What Does it Mean to Move? Joy and Resistance Through Cultural Work in South–South Migration

Abstract

Within migration studies, there has been an emphasis on the economic aspects of forced migration from the countries of the Global South to the Global North. The Global North’s measurement-heavy and largely economistic perceptions of the need to migrate obscure the humanity of forced migration. Where research and development work engage with arts and culture, it typically does so to communicate findings, educate, or mediatise. This chapter considers how art and cultural works serve as methods practised daily by migrants in contexts of violent (b)ordering, (dis)counting, and survival. It opens by unpacking necropolitics of the (b)ordering and (dis)counting that are not only drawn between the here and there, the us and them, but also between the knowable and the unknowable. The intention, here, is to rebuke the creation of “death-worlds and their minions” (Schaffer, 2020) with the forms of resistance which demonstrate and persist where people are manifestly, often gloriously, alive. It then moves on to conceptualise ways of destituting these violent structures of (b)ordering and (dis)counting through artistic, poetic, and cultural work. The chapter concludes by stressing the need for cultural work mediated by arts-based research to unmask not only the humanity within the South–South migration but also the potent forces of comfort and discomfort.

Introduction

Once I lived in a beautiful town;

Once, I owned a beautiful house,

with a grand garden full of flowers,

and I was a prince of it all. Once,

I lived in a house with a name:

And now, I am just a number.

Nations talked to nations

And robbed me of myself.

They made me

a number among millions.

The above lines are from the poem Where are my unnumbered days? by a young Syrian boy, Mohamed Assaf, reflecting on his childhood (Assaf & Clanchy, 2018). Mohamed Assaf, as articulated in the above lines, appears perplexed by how his life is reduced to such a precarious form of existence that he features as just a number. It echoes the words of another refugee, from the time of the Holocaust, Simone Weil, who remarked that the lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all (Weil, 1970).

In another poem, When my teachers asked me, Mohamed Assaf speaks of becoming a “refugee”, which for him was an unthinkable prospect, yet that was “The word the West was holding for [him]” (Assaf & Clanchy, 2018, 210). As he points out in his poem, Mohamed Assaf is only one person among many millions of displaced people. Published annually, the UNHCR Global Trends Report (2022) leads in providing the latest statistical trends of involuntarily displaced people. According to the UNHCR Global Trends report, the number of involuntarily displaced people across the world totalled over 89 million at the end of 2021, 83% of whom were hosted in the Global South, with over 72% living in immediately adjacent countries (UNHCR, 2022, 2). The report indicates that the number of displaced people has now “exceeded 100 million” as a result of the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Burkina Faso, and Myanmar (UNHCR, 2022, 7). These numeric measurements from UNHCR are highly reductive to comprehensively understand the lived realities of those caught up in the search for refuge from war and persecution.

The category of the forced migrant,¹ as Mohamed Assaf points out, reduces displaced people to nameless and faceless numbers. Forced migrants in general and those from the Global South in particular are often rendered nude, damned, and unwelcome persons by violent practices of (b)ordering and (dis)counting (see, for example, Agamben, 1995; Aiyar et al., 2016; Berry et al., 2016; Malkki, 1996; Mbembe, 2019). We only need to think of the branding on skin in the death camps of the Holocaust, to the use of numbers not names to refer to those held in Australian detention centres in the last decade. Practices of both quantifying and qualifying through naming can become practices of erasure, their powerful technologies largely in the hands of state actors for the purpose of control. This control may be humanitarian, or it may be exclusionary, but the legacies are similar in the intersections of both.

Over the last few decades, it has been apparent that (b)ordering and (dis)counting are deployed ubiquitously, including on the bodies of migrants, through biometric and electronic borders (Aas, 2006; Amoore, 2006; Mbembe, 2019; Salter, 2004). To draw carceral lines between the Global North and Global South, state, and non-state (b)ordering regimes are deployed along territorial and extra-territorial borders, as well as in airports, refugee camps, hotspots, water bodies, and deserts. These violent (b)ordering structures are designed to keep the bodies and faces of forced migrants away from borders and cameras. Equipped with “smart” technologies (Salter, 2004), these (b)ordering regimes “count” and “discount”—(dis)count—those who have lost their lives and those who “sneak” across the violent borders, respectively. The goal is, as Mbembe (2019, 7) points out, “to make life itself amenable to ‘datafication’”. This is exactly what the settled narrative of forced migration from the Global South to the Global North boils down to in the current migration scholarship (Phipps, 2022).

Yet, the story of South–South migration cannot be reduced to the violence of (b)ordering and (dis)counting. In fact, migrants continue to move both inside and outside of the Global South. Movement allows migrants to overcome, as mobile human beings with various capabilities but also vulnerabilities, the exclusive barriers of time, space, and knowledge deployed by (b)ordering and (dis)counting regimes. Historically speaking, South–South migration is rooted in intercultural and interepistemic communication. For example, referring to the pre-colonial migration of people within the continent of Africa, Mbembe (2020, 58) observes:

It is a history of colliding cultures, caught in the maelstrom of war, invasion, migration, intermarriage, and a history of various religions we make our own, of techniques we exchange, and of goods we trade. The cultural history of the continent can hardly be understood outside the paradigm of itinerancy, mobility, and displacement.

Despite the threat of (b)ordering and (dis)counting to “this very culture of mobility” (Mbembe, 2020, 58), similar patterns of mobility are still practised in the Global South. The migration of workers from South Asia to the Middle East and from Eastern Africa to Southern Africa are just two examples of mobility within the Global South (see Malkki, 1996; Wickramasekara, 2011). Moreover, climate-induced internal displacement continues to create new patterns of semi-nomadic life within the borders of Horn of Africa countries and beyond (see Bach, 2022). Nevertheless, as shown above, the association of these forms of migration with barriers of place, time, and (dis)counting has prevented transformative work in South–South migration. In addition to inflicting enduring violence, the regimes of (b)ordering and (dis)counting create epistemic barriers—borders between the knowable and unknowable—that obscure the fluidity, creativity, and interculturality of South–South migration. These illusive regimes of epistemic (b)ordering and (dis)counting create differential humanity in which some lives are regarded as more qualified than others, more liveable than others (see, for example, Butler, 2006; Mbembe, 2019). These are colonial predicaments of what Maldonado-Torres calls “metaphysical catastrophe”, namely, “the meaning and function of the basic parameters of geopolitical, national, as well as subjective and intersubjective dynamics to the extent that it creates a world to the measure of dehumanization” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, 12). These modalities of dehumanisation leading to the death of forced migrants are perceived, to use Mayblin’s (2020, 39) blunt description, as “beneficial to the whole population, and [the forced migrants’] suffering is of little consequence to society as a whole”.

One of the approaches to dealing with the necropolitics that are part of the “metaphysical catastrophe” has been to engage the arts in work for advocacy and communication of both the plight and the complexity of regimes of (b)ordering. Where research and development work engage with arts and culture, however, it typically does so to communicate findings, educate, or mediatise. This chapter considers how art and cultural works serve as methods practised daily by migrants in contexts of violent (b)ordering, (dis)counting, and survival. It opens by unpacking necropolitics of the (b)ordering and (dis)counting that are not only drawn between the here and there, the us and them, but also between the knowable and the unknowable. The intention, here, is to rebuke the creation of “death-worlds and their minions” (Schaffer, 2020, 48) with the forms of resistance which demonstrate and persist where people are manifestly, often gloriously, alive. It then moves on to conceptualise ways of destituting these violent structures of (b)ordering and (dis)counting through artistic, poetic, and cultural work. The chapter concludes by stressing the need for cultural work mediated by arts-based research to unmask not only the humanity within the South–South migration but also the potent forces of comfort and discomfort.

Necropolitics of (Dis)counting and (B)ordering

The insecurity, instability, and precarity of the South–South migration are often associated with the deployment of barriers of place, time, and (dis)counting. The inherently colonial relations of power and knowledge between the Global North and Global South (see Fynn-Bruey, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh this volume), create exclusive modes of distancing, containing, counting, and discounting. What these relations keep distant from the Global North are the discursively nude and bare bodies of the Southern migrants. “The goal is”, as Mbembe (2019, 9) asserts, “to better control movement and speed, accelerating it here, decelerating it there and, in the process, sorting, recategorizing, reclassifying people with the goal of better selecting anew who is whom, who should be where and who shouldn’t, in the name of security”. This confining of forced migrants in space and time is epitomised at the interstices of borders, refugee camps, torture camps, and detention facilities (see, for example, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020a, 2020b; Fisseha, 2015; Malkki, 1996; Yohannes, 2021a, 2021b). As Yohannes perceptively explains, “These spaces—the coordinates of the carceral network—are where the exception is applied to ensure the complete domination, surrender, and annihilation of the [refugees]… the refugees’ instincts, capacities, and potentialities are negated indefinitely” (2021b, 200).

Stranded indefinitely in these spaces of impoverishment, violability, and denigration, forced migrants, figuratively and literally speaking, appear only in the statistical schemata of international organisations, deployed as part of the (b)ordering spectacle. The UNHCR Global Trends Report details the latest trends:

With millions of Ukrainians displaced at the time of writing, as well as further displacement elsewhere this year, notably in Burkina Faso and Myanmar, total forced displacement now exceeds 100 million people... This means 1 in every 78 people on earth has been forced to flee – a dramatic milestone that few would have expected a decade ago. (UNHCR Report, 2022, 7)

These numbers and other statistics are often used by governments and international institutions to forecast economic impacts and security risks in countries of the Global North. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, predicted the following budgetary expenditure for people seeking asylum in European countries in 2015 and 2016:

IMF staff estimate that, on a GDP-weighted basis, average budgetary expenses for asylum seekers in EU countries could increase by 0.05 and 0.1 percent of GDP in 2015 and 2016, respectively, compared to 2014... Austria (at 0.08 and 0.23 percent of GDP), Finland (at 0.04 and 0.28 percent of GDP), Sweden (at 0.2 and 0.7 percent of GDP), and Germany (at 0.12 and 0.27 percent of GDP) are expected to shoulder the largest spending increases in 2015 and 2016, respectively, relative to 2014. (Aiyar et al., 2016, 12)

These are not neutral statistics. They go beyond making purely economic assessments to create alarmist discourses of a threatening refugee “crisis”, an “invasion”, and of a “mass influx” of undesirable people into the Global North (see Berry et al., 2016; Heller & Pécoud, 2020). Heller and Pécoud (2020, 483) explicate:

Migration statistics do not merely “describe,” in an “objective” manner, a pre-existing social reality. They rather contribute to the very existence of “migration” by making the phenomenon visible and countable by governments. They are both the product of immigration policies and the condition for these polices to exist, thereby constituting the privileged tool through which state policies operate.

The systemic techniques used to render people (in)visible and calculable, fuelled by the mainstream media and by uncritically produced migration scholarship, including the perpetuation of state and intergovernmental serving data “extraction” processes, create an environment in which governments can establish necropolitical bordering regimes, to the detriment of people seeking refuge. For example, the European Commission, at the height of the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015, adopted a new policy “to boost the central EU resources devoted to the refugee surge in 2015–16 by €1.7 billion (0.01 per cent of EU GDP) to €9.2 billion (0.07 per cent of EU GDP) by reallocating resources from other parts of the EU budget” (Aiyar et al., 2016, 13). These resources are used to provide “funding for the FRONTEX budgets, support to member countries for migration and border management… and support to countries outside the EU (for example, through the EU Regional Trust Fund in response to the Syrian crisis and additional funding for Turkey)” (Aiyar et al., 2016, 13). The primary goal, here, is to reinforce a “fortress Europe” whose borders are stretched beyond the continent’s territorial limits so as to immobilise in precarious conditions people desperately seeking refuge and govern them through necropolitics (see Damoc, 2016; Kofman & Sales, 1992; Mainwaring, 2019; Van Avermaet, 2009).

The regimes of fortification and necropolitics enforced to contain most of the displaced people within a particular region—the Global South—threaten the very humanity of the forced migrants. The vulnerability, violability, and inaudibility of these migrants are directly associated with the regimes of bordering deployed primarily by the Global North, but also within the Global South. The bordering regimes are designed not only to institute a radical form of inhospitality but also to create necropolitical conditions in which migrants are met by violent borders, while also being preyed on by organised criminals such as smugglers and traffickers. This is why migrants from the Global South are often trapped in irregular forms of movement, such as smuggling, trafficking, and/or deportation (see Human Rights Watch, 2009; Loschi et al., 2018; Yohannes, 2021a). Stranded in the necropolitical spectacles of (im)mobility and carcerality, these migrants feature as “discounted bodies”, or “bodies at the limits of life, trapped in uninhabitable worlds and inhospitable places” (Mbembe, 2019, 10). Death is normalised for these (dis)counted migrants; for example, the IOM Missing Migrants Project recorded the deaths of 49,383 people between 2014 and July 2022 (Missing Migrants Project, 2022). These are simply (dis)counted people; discounted in life and counted in death, namely, “necropolitics” or the politics of “subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembé, 2003, 39). The Missing Migrants project themselves also caution as to any potential claims for accuracy in their data, given that such data are notoriously difficult to obtain and to verify.

Furthermore, “stuckness” in spaces of containment, such as refugee camps and informal settlements, is another characteristic feature of migration from and within the Global South. The necropolitical violence faced by refugees in realms of immobility, inhospitality, and precarity are epitomised in regions stretching from Western and Eastern Africa to North Africa and the Middle East; from Yemen, Syria, and Iraq to Myanmar; and from South America to the US border with Mexico (see Green, 2015; Malkki, 1996; Mudawi, 2019; Yohannes, 2021a). The refugee camps and informal settlements spreading from eastern Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda to Asia–Pacific and South America are just some examples of places where refugees live for decades in impoverished and destitute states (see, for example, Bahlbi, 2016; Davies, 2020; Green, 2015; Kok, 1989). The migrants in these impoverished spaces continue are stuck in realms of destitution and necropolitics. Those without the adequate resources and ability to move (e.g., children, single mothers, and disabled people) are displaced (or mobilised) in conditions of immobility. For the resourceful and those able to move, irregular migration allows them to dodge the impoverished camps, torture camps, and violent borders. For these migrants, forced to navigate unsafe journeys, movement is necessary to overcome solitude, persecution, torture, and immobility. Theirs is a story of “survival” (Perl, 2019). Below, we discuss ways of revealing the humanity of the Southern migrants through their survival stories of cultural agency and cultural work for justice.

Revealing the Humanity in South–South Migration: “Destituting” the Practices of (B)ordering and (Dis)counting

Practices of (b)ordering and (dis)counting leave forced migrants facing a perpetual struggle to communicate their lived experiences to a world that continues to be indifferent to them. They do so “by crossing borders, dying in treacherous waters and deserts and appearing in politicised spaces” (Yohannes, 2021b, 18). The stories of Yohanna, who perished off the island of Lampedusa on 3 October 2013 with her new-born baby still attached to her by its umbilical cord, and of a nameless child, who died alongside Yohanna, (dis)counted as No.92, are just a few examples of the necropolitics of (b)ordering and (dis)counting. Reduced to media content and an abstract number, the lives and deaths of the many thousands of migrants who perish in the carceral spaces are rendered, respectively, “unliveable” and “ungrieveable”, as Butler would argue (Butler, 2009). Their bodies perish, as if they had never existed, and they are reduced to numbers, as if they had never had names, which amounts to “epistemic and pedagogical brutality” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, 3). The question becomes one of methodology: how to go beyond these profound structures of violence and disposability, as Butler (2006, 30) invites us to contemplate:

If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?

“In crucial times”, Lévinas (1996) reminds us, “when the perishability of so many values is revealed, all human dignity consists in believing in their return” (121). This return of human dignity cannot be achieved without restorative, reparative and regenerative works of art, of culture, of memory, and of imagination. We find such restorative, reparative, and regenerative creations primarily in the artistic work of people with lived experiences, but also in decolonial aesthetics. Michael Adony,² for example, has depicted Yohanna’s story through his powerful artwork. Adonay’s painting depicts the unheard cries of the new-born baby who never got a chance to see the light of the day, and the pain of a mother unable to welcome her new-born baby. These cries represent not only expressions of desperate need, but also a call for humans to assume ethical responsibility for one another as part of a human family. What factors led to these calamities? What circumstances limit the ethical responsibility people feel for the refugees? What stops states from helping a drowning woman with her new-born baby still attached to her by its umbilical cord? What is possible in the moment when we “regard the pain of others” (Sontag, 2004)? What is destituting our affective registers? These are fundamental questions to address if we wish to understand both the humanity of the other and our own humanity. The “cry” constitutes a starting point for a theory that can help us answer these questions, as Maldonado-Torres (2007, 256) aptly puts it:

The cry, not a word but an interjection, is a call of attention to one’s own existence... It is the cry that animates the birth of theory and critical thought. And the cry points to a peculiar existential condition: that of the condemned.

In short, the cry can guide us towards the “truth”. Michael Adonay’s powerful artwork invites us to “contemplate” the truth of those whose very lives and livelihoods are perpetually at stake. It takes us beyond what Sontag has termed the “spectating” of “calamities taking place in another country”. She argues that “For photography of atrocity, people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance” (Sontag, 2002, 26–27). What artists, such as Michael Adonay enable is a way of bringing continuity into the future or what has been rendered mute, controlled, enumerated, and therefore consigned within the structures of power that accompany “data collection”. The image brings the stories flooding back, the stylisations which belong within orthodox forms of artistic expression troubling the controlled stories of western forms of artistic expression, the fluidity of movement of water and hair and umbilical cord refusing the stasis, the rigour mortis. As a figure is dignified by blues and golds and greens of careful, attentive brush strokes there is presence and story, the story of a painter, the story of the shipwreck, the story of the woman, her labour, her body found and both given the number 92, and ungiven that number through the silence of art.

The image appeals to us to reclaim the humanity of the other in the same way we recognise our own humanity. It reminds us that “love and rage are possible in spite of the profound wounds created by modernity/coloniality” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, 24). We are called upon to reclaim our collective humanity by destituting the (b)ordering and (dis)counting practices that coloniality has maintained through its exclusive politicisation of life. It is an answer to Donna Haraway’s questions in Staying with the trouble: “How can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every fibre of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and repatterned?” As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben powerfully argues, “Life is not in itself political, it is what must be excluded and, at the same time, included by way of its own exclusion” (2014, 65). In Agamben’s political theory, this constitutively exclusive process of politicisation creates “human beings [who] could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (Agamben, 1998, 97). The cry is the language of innocent people whose lives have been rendered disposable. Attending to the cry by making room for the agency of lives and the agency of artists insistent on regenerative work, is a powerful way to resist this situation. We return to this point below.

“I Can’t Bear You Being Called NUMBER 92”: The Destituting Power of Poetry

While artistic image is one form which can counter the (dis)counting, the arts in general when used through ceremony and not in the service of forms of propaganda, and when bound into ethical practices of attention, can all serve to destitute the violences of erasure and silencing.

Poetry is a powerful way of resisting and “destituting” the omnipresent violence of (b)ordering and (dis)counting. Where image can work to visibilise, poetry to work to vocalise. “To destitute work means”, Agamben (2014, 73) explains, “to return it to the potentiality from which it originates, to exhibit in it the impotentiality that reigns and endures there”. As Agamben argues, poetry is a way of destituting the violence of the speaker. Agamben (2014, 70) asks: “What is a poem, in fact, if not an operation taking place in language that consists in rendering inoperative, in deactivating its communicative and informative function, in order to open it to a new possible use?” At this point, we now invite you to consider Selam Kidane’s poem entitled No. 92.

I wonder what she called you.

Your precious mama…

Maybe she called you Berhan?… My Light

Or did she call you Haben?… My Pride

She may have called you Qisanet… Rest

Or were you, Awet? Victory…

Tell me, Little One, did she name you after her hope?

Or her aspirations… her dream?

Did she name you after the brother she lost?

Or after her father long gone?

Did she name you after the desert she crossed?

Or the land she left behind…?

Maybe she named you for the land you were to inherit?

Tell me, Little One, what did your precious mother call you?

For I can’t bear you being called Number 92…

In contemplating these words, we invite you to contemplate those drowned, trafficked, tortured to death, and/or rendered nameless. Contemplation subsists alongside criticality. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos demonstrates (Santos, 2014, 19–20), “[a] sense of exhaustion haunts the Western Eurocentric critical tradition […] Of there is so much to criticize, why has it become so difficult to build convincing, widely shared, powerful, critical theories that give rise to effective and profound transformative practices?”.

What if, alongside Selam Kidane, we insist on also walking behind and looking down to see and feel the light, pride, rest, victory, hope, and dreams of those who are left behind and/or (un)buried following painful death. What if contemplation, the silence present in standing before a work of art, the softening of the mind needed as a poem plays with and entices new ways of hearing the world, is where the exhaustions of critique can meet the restorative, reparative, and regenerative possibilities of cultural work.

Kidane’s words open different ways to be alongside the names, not numbers, of those whose lives humanity has failed to pronounce. These words allow us to destitute the assigning of abstract numbers and “restore” the real names, for destitution along with “restoration” are “the coming politics” (Agamben, 2014, 74). They step beyond “weak answers” (Santos, 2014, 20) which the Eurocentric critical tradition has for the “strong questions confronting us in our time”. Agamben reminds us that contemplation, in operativity, and destitution, as emerging forms of politics, are operatives through which we can reclaim our collective humanity from the violent power of the state. The work of contemplative and joyful art is central to this emerging politics. The presence of joy and of contemplation, of silence and of energy in the face of the tiredness of critiques, as liberation theologian Andrade argues “are counter proof”. Joy, in such circumstances, or the stillness and dignity of the poise of the figures in Adonay’s image, the line from Kidane “tell me, Little One, what did your precious mother call you? For I can’t bear you being called Number 92…” do the work of destituting the violence of what created the impulse to the image, the poem in the first place. And in the posing of the question by Kidane, or the unveiling of the image by Adonay, there is the first step away from the destitution and in that step is felt, however fleeting, the potential of the joy of resistance, and a understanding that “other worlds are possible” (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021).

Agamben, again, writes: “Politics and art are neither tasks nor simply ‘works’: they name, rather, the dimension in which the linguistic and corporeal, material and immaterial, biological and social operations are made inoperative and contemplated as such” (2014, 74). The inoperativity of violence—physical, epistemic, or otherwise—should be the goal of the meditative art and poetry.

Joy as a Form of Resistance

In addition to destituting violence, cultural and artistic works can also create the conditions for the possibility to “enjoy” life. Again, we take pains here to emphasise that this is not always the work undertaken by cultural and artistic work. Here, “enjoyment” is understood, in Lévinasian terms, as “the ultimate consciousness of all the contents that fill [our lives]” (Lévinas, 2011, 111). “The final relation”, Lévinas adds, “is enjoyment, happiness” (2011, 113, emphasis in the original). When correctly deployed, cultural, and artistic works can exhibit the happiness contained within migrants’ survival stories, or in the survival of their stories, their afterlives in narratives which refuse erasure and enact memory. For migrants, migration does not merely consist of moving from place to place; it also involves creating, dancing, mediatising, and exhibiting joy. If not joy and imaginative work, what is brought to our lives by playing with clay, making pottery, weaving, painting, decorating, music, dance, theatre, cinema, sculpture, architecture, and literature? Music, for example, has never ceased to bring joy to colonised and opposed peoples, even during the most difficult times of colonisation, as Mbembe (2015, 4) explains:

Indeed, in Africa, music has always been a celebration of the ineradicability of life, in a long life-denying history. It is the genre that has historically expressed, in the most haunting way, our raging desire not only for existence, but more importantly for joy in existence.

A sense of joy in existing makes living thinkable for migrants in the face of unthinkable violence inflicted by (b)ordering and (dis)counting practices. As part of our restorative work with South–South migrants, we have witnessed migrants, throughout their journeys, resolutely and unapologetically celebrating their cultures, festivals, and prayers, as well as their traditional coffee, food, and attire. In addition to sustaining their own peculiar migration survival stories, these moments of celebration present us with memories and images that shape our ways of thinking about and being with the migrants. They often turn power relations upside down and enable those previously being destitute to turn the tables and become those hosting, those enabling, those even also destituting as the language and culture of the dominant group are usurped in such moments by that of those others discounted or subjugated to integration as assimilation. As can be seen in the pictures below, moments of prayer, music, poetry, and cultural celebration bind together poets, social scientists, musicians, and artists as co-producers of knowledge together with the migrants (Figs. 7.1 and 7.2).

Fig. 7.1

Refugee-organised mass at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, Cairo, Egypt

Fig. 7.2

Eritrean coffee celebration with Alison Phipps, Glasgow, Scotland

Moments of prayer and cultural celebration can be artistic, poetic, cultural, and life affirming. They can also be awkward, uncomfortable, and strange depending on the fluency of their use. But under both circumstances these are not “weak” responses to “strong questions” but rather elicit powerful affective responses. In addition to finding opportunities to be happy in these acts of prayer, celebration, and artistic meditation, the migrants mobilise joy and fluency in cultural practice as the ultimate form of resistance to the violence of their own cultural destitution as migrants. These organised moments of joy enable the migrants to destitute violence and their fear of it at its very roots, even if the shadow of violence inevitably returns in moments of despair. For the migrants, it is a way of asserting that no one can take away their capacity to be happy and enjoy life, for their capacity to be happy rests on, as Lévinas puts it, “the independence and sovereignty of enjoyment” (2011, 114). It is only by recognising this irreducible capacity to experience joy and generate discomfort and comfort, artfully, that we can come to understand that the life of a migrant, in Lévinasian terms, “is not a bare existence; it is a life of labor and nourishments; these are contents which do not preoccupy it only, but which ‘occupy’ it, which ‘entertain’ it, of which it is enjoyment” (Lévinas, 2011, 111, emphasis in original). In other words, this irreducible capacity to continue to be happy is an invocation of the migrants’ humanity in the face of the stubborn necropolitics of the Global North. Thus, we argue that generative cultural enjoyment, as a form of resistance, is central to the work of reclaiming humanity in South–South migration.

Crucially, movement, circulation, communication, and sharing are all central to these imaginative, contemplative, and creative works within South–South migration. Such acts open possibilities for visibility, recognition, and globality. South–South migration reveals but also enables these possibilities. For the migrants, mobility has existential value; to move is to live, to survive, to connect, to resist, to exist, and to enjoy. The migrants’ ability to move, despite the impediments they face, demonstrates that they will not be confined by (b)ordering practices or remain perpetually suspended in time in impoverished refugee camps and informal settlements. Despite (b)ordering regimes’ acquisitions of new “smart” technologies of violence (Salter, 2004), the migrants use their collective creative powers to continue to move, survive, and be visible. They find their authentic voices in this irreducible capacity to move. Yet, when speaking of mobility as a voice, we must be mindful that this voice is neither universal nor univocal. In the complex (b)ordering regimes, some migrants are more resourceful and capable than others; some are more successful in their journeys than others (Haile, 2020; Yohannes, 2021a, 2021b). In fact, some might remain stuck in perpetual immobility and yet “keeping on the move without letting pass” (Tazzioli, 2020, 101).

The barriers of place, time, and knowledge imposed by (b)ordering and (dis)counting regimes dissolve to the point of non-existence every time these migrants are welcomed in places not far from their homes and not indifferent to their ways of life. South–South migration within the continents of Africa (e.g., Congolese migrants migrating to South Africa, the entrepreneurship of East African refugees in Uganda, South Sudan, Angola, etc.), South America (e.g., Venezuelan refugees settled within the region), and Asia (e.g., Syrian refugees settled in the Middle East, Yemeni refugees in the Gulf, etc.) are just a few examples of refugees making significant contributions to the economic and socio-cultural life of the regions in which they settle (see Crush & Ramachandran, 2014; Kibreab, 2000; Kok, 1989). These forms of movement, intersubjective encounter, intercultural communication, and skills/knowledge sharing enable the South–South migrants to turn themselves into communicative and trading “nomads”, in the Lévinasian sense of the term. For Lévinas, “Nothing is more enrooted than the nomad… he or she who emigrates is fully human: the migration of man does not destroy, does not demolish the meaning of being” (1998, 117). These practices of mobility grounded in principles of “ubuntu” reveal the possibilities and opportunities within the region, as well as the many works of peace and hospitality that reign in invisibility (see Arthur et al., 2015).

Reclaiming the Humanity of Forced Migrants

Throughout this chapter, we insist on remembering the dismembered bodies of the displaced migrants and recognising their humanity in the same way we recognise our own humanity. And we suggest that the tasks of remembering, and recognition comprise attending to the forced migrants’ pain and joy, cries, songs, and poems, as well as understanding and welcoming the migrants. These sensibilities and the ability to move from the very foundations of the forced migrants’ human qualities. As Maldonado-Torres (2008, 133), for example, reminds us: “Before the word reaches the horizons of meaning, where the world is unveiled and the meaning of reality becomes clear, the cry becomes a call for the recognition of the singularity of the subject as such”. That is to say that the manifestation of pain and happiness through the phenomenologies and epistemologies of crying and rejoicing against those of “blindness” (Santos, 2001) constitute the primal utterances of subjects held by (b)ordering and (dis)counting in “a state of injury” (Mbembé, 2003, 21, emphasis in original). These primal epistemic utterances come before the so-called participant stories, which are often obtained through extractive methods such as interviews and focus group discussions.

To put these utterances into words—that is, to transition from attending to feelings to saying and writing—is, as Qasmiyeh (2019) puts it, “to embroider the voice with its own needle”. For Qasmiyeh,³ “voice” is “a prior state of being that is initiated by and therefore intrinsically belongs to the individual herself” (2020, 254). Qasmiyeh (2020, 254) adds:

Indeed, embroidering the voice is writing the intimate, the lived, and the leftovers in life into newer times as imagined by the writer herself; it is writing without a helping hand from anyone but rather through continuously returning to the embroidered (and what is being embroidered) and its tools, notwithstanding how incomplete and fragmentary they are.

The transition from attending to primal epistemic utterances and to embroidering the voice opens the possibility for the Southern subject to emerge “out of the impossibility of demanding anything whatsoever” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, 136). This departure from the primordial epistemic utterances allows us to abandon the Cartesian dictum of “I think, therefore I am”, in favour of harnessing the epistemic powers of “I feel, therefore I can be free” (Lorde, 2018, 4), together with ubuntu sensibilities which situate being in the collective. Feelings come before thinking and writing, and these must be attended to in their epistemic order in order to excavate the “shards of radical potential buried in the sedimentation of the political present” (Kramer, 2019, 12). The artistic and cultural works we have highlighted above as examples allow us to begin the arduous task of inviting scholars into methods which might promote “epistemic healing” (Khan & Naguib, 2019). As Mbembe (2015, para. 17) expounds:

From art, literature, music, and dance, I have learnt that there is a sensory experience of our lives that encompasses innumerable unnamed and unnameable shapes, hues, and textures that “objective knowledge” has failed to capture. The language of these genres communicates how ordinary people laugh and weep, work, play, pray, bless, love and curse, make a space to stand forth and walk, fall, and die.

As such, intercultural and interepistemic communication mediated by artistic and cultural work allows the humanity of the Global South to manifest itself in ways the Global North cannot render invisible and inferior.

Furthermore, reclaiming humanity entails the unconditional ethical responsibility to encounter the Other, in Lévinasian terms, “face-to-face” (see Lévinas, 2011). For Lévinas, the otherness of the Other is an inescapable reality. It is, fundamentally, a realisation of an ontology of being of other beings—of an existence of other humans—outside oneself. Questioning that very existence—the otherness of the Other—amounts to “an act of ontological violence” (Walker, 2004, 530).

We therefore must dissociate the face of the forced migrant from the “invented threat” that the Global North wishes to perceive. The vulnerable faces and precarised situations of the forced migrants are indications neither of threats to be feared nor inferior beings to be dominated. This reality should be the guiding principle in our attempts to destitute the violence—epistemic or otherwise—of (b)ordering and (dis)counting. Reclaiming the humanity of the forced migrants and restoring their dignity requires a radical ethical responsibility to receive them, be sympathetic to their weary faces, and be prepared to live with them. This unconditional welcome is “subjectivity as welcoming the Other, as hospitality” (Lévinas, 2011, 27). From this standpoint, Lévinas (1994) asks: “To shelter the other in one’s own land or home, to tolerate the presence of the landless and homeless on the “ancestral soil”, so jealously, so meanly loved—is that the criterion of humanness?” (98). Lévinas’ response is: “Unquestionably so” (98). The conviction that people should gift their homes/lands/shelters to welcome the forcibly displaced constitutes the essence of a collective ethical responsibility towards one another.

Therefore, the task of reclaiming the humanity of forced migrants necessitates re/membering the names and faces of the migrants, as well as recognising their dignity, humanity, and epistemic utterances. The urgent task, we argue, is to demolish intellectually the violability and bestiality assigned to forced migrants and create a place of decolonial possibility in which to imagine new ways of knowing and being. The place from which to begin this task is “the realm of intersubjectivity”, a site where the humanity of the subjects in question is recognised (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, 131). To be clear, we are not suggesting that forced migrants be humanised, because that would assume they are not already “human enough” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, 13). In fact, the sensibilities we have outlined above are a testament to the humanity of these migrants. We are simply pointing to the lively practices of comfort and discomfort, of joy and exuberance in their manifold presences in migratory settings and practices, as manifesting what Barber describes as “the art of making things stick” (Barber, 2007). By this, she is pointing to the way cultural practices, play, ceremony, and ritual observance of seasonality are laden with heavy ways of spending time and expending energy on what seems frivolous, uneconomical, even pointless, and yet is accompanied by embodied practice of tears, laughter, silence, observation, dance, and contemplation. Ritual practices are, in Barber’s view, also part of ensuring continuity of knowledge about how to reclaim humanity and such practices have, according to Graeber and Wengrow, always been part of the human archaeological and anthropological record, it is simply the narrative of Eurocentric scholarship that has assumed otherwise (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021). This humanist call, as Frantz Fanon articulates, demands “quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself” (1986, 231). These are the decolonial foundations of restorative, reparative, and regenerative cultural and epistemic praxes that allow the humanity of the South–South migration to be birthed in the intellectual endeavours.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have demonstrated how (b)ordering and (dis)counting are deployed to create necropolitical borders between the Global North and Global South, but also within these regions, with the intention of (im)mobilising, containing, and detaining forced migrants. As Mbembe points out, these necropolitical regimes function by “deepening the space and time asymmetries between different categories of humanity while leading to the progressive ghettoization of entire regions of the world” (2019, 11). As demonstrated, the Global South has become the primary target of necropolitical (b)ordering and (dis)counting experimentation on the region’s forced migrants. The Global North and Eurocentric humanitarian organisations roam the Global South with their measurement-heavy perceptions to create what Santos (2016) calls “Abyssal thinking”. “Abyssal thinking”, Santos (2016, 118) explains, “consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundations of the visible ones”. We have demonstrated how distinctions are made between migrants’ primal utterances and the Global North’s measurement-heavy perceptions to maintain the abyssal thinking. The former is subordinated to the latter to obscure the humanity of the migrants by reducing them to calculable figures and rendering them unintelligible and invisible.

Despite the titrations of life and death conditions, however, the Global South continues to be a place where “a symbiotic merging of life and mobility” is possible (Mbembe, 2019, 10). For the migrants, movement is a liminal mode of living and being, in which life is lived as a journey across time and space. Indeed, as shown, South–South migration is inextricably linked to the migrants’ experiences of mobility against spatial, temporal, and conceptual barriers. Thus, any attempt to understand South–South migration requires understanding the lived experience of the migrants, which includes listening to their pain, as well as their love and their rage. The Global South must be able to think, write, and theorise about South–South migration from its own geopolitical and epistemic locations, rather than relying on the measurement-heavy perceptions of the Global North. And, most importantly, the Global North must recognise that the faces and places of the Global South have an equal stake in any intersubjective, intercultural, and interepistemic interactions. Both North and South need the resources of hope which are found in resistance prayers of both joy and sorrow, widening the tired narratives of critique from their narrow moorings.

Moreover, we refuse to contemplate the colonial necropolitical projects of (b)ordering and (dis)counting—epistemically or otherwise; our only contemplation consists of their destitution, to break the carceral cage and necropolitical governance they create. There is no point in metricising people for the sake of (dis)counting; fortifying borders for the sake of (b)ordering; legislating laws for the sake of dehumanising; and waging necropolitics for the sake of “governing through death” (Mayblin, 2020, 38). We therefore suggest systemic destitution of (b)ordering and (dis)counting practices, whose prime function is to create differential levels of humanity, whereby some lives are deemed more qualified than others. We have argued for the intellectual demolition of these structurally violent regimes and suggested doing so on epistemic, conceptual, and ethical grounds. We have shown how artistic and cultural works such as poetry and music can help us contemplate, listen to, and restore sensibilities subjected to epistemic muteness. From this perspective, we have rejected the conditions and preconditions of necropolitics in favour of “sowing and growing that give root to praxis; a sowing and growing that herald life in an era of violence-death-war” (Walsh, 2021, 11). To humanise the cultural and epistemic work in South–South migration, one must consider “delinking” the cultural and epistemic work from violence—epistemic or otherwise (Mignolo, 2007). Let art be art on its own terms and culture be a way of life in its own contexts.

We have opened our discussion with a poem because, as Lorde (2018, 1) eloquently affirms, “it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt”.

Obedience

I spent the day in obedience

Unwriting all that has been written.

Unwalking the beech strewn paths.

Unthinking all that has been thought

Unfeeling all sensuous sensation.

I let the water lap around my skin

then unlapping, let the water join the mist.

I held only air.

Spoke only with silence.

Touched only the shadows lay.

I reeled in every prayer, unhooked the bait,

Threw the fish back into the water.

Decreated, I surveyed the battlefield.

Warriors are not warriors outwith wartime.

Warriors are gardeners, poets,

spirits of the living,

spirits at one

with the dead.

Decreated, I tore the many words from my lips,

the many thoughts from my mind,

the hopes from my heart.

Decreated, I left the dance floor.

And for a while

my land had rest from war.

Disobedience

After letting my land rest,

I disobeyed.

I could do no other.

It began with a poem

from the place of obedience.

The words made the clinging mist blush crimson

The bark in the forest burn red like cedar

Scented as richly and skelfing the skin.

The ink smudged,

the wax melted,

the carpet of leaves was moist.

The fish swam onto the hook,

onto the fire

and into the poem’s wide,

wild mouth.

(Phipps, 2019).