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Introduction: The Poetics of Hospitality: Refugee, Migrant, Testimony Hospitality consists in doing everything to address the other, to accord him, even to ask him his name, while keeping this question from becoming a “condition,” a police inquisition, a blacklist or a simple border control. This difference is at once subtle and fundamental, it is a question which is asked on the threshold of the ‘home’ and at the threshold between two inflections. An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it. —jacques derrida, “the principle of hospitality” In her 2007 memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat recounts the events surrounding the death of her eightyone -year-old uncle Joseph Dantica, who died while being detained by U.S. immigration authorities shortly after his arrival at Miami International Airport in 2004. Dantica, a pastor, fled his home in Haiti after gang members burned down his church and threatened to kill him. Despite having a visa, which had allowed him to enter the United States on numerous other occasions, Dantica, “not understanding the full implication of that choice, said that he wanted to apply for temporary asylum” when questioned by a Customs and Border Protection officer at the airport.1 Danticat writes, “I can only assume that when he was asked how long he would be staying in the United States, he knew that he would be staying past the thirty days his visa allowed him and he wanted to tell the truth.”2 Danticat notes that the transcripts of an interview with a second Customs and Border Protection officer reveal that the officer did not ask for further details on the three occasions that Dantica indicated that his life was in danger in Haiti.3 The officer determined that Dantica did not have “a legitimate reason for entering the U.S,” and he and his son Maxo were sent to Krome Detention Center in South Miami, where they were subsequently separated and Dantica’s personal effects, including medication for blood pressure and an inflamed prostate, were taken from him.4 During his daylong detention at Krome, he was given medical attention for high blood pressure, but his medications were not returned to him. During his asylum interview the following day, he 2 / introduction suffered a violent seizure that paralyzed his body. When a medic finally arrived, he declared that Dantica was “faking.” Danticat explains that “to prove his point, the medic grabbed my uncle’s head and moved it up and down. It was rigid rather than limp, he said. . . . The medic then turned to Pratt [Dantica’s immigration lawyer] and told him that based on his many years of experience at Krome, he could easily make such determinations .”5 When his health continued to deteriorate, he was “transported to Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital with shackles on his feet,” where he waited for twenty-four hours to be seen by a doctor.6 A few hours after finally receiving his medical examination, he died in the hospital’s prison ward. Ironically, Danticat explains that years earlier her uncle’s natural voice box had been removed when he had traveled to the United States for throat cancer treatment, which resulted in a tracheotomy, leaving him able to speak only with a battery-operated voice box. Immediately prior to his seizure during the asylum interview, he was asked to lean closer to the phone so that his interpreter, who was on the line instead of in the interview room, could understand him more clearly. Once the seizure began, he dropped the voice box: “Vomit shot out of his mouth, his nose, as well as the tracheotomy hole in his neck. The vomit was spread all over his face, from his forehead to his chin, down the front of his dark blue Krome-issued overalls. There was also vomit on his thighs, where a large wet stain showed he had also urinated on himself.”7 In a sense, his body betrays his voice as the vomit makes his voice box inoperable. With the loss of his voice, his body becomes material testimony, a physical response to the poor medical care during his incarceration that authorities , despite the physical evidence, refute—as he is deemed to be “faking.” That the seizure took place during the asylum interview indicates that the interview is the ultimate space of interdiction, which would have decided Joseph’s future in relation to the United States...

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