Writing As Action? On the Moral Urgency of the Migrant Crisis

I had been invited to dinner by some of my friends. Not for the sole pleasure of seeing one another, but so that they might alert me to what was happening on the outskirts of the City of Lights. These friends are artists, actors, journalists, activists . . . They write in the press, perform on stages, film things in impossible places. They are in essence what I am not: people of action.

For months they had been battling on the most unexpected of front lines. Hundreds of people—who had overcome deserts, oceans, walls, lines of barbed wire, checkpoints, who had survived nightmarish camps—were arriving in tireless waves only to crash against police violence in the very heart of Paris. They told me what they were experiencing: tales of daily assistance, accounts of brutality, medical care to be dispensed, endless steps to be taken in administrative dead ends. All of which was supplemented by photos and videos salvaged from their confrontations. They filled me with a mixture of guilt and silent indignation.

My friends, women of action, exhorted me to write in my own way about what was happening. By nature calm, rather contemplative, removed from activism, I always feel somewhat guilty in front of people who know how to act, and who act. Even if literature has often showed me the contrary, it’s rare for me to think straightaway that writing, when the emergency is under way, could turn out to be at all useful. Édouard Glissant thought differently. Every time we would write against something we considered unacceptable, he would be the one who initiated it. With vigilant serenity, he thought that beneath the facts, beneath the horror, a poetic vision was able to identify the forces at work, and among them to discern the acting power that alone, in the end, would be the key to a decisive response. Every act, he would say, was born of a poetics. Thus, poetics would usher in politics. My friends had reminded me, probably without knowing it, of Glissant’s thoughts.

The indignation they had managed to arouse in me hardened into a sort of obsession. What I knew or what I had sensed for months about the terrible migratory phenomenon became one of those particular torments which I can escape only through writing. I found it unbearable that in the Mediterranean, in the full light of day, thousands of people had already lost their lives. That in the coming months and years thousands of others were going to die, in the same places, in identical conditions, and in much larger numbers. That such a slaughter is possible in the 21st century, that we can simply tolerate the idea of it, accept the existence of it, can mean only one thing: a barbaric night has settled on the global conscience, and it no longer fears to show itself in the open and without shame. Many are those who say, “Why should we care about this Mediterranean business! It’s Europe’s problem! If there’s barbarity, it’s only a European barbarity, it doesn’t concern us!” And many are those who retreat into the cocoon of good conscience.

And yet a quick look around the world—the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and their archipelagoes—is enough to show us that migratory phenomena palpitate, persist, insist, convulse in one place, are up in another. Everywhere, to various degrees, children, women, men who want to move are ground up in lawless spaces in which human beings become strangers to humanity. Borders are sharpened more and more like the blade of a guillotine. Around them, those who come as humans toward other humans, whose only crime is to be human and call out to their brothers and sisters from the depths of a very human distress, find themselves faced with systems which no longer know how to recognize a human being. As if those who ask for help were a breed of medusae that could be blotted out from the face of the earth. A quick look around shows us that this matter is one of the forces at work in the world, and even worse: that it risks becoming one of the major issues of our planet.

Our immediate future will be dominated by two formidable monsters:

1. Climate change.

2. The triumph of neoliberalism, and of its multidimensional perverse effects.

Two catastrophes that will lead to ecological upheaval, devastating pollution, nuclear accidents, reactionary wars, global precarity, and medieval misery . . . Populations affected in one way or another will not fail to rush off from wherever to wherever. These migratory impulses will only intensify. They will be transglobal but also transnational—but also intranational . . .

Fixity has never existed in cultures, civilizations, or identities. It has never existed in life. Any one of us can, in the wake of a fire, a tornado, a tectonic fury, a job loss, be forced to leave home and ask for asylum a bit farther along, in his or her own nation or beyond. All of us risk finding ourselves inflicted with the conditions forced upon the migrants in the Mediterranean: a nearly systematic destruction as the only answer to distress. Inhumanity is still part of humanity. But when inhumanity sets itself up as a cogwheel mechanism it becomes dishumanity. In dishumanity the principle of humanity itself is threatened by a systematic entity. A murderous, cold robotization, lacking the limitations of affect. The death knell, the famous death knell, then tolls for all, but, lacking a human audience, it remains inaudible.

Acting out of compassion while fearing for oneself is the lowest form of relationship between a conscience and the indecencies of the world. It seems to me that the intensity of these migratory phenomena is such that they were not simply fed by fear, suffering, and wars. That there is, underneath, another imaginary of the world. A particular vision that the exceptional energy of these people secretly possessed. I had to find this power and allow it to project all action beyond humanitarian compassion or fear for oneself. So I attempted to apply to these phenomena the particular poetics that Glissant called globality.

Capitalist economic globalization is not the only force behind the unification of the world. In reality, in this capitalist expansion of the Market, of its alleged invisible regulations, there is no unification. Only the setting up of different places of marketable standardizations that allow the circulation of merchandise and the accumulation of obscene profits. The unprecedented multiplication of contacts, encounters, and exchanges, technoscientific acceleration, and the setting up of an omnipotent digital ecosystem have this as their only goal: markets, profits, financial hoards. And yet, beneath this commercial scheming an encounter between the imaginaries of peoples and individuals is taking place. Truly human sensibilities open up to greater spaces, and, mixing with one another, come together, pass through each other or unite, sometimes fight each other as much as they mutually inform one another. A perception of the world broader than that of our nation alone develops and produces to various degrees, in each of us, the vague consciousness of a world totality: of a world perceived as an indivisible whole. This is globality.

We live not in a state, a nation, a federation or confederation, surely not in a constellation of commercial hyper-places and financial centers, but in an ecological and human totality: extremely reactive, sensitive, unpredictable. It brings us tightly together in a shared fate. All of us together must think and construct this ultimate and grandiose level of the “common good.” Not in the desert of haughty, warlike, or arrogant solitudes, but in the oxygenated luxuriance of encounters, of a mobility in which differences are present, of a solidary exchange that makes everyone grow, and of a human competence that in all circumstances will retain its aptitude to recognize humanity, wherever it might go, wherever it might come from.

*

Hind, the one filming, says to me: In France, the Mediterranean is at the corner of the street and the Calais jungle, destroyed by shovels, keeps popping up along the boulevards! . . .

Jane, the one writing, whispers to me: In Paris, I serve hot coffee, slices of buttered bread, to eyes lacking eyelids. The pupils, whitened by vigilance and the salt of deserts, are like semaphores. In the shadow of these bodies that spring up from nowhere, who do nothing but emerge, evanescent between banks and shores, I see roads become eternal, tombs heaped between islands and continents, a vast array of origins that end up jumbled together on a raft of bundles and suitcases . . . Each one of these silhouettes seems to draw its endurance from a burden of tomorrows shouldered without fatigue, carried without future . . .

She sighs to me too: See how destinations are kept alight like embers, although no one ever arrives at them; how so many little people—children!—can be born into strange solitudes, congenital dagos, spontaneously stateless, untouchables and immanent pariahs, stripped of all sense of belonging, handed over to the damnations of a decree of medusae and sunken boats! . . .

Hind, the one filming, further proclaims to me: In Paris, in Ventimiglia, just as in the Calais region for almost 15 years, migrants have remained stranded on the margin of all margins, minors are treated like industrial livestock, even rounded up on the threshold of France, land of asylum, and hope itself is rooted out!

They are tarnished! . . .

. . . from police stations to detention centers, from detention centers to packages addressed to nowhere, without recourse, without witnesses, without lawyers, often without interpreters, their only asset the persistence of a fear that never gives up, that gives up on nothing! . . . Squats are evacuated without anyone caring for the sick, women, and children! The compassionate are brought before the courts for the crime of solidarity! Demonstrations are crushed even before they are risked! . . .

Here, close by (almost so far away), they are dispersed, they are punished with arrests, rocks are stacked and barriers raised in spaces dedicated to their final weariness; over there, far away (almost so close), coast guards, wall guards, border guards—guards of life, guards of death!—are sick of not being able to contain them! . . . The flow has the vitality of a biblical beginning, it swells having never begun, it begins again having never slowed down and even before it had time to stop . . . At times, guards of misery machine-gun madly and randomly, and often torture out of exasperation, and when they find themselves driven to the limits of their own conscience they cry without really understanding why! . . .

She then growls with all her youth: Islamophobia insecurity identity immigration . . . are words that have turned monstrous! They’ve mated under media hypnosis, in a shrill horde, and they grind madly like cogs, in almost every direction, everywhere, almost endlessly, crushing people under bright city lights and boulevard garlands! . . . We have to act, here’s a cause! . . .

Suddenly, Jane, the one who writes so well, says in astonishment: I saw their eyes, they’re firefies . . .

*

Yes, in this night, on this raft, beneath this frozen horizon, among these shivering shelters, camps, and bivouacs, destroyed again and again yet always reconstructed, in Europe, but also in Asia, in Africa, in the lands of the Caribbean and the other Americas, what you say, my dears, triggers in the geographies of the wind, in sparks of salt, in sparks of sky, a strange meeting of poets and great human beings . . .

*

What is it then to act or to make an effort beyond emergency without neglecting the emergency or missing the essential, and without considering that at the origin of this drama reign invisible forces?

And yet how can we not see them? Neo-liberalism nearing triumph; its financial markets lapsed into lethal hysteria; politics deserting within democracies that have become erratic; a state that is dwindling, leaving the economists alone at the helm and bent beneath the weight of innumerable diffuse mercantile entities participating in the fabric of the world. Not a single computer program, not a single screen, not a single innovation in nanoscience and biotech, not a stitch of the mind, and not a single connection escapes their dogma! . . . And here’s what this planetary darkening causes: exclusion, rejection, violence, stupidity, hatred, and indecency fermenting everywhere, intensifying in loops of algorithms and social networks, exploding in the impulsive horde of the media that are so fascinated by these networks that they become mimetic. This collapse leads to a loss of ethics, and when ethics fail, beauty falls. Pier Paolo Pasolini was right to be troubled in the face of an Italian night that seemed triumphant. A similar night is swallowing us, without alarm, imperceptible, invisible, until suddenly it is malevolently embodied under a blond swath of hair in command of the most powerful nation on earth . . .

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From Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity by Patrick Chamoiseau; translated by Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck; published by Yale University Press in April 2018. Reproduced by permission.