The idea of a body that is weak at the outset draws on not just physical movement over landscapes but “categorical figures moving through representational spaces.” īoth these notions of the political and the apolitical are products of what Judith Butler terms as masculine systems of knowledge production which dictate that being women, or in this case being feminized, automatically restrains violence. They are consequently perceived as “potential liabilities as best and security threats at worst”. The second is the kind of refugee who is introduced to the host state while mobile. Home becomes crucial as the perspective of the recipient of this discretionary goodwill is missing in the mainstream. It is by virtue of this feminization that they are perceived as benign recipients of benevolence from the host state. These spaces act as sites for the enactment of gendered notions where the settled refugee– one whose life is in a state of “permanent temporariness” is “genuine, immobile” and hence feminized. This understanding rests on Hyndman and Giles’ analysis of gendered systems which manage refugees and the geographic spaces they inhabit. It is important to analyse this distinction as it defines the political with its basis in movement– while the settled refugee is systematically depoliticized, the mobile refugee is increasingly political. The former is the refugee that waits, the latter, the refugee who acts. The binary is between the settled other and the mobile other, from the perspective of the host state. In Home, Shire evokes imagery which brings to light the risk associated with the journey an asylum seeker undertakes.The usage of words like ‘leave’ and ‘stay’ points to the creation of binaries that Hyndman and Giles bring to light. Hanging in limbo: the sedentary feminine and the mobile threat What the media intensifies is “racial hysteria in which fear is directed anywhere and nowhere,…so everyone is free to imagine and identify the source of terror.” This, in the context of refugee crisis, is imagined as the masculinized, threatening mobile other. Poetry also brings to the public view crimes that are always partially hidden by mechanisms of state vetted journalism. It is here that the role of poetry becomes critical, while it may not produce individuals, it does something more important– it puts experiences as personal and not pitiable. Butler says, “It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable.” By the fact of being unmarkable, these groups are ungrievable as it is very difficult to evoke emotion for an abstraction. This allows only rigid conceptions of loss, so loss of lives which are not ‘ours’ are not grieved, especially those which have been established as threatening at the outset itself. These tend to silence refugees, placing them as abstractions and laying emphasis on the humanitarian aid doled out to them by state actors. It is produced and reproduced as a critique to mainstream forms of media which may act as purveyors of the same “cultural frames of thinking” perpetuated by the state which dictate both the content and the perspective presented. Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles cite Nancy Fraser in defining the ‘social’ as a metaphorical space where the “politics of policies and knowledge production are meted out.” Drawing on this understanding, poetry can be construed as a feature of the social. What’s in a frame? Challenges from Poetry It becomes important to focus on the affect produced by these ideas of vulnerability and violence because narratives which have conventionally focused on the views, policies and politics of the state run the risk of erasing complexities and nuances surrounding people. In addition to this, I will focus on the threat constructed around the refugee by mechanisms of the state and its inhabitants. This paper will delve into these themes including vulnerability, grief and risk that surround the journey an asylum seeker undertakes. The poem Home by Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire points out the various motivations that fuel the need for people to flee and brings us the understanding of larger themes in the discussion surrounding refugee crises around the world, especially in the global North. While on the one hand, the category of ‘refugee’ is de-historicized, and seen without the context of post-colonial responsibility, the “signs of threat” that accompany those bodies are shaped by multiple histories. These boundaries are traversed by a variety of groups, some more vulnerable than others. The very conditions of ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘you’ necessitate boundaries.
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