink without witness, those that drown before rescue, those who sleep outside in many centers, tendopoli, camps…waiting, waiting, waiting…to be transferred, somewhere; those who get their documents and still live on the streets, in temporary shelters, those who confront racism every day, those who suffer violence in detention centers and elsewhere, those who bear children that will never be Italian citizens—are forgotten. Over 20,000 deaths counted since 1988 in the Mediterranean.[15] And those uncounted?

Activists hope this new tragedy, because of its sheer volume, will finally be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. They hope it will finally be what will make the uninterested—politicians and citizens alike—care. Images of Lampedusa’s dead are flanked with photos of Italian emigrants to the United States in the 1900s that drowned en route.[16] The photographs scream: please, care. One day, not too long ago, it was you. It was you, the Italians. It was your grandparents and great-grandparents and cousins who were unwanted, who died along the way.

Letta visits Lampedusa and the caskets whose number grows daily. Yet the Italian state’s responsibility and complicity with this and other disasters is deferred. This is an “EU problem” too, he says.[17] Should the Bossi-Fini law,[18] which criminalized migrants and refugees, be overturned? Angelino Alfano, Minister of the Interior, says this is not the solution.[19] But he does recommend the Nobel for Lampedusa.[20] Letta says he was ashamed that those who survived this shipwreck were registered, per Bossi-Fini, as clandestini, and thus the government should discuss the matter. All talk, all theory, and no action. The continued work of border policing overshadows that of the Coast Guard’s many rescue operations.[21]

And still, the Nobel Peace Prize comes up. Reminiscent of Berlusconi’s 2011 “promises”[22] to islanders who were upset that over 6,000 refugees from the Arab Spring had to camp on Lampedusa’s hills because the state did not care. The state did not transfer. The state still does not transfer.[23] The state did not recognize the humanity of migrants. Over 30,000 signatures on an electronic petition: “Lampedusa deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.”

But which Lampedusa? The one that protested migrant arrivals because they feared tourism profits would decline? The one that blocked the port so that migrants were forced to wait for medical attention and care for hours, migrants whose boat was unfit to be towed to Lampedusa and had to be transferred via Coast Guard vessels? The one whose detention center does the “best it can” while pocketing state money and leaving migrants to sleep outside? Or the Lampedusa of fishermen who rescue or alert authorities to migrant boats in distress? Of activists who wake up to a boat landing outside their window and invite migrants into their home for shelter? Of young activists who want to fight against those who wish to forget the migrants and start a migration museum on the island with boats and items migrants leave behind? Of the new mayor who cares for the plight of these migrants, who fights for them, who calls on the president to mourn these deaths? The Lampedusa of the priest, Catholic community, and locals who cooked food for the 6,000 who lived on the Collina della Vergogna, the Hill of Shame, after the Arab Spring, because the detention center couldn’t, or wouldn’t, because the state ignored them?

With the help of MeltingPot.org, an organization that has documented migrant experiences and abuses and fought in the courts for migrant rights in the Mediterranean since 1996, some locals have started a different petition. They have been echoing what activists have been demanding for years– open a true humanitarian corridor. Migrants are leaving all parts of Africa and the Middle East, many travel through Libya and are tortured, killed, and kept in jails for years.[24] The migrants travel by rickety old boats fishermen no longer consider seaworthy because that is their only option. They flee war, dictators, persecution, poverty. And they are at the mercy of smugglers–smugglers in the Sinai desert who extort their family members, or kill them. [25]So once they make it to the water, the worst should be over.

And yet, this petition only garnered 7,000 signatures a few days after the shipwreck.[26] Because it’s easy to say, “Look at the brave [people] on that small island that saved some drowning migrants. Peace Prize! Recognize us. Recognize the sacrifice Lampedusa as an island has made.” It is harder to say, “We want no recognition.” We want you to focus not on Lampedusa, but on the migrants.

Because this should not happen. Migrants should not be adrift at sea for 21 days.[27] Migrants should not have to cross the Sahara on foot, passing the bodies of those who could not go on[28]. Migrants should not have to brave horrific boats, rough seas, torture, extortion and violence in order to escape violence. Migrants should not have to die to obtain citizenship.[29]

The individuals from MeltingPot.org, those who have signed the new petition, and those activists who have for years cried out for a real humanitarian corridor—real concern—for migrants don’t want or need a prize. They don’t want or need the focus to be on them or on Lampedusa. The focus should be on the migrants–those who came before and made it, only to be beaten down by a legal system (Italian and EU) that gives them no rights, no support,[30] no citizenship. On those who died trying to cross and whose bodies were found. On those who died and whose bodies lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean. And on all those migrants trapped in Libya– trapped under the control of smugglers and traffickers en route between their hometown and the EU. And especially, to all those migrants traveling right now, be it on foot or by boat, through the desert, or across the sea.

Let’s put the focus on them, because this should not happen again. Because a true humanitarian corridor would value migrant lives– above politics, above economics, above tourism. As Pope Francis said when he visited Lampedusa in July 2013, we must fight against the globalization of indifference and against state practices that do not value the humanity of all.[31] We must fight for these migrants.

So let’s remember Lampedusa not for one instant, one tragedy, but for what it represents:—a small stop; part of a long journey of struggle. And let’s honor the memories of these most recent victims of inhumane state practices by remembering all who have lost their lives in the crossing, in the desert, in the Libyan jail cell, in the Italian detention centers, on the Italian streets. Let’s pursue concrete action to provide those seeking refuge a safe way to enter Europe.

The post Lampedusa: “An Island Full of Pain; It Carries the Weight of the World’s Indifference” * appeared first on The Postcolonialist.