Undocumented bodies, burned identities

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DOI: 10.1177/0539018408096444 2008; 47; 505 Social Science Information

Roberto Beneduce papiers, harraga � when things fall apart

Undocumented bodies, burned identities: refugees, sans

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Special issue: Migrants and clandestinity

Numéro spécial: Migrants et clandestinité

Roberto Beneduce

Undocumented bodies, burned identities:refugees, sans papiers, harraga – when thingsfall apart

Abstract. Taking an anthropological approach, the author reflects on refugees andclandestine immigrants, and in particular on the fractured structure of their narratives.This attempt to grasp the sense of vagueness or silence we so often find in immigrants’ storiesis designed to draw attention to the psychological consequences of both traumatic past eventsand of the unpredictability and uncertainty often experienced in host countries. The authorfurther argues that the attitudes of social workers involved in clandestine migration andrefugee issues reveal unconscious attitudes characteristic of meeting with the Other which alsoconvey the contradictions, racism, and hypocrisy of our policies and governments. The authorfinally discusses the scenarios of death, violence and apartheid that characterize the day-to-day life of many undocumented immigrants, and invites academic researchers not to take forgranted such descriptive terms as ‘clandestine’, ‘refugees’, and so on.

Key words. Anthropology – Clandestinity – Migration policies – Narratives – Nation-state –Psychology – Refugees – Social workers – Undocumented immigrants

Résumé. A partir d’une approche anthropologique, l’auteur propose une réflexion sur lesréfugiés et les immigrants clandestins, en particulier sur la structure fragmentée de leursrécits. Cet effort pour appréhender le sentiment de vague ou le silence qui caractérisent sisouvent les récits des immigrants a pour dessein d’attirer l’attention sur les conséquencespsychologiques à la fois des événements passés traumatiques et de l’imprévisibilité etl’incertitude dont ceux-ci font l’expérience dans les pays d’accueil. L’auteur postule aussi quel’attitude des travailleurs sociaux en charge des problèmes des réfugiés et des migrantsclandestins révèle des postures inconscientes caractéristiques de la rencontre avec l’Autre qui

Social Science Information © SAGE Publications 2008 (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singaporeand Washington DC), 0539–0184

DOI: 10.1177/0539018408096444 Vol 47(4), pp. 505–527; 096444



véhiculent aussi les contradictions, le racisme et l’hypocrisie des politiques et des gouvernementsde nos pays. Pour finir, l’auteur analyse les scénarios de mort, de violence et d’apartheid quisont le lot quotidien de nombreux immigrants sans-papiers et invite les chercheurs à utiliseravec précaution des termes descriptifs tels que ‘clandestins’, ‘réfugiés’ et autres.

Mots-clés. Anthropologie – Clandestinité – Etat-Nation – Immigrants sans-papiers –Narrations – Politiques d’immigration – Psychologie – Réfugiés – Travailleurs sociaux

Within the interstices of history: crossing the ‘national orderof things’

In the biographies and the stories told by illegal immigrants and refugeessomething forces, and challenges, our unspoken desire to forget, toobliterate and hide them within the national order of things (Malkki, 1995,2002). With their lives or their tales of death, they are pure epistemologicaland political detectors of the present, of modernity and of modernity’sprimordial fetish, the nation-state.Clots and crystals of history – this is how, in the end, I have received the

gazes and speech of the immigrants I have met over the years. ‘Refugees’,‘victims of trafficking’, ‘asylum-seekers’, ‘victims of torture’, ‘unaccompaniedminors’, ‘Gastarbeiter’, ‘sans papier’ – categories hopelessly trying to graspand classify impregnable and painful vicissitudes, the edges of which areincessantly being reshuffled by the actors who are involved from time to time(governments, institutions, media, immigrants themselves).1

Indeed the narratives of their experience are in some cases a smallepistemological scandal. Their ramblings remain, and resist all sociologicalor historical analyses, or ‘consistent’ narrative reconstructions. Whilelistening to dismembered stories, warped by silence and bitterness, I oftenfeel I am facing the renowned Cretan’s paradox, the solution of which isalways the same: what are they talking about, when they are lying, if notabout themselves? It is hard to convince social and humanitarian aid workersthat this is it: just this! It is hard to make them understand that – in thepresence of such narratives – cure, social help, as well as ethnographicencounter can be considered only if other memories and other discourses areallowed to emerge, those typically hidden in the presence of representativesof power and institutions, when fear and uncertainty dominate. Onlyethnography and sensitive clinical work can bring to the fore such remarksand discourses, these fragments of resistance, in some cases similar to the‘hidden transcripts’ Scott (1990) analysed.In a few sentences, collected outside official places, in the temporary

quietness of a reception centre beyond the formalities of official settings,

506 Social Science Information Vol 47 – no 4



cracks can emerge, invisible depths become visible: just like the secretgeography of unknown passages and restless customs. Inside thesecartographies of pain and anxiety, along the boundaries keeping poor apartfrom rich, hell from peace, life from death, passeurs – the new entrepreneursof bodies and dreams – operate as the factual masters of the destinies of thosehundreds of thousands of men and women trying to run up the sense ofHistory, turning from persecuted people and victims into illegal immigrants,then becoming refugees so as to eventually – and perhaps simply – be turnedinto citizens again. Only then can such a silent conspiracy be escaped.How can we think about or understand these stories, and in what sense may

they be healed? Absurdity and arbitrariness go well beyond the possibility ofconventional narration, and mental health professionals [of psychoanalyticorientation], familiar with narratives of a different sort, in which symptomsalways refer to something else, something to be brought to consciousness,may feel impotent in the face of such experiences and stories – stories thatspeak of real events – and be overwhelmed by their literality. When thesymptoms are not just ‘signs’ of something suppressed, something else thatunderwent repression, but instead attest to a bare reality of atrocities anddeath, of violence and abuse, to an excess of the real impossible to symbolize,the familiar paradigm of suspicion to which we have been trained by ourpsychoanalytically inspired model seems to get stuck. In addition, manyhealth or social workers ignore the political and social contexts from whichmost refugees and illegal immigrants come – pervaded by violence of theimaginary, by despotism, arbitrariness and terror. In the stories of thesewomen and men, contradictions and forgetting are frequent, details and events– perhaps too unbearable to be remembered – have been obliterated, or theirrecollection is inhibited by particular cultural and social values. The versionsoffered in psychotherapeutic sessions are often multiple and discrepant:sometimes symptoms are correlated to events related casually; there is a lackof coherence, as if for these women and men it was impossible to bridge thetime ‘before’ and ‘after’, impossible to bridge different times and experiences,different worlds – a work of bridging which is the specific function of theimagination (Kirmayer, 2003; Rousseau & Drapeau, 2001). What emergeslike a shadow from these narratives, from the ‘insistent grammar’ (Caruth,1996: 3) of their humiliated bodies, is a traumatized social Self, the spectraltrace of communities and cultures under siege, of which those we call ‘illegalimmigrants’ (clandestine) are but the unrecognizable shreds.We – their therapists and institutional interlocutors – are left with the

uncanny feeling that what they show us are memory’s broken vertebrae(Beneduce, 1998; Robben & Suárez-Orozco, 2000). The voices andwitnesses they evoke are irremediably missing or disjointed. A dissociation

Beneduce Undocumented bodies, burned identities 507



between body, memories and events dominates these narrations. Sometimeswe may recognize an attempt to reconstruct an image that better representstheir experience in front of the Other, the psychotherapist, the Asylum orRefugee Committee. Their narratives are indeed indifferent to the qualitiesand the styles that usually characterize the autobiographies of those whohave not lived through such experiences (Simic, 2003). Kirmayer (2003)appropriately speaks of ‘failure of imagination’ to describe these storiesmade up of holes and clefts, of discontinuities and contradictions. Theadolescent illegal immigrants I have met – often in prison – shownonetheless a peculiar and phantasmagorical development of theirimagination. They tell of heroic adventures, daring escapes and victoriousfights with the innumerable enemies they have met during their getaways(unknown aggressors, police and customs officers, etc.), impassable wallsjumped with a single leap... Such tales refer to an almost hallucinatoryworld, the only one that seems conducive to an acceptable narrative plot.Why should we be surprised? Isn’t their real world a place of unspeakableviolence, where every kind of abuse and outrage was perpetrated under theguise of ambiguous moralities, movie characters or cartoons?2 Their speechand their bodies remind us of a difference that most of us would ratherforget. Their experiences are in fact calls to resist social amnesia – thetemptation to depict a world without conflicts, without abuses, appeased bytalk about ‘human rights’ (Agier, 2002, 2005; Fassin & Rechtman, 2007;Quemin, 2001). Such an image of ephemeral tolerance is opposed by asubterranean buzzing that resists and challenges the systematic inversion oftruth on which inequalities, impunities and hypocrisies are reproduced.The ‘embodiment of inequalities’, an expression proposed by Fassin (2002)

with reference to the question of Aids and its social truth in South Africa, is aconcept particularly appropriate to reflect on the difficulties encountered bythose professionals who work with refugees, victims of torture, illegalimmigrant minors, and so on. The embodied history I am thinking of is theirreducible difference shown by those who have been humiliated and reducedto starvation for generations in colonized cities, compelled to work at insecurejobs, forced into the uncertain succession of harvests and famines, or into theviolence nowadays perpetrated in the shadow cast by the so-called ‘occulteconomies’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999). In their tense bodies, an out-of-datedistinction keeps on speaking; many today maintain that ‘ethnic minorities’ or‘cultural differences’ are anodyne and ambiguous expressions, which have themere effect of masking social and economic contradictions and class conflicts.It is impossible not to feel this question present in the gaze of a man or awoman talking about unburied bodies, abuses of power, hunger and rape. If welisten to the stories told by asylum-seekers and victims of violence, and question




ourselves about the dramatic experiences and needs of legal immigrants, we donot have many possibilities: we simply cannot just observe, like inattentiveonlookers, from a ‘safe distance’, as Lucretius’ spectator did from the shore.3

What is happening these days to so many illegal immigrants is too close for usnot to hear the echo of their rage and pain in our lives. We cannot ignore thesepeople ruined by modernity: their requests for help are too intrusive (housing,work, permits, medicine, money to send to their families); the number of deadis too relentless. These facts became questions we ask ourselves.What does theimage of the men and women who died in the course of these journeys evokein us? What do we feel when the luckiest of them, having reached land, withan exhausted smile, open their fingers in a V of victory?De Boeck and Honwana (2005: 7) recall the episode of two boys from

Guinea whose frozen bodies were found in the undercarriage of a Sabenaaircraft at an international airport. On one of the bodies a letter addressed tothe European political leaders was found. It read in part: ‘Please, help us, weare suffering enormously in Africa … we have war, disease, lack of food …We want to study and we ask you to help us study so that we can live likeyou but in Africa …’.Those who work in this area on a daily basis may experience a kind of

dizziness, a weariness that I have learnt to sense in the words of so many socialworkers, embittered by a feeling of impotence that often turns into irritationand rejection, and which inevitably yields to barely dissimulated forms ofracism. Not many alternatives are left: the ethnography of such journeys, ofsuch deaths and destinies, forces us to stand by their pain and confusion andtheir stories of inhuman violence. The obstinate ambivalence of which thesebeneficiaries are accused is in any case sincere: their behaviour reflects ourambiguous present, with its allurements and its shadows.Refugees’ lives are prisms revealing at the same time the whole

‘spectrum’ and the ‘spectre’ of social contradictions, both in the societiesthey are emigrating from and in the ones they would reach. Their existenceilluminates the violence of the contemporary moral and economic horizon,thus becoming a corrosive commentary on our models of development, thedisturbing creaking of what Liisa Malkki calls ‘the national order of things’:‘Refugees are constituted … as a dangerous category because they blurnational (read: natural) boundaries, and challenge the “time-honoureddistinction between national and foreigners” (Arendt). At this level, theyrepresent an attack on the categorical order of nations’ (Malkki, 1995: 7–8).Not surprisingly, then, politics breaks into migration, into the refugees’

tales. Migration is always a ‘total social fact’ – as Marcel Mauss would say– in its nature, and always a political fact, regardless of the levels ofconsciousness possessed by protagonists, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (2000:




177) maintain in their remark onAbdelmalek Sayad’s work: ‘The immigrantfunctions in the manner of a live, flesh-and-blood analyser of the mostobscure regions of the social unconscious.’ Now, allegations of economicand political reasons for migration, in general, and for the clandestine form,in particular, often risk suppressing our interlocutors’ moral questioning(Kirmayer, 2003).Refugees and illegal immigrants thus become expressions, par

excellence, of atopos, hybrids without a place, out-of-place, in the doublesense of incongruous and awkward beings. To all appearances they aretrapped in an inconvenient interstice between social being and non-being,affirming – with their exposed lives – their will to exist notwithstandinglaws and international agreements, in spite of ‘programmed access’, or thefate of poverty and death History has assigned to them.Bourdieu andWacquant’s comment can be applied verbatim to clandestine

foreigners and refugees: ‘Neither citizen nor foreigner, neither on the side ofthe Same nor on that of the Other, he exists only by default in the sendingcommunity and by excess in the receiving society, and he generates recurrentrecrimination and resentment in both’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2000: 178).Such a paradoxical condition probably best describes these individuals whorarely find – in the dubious definitions of laws and decrees – what they werenot allowed to enjoy in their own countries, due to violence and wars, torture,poverty and inequalities. What they are seeking – real rights well beyond amere visa – often remains an illusion. I personally witnessed this situation,when I met some 80 refugees – mostly from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan –who had been granted asylum, only to have been forgotten in an obsoleteindustrial plant on the outskirts of Turin until they decided to take possessionof a more visible building in town, and to ask for assistance, work andsolidarity. Can such objectives be achieved if conventions and agreements arestill imposed (just as they were under colonialism) in the name of the rulingeconomies that force countries of migration to accept their timing, their termsof agreements and their purposes?These are the premises on which any discussionmust be based so as to evoke

the unresolved conflicts in the memories of refugees and immigrants, as wellas the painful knots besetting them in their host countries. This is the starting-point for comprehending their conditions: examining the oppressing life in thesocieties from which they emigrate and, at the same time, the violence and theunresolved contradictions of the host societies, where suspicion of lies anddoubts about the existence of hostility in far-away places thrive.Could this be why so many social workers feel they are being

‘manipulated’? Could this be what is behind the allegation that refugees andforeigners applying to our welfare services are ‘not very willing to cooperate’?




What are the hidden origins of these suspicions? Nor can we forget anotherissue. Immigrants and refugees keep on migrating from former colonies, froma past that is still casting up their bodies like a regurgitation of history (Sayad,2002). This is an uncomfortable fact, an object of repression, in thepsychoanalytical sense, to which it is urgent to return.4 It means that refugeesand immigrants do not reveal, in their gaze, only the complex political andhuman dimensions of their situation, but also the density of an unspeakable,repressed collective past, still waiting to be redeemed (de Certeau, 1994:chapters xv-xviii). These are the reasons why migration and the refugeecondition are a ‘political fact’ per se. They are always telling us about History,about borders imposed by force, about strange laws and topographies, aboutdistant, but not forgotten, humiliations. Here is the colonial truth about whichBhabha writes: ‘There is a conspiracy of silence surrounding a colonial truth,whatever it is’ (2001: 173), a truth bursting to get out despite the silence ofinfinite misunderstandings. The refugees’ pilgrimage and their ‘ambiguousadventure’ (the title of a famous novel by Cheick Hamidou Kane), the immensestrain and the imagination of death (or the phantasma of death, in thepsychoanalytic sense) accompanying them during their escapes aboard pateras(the dangerous barges crossing the Mediterranean to Gibraltar or other shores),the uncertainty dominating their existence in the host countries; these all arefragments of a human and historical reality that the ‘gouvernementhumanitaire’ tries in vain to anaesthetize (Agier, 2002, 2005).

The making of invisible selves: clandestine worlds, tactics andthe violence of the ‘imaginary’

Something tragic and heroic, bitter and unspeakable marks the lives of thesemen and women. They often manage to talk about these things only byresorting to fleeting images, fragments of narration, to stifled experiences. Inmany cases, the non-thought-of seems to have been turned into an excess ofreality: nauseating, full of smells, fear, oppressive as only nightmares can be.A woman from Mali told me about her month-long journey across the

Algerian desert, and then toward Tripoli (Libya): travelling by night andstopping by day, trying to avoid arrest by the police, with terror and solitudeas companions, always remembering to keep a cloth soaked in animal bloodso as to pretend to be menstruating in order to avoid being raped. The journeyso well described by Michael Winterbottom in his film In this world veryeffectively expresses the stifled time spoken about with sadness by those whomanage to get ashore, having been accompanied by the desperate dreams, thebreath and the agony of those who ‘are not of this world any more’.




Liisa Malkki’s words (1995) suggest a valuable analogy between therefugees’ condition and the definition of liminality proposed byanthropologists with regard to rites of passage. Van Gennep divided thisprocess into three phases: separation, liminality and incorporation. Thissequence is typical of many events and rituals (birth, circumcision, wedding,journey, illness, etc.) marked by the idea of a transformation in theprotagonist’s social and psychological identity. Victor Turner insisted on therelevance of the intermediate phase, central not only in initiation rites butalso in the experiences of disease and death. During the liminal time, peopleare in fact inside and outside the world at the same time, possessing veryfew social attributes. Those concerning the past together with those that willdefine the future role are absent or barely detectable: ‘The structural“invisibility” of liminal personae has a twofold character. They are at onceno longer classified and not yet classified’ (Turner, 1967: 95–6). The liminalphase is characterized by radical psychological, logical and symbolic, aswell as social, changes, which are altogether necessary to shape a newcondition. Recently Barrett (1998) took up the concept of liminal persona indefining the condition of schizophrenic patients: the phase characterized bychaos, terror and uncertainty described in so many initiation rites would be,according to the author, a perfect metaphor to describe the experience ofschizophrenia. These patients are said to show a structural uncertainty (dothey exhibit symptoms or voluntary acts?) whose nature necessarily impliesa redefinition of person and agency. Other researchers have applied theconcept of liminality to disabled people, with reference to the indeterminatecondition that often characterizes their existence: oscillating between healthand illness, acceptance and stigmatization, their lives are always signallinganomalies, a crisis in our classification models (Murphy et al., 1988). Theformula Dal Lago (2004) proposes for immigrants and refugees, nonpersonae, once again represents the common perception we have of them asliminal individuals – undetermined, ambiguous, extraneous to the logicopposing foreign and autochthonous citizens, trapped between an obscurepast and an uncertain future and, not because of illness but as defined by law,deprived of their basic rights, the first of which is recognition.Nevertheless, some differences in these legitimate analogies must be

pointed out. The uncertainty that unfolds in the liminal phase of initiationrites is consistent with a particular cultural and moral background, andusually leads to a socially approved and individually sought constitution. Onthe contrary, the liminal condition of clandestine foreigners and asylum-seekersis that of a ‘frozen time’, with no foreseeable sequences, in which a formerexclusion does not necessarily imply subsequent full integration. This time is –not by chance – haunted by persecuting phantoms, by fear and doubts




concerning their future legal status (‘Will they believe what I told them?’).With the passing of time, such an experience may develop into painful andworrying indefiniteness (a woman stated: ‘I am scared: what if, when theycall me from Rome, what if they say my claim was not accepted? What willI do?’). In these experiences, time is under siege, and unpredictability isperhaps the main and painful profile.The behaviours observed among clandestine immigrants are factual effects

of such a siege: not going out unless it is strictly necessary, avoiding havingpapers checked by the police so as to not reveal their real age or identity, notgetting their umpteenth exclusion order, not being driven to a CPT (Centrodi Permanenza Temporanea):5 almost dreaming of being magically invisible.Bourdieu underlined how initiatory rites were often considered from a

temporal perspective, but he ignored or neglected the fact that one of theresults of a rite is ‘not so much to separate those who have undergone it fromthose who have not yet done so, but from those who never will, and toestablish a durable difference between those involved in a rite and those whoare not’ (Bourdieu, 1982: 121). What Bourdieu is suggesting is particularlyrelevant to foreign adolescents living underground, socially invisible, inmost cases working illegally. The journey (here a kind of initiatory rite, inBourdieu’s sense) has produced a deep metamorphosis in them, makingthem inevitably different. In the aftermath and a continuing context ofexperiences and practices marked by fear, misunderstanding, loneliness ortreachery, these urban ‘novices’ lead their lives according to an arbitrarylogic, and only some kind of peer solidarity may at times support theselonely people. Their condition is an expression of structural ambiguity: theyare victims and persecutors, at the same time constructing and destroying.‘How can we understand, De Boeck and Honwana ask, children and youthin various African contexts as both makers and breakers of society, whilethey are simultaneously being made and broken by that society?’ (2005: 1–2). In most cases they are the completed and extreme product of the processof de-parenting (déparentalisation) eventually produced by economic,political, social, moral and religious variables.6

A highly significant image of the change evoked here is the act ofincinerating legal identities by burning ID papers before the great journey.In Moroccan Arabian, the term for those leaving the country clandestinely,and thus becoming illegal immigrants, is harraga (in the singular, the termalso denotes the passeur). Derived from the verb meaning ‘to incinerate’, thisterm appears to be an apparently paradoxical way of making identificationharder and therefore averting the risk of expulsion once in Europe (Teriah,2002); but it also signals the will to literally burn down social, cultural andfamilial identities. In other cases papers must be turned over to the passeurs.




Through these practices, illegal immigrants build up a new space for theirexistences, while shattering the concept of citizenship, which is at the verybasis of the modern State.Such invisibility gives rise to unique behaviours. If State laws and

regulations no doubt form the basis of these behaviours, as do too thedisquieting perceptions of otherness in the host country,7 nevertheless one canalso recognize in these behaviours the expression of a tactic, in the meaningde Certeau attributed to this word: a shrewd procedure aimed at objectivesdifficult to classify, weapons in the arms of weak individuals in the Other’splace, capable of exploiting even the slightest of opportunities, with no totalperspective, devoid of any proper space, short-sighted and efficient at the sametime (as in hand-to-hand combat, de Certeau wrote) made possible by the lackof power, grounded on ‘an able use of time and of the opportunities it offers’(1990: 57–63). What better image can there be for describing the behaviourand moral economy of so many young clandestine immigrants?

Cultural anaesthesia and necropolitics

The stories of immigrants, asylum-seekers and all of those detained in Centridi Permanenza Temporanea (Centers for Temporary Stay and Assistance or asthey are sometimes called ‘Centri di Accoglienza/ Hospitality’, CPTs), tell ofstates of exception (Agamben, 2003) where basic rights and the very idea of‘hospitality’ are often forgotten or abolished. Refugees and illegal immigrantsare often assimilated to ‘criminals’or ‘suspects’. The cages in CPTs evoke wellbeyond a pure historical analysis the tragic ‘human zoo’ in which indigenous‘specimens’ imported from the colonies were exhibited in Saint Louis,Chicago, Berlin, London, Paris, etc., for the purpose of showing their savagelife and their exotic village. A fil rouge seems to tie yesterday’s ‘native’ tothe immigrant in French banlieues (Bancel & Blanchard, 1998; Bancel,Blanchard & Gervereau, 1993; Blanchard, Deroo & Manceron, 2001).Something ominous is being repeated by means of this device, with its moraland legal asymmetries, something playing the tune of an intermittent deathmarch, with upsetting memories persisting from the colonial age to our own.Other uncanny analogies and questions enliven the current debate. Why doCPT cages so resemble the prisons at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib? Why dothose bodies move behind the bars like hunted and sedated beasts?The condition of illegal immigrants and refugees also evokes a further

theme: the violence of the imaginary, of the economy, and of institutions.Different from ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1982, 2003), it is actualviolence exercised on bodies, violence made up of actual deaths and wounds




(Tonda, 2005, 2008) – as we are told is the case of the diamond or coltandiggers in Angola or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (de Boeck,1996). All this is revealed by the bodies of clandestine immigrants withirregular or illegal jobs when injuries make them visible, everywhere. Wecan say that their bodies gain humanity only after having been turned intoprofessional capital (an expression used by Wacquant). Similar problemsare told by the bodies of unaccompanied minors and those of prostitute-immigrants – defined in law as ‘victims of trafficking’. When theseprocesses are closely analysed, such notions as ‘incorporation practices’ or‘incorporated memories’ effectively underline how bodies tell and revealmuch more than what social actors can comprehend in their activities, intheir roles and choices, something they often are only faintly aware of. Inexploring these issues, various authors have questioned the unexpected (andinexorable) topicality of the concept of ‘slavery’, while others havehighlighted how illegal economies flourish along borders (the existence ofpasseurs, as well as the bribing of customs officials, who allow migrants tocross the border after paying a baksheesh, are examples of such economicdynamics; other authors refer to them as bush economies).Starting from Benjamin’s writings, Agamben analysed the emergence of the

perverted relationship between ‘anomic violence and the law’ that is at the rootof the state of exception in modern doctrine (2003: 77).8 He has shown howlives in these places of exclusion are kept in indistinct, undefined temporality:remains, ‘racaille’, excesses without identity (street children in Columbia arecalled desechables, ‘disposables’), for which modernity leaves the placereserved for outcasts (Bauman, 2005).Within the boundaries of these places ofexclusion, as in the case of CTPs, ‘the normal system is in fact suspended’.Whether or not atrocities, violence and abuses are committed within these areasdoes not depend on the law, but rather upon the police’s sense of ethics andcivility, as they are temporarily acting like sovereigns (Agamben, 2005: 195).Consistent with this pattern, the figure of the ‘camp’ emerged as a centralnucleus of modernity and its biopolitics, when the political system of themodern nation-state entered a lasting crisis. ‘An order without localization isnow substituted by a localization without order (the camp as permanent spaceof exception) … The camp… is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet’ (pp.197–8).Almost everything having to do with the law, with life and death, playsitself out in this new existential geography. Agamben reminds us of this withreference to the camps in the former Yugoslavia, as well as to the delocalizedspatiality of the Hotel Arcades at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. At the‘arcanum’ of power is this anomalous delocalization of political life – anexistential topography and a delocalization that already in the colonial age havedisplayed their efficacy, and their violence.




For such reasons, refugees and immigrants take on peculiar sociologicaland anthropological salience: they probably represent the harshest and mostefficacious icon of post-colonialism and globalization, of World Order, of thehard and often fruitless attempt to match principles and practices ofmodernity, which seems to be stated only through subversive actions (Biaya,2001). The level of contradictions, the social grey zone on which Sayad andBourdieu invite us to reflect, do not concern simply laws of macro-economy,models of development or invisible hierarchies. The symbolic violenceevoked by Bourdieu is also reproduced in purviews and in social workers’everyday speech and gestures. Well beyond their consciousness or intentions,in ordinary practices of our institutions and of their representatives, socialworkers often perform acts of invisible violence, adding to those alreadyexperienced by such ‘wounded memories’ (Ricoeur’s expression, 2004: 71ff).This happens, for example, when they present ‘motivated’ refusals, or

bare indifference masked by legal binds and impracticality. The arbitraryand anxiety-provoking nature of these procedures often becomes routine; aperson’s destiny hinges on some law by means of which an existence isallowed to be given its ‘name’, taken from a section of the law,9 as happensin prison when it is the article of the legal code by which the punishment hasbeen determined that ‘names’ the person and gives him an identity.Within these categories, where the ‘right to privacy’ often turns into a

hypocritical litany, wherein men and women daily face a Kafkaesque universeof differently applied regulations, of never-ending waiting, where the‘response’ (regarding a residence permit or accommodation in a centre) takeson the shape of a verdict. If we consider that the possibility of being hosted ina country is a matter of life or death, then the ‘force of law’ mentioned byDerrida (2003) is real force indeed, epitomizing the whole original violenceinscribed in the law. I was reminded of this by the attempted suicide of aNigerian woman, whose desperate gesture very well represented how muchthe refusal of asylum and expulsion fromAustria equaled a death penalty. Arethese the modern (and unexpected) forms of biopolitics and necropolitics?Arethese the globalized and transnational expressions of biopower?In the fragments evoked, I think we can find enough elements to at least

propose as a hypothesis that today modern ways of governing the life anddeath of citizens are expressed precisely in these interstitial spaces: thebiopolitics and necropolitics Foucault examined in the constitution of themodern State are reproduced ever less by the sovereign’s decisions butrather more in the intricate and anonymous plethora of laws and acts, in thecontradictory attitudes of operators and institutions, in the proliferation ofminute, out-of-control sovereignties. From such chaotic interconnectionsthere emerge heterogeneous motivations, motivations often impossible to




recognize and even less avow, which nonetheless are responsible for thedecision to prescribe long-term hospitalization for an undocumentedforeigner, to grant an asylum-seeker the right to stay (would the reply to hisor her claim then depend on her or his nationality, presumed ‘docility’ orreligious creed?). The above reference might well be multiplied byunderlining the efforts to turn this or that immigrant into a citizen prone tocollaborate, to convince this or that reluctant refugee to accept good adviceand to be transformed into a homo œconomicus.Aihwa Ong’s analysis of refugees in the United States is consistent with

the reflections that have been presented here. The author reminds us that theexercise of sovereign power is dilated into a web of welfare offices,vocational schools, hospitals and working places, where the variousbureaucrats use their knowledge to shape the subject’s behaviour, turning agood-for-nothing into a good citizen-subject (Ong, 2005: 29). Ong is notexaggerating when she maintains that interventions aimed at refugeesdisclose structures similar to colonial philanthropism and paternalism, orwhen she claims that we do not recognize a modern expression of‘sympathetic domination’ in them, in which rights are often crushed in anambivalent net of therapeutocracies and bureaucracies.Asylum and the right to health care define the new territory of biopolitics,

other authors write, who highlight how the only possibility for irregularforeign citizens to be recognized is to become ill (Fassin, 2001). Similarly,the number of refugees and asylum-seekers has increased since the 1960s,despite increasing restrictions on work immigration. If work migrants werein fact the sole historical subjects in the past century, refugees represent ‘theanthropological figure of the twenty-first century’ par excellence (Fassin &d’Halluin, 2005: 606).10

Troublesome geographies, or the cursed side of history

References made in speech and related memories, places mentioned onmedical certificates of refugees, illegal immigrants and victims of torture, aretracing a new geography: Benin City, Khouribga, Kano, Keren, Bukawu,Kanyabayonga, etc., seem to be the cities of a new map, of a new continentunknown until some years ago and which have now suddenly surfaced,starting off as in a tectonic movement. In the Mediterrean, Ceuta and Melilla,Lampedusa and Sengatte have drawn new borders. This geography, mappedby ‘speechless emissaries’ (Malkki, 2002), cannot be welcome in the nationalorder of things. For the refugee, and the asylum-seeker, the remark byBourdieu and Wacquant concerning those who emigrate – ‘out-of-place in




both social orders defining their non-existence, immigrants compel us to re-consider the issues of citizenship and of the relationship between citizen, stateand nation from top to bottom’ – is indeed valid (Bourdieu & Wacquant,2000). That is why refugees and clandestine immigrants are painfully out-of-place, their very gaze is already a censure, a finger pointed at amnesias.What an anthropologist or a clinician encounters is a set of wounded

memories, as dismembered as the victims’ bodies, blocked in anoverwhelming oppressive past, a past for which there has been nopunishment nor redemption (Beneduce, 2004, 2007b; Hunt, 2008). In allthese cases, we wonder what past, what identity it is still possible to tell, toremember, to claim. Two observations must at least be evoked in closing thissection; even if they do not complete the horizon of these issues.The first concerns the conflicts in European metropolises and their

outskirts, with the appearance of a recent nightmare: the ‘banlieue rebellion’that has recently puzzled sociologists, anthropologists and other experts. Itis necessary to reflect on the social semantics of these scornful expressions,on the trivial use of the concept of culture, on the specific imaginary thesefacts and discourses comprise. What happened in France openly tells of astill-bleeding colonial rift, visible in the ghettos where French citizens ofAfrican origin have been parked. In a recent article, Achille Mbembe (2003)recalls this while analysing the latent hostility displayed by new generationsand this ‘infamous geography’, the geography of the ‘border camps’ locatedin the vicinity of airports, as well as in the depot-fields where many peopleof colour are compelled to live and are, without any apparent reason,checked by the police on a daily basis. The author goes so far as to writeabout ‘palestinization’ in relation to the daily humiliating strategies, to thescornful judgements about foreigners and illegal immigrants, which recallcolonial or neo-colonial modes of behaviour. The banlieues are regarded asinhabited by indistinct masses easily disdained (wild children, mobs,canaille, criminals, ‘caids of the parallel economy’). The temptation toapply colonial modes derived from racial wars to the most vulnerablecategories of current French society is strong indeed, since it is erected as adefence wall against a new planetary war involving culture and religion inwhich the republican identity itself is at stake. When talking with refugeesand illegal immigrants, the issue of the Other emerges like a ghost, raisingthe fear of its ‘insatiable’ desire if only their condition of victims istemporarily forgotten.11

The second issue, closely linked to the previous, relates to the roots of suchfears and phantoms. Bhabha highlighted a conclusive theme in Fanon’swritings: the uncertainty of the psychic relation between the colonizer and thecolonized a relationship prone to play on paranoid fantasies of unlimited




possession, of ‘taking up the master’s place’ (Bhabha, 2001: 66–7). The sameuncertainty is now emerging in the relationship with immigrants, both legal andillegal: fear of their desire for revenge. In these places marked by suspicion,uncertain dynamics place the ones face to face with the others, the ones againstthe others: foreigners and institutions. New expressions of biopolitics andnecropolitics, the narrow rhetoric where racism and national security issuesoverlap, emerge again, often in an invisible way. This quiet violence must beexamined if we are to grasp how practices and talk about refugees end upsilencing the immigrants themselves (Malkki, 2002: 345). Looking at theserisks may be a good antidote to the risk of falling into what might be definedas ‘cultural anaesthesia’, to borrow Feldman’s expression (2002).Sayad (2002: 123) wrote that emigrating is objectively a pure political act,

‘even if its masking and denial belong to the very nature of thisphenomenon’.We thought we had got rid of Fanon’s words, of his propheciesabout the contraposition between the colonizers’ and the colonized’s towns,of his analysis of the way the latter are made by the mirror of the Other, ofthe White Man, of the Colonizer. But his words are instead still echoing likepersistent and stubborn voices: in our contemporary banlieue conflicts, inmoral judgements on clandestine immigrants, in psychiatric diagnosesaddressed to immigrants (Mbembe, 2005). If it is true that the mirror and theimage of the Other allow us to recognize ourselves as Subjects, what happenswhen such an Other reflects back the contradictions and inhumanity ofcolonial times, when he or she sends back a suspicious image, loaded withdistrust and disdain? This is the blocked memory in which the relationshipbetween our society and illegal immigrants is still too often built. The relationis confused and contradictory, in so many cases dominated by the imaginary:the imaginary and not unreality, where that term, as Deleuze reminds us,means the very impossibility of separating, of distinguishing between ‘real’and ‘unreal’ (Deleuze, 2003: 93).

Undocumented bodies against boundaries andtraumatic history, walls against desires

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea ofa solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, likethe themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best they requireno reconciling, no harmonizing. They are ‘off’ and may be out of place, but at least they arealways in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combination movingabout … With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being notquite right and out of place. (Said, 1999: 295)




What is the subjectivity and recognition in the laws regulating thecirculation of foreign citizens today? What domination plan does theproliferation of walls and fences express?What form of ‘gouvernementalité’(Foucault, 1991; Bayart, 2004) does the nation-state subtend today? Why ispower of life and death most often to be found along national borders? It isimpossible not to raise these issues when we regard the proliferation ofwalls, fences and separations that are drawing a hidden kind of globalizedapartheid. Here I am also recalling the wall separating the Palestinian andIsraeli peoples, thus enclosing the former in a space of humiliation andimpotence. Such apartheid seemed impossible a few years ago, when thepredominant image was the fall of the BerlinWall. In conclusion, let us lookat some of these new fences that are now separating mankind.Along the Mexican border, mojados (‘wetbacks’) – in other words the

illegal immigrants trying to cross the Rio Grande marking the border withthe United States – and those hunted and arrested along the fence that runsfor kilometres along the border between the two countries, are realsociological revealers of the contradictions and inequalities of present-daysociety, marked by wars, fears and rebellions, in want of walls to protect itsprivileged zones. Nothing seems able to stop their dreams, as nothing canstop the young Salvadorians and Guatemalans who clandestinely enterMexico across its southern border, often at the risk of their lives. In MexicoCity, close to the Anthropological Museum, giant photographs showdramatic scenes. There are portraits of youths from Guatemala who had aleg amputated while trying to get onto a train. A mother stands beside oneof them, silent and resigned. Other photographs show men in handcuffsalong the border with the United States, guarded by dogs, while cowboyssmile as they watch their prey; this is no different from what happened toIndians or slaves who ran away from plantations. These pictures offer theprofile of a restless and controversial modernity, like the shout of illegalmigrants leaving the shores of Senegal and Morocco: ‘Barcelona or death!’The violence of poverty is no less cruel: moths drawn to a flame – this is theimage these men and these women bring to mind.In the end, the figure of the clandestine immigrant is this intolerable buzzing

that ‘the government of the world’ (Bayart, 2004) tries to repress, a buzzingtelling of plans, dreams and needs stubbornly thrown against symbolic and realborders. With regard to these issues, we remember the images of the woundedor arrested people along the electrified fence dividing Morocco from theSpanish territories of Ceuta or Melilla. Their bodies throw themselves againsta hateful order seeking in vain its legitimacy in official history and trying tohide another history, one that is made up of violence, death and silence. Thesebodies are the symptoms of a wounded history: the witchcraft of history




mentioned by Taussig, evoking the disturbing vacillation between death andwish. It is difficult not to recognize the shadows of the colonies in such fencesand borders. The neo-colonial scheme seems to make use of old techniques:‘villagization’, militarization of territories, settlements and deportations.12 Theheritage of a colonial past and the neo-colonial schemes are thereforeinextricably and painfully linked in the memory and in the imaginary of theoutcasts, of the dominated, of those who have been dispossessed by history (seeStoler, 2008, on the concepts of ‘imperial ruins’ and ‘sites of decomposition’).Clandestine immigrants become spokespeople for this immense repression,like the ghost haunting Sethe, the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s novel,Beloved. That ghost is not a ‘hysterical symptom’ of a family trauma but thesymptom of a social and historical traumatic event (the horror of slavery)(Parker, 2001). The allegations so many immigrants address to Westerncountries tell of this and other unspeakable traumas, and transmit a bothcollective and personal truth, the ‘crisis’ of which often arises only fromexperts’ refusal to link individual experience to historical reasons (Caruthexpresses similar considerations in his work on trauma and memory: 1995: 8–9). No matter if years, decades or centuries have elapsed: ‘The impact of thetraumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simplylocated, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single placeor time’ (Caruth, 1995: 8–9; emphasis added). The author’s considerations areparticularly pertinent for us, above all when she emphasizes the literal (i.e. notsymbolical) character of images, dreams and flashbacks in the victims oftrauma. This happens also because the trauma never becomes dominantknowledge; on the contrary, trauma ‘possess[es], at will, the one it inhabits’(Caruth, 1995: 6). The experience of many clandestines, the strength of theirsuffering, lies in this literality of past experiences.This refusal to be located indeed seems to link colonial trauma and past

violence to the figure of clandestinity within a common imagined texture,indifferent to the articulations of history or to social, economical andcultural differences.Contemporary forms of power, and of the power of death, can tolerate

neither a flow of wishes threatening to block their mechanics, nor a return ofthe past into the present. History seems here simply intolerable andunspeakable. Is it correct to connect ‘clandestines’ and contemporary laws onmigration with the colonial past and its traumatic memory? Bayart et al. write:

On the one side, the ‘colonial heritage’ lays in the depths of hegemony and of the verydefinition of citizenship in the metropolises, hence the virulence of the conflicts that haverecently inflamed France. On the other, it belongs to the social relationships that constitutethe post-colonial State rather than being connected to the relations the latter has with itsancient metropolis or the Western world. From this point of view, the contemporary




government of globalization moves forward in a straight line from the colonial moment andfrom a colonial vision of the world. (2006: 6–7)

These embedded issues contribute to making the plan of going beyondborders not only a concrete strategy to eliminate poverty or violence and thesense of history, but almost an irrepressible obsessive drive, making the‘crossing’ (‘ubur, in Moroccan Arabian) the very figure of this will to gobeyond, even at the risk of being separated from themselves or of dying.If we examine these dynamics through the eyes of the protagonists, it is

obvious that modern individuals construct themselves with reference to rifts,prohibitions and splittings. To some extent, a clandestine immigrant is thenew figure of the trickster, the anti-hero who deceives customs officers,dissimulating his presence, thinking up survival tactics, who lives feelingalien both to his native land and the host country. His presence almost takeson the nature of a sign, the token of a double threat. He in fact evokes bothan external threat, penetrating the barriers of the nation-state and therebysuddenly revealing our vulnerability, and a threat emanating from within us.One could say a clandestine person is Unheimlich, in Freud’s sense ofthe word.The very possibility of the existence of ‘clandestine’ beings seems indeed

to make us shake, as though it evoked something uncanny, obscure andfragile at the same time.It is probably not by chance that Leggatt, the mysterious character of

Conrad’s tale The Secret Sharer, responsible for murder and taken on boardby the Captain, becomes an obsession to him, like a shadow, a doubt. In suchrelationships, roles seem to be exchanged, to overlap and to merge.Throughout the story, the former’s clandestinity and getaway reflect acommon condition: the ‘secret tenant’ allows the consciousness of a ‘secretsharing’ to emerge, in which the Captain’s loneliness and his extraneousnessto his ship or, even more – as the protagonist states – to himself, is to becaptured. As with Conrad’s characters, the presence of the Other, theimmigrant, the clandestine, and the suffering with which his uncertaincondition is narrated, inevitably awaken our uneasiness and the need to feelthat we belong to ‘something’, that we are recognized by this ‘something’.In this way encountering their needs prompts a reflection upon our identity,our institutions and our memory, our rites. Attending to a clandestineperson’s sufferings, worries and needs, as well as his desire for freedom,means recognizing the loneliness and fragilities of our own condition at thesame time or, in other words, the weakness of our ‘definitions’ and of our‘maps’. This weakness reveals another profile: these maps and definitions,these laws, often have been written by the repression of history.




If today national frontiers are the ‘border’ whose symbolic value anddramatic consequences do not require further underlining (Appadurai,1998), we must analyse how this border often hinders or hampers therecognition of the Other. Perhaps the time has come to consider recognitiondifferently, freed from norms that often merely crystallize (or weaken)identities. In this respect, my conclusions are not far from what broughtJudith Butler to explore the psychic dimensions of power and the ambivalentrelationship between the social and the psychic that it exploits (1997), or thehidden meanings fortifying the contemporary image of the State (2007).These assumptions may offer the possibility of more effectively conceivingand healing the ambivalence, anxieties and sorrows of those men andwomen whom we stubbornly keep on thinking of as mere ‘clandestines’.

Roberto Beneduce, MD, PhD, is Professor of Cultural and Psychological Anthropology atthe University of Turin and the head of the Frantz Fanon Centre (Turin). Author’s address:Dipartimento di Scienze Antropologiche, Archeologiche e Storico Territoriali, Universitàdegli studi di Torino, Via G. Giolitti 21/E, Torino, Italy. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. The considerations presented in this paper are derived from work I have conducted over thepast 13 years at the Centro Frantz Fanon, in Turin. The Centro Fanon, which I founded in Turinin 1996, operates within a public structure, supporting immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, andvictims of torture in need of psychological support, regardless of their juridical status. It offers themfree guidance, psychological support, counselling and psychotherapy. Many of them are referred byother health services, and by public or religious institutions. In this centre, families, unaccompaniedminors, men and women are given attention; they are helped to reconstruct their wounded history,to reconnect their broken bonds as well as to establish new relationships. They are also put in contactwith other services in order to obtain legal protection, economic help, etc. For more about thisexperience and on the ethnographic model employed, see Beneduce (1998, 2007a).

2. Here I am recalling the acts of violence carried out in Liberia, Sierra Leone or in theDemocratic Republic of the Congo by wigged militiamen (Mayi Mayi, in Eastern DRC)dressed up as women, or in the Republic of Congo by the Ninja and Cobra Armies, todemonstrate how much reality has been weirdly changed, thus compelling us to reconsider ourusual division between the imaginary (imaginaire) and reality (see Beneduce, 2008; Ellis,1999; Tonda, 2005, 2008).

3. In ancient times, sailing the sea represented a violation of boundaries. The sea was thelimit ‘assigned by nature to human deeds’; it is therefore the perfect image of disorientation,unpredictability and wandering. (Blumemberg mentions that – not by chance – a messianictime without any sea was promised in Saint John’s Apocalypse (1985: 28).

4. ‘Every migrant carries this repressed relation of power between states within himself orherself and unwittingly recapitulates and re-enacts it in her personal strategies and experiences… The relation of the emigrant to his homeland is likewise invisibly overdetermined bydecades of conflictual and asymmetric relations between the two countries he links’ (Bourdieu& Wacquant, 2000: 174).




5. Centers for temporary stay and assistance (CTSA).6. On street children, child soldiers, and children accused of being a witch, see Tonda (2008).7. Carlo Ginzburg analysed various expressions of the presumptive logics followed in

disciplines such as medicine, legal investigation, hunting and divination. He reminds us howthe British administration in Asia turned what initially was a divinatory system (reading handsand fingertips) into a system aimed at identifying offenders. This is how they thereby tried totame the puzzling datum of homogeneity that made locating culprits otherwise impossible.

8. ‘While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context,Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it – as pure violence – anexistence outside the law … Here, pure violence, as the extreme political object, as the “thing”of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stake;the strategy of the exception, which must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law,is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being in the meshesof the logos’ (Agamben, 2003: 59–60, of English translation, 2005).

9. Formulas referring to laws concerning victims of trafficking, unaccompanied minors, etc.(Articles 18 and 11) end up representing expressions that go well beyond the sphere of juridicallanguage, only to be turned into terms of a new social and moral grammar, the rules of which infact regulate … in a Foucauldian sense … the real lives of so many immigrant women and men.10. See also the special issue of Politique africaine (2002, vol. 85) ‘Réfugiés, exodes et

politique’; devoted particularly to refugees’ dynamics in the African context.11.We remember what Fanon wrote on the apartheid world of colonization: ‘La zone habitée

par les colonisés n’est pas complémentaire de la zone habitée par les colons. Ces deux zoness’opposent … Le regard que le colonisé jette sur la ville du colon est un regard de luxure,d’envie. Rêve de possession. Tous les modes de possession: s’asseoir à la table du colon,coucher dans le lit du colon, avec sa femme si possible. Le colonisé est un envieux. Le colonnel’ignore pas …’ (Fanon, 2002: 42–3).12. ‘As the Palestinian case illustrates, late-modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of

multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical. The combination of the threeallocates to the colonial power an absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupiedterritory. The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows a modality of killing that doesnot distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the targetof the sovereign. The besieged villages and towns are sealed off and cut off from the world.Daily life is militarized. Freedom is given to local military commanders to use their discretionas to when and whom to shoot. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits.Local civil institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived oftheir means of income. Invisible killing is added to outright executions’ (Mbembe, 2003: 29–30). Here a state of exception is a state of death. On the Occupied Territories, see also theconcept of ‘vertical sovereignty’ (Hass, 1996; Weizman, 2002; see also Mbembe, 2005).

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Undocumented bodies, burned identities

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