Opinion: Dead on Arrival
By Pramod K Nayar The recent news about 46 migrants found dead inside a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas, shocked the Americans. Most of the migrants had suffocated to death. All of them were Mexicans, part of the recent surge in migrant crossing from Mexico into the USA. Aylan Kurdi is not so old […]
By Pramod K Nayar
The recent news about 46 migrants found dead inside a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas, shocked the Americans. Most of the migrants had suffocated to death. All of them were Mexicans, part of the recent surge in migrant crossing from Mexico into the USA.
Aylan Kurdi is not so old as news. Migrants dying in boats when attempting to reach Australia is also not new. The International Organization for Migration estimated that 15,348 deaths occurred at the EU’s borders between 2014 and 2017 alone.
In short, San Antonio was the iteration of an old story: of the border.
Who crosses the border?
The border is the key site of contemporary geopolitics. It is at once a metaphor for authorisations and aspirations, but also a concrete reality.
Policed, surveilled, reinforced, the border defines nations, peoples, movements and identities. Immigration policies focus on the migrants seeking refuge, asylum and escape and are determined by these geopolitics: are the asylum seekers deserving of asylum? Do they have linguistic and religious affinities with the receiving societies?
These and other questions are matters of geopolitical formations. The authorisation to cross the yellow line at Immigration Control cubicles in airports is perhaps the softest of these dimensions and their embodiments. Ellis Island, as history records, was positively a horror-site for migrants, given how they were treated before being granted entry (or not).
But the border is also the site of a biopolitics.
Not everybody is allowed across, not every body crosses. The migrant’s or asylum-seeker’s body is the site where the nation and its politics is played out. This could be in the form of identification papers that testify to the body being who the person claims s/he is. It could be in the form of the health of the migrant, as Ellis Island famously insisted on in the early 20th century. It could be the biometric investigations and documentation that contemporary crossings and check points insist on. There are injured bodies seeking to cross, there are starving bodies, awaiting permission to cross. Are maimed bodies more deserving of asylum and help? We see such bodies in works like Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and in graphic texts such as Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees.
The border is where the migrant’s body is scrutinised, and rendered into an object or specimen. But this body is also a spectacle: made to stand for long hours before teams of inspectors, incarcerated in camps where they often spend years, their movements restricted, monitored. Entire residential complexes are built with steel doors, electrified fences and 24×7 surveillance in Canadian cities for illegal immigrants, as captured in Tings Chak’s Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention.
The migrant body as specimen and as spectacle is placed in sharp contrast to the citizen body.
Non-persons
Yet, what of dead migrant bodies, such as the San Antonio victims?
Separated, often, from their families and localities in which they had some identity, the once-alive departed from their homes and arrived dead in what they hoped would be a new home. Or, in cases such as Kurdi’s, some members of the family arrived, the remaining arrived dead.
If they had died at home, there would be rituals of mourning and instantiations of private grief from their family, friends and community. In cases such as the San Antonio dead, there are no rituals possible because, most likely, the bodies do not carry correct identifications but rather fake papers. The bodies are, therefore, classified as ‘migrants’ or ‘illegals’ but are non-persons. There are no possibilities of mourning these dead-on-arrival non-persons, those who had left an identity behind but never acquired a new one.
Missing the Dead
Who, therefore, misses these dead non-persons, and in what form? Obviously, those left behind at home mourn them, but with little or no idea as to the identities under which the migrants travelled, how they were found, and under what names they were identified and interred. ‘Missing’ takes a whole new meaning here.
The larger point about the dead-on-arrival migrant bodies is that the dead are spectacles in a wholly different sense. They are the results of not just immigration policies and geopolitics but also of specific business models. Cultural Studies scholars Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese write:
“What forms might a public mourning take that seeks to bring the dead into view, not as hapless victims of circumstance, but as the targets of official policy, whose deaths are the outcome of a “business model” . . . that has been shaped as much by states as by smugglers?”
Those incarcerated in camps, such as the ones we see in Kugler or Kate Evans’ Threads from the Refugee Crisis are also often unable to trace those they travelled with — families being broken up is a common feature — or get in touch with those they left behind.
This leads to what Human Rights scholar Simon Robins in a recent essay terms ‘ambiguous loss’. Unable to determine whether their family members are alive, dead, lost, found, they are trapped in a condition where their sense of loss is ambiguous at best, and impossible at worst. The lost-on-arrival and the disappeared-on-arrival are of one kind in the sense they constitute the living dead: whether they are alive or dead is impossible to ascertain, for those who mourn and miss them.
In such cases, mourning those disappeared takes the form of memories recalled, stories told of their homesteads and families, but ambiguous about whether they ought to grieve or not. As literary scholar Anna Kurian says of the storytelling in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “the narrative reanimation of those who die perpetuates their lives: keeping them alive in minimal ways and making of them a form of the living dead.”
This applies to the migrants who arrive dead or are ‘disappeared on arrival’ as well.
We are defined by those who will mourn us after we are gone, in the grief-narrative of the survivor.
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)
