I’ve just finished a work camp in the Red Cross Center for Asylum Seekers of Nonceveux. The two weeks spent there were so intense that I have great difficulties setting my experience on paper…I have the impression of not doing justice to my own feelings.
When I got on the train that would take me to Nonceveux, I was convinced that, since I was well informed, nothing could surprise or shock me. And I was well informed, in theory I knew the drill: the laws, the statistics, the inherent shallowness and absurdity of a system that attempts to measure, weight and count human experience to see if it fits in the Procrustean bed of our little cozy Fortress Europe. I had heard the official discourse on migration enough times to know why I didn’t agree with it, enough times to know the difference between politics and reality. What’s more, I had been to centers for asylum seekers on various occasions, I had talked to the people, I knew the ups and downs. But once again I was proved that there’s a difference between knowing a situation and living it.
Of course, saying that I “lived” this situation is a relative term and sort of an overstatement. I spent two weeks with and amongst these people, I experienced the material conditions of the center, the shared rooms, the bad food, other’s people hair in the sink in the morning when you brush your teeth. But I didn’t, couldn’t experience probably the most important thing: the psychological circumstances. The insecurity, the long days spent sitting around just waiting, the bad memories that come back to haunt or the good memories that make people nostalgic. All this I could only notice from a certain distance. Because, although I am a migrant myself, I was born on the right side of the world, on the side where borders are less important, on the side where you can choose to leave your country knowing that you can come back at any time.
The work camp was for me an opportunity to discover the people with which I shared my every day life, but also an opportunity to discover myself, to discover resources but also prejudices I didn't think I had. When I started I was determined not to treat residents as beneficiaries of our work in the center - they are already beneficiaries of so many things. And besides, treating people as beneficiaries puts you in a position of authority, of superiority, which always makes my slightly anarchist skin itch. Why then, with this principled determination well in mind, was I surprised to discover that the people in the center are extremely intelligent, highly educated, talented and funny? Why such qualities, that do not surprise me in so many people I meet every day in “normal" circumstances, produced such an effect on me in the center? I guess the bullshit we hear every day in the media gets even to those of us who imagine having broken with the mainstream. Prejudice plus self-administered kick in the ass number one.
Also, before the work camp, I imagined that, since the people find themselves in a difficult situation, centers are basically sad places. To some extent they are, if you pay attention to the details, to the small discourse particularities, to the shadows that suddenly darken people's faces for a couple of seconds in the middle of a conversation and that hint to the fact that not everything goes “for the best in the best possible world”. But people laugh, they have fun, they joke. There's a sense of community in the center that allows people who have known each other for two weeks to tease each other without hard feelings the way I can only do with my oldest friends. There’s also a feeling that not everything is lost as long as you can still laugh and make fun of the world. And I can say few times in my life did I have so much fun as with these people that in my head I did not grant the possibility, even the right, to have fun. Prejudice plus self-administered kick in the ass number two.
What is most striking about life in the center - and this I only fully realized when the work camp was over and I had to come back to my daily life - is the notion of time. When every day is the same, when every day is spent waiting, time just flows indeterminately, hand in hand with a feeling of uselessness. Like in a novel by Julien Gracq, this waiting takes over, it eats up people’s lives, it seems to exist independently, to be an almost physical presence in the center. Waiting for what? For normalization, for the papers that legitimate you as a human being in your own right, for the 9-to-5 jobs, families and small every day annoyances that the rest of us take for granted, for Godot…After two weeks spent in this “illo tempore”, I felt I could barely reintegrate in what was before my “normal” life, I had a seriously hard time finding my place again. But the “normal” asylum procedure does not take two weeks, it takes months and, in some desperately absurd cases, years. And then what…?
Conclusion? Actually there are two. The conclusion that is easy to swallow and the conclusion that is rough around the edges and gets stuck in your throat. The easy conclusion is that the system is flawed, that it doesn’t work, or at least not to the best interest of the people directly concerned by it. But to say this goes smoothly on our conscience because "the system" is an abstract notion that seems immutable, out of reach. The conclusion that we may have a harder time to swallow is that, to a certain extent, the system is shitty because we allow it to be. Because we don't ask enough questions. Because when we do ask questions, we are satisfied by the propaganda and half-truths we get as an answer. Because we accept to live every day in a Europe that ignores the human consequences of its policies, that has broken with its humanist roots. Because we accept that people die at our frontiers (more than 11.000 dead since 1993 and counting). Because we accept this democratic void that migration represents today in countries that boast about human rights values. You could say that I have the tendency to take the world personally and you would be half right. But do you want to live in a system that tramples on people’s rights with the excuse - generally unquestioned by the majority - that “it’s just foreigners”?