Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism

7. The Euro-Mediterranean: Literature and Migration

7 The Euro-Mediterranean Literature and Migration Africa is not fiction. Africa is people, real people. —Chinua Achebe1 One has to understand that the most basic comfort level necessary to survive here during the Winter is something people dream of over there —Dany Lafferière2 Economic, political, and social asymmetries account for transitions in migratory patterns within countries and continents and beyond strict national/ continental borders. This has been convincingly demonstrated by migratory movements triggered by the “Arab Spring,” whereby new geopolitical realignments revealed the extent of the interpenetration of global politics and globalized societies and new arrivals at the European Union’s external borders in Corsica, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Italy, and Spain. These prompted the E.U. to publish a “Communication on Migration,” stating that “recent events of historic proportion in the Southern Mediterranean have confirmed the need for a strong and common EU policy in the field of migration and asylum.”3 We have seen how politicians have instrumentalized the precariousness of displaced populations (France’s leader of the extreme right-wing Front National, Marine Le Pen, for example, made a much-publicized visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa on March 14, 2011). Recourse to the global south as a category has made it possible to circumscribe those disadvantaged regions from which emigration is most significant, while also highlighting the unidirectionality of human mobility toward those economically prosperous geographic zones in The Euro-Mediterranean 157 the E.U.4 Naturally, these migratory routes and patterns inscribe themselves alongside a multiplicity of other twenty-first-century transnational networks.5 Indeed, if migration has emerged as a key geometric coordinate of globalization today, then so too has the concern with controlling the planetary circulation of human beings (labor forces, asylum seekers, refugees), particularly when it comes to the African continent. As Paul Gilroy has argued, “The war against asylum seekers, refugees, and economic migrants offers a chance to consider not just changing patterns of governmentality, commerce, and labor but to examine the cultural and ethical contours of Europe where the notion of public good and the practice of politics seem to be in irreversible decline— undone by a combination of consumer culture, privatization, and the neoliberal ideology.”6 Political leaders recognized the benefits to national interests of harmonizing European imperial ambitions in Africa, and this awareness provided the rationale for the 1884–1885 Berlin Congress. Such historical antecedents to transcolonial developments in E.U. policy-making are hard to ignore particularly when one considers changes in immigration rules and regulations. “Africans were citizens of the French Union according to the 1946 Constitution and in theory at least free to circulate on French territory,” Pap Ndiaye has reminded us, and: “Independence did nothing to alter this relationship given the bilateral agreements that were signed between African countries and France. French industry needed labor, . . . and in those days it was easy to enter France, even illegally, find work and later put one’s papers in order. But a decisive change occurred in 1974 when the borders were closed off to work-related immigration from non-European countries.”7 In relative terms, though, policies implemented during the later years of the twentieth century could very well be considered moderate when one compares them to more recent incarnations. As Saskia Sassen has shown, “Strengthening control is what the European Union is gearing up to do when it comes to immigration from outside its borders . . . moving toward the construction of a sort of Berlin wall across the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic.”8 These observations can be illustrated with a number of concrete examples. As we have seen repeatedly throughout this book, the creation of the Ministry for Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development underscored the urgency for Sarkozy’s government of controlling migratory flows and collaborating with sending countries. France was successful in extending these policy objectives to other E.U. member-states, and achieving a common and coordinated policy has also been made possible as a result of 158 Africa and France modifications to economic and political alignments—and treaties via the E.U. Neighborhood Policy with its southern neighbors—between different regions of the world, most significantly in relation to the Mediterranean where “part of North Africa is drawn toward the Mediterranean. Without necessarily espousing Europe’s cultural values, it is trying to bind its economic future to that of Western Europe.”9 The first matter to address...