What We Talk about When We Talk about Movement

How do you, the migrant, see Us, the Other? asked the man last night, after my talk in Venice.

Guess the race of Us. Guess the citizenship.

I’ve said so often that I’m hoarse with it: Kenya is cities, towns, as well as wilderness. See us. Kenya is people, humanity. Not just wildlife. See us.

What we talk about when we talk about freedom is the right to be seen. To be visible—and to be normative. Visible while safe. Visible while unquestioned.

How do I, who you construct as migrant, see you, who believe you belong here? You who think yourself stable in Venice, city of wedding cake palazzi balanced on fast-rising waters?

. . .

I said:

What I see is that white migrants to Kenya call themselves expatriates. Before, they called themselves settlers.

I said:

What I see is the painful smallness of your window on the world. Barely a slit in the wall. The scantest sliver of light.

Enlarge your window, I said. Swing a sledgehammer through the brick. Make a jagged hole at least two hundred years wider. See European migrants storm the borders of China, flood the country with opium.

Swing the hammer again. Knock out another two hundred years. Stand back from flying shards of masonry.

Look to your East. Watch white migrants, locusts in pith helmets, swarm over Asia. See the famished corpses, the vandalized temples, in their wake.

Look down. See the hungry hordes of Europe pile into rickety vessels, set sail South. See their scurvied bodies surge onto the African continent. Hands outstretched. Jaws in perpetual motion.

Swing the hammer again. Wait for the dust to settle. You now have a panoramic view, five hundred years in breadth. There are the boats packed with ravenous European migrants scrabbling over the shores of North America.

We won’t speak of what follows.

. . .

Citizen, you call yourself. Denizen of the citadel. The fantasy of rooted nativity. The fiction that you live where you began.

What I see when I look at you is ceaseless torrential migration of your material effluvium.

Your mountains of disemboweled computers in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Your tsunami of discarded plastics in China. Your bales of used clothing in Nairobi’s Gikomba. Your canisters of nuclear waste on the beaches of Somalia. Your oil spills and pipeline flares across Ogoni land. Your raging psychopath man-children raping girls from Afghanistan to Okinawa. Your guns. Your bombs. Your tanks. Your drones slicing the skies over Africa.

What I see when I look at you are throngs of Italian child rapists on the streets of Malindi, tugging skinny twelve-year-olds by the hands.

You did ask.

. . .

What we talk about when we talk about seeing is the size of the window. What direction it faces. What we talk about when we talk about migration is, What moves, and who is moved? By whose muscle? Where does it come to rest?

What we talk about when we talk about talking is, Who defines and delineates? Where does their detritus go? Who is safe, and who is ultimately free?