![]() No-one puts their child in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.” “No-one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark In the powerful words of the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire: The countries they’re mostly fleeing from – Iraq, Iran, Eritrea – are countries where their lives are already at risk. People only risk their lives in flimsy boats in the Channel because they’ve literally got nothing left to lose. ![]() Yet we know, as they must surely know, that the only thing that would break that business model would be to offer safe and legal routes to asylum in this country. Ministers claim that this policy is about ‘breaking the business model of the people traffickers” Rwanda, one of the poorest countries in the world, with almost double the population density of the UK, and yet which, per capita, is already hosting 5 times as many refugees as the UK. Rwanda, a country which our own Government said last year was guilty of human rights abuses and torture It is beyond belief that ministers are dressing up this cowardly outsourcing of our asylum obligations as if it were some kind of “development partnership” with Rwanda We’re here to say that we will fight it every step of the way This vile and vicious policy is inhumane, unworkable, probably illegal and certainly immoral I suppose our work would take on more powerful tones when we see that this is not merely about letting people in it is about meeting the estranged other in all her fascinating strangeness, in all her monstrosity, in all her wounded Samaritan-ness, and pausing long enough to be met, to be struck, to become a with-ness to the leaking truth: that we are all in this together.We’re here with a very clear message for Boris Johnson and Priti Patel ![]() We may not notice it but we are subjects of this modern eliding power, of shopping malls and their claims on what food means, of giant pharmaceutical interests and their investments in what health means or does not mean, and of regimes of discursive power that deify human interests over and above non-human becomings. Those severely affected by Trump’s signature are heralds of the very conditions that we all now live in they are critiques of our complacency and doctrines of arrival. This is about meeting the hauntings that have been repressed by our modern claims to transcendence, and staying with their ghostly moanings and stirrings long enough to know we are just as undone. This whole saga is about reworking our practices of being at ‘home’. We are just as involved in this vast conspiracy about what home means, how power is distributed, how bodies are marked, and how stories become meaningful. They are how things come to matter, and how others stop mattering. There is much more at stake than a seasonal, charitable feeling of inclusiveness.īorders are not merely lines that mark where things end and others begin, they are substantiating practices of identity-making and world-building. This is not even about bringing more people in. As America enacts nationalistic walls and ‘America First’ borders to ‘save’ those within from the monsters without – the supposed enemies skirting the boundaries – and as people boldly take to the streets to protest and insist on the decency of being hospitable in a time of painful dispossessions and widespread homelessness, may our work be disciplined by the humility of recognizing that this is not an effort to redeem those lingering at the airports. As such, in a game of sides, the greatest thing suffered is the loss of the other side. I cannot fully account for myself if my account leaves you out of its logic. You see, it’s not just that those we label ‘Muslims’, ‘refugees’, and ‘primitives’ are like us in stunning ways – it’s that they are the very condition that make ‘us’ possible. It is denying the significance of my entanglement with you, and participating in the modern obscenity of total independence. This colonial notion of enmity has its effects in failing to see the fault lines that pressure us into assuming that difference means separation, and intimacy, sameness. I am speaking to the heart of the modern project and its account of selves as independent entities in constant, inescapable friction with ‘not-selves’. I am not speaking of enmity as a state of being at odds with another. There is something more lasting, more threatening, more monstrous than the figure of a fire-breathing enemy in the distance: and that is the abstracted notion of enmity itself. No one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |