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Undocumented bodies, burned identities: refugees, sans papiers, harraga when things fall apart
Roberto Beneduce Social Science Information 2008 47: 505 DOI: 10.1177/0539018408096444

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Special issue: Migrants and clandestinity Numro spcial: Migrants et clandestinit Roberto Beneduce

Undocumented bodies, burned identities: refugees, sans papiers, harraga when things fall apart
Abstract. Taking an anthropological approach, the author reflects on refugees and clandestine 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 stories is designed to draw attention to the psychological consequences of both traumatic past events and of the unpredictability and uncertainty often experienced in host countries. The author further argues that the attitudes of social workers involved in clandestine migration and refugee issues reveal unconscious attitudes characteristic of meeting with the Other which also convey the contradictions, racism, and hypocrisy of our policies and governments. The author finally discusses the scenarios of death, violence and apartheid that characterize the day-today life of many undocumented immigrants, and invites academic researchers not to take for granted such descriptive terms as clandestine, refugees, and so on.
Key words. Anthropology Clandestinity Migration policies Narratives Nation-state Psychology Refugees Social workers Undocumented immigrants

Rsum. A partir dune approche anthropologique, lauteur propose une rflexion sur les rfugis et les immigrants clandestins, en particulier sur la structure fragmente de leurs rcits. Cet effort pour apprhender le sentiment de vague ou le silence qui caractrisent si souvent les rcits des immigrants a pour dessein dattirer lattention sur les consquences psychologiques la fois des vnements passs traumatiques et de limprvisibilit et lincertitude dont ceux-ci font lexprience dans les pays daccueil. Lauteur postule aussi que lattitude des travailleurs sociaux en charge des problmes des rfugis et des migrants clandestins rvle des postures inconscientes caractristiques de la rencontre avec lAutre qui

Social Science Information SAGE Publications 2008 (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC), 05390184 DOI: 10.1177/0539018408096444 Vol 47(4), pp. 505527; 096444

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vhiculent aussi les contradictions, le racisme et lhypocrisie des politiques et des gouvernements de nos pays. Pour finir, lauteur analyse les scnarios de mort, de violence et dapartheid qui sont le lot quotidien de nombreux immigrants sans-papiers et invite les chercheurs utiliser avec prcaution des termes descriptifs tels que clandestins, rfugis et autres.
Mots-cls. Anthropologie Clandestinit Etat-Nation Immigrants sans-papiers Narrations Politiques dimmigration Psychologie Rfugis Travailleurs sociaux

Within the interstices of history: crossing the national order of things In the biographies and the stories told by illegal immigrants and refugees something forces, and challenges, our unspoken desire to forget, to obliterate and hide them within the national order of things (Malkki, 1995, 2002). With their lives or their tales of death, they are pure epistemological and political detectors of the present, of modernity and of modernitys primordial 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, unaccompanied minors, Gastarbeiter, sans papier categories hopelessly trying to grasp and classify impregnable and painful vicissitudes, the edges of which are incessantly 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 small epistemological scandal. Their ramblings remain, and resist all sociological or historical analyses, or consistent narrative reconstructions. While listening to dismembered stories, warped by silence and bitterness, I often feel I am facing the renowned Cretans paradox, the solution of which is always the same: what are they talking about, when they are lying, if not about themselves? It is hard to convince social and humanitarian aid workers that this is it: just this! It is hard to make them understand that in the presence of such narratives cure, social help, as well as ethnographic encounter can be considered only if other memories and other discourses are allowed to emerge, those typically hidden in the presence of representatives of power and institutions, when fear and uncertainty dominate. Only ethnography and sensitive clinical work can bring to the fore such remarks and 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,

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cracks can emerge, invisible depths become visible: just like the secret geography of unknown passages and restless customs. Inside these cartographies of pain and anxiety, along the boundaries keeping poor apart from rich, hell from peace, life from death, passeurs the new entrepreneurs of bodies and dreams operate as the factual masters of the destinies of those hundreds of thousands of men and women trying to run up the sense of History, turning from persecuted people and victims into illegal immigrants, then becoming refugees so as to eventually and perhaps simply be turned into 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 of conventional narration, and mental health professionals [of psychoanalytic orientation], familiar with narratives of a different sort, in which symptoms always refer to something else, something to be brought to consciousness, may feel impotent in the face of such experiences and stories stories that speak of real events and be overwhelmed by their literality. When the symptoms are not just signs of something suppressed, something else that underwent repression, but instead attest to a bare reality of atrocities and death, 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 our psychoanalytically inspired model seems to get stuck. In addition, many health or social workers ignore the political and social contexts from which most refugees and illegal immigrants come pervaded by violence of the imaginary, by despotism, arbitrariness and terror. In the stories of these women and men, contradictions and forgetting are frequent, details and events perhaps too unbearable to be remembered have been obliterated, or their recollection is inhibited by particular cultural and social values. The versions offered in psychotherapeutic sessions are often multiple and discrepant: sometimes symptoms are correlated to events related casually; there is a lack of coherence, as if for these women and men it was impossible to bridge the time before and after, impossible to bridge different times and experiences, different worlds a work of bridging which is the specific function of the imagination (Kirmayer, 2003; Rousseau & Drapeau, 2001). What emerges like a shadow from these narratives, from the insistent grammar (Caruth, 1996: 3) of their humiliated bodies, is a traumatized social Self, the spectral trace of communities and cultures under siege, of which those we call illegal immigrants (clandestine) are but the unrecognizable shreds. We their therapists and institutional interlocutors are left with the uncanny feeling that what they show us are memorys broken vertebrae (Beneduce, 1998; Robben & Surez-Orozco, 2000). The voices and witnesses they evoke are irremediably missing or disjointed. A dissociation

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between body, memories and events dominates these narrations. Sometimes we may recognize an attempt to reconstruct an image that better represents their experience in front of the Other, the psychotherapist, the Asylum or Refugee Committee. Their narratives are indeed indifferent to the qualities and the styles that usually characterize the autobiographies of those who have not lived through such experiences (Simic, 2003). Kirmayer (2003) appropriately speaks of failure of imagination to describe these stories made up of holes and clefts, of discontinuities and contradictions. The adolescent illegal immigrants I have met often in prison show nonetheless a peculiar and phantasmagorical development of their imagination. They tell of heroic adventures, daring escapes and victorious fights with the innumerable enemies they have met during their getaways (unknown aggressors, police and customs officers, etc.), impassable walls jumped with a single leap... Such tales refer to an almost hallucinatory world, the only one that seems conducive to an acceptable narrative plot. Why should we be surprised? Isnt their real world a place of unspeakable violence, where every kind of abuse and outrage was perpetrated under the guise of ambiguous moralities, movie characters or cartoons?2 Their speech and their bodies remind us of a difference that most of us would rather forget. Their experiences are in fact calls to resist social amnesia the temptation to depict a world without conflicts, without abuses, appeased by talk about human rights (Agier, 2002, 2005; Fassin & Rechtman, 2007; Quemin, 2001). Such an image of ephemeral tolerance is opposed by a subterranean buzzing that resists and challenges the systematic inversion of truth 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 a concept particularly appropriate to reflect on the difficulties encountered by those professionals who work with refugees, victims of torture, illegal immigrant minors, and so on. The embodied history I am thinking of is the irreducible difference shown by those who have been humiliated and reduced to starvation for generations in colonized cities, compelled to work at insecure jobs, forced into the uncertain succession of harvests and famines, or into the violence nowadays perpetrated in the shadow cast by the so-called occult economies (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999). In their tense bodies, an out-of-date distinction keeps on speaking; many today maintain that ethnic minorities or cultural differences are anodyne and ambiguous expressions, which have the mere 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 a woman talking about unburied bodies, abuses of power, hunger and rape. If we listen to the stories told by asylum-seekers and victims of violence, and question

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ourselves about the dramatic experiences and needs of legal immigrants, we do not have many possibilities: we simply cannot just observe, like inattentive onlookers, 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 us not to hear the echo of their rage and pain in our lives. We cannot ignore these people ruined by modernity: their requests for help are too intrusive (housing, work, permits, medicine, money to send to their families); the number of dead is too relentless. These facts became questions we ask ourselves. What does the image of the men and women who died in the course of these journeys evoke in us? What do we feel when the luckiest of them, having reached land, with an 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 Sabena aircraft at an international airport. On one of the bodies a letter addressed to the European political leaders was found. It read in part: Please, help us, we are 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 like you 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 social workers, embittered by a feeling of impotence that often turns into irritation and rejection, and which inevitably yields to barely dissimulated forms of racism. Not many alternatives are left: the ethnography of such journeys, of such deaths and destinies, forces us to stand by their pain and confusion and their stories of inhuman violence. The obstinate ambivalence of which these beneficiaries are accused is in any case sincere: their behaviour reflects our ambiguous 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 societies they are emigrating from and in the ones they would reach. Their existence illuminates the violence of the contemporary moral and economic horizon, thus becoming a corrosive commentary on our models of development, the disturbing creaking of what Liisa Malkki calls the national order of things: Refugees are constituted as a dangerous category because they blur national (read: natural) boundaries, and challenge the time-honoured distinction between national and foreigners (Arendt). At this level, they represent an attack on the categorical order of nations (Malkki, 1995: 78). 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 of consciousness possessed by protagonists, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (2000:

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177) maintain in their remark on Abdelmalek Sayads work: The immigrant functions in the manner of a live, flesh-and-blood analyser of the most obscure regions of the social unconscious. Now, allegations of economic and 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 double sense of incongruous and awkward beings. To all appearances they are trapped in an inconvenient interstice between social being and non-being, affirming with their exposed lives their will to exist notwithstanding laws and international agreements, in spite of programmed access, or the fate of poverty and death History has assigned to them. Bourdieu and Wacquants comment can be applied verbatim to clandestine foreigners and refugees: Neither citizen nor foreigner, neither on the side of the Same nor on that of the Other, he exists only by default in the sending community and by excess in the receiving society, and he generates recurrent recrimination and resentment in both (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2000: 178). Such a paradoxical condition probably best describes these individuals who rarely find in the dubious definitions of laws and decrees what they were not allowed to enjoy in their own countries, due to violence and wars, torture, poverty and inequalities. What they are seeking real rights well beyond a mere 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 obsolete industrial plant on the outskirts of Turin until they decided to take possession of a more visible building in town, and to ask for assistance, work and solidarity. Can such objectives be achieved if conventions and agreements are still imposed (just as they were under colonialism) in the name of the ruling economies that force countries of migration to accept their timing, their terms of agreements and their purposes? These are the premises on which any discussion must be based so as to evoke the unresolved conflicts in the memories of refugees and immigrants, as well as the painful knots besetting them in their host countries. This is the startingpoint for comprehending their conditions: examining the oppressing life in the societies from which they emigrate and, at the same time, the violence and the unresolved contradictions of the host societies, where suspicion of lies and doubts 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 and foreigners applying to our welfare services are not very willing to cooperate?

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What are the hidden origins of these suspicions? Nor can we forget another issue. Immigrants and refugees keep on migrating from former colonies, from a 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 the psychoanalytical sense, to which it is urgent to return.4 It means that refugees and immigrants do not reveal, in their gaze, only the complex political and human 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 refugee condition are a political fact per se. They are always telling us about History, about borders imposed by force, about strange laws and topographies, about distant, but not forgotten, humiliations. Here is the colonial truth about which Bhabha 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 of infinite misunderstandings. The refugees pilgrimage and their ambiguous adventure (the title of a famous novel by Cheick Hamidou Kane), the immense strain and the imagination of death (or the phantasma of death, in the psychoanalytic 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 are fragments of a human and historical reality that the gouvernement humanitaire tries in vain to anaesthetize (Agier, 2002, 2005).

The making of invisible selves: clandestine worlds, tactics and the violence of the imaginary Something tragic and heroic, bitter and unspeakable marks the lives of these men and women. They often manage to talk about these things only by resorting to fleeting images, fragments of narration, to stifled experiences. In many cases, the non-thought-of seems to have been turned into an excess of reality: 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 and stopping by day, trying to avoid arrest by the police, with terror and solitude as companions, always remembering to keep a cloth soaked in animal blood so as to pretend to be menstruating in order to avoid being raped. The journey so well described by Michael Winterbottom in his film In this world very effectively expresses the stifled time spoken about with sadness by those who manage to get ashore, having been accompanied by the desperate dreams, the breath and the agony of those who are not of this world any more.

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Liisa Malkkis words (1995) suggest a valuable analogy between the refugees condition and the definition of liminality proposed by anthropologists with regard to rites of passage. Van Gennep divided this process into three phases: separation, liminality and incorporation. This sequence is typical of many events and rituals (birth, circumcision, wedding, journey, illness, etc.) marked by the idea of a transformation in the protagonists social and psychological identity. Victor Turner insisted on the relevance of the intermediate phase, central not only in initiation rites but also in the experiences of disease and death. During the liminal time, people are in fact inside and outside the world at the same time, possessing very few social attributes. Those concerning the past together with those that will define the future role are absent or barely detectable: The structural invisibility of liminal personae has a twofold character. They are at once no longer classified and not yet classified (Turner, 1967: 956). The liminal phase is characterized by radical psychological, logical and symbolic, as well as social, changes, which are altogether necessary to shape a new condition. Recently Barrett (1998) took up the concept of liminal persona in defining the condition of schizophrenic patients: the phase characterized by chaos, terror and uncertainty described in so many initiation rites would be, according to the author, a perfect metaphor to describe the experience of schizophrenia. These patients are said to show a structural uncertainty (do they exhibit symptoms or voluntary acts?) whose nature necessarily implies a redefinition of person and agency. Other researchers have applied the concept of liminality to disabled people, with reference to the indeterminate condition that often characterizes their existence: oscillating between health and illness, acceptance and stigmatization, their lives are always signalling anomalies, a crisis in our classification models (Murphy et al., 1988). The formula Dal Lago (2004) proposes for immigrants and refugees, non personae, once again represents the common perception we have of them as liminal individuals undetermined, ambiguous, extraneous to the logic opposing foreign and autochthonous citizens, trapped between an obscure past 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 initiation rites is consistent with a particular cultural and moral background, and usually leads to a socially approved and individually sought constitution. On the contrary, the liminal condition of clandestine foreigners and asylum-seekers is that of a frozen time, with no foreseeable sequences, in which a former exclusion does not necessarily imply subsequent full integration. This time is not by chance haunted by persecuting phantoms, by fear and doubts

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concerning their future legal status (Will they believe what I told them?). With the passing of time, such an experience may develop into painful and worrying indefiniteness (a woman stated: I am scared: what if, when they call me from Rome, what if they say my claim was not accepted? What will I do?). In these experiences, time is under siege, and unpredictability is perhaps 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 having papers checked by the police so as to not reveal their real age or identity, not getting their umpteenth exclusion order, not being driven to a CPT (Centro di 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 the results of a rite is not so much to separate those who have undergone it from those who have not yet done so, but from those who never will, and to establish a durable difference between those involved in a rite and those who are not (Bourdieu, 1982: 121). What Bourdieu is suggesting is particularly relevant to foreign adolescents living underground, socially invisible, in most cases working illegally. The journey (here a kind of initiatory rite, in Bourdieus sense) has produced a deep metamorphosis in them, making them inevitably different. In the aftermath and a continuing context of experiences and practices marked by fear, misunderstanding, loneliness or treachery, these urban novices lead their lives according to an arbitrary logic, and only some kind of peer solidarity may at times support these lonely people. Their condition is an expression of structural ambiguity: they are victims and persecutors, at the same time constructing and destroying. How can we understand, De Boeck and Honwana ask, children and youth in various African contexts as both makers and breakers of society, while they are simultaneously being made and broken by that society? (2005: 1 2). In most cases they are the completed and extreme product of the process of de-parenting (dparentalisation) eventually produced by economic, political, social, moral and religious variables.6 A highly significant image of the change evoked here is the act of incinerating 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 term also denotes the passeur). Derived from the verb meaning to incinerate, this term appears to be an apparently paradoxical way of making identification harder and therefore averting the risk of expulsion once in Europe (Teriah, 2002); but it also signals the will to literally burn down social, cultural and familial identities. In other cases papers must be turned over to the passeurs.

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Through these practices, illegal immigrants build up a new space for their existences, while shattering the concept of citizenship, which is at the very basis 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 the disquieting perceptions of otherness in the host country,7 nevertheless one can also recognize in these behaviours the expression of a tactic, in the meaning de Certeau attributed to this word: a shrewd procedure aimed at objectives difficult to classify, weapons in the arms of weak individuals in the Others place, capable of exploiting even the slightest of opportunities, with no total perspective, devoid of any proper space, short-sighted and efficient at the same time (as in hand-to-hand combat, de Certeau wrote) made possible by the lack of power, grounded on an able use of time and of the opportunities it offers (1990: 5763). What better image can there be for describing the behaviour and moral economy of so many young clandestine immigrants?

Cultural anaesthesia and necropolitics The stories of immigrants, asylum-seekers and all of those detained in Centri di Permanenza Temporanea (Centers for Temporary Stay and Assistance or as they are sometimes called Centri di Accoglienza/ Hospitality, CPTs), tell of states of exception (Agamben, 2003) where basic rights and the very idea of hospitality are often forgotten or abolished. Refugees and illegal immigrants are often assimilated to criminals or suspects. The cages in CPTs evoke well beyond 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 savage life and their exotic village. A fil rouge seems to tie yesterdays native to the 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 moral and legal asymmetries, something playing the tune of an intermittent death march, with upsetting memories persisting from the colonial age to our own. Other uncanny analogies and questions enliven the current debate. Why do CPT cages so resemble the prisons at Guantnamo or Abu Ghraib? Why do those 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 actual violence exercised on bodies, violence made up of actual deaths and wounds

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(Tonda, 2005, 2008) as we are told is the case of the diamond or coltan diggers in Angola or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (de Boeck, 1996). All this is revealed by the bodies of clandestine immigrants with irregular or illegal jobs when injuries make them visible, everywhere. We can say that their bodies gain humanity only after having been turned into professional capital (an expression used by Wacquant). Similar problems are told by the bodies of unaccompanied minors and those of prostituteimmigrants defined in law as victims of trafficking. When these processes are closely analysed, such notions as incorporation practices or incorporated memories effectively underline how bodies tell and reveal much more than what social actors can comprehend in their activities, in their roles and choices, something they often are only faintly aware of. In exploring these issues, various authors have questioned the unexpected (and inexorable) topicality of the concept of slavery, while others have highlighted how illegal economies flourish along borders (the existence of passeurs, as well as the bribing of customs officials, who allow migrants to cross the border after paying a baksheesh, are examples of such economic dynamics; other authors refer to them as bush economies). Starting from Benjamins writings, Agamben analysed the emergence of the perverted relationship between anomic violence and the law that is at the root of the state of exception in modern doctrine (2003: 77).8 He has shown how lives in these places of exclusion are kept in indistinct, undefined temporality: remains, racaille, excesses without identity (street children in Columbia are called desechables, disposables), for which modernity leaves the place reserved for outcasts (Bauman, 2005). Within the boundaries of these places of exclusion, as in the case of CTPs, the normal system is in fact suspended. Whether or not atrocities, violence and abuses are committed within these areas does not depend on the law, but rather upon the polices sense of ethics and civility, as they are temporarily acting like sovereigns (Agamben, 2005: 195). Consistent with this pattern, the figure of the camp emerged as a central nucleus of modernity and its biopolitics, when the political system of the modern nation-state entered a lasting crisis. An order without localization is now substituted by a localization without order (the camp as permanent space of exception) The camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet (pp. 1978). Almost everything having to do with the law, with life and death, plays itself out in this new existential geography. Agamben reminds us of this with reference to the camps in the former Yugoslavia, as well as to the delocalized spatiality of the Hotel Arcades at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. At the arcanum of power is this anomalous delocalization of political life an existential topography and a delocalization that already in the colonial age have displayed their efficacy, and their violence.

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For such reasons, refugees and immigrants take on peculiar sociological and anthropological salience: they probably represent the harshest and most efficacious icon of post-colonialism and globalization, of World Order, of the hard and often fruitless attempt to match principles and practices of modernity, which seems to be stated only through subversive actions (Biaya, 2001). The level of contradictions, the social grey zone on which Sayad and Bourdieu invite us to reflect, do not concern simply laws of macro-economy, models of development or invisible hierarchies. The symbolic violence evoked 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, social workers often perform acts of invisible violence, adding to those already experienced by such wounded memories (Ricoeurs expression, 2004: 71ff). This happens, for example, when they present motivated refusals, or bare indifference masked by legal binds and impracticality. The arbitrary and anxiety-provoking nature of these procedures often becomes routine; a persons destiny hinges on some law by means of which an existence is allowed to be given its name, taken from a section of the law,9 as happens in prison when it is the article of the legal code by which the punishment has been 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 universe of differently applied regulations, of never-ending waiting, where the response (regarding a residence permit or accommodation in a centre) takes on the shape of a verdict. If we consider that the possibility of being hosted in a country is a matter of life or death, then the force of law mentioned by Derrida (2003) is real force indeed, epitomizing the whole original violence inscribed in the law. I was reminded of this by the attempted suicide of a Nigerian woman, whose desperate gesture very well represented how much the refusal of asylum and expulsion from Austria equaled a death penalty. Are these the modern (and unexpected) forms of biopolitics and necropolitics? Are these 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 and death of citizens are expressed precisely in these interstitial spaces: the biopolitics and necropolitics Foucault examined in the constitution of the modern State are reproduced ever less by the sovereigns decisions but rather more in the intricate and anonymous plethora of laws and acts, in the contradictory attitudes of operators and institutions, in the proliferation of minute, out-of-control sovereignties. From such chaotic interconnections there emerge heterogeneous motivations, motivations often impossible to

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recognize and even less avow, which nonetheless are responsible for the decision to prescribe long-term hospitalization for an undocumented foreigner, to grant an asylum-seeker the right to stay (would the reply to his or her claim then depend on her or his nationality, presumed docility or religious creed?). The above reference might well be multiplied by underlining the efforts to turn this or that immigrant into a citizen prone to collaborate, to convince this or that reluctant refugee to accept good advice and to be transformed into a homo conomicus. Aihwa Ongs analysis of refugees in the United States is consistent with the reflections that have been presented here. The author reminds us that the exercise of sovereign power is dilated into a web of welfare offices, vocational schools, hospitals and working places, where the various bureaucrats use their knowledge to shape the subjects behaviour, turning a good-for-nothing into a good citizen-subject (Ong, 2005: 29). Ong is not exaggerating when she maintains that interventions aimed at refugees disclose structures similar to colonial philanthropism and paternalism, or when she claims that we do not recognize a modern expression of sympathetic domination in them, in which rights are often crushed in an ambivalent 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 irregular foreign 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 were in fact the sole historical subjects in the past century, refugees represent the anthropological figure of the twenty-first century par excellence (Fassin & dHalluin, 2005: 606).10

Troublesome geographies, or the cursed side of history References made in speech and related memories, places mentioned on medical certificates of refugees, illegal immigrants and victims of torture, are tracing a new geography: Benin City, Khouribga, Kano, Keren, Bukawu, Kanyabayonga, etc., seem to be the cities of a new map, of a new continent unknown 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, mapped by speechless emissaries (Malkki, 2002), cannot be welcome in the national order of things. For the refugee, and the asylum-seeker, the remark by Bourdieu and Wacquant concerning those who emigrate out-of-place in

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both social orders defining their non-existence, immigrants compel us to reconsider the issues of citizenship and of the relationship between citizen, state and nation from top to bottom is indeed valid (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2000). That is why refugees and clandestine immigrants are painfully out-ofplace, 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 an overwhelming oppressive past, a past for which there has been no punishment nor redemption (Beneduce, 2004, 2007b; Hunt, 2008). In all these cases, we wonder what past, what identity it is still possible to tell, to remember, to claim. Two observations must at least be evoked in closing this section; 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. It is necessary to reflect on the social semantics of these scornful expressions, on the trivial use of the concept of culture, on the specific imaginary these facts and discourses comprise. What happened in France openly tells of a still-bleeding colonial rift, visible in the ghettos where French citizens of African origin have been parked. In a recent article, Achille Mbembe (2003) recalls this while analysing the latent hostility displayed by new generations and this infamous geography, the geography of the border camps located in the vicinity of airports, as well as in the depot-fields where many people of 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 write about palestinization in relation to the daily humiliating strategies, to the scornful judgements about foreigners and illegal immigrants, which recall colonial or neo-colonial modes of behaviour. The banlieues are regarded as inhabited by indistinct masses easily disdained (wild children, mobs, canaille, criminals, caids of the parallel economy). The temptation to apply colonial modes derived from racial wars to the most vulnerable categories of current French society is strong indeed, since it is erected as a defence wall against a new planetary war involving culture and religion in which the republican identity itself is at stake. When talking with refugees and illegal immigrants, the issue of the Other emerges like a ghost, raising the fear of its insatiable desire if only their condition of victims is temporarily forgotten.11 The second issue, closely linked to the previous, relates to the roots of such fears and phantoms. Bhabha highlighted a conclusive theme in Fanons writings: the uncertainty of the psychic relation between the colonizer and the colonized a relationship prone to play on paranoid fantasies of unlimited

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possession, of taking up the masters place (Bhabha, 2001: 667). The same uncertainty is now emerging in the relationship with immigrants, both legal and illegal: 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 against the others: foreigners and institutions. New expressions of biopolitics and necropolitics, the narrow rhetoric where racism and national security issues overlap, emerge again, often in an invisible way. This quiet violence must be examined if we are to grasp how practices and talk about refugees end up silencing the immigrants themselves (Malkki, 2002: 345). Looking at these risks may be a good antidote to the risk of falling into what might be defined as cultural anaesthesia, to borrow Feldmans 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 this phenomenon. We thought we had got rid of Fanons words, of his prophecies about the contraposition between the colonizers and the colonizeds towns, of his analysis of the way the latter are made by the mirror of the Other, of the White Man, of the Colonizer. But his words are instead still echoing like persistent and stubborn voices: in our contemporary banlieue conflicts, in moral judgements on clandestine immigrants, in psychiatric diagnoses addressed to immigrants (Mbembe, 2005). If it is true that the mirror and the image of the Other allow us to recognize ourselves as Subjects, what happens when such an Other reflects back the contradictions and inhumanity of colonial times, when he or she sends back a suspicious image, loaded with distrust and disdain? This is the blocked memory in which the relationship between our society and illegal immigrants is still too often built. The relation is 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 and traumatic history, walls against desires
I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of ones life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are off and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combination moving about With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place. (Said, 1999: 295)

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What is the subjectivity and recognition in the laws regulating the circulation of foreign citizens today? What domination plan does the proliferation of walls and fences express? What form of gouvernementalit (Foucault, 1991; Bayart, 2004) does the nation-state subtend today? Why is power of life and death most often to be found along national borders? It is impossible not to raise these issues when we regard the proliferation of walls, fences and separations that are drawing a hidden kind of globalized apartheid. Here I am also recalling the wall separating the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, thus enclosing the former in a space of humiliation and impotence. Such apartheid seemed impossible a few years ago, when the predominant image was the fall of the Berlin Wall. In conclusion, let us look at 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 with the United States and those hunted and arrested along the fence that runs for kilometres along the border between the two countries, are real sociological revealers of the contradictions and inequalities of present-day society, marked by wars, fears and rebellions, in want of walls to protect its privileged zones. Nothing seems able to stop their dreams, as nothing can stop the young Salvadorians and Guatemalans who clandestinely enter Mexico across its southern border, often at the risk of their lives. In Mexico City, close to the Anthropological Museum, giant photographs show dramatic scenes. There are portraits of youths from Guatemala who had a leg amputated while trying to get onto a train. A mother stands beside one of them, silent and resigned. Other photographs show men in handcuffs along the border with the United States, guarded by dogs, while cowboys smile as they watch their prey; this is no different from what happened to Indians or slaves who ran away from plantations. These pictures offer the profile of a restless and controversial modernity, like the shout of illegal migrants 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 the image 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 buzzing telling of plans, dreams and needs stubbornly thrown against symbolic and real borders. With regard to these issues, we remember the images of the wounded or arrested people along the electrified fence dividing Morocco from the Spanish territories of Ceuta or Melilla. Their bodies throw themselves against a hateful order seeking in vain its legitimacy in official history and trying to hide another history, one that is made up of violence, death and silence. These bodies are the symptoms of a wounded history: the witchcraft of history

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mentioned by Taussig, evoking the disturbing vacillation between death and wish. It is difficult not to recognize the shadows of the colonies in such fences and borders. The neo-colonial scheme seems to make use of old techniques: villagization, militarization of territories, settlements and deportations.12 The heritage of a colonial past and the neo-colonial schemes are therefore inextricably and painfully linked in the memory and in the imaginary of the outcasts, of the dominated, of those who have been dispossessed by history (see Stoler, 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 Morrisons novel, Beloved. That ghost is not a hysterical symptom of a family trauma but the symptom of a social and historical traumatic event (the horror of slavery) (Parker, 2001). The allegations so many immigrants address to Western countries tell of this and other unspeakable traumas, and transmit a both collective and personal truth, the crisis of which often arises only from experts refusal to link individual experience to historical reasons (Caruth expresses similar considerations in his work on trauma and memory: 1995: 8 9). No matter if years, decades or centuries have elapsed: The impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time (Caruth, 1995: 89; emphasis added). The authors considerations are particularly pertinent for us, above all when she emphasizes the literal (i.e. not symbolical) character of images, dreams and flashbacks in the victims of trauma. This happens also because the trauma never becomes dominant knowledge; on the contrary, trauma possess[es], at will, the one it inhabits (Caruth, 1995: 6). The experience of many clandestines, the strength of their suffering, 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 and cultural 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 of the past into the present. History seems here simply intolerable and unspeakable. Is it correct to connect clandestines and contemporary laws on migration 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 very definition of citizenship in the metropolises, hence the virulence of the conflicts that have recently inflamed France. On the other, it belongs to the social relationships that constitute the post-colonial State rather than being connected to the relations the latter has with its ancient metropolis or the Western world. From this point of view, the contemporary

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government of globalization moves forward in a straight line from the colonial moment and from a colonial vision of the world. (2006: 67)

These embedded issues contribute to making the plan of going beyond borders not only a concrete strategy to eliminate poverty or violence and the sense of history, but almost an irrepressible obsessive drive, making the crossing (ubu in Moroccan Arabian) the very figure of this will to go r, beyond, 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 the new figure of the trickster, the anti-hero who deceives customs officers, dissimulating his presence, thinking up survival tactics, who lives feeling alien both to his native land and the host country. His presence almost takes on the nature of a sign, the token of a double threat. He in fact evokes both an external threat, penetrating the barriers of the nation-state and thereby suddenly revealing our vulnerability, and a threat emanating from within us. One could say a clandestine person is Unheimlich, in Freuds sense of the word. The very possibility of the existence of clandestine beings seems indeed to make us shake, as though it evoked something uncanny, obscure and fragile at the same time. It is probably not by chance that Leggatt, the mysterious character of Conrads tale The Secret Sharer, responsible for murder and taken on board by the Captain, becomes an obsession to him, like a shadow, a doubt. In such relationships, roles seem to be exchanged, to overlap and to merge. Throughout the story, the formers clandestinity and getaway reflect a common condition: the secret tenant allows the consciousness of a secret sharing to emerge, in which the Captains loneliness and his extraneousness to his ship or, even more as the protagonist states to himself, is to be captured. As with Conrads characters, the presence of the Other, the immigrant, the clandestine, and the suffering with which his uncertain condition is narrated, inevitably awaken our uneasiness and the need to feel that 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 clandestine persons sufferings, worries and needs, as well as his desire for freedom, means recognizing the loneliness and fragilities of our own condition at the same 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.

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If today national frontiers are the border whose symbolic value and dramatic consequences do not require further underlining (Appadurai, 1998), we must analyse how this border often hinders or hampers the recognition of the Other. Perhaps the time has come to consider recognition differently, freed from norms that often merely crystallize (or weaken) identities. In this respect, my conclusions are not far from what brought Judith Butler to explore the psychic dimensions of power and the ambivalent relationship between the social and the psychic that it exploits (1997), or the hidden meanings fortifying the contemporary image of the State (2007). These assumptions may offer the possibility of more effectively conceiving and healing the ambivalence, anxieties and sorrows of those men and women whom we stubbornly keep on thinking of as mere clandestines.
Roberto Beneduce, MD, PhD, is Professor of Cultural and Psychological Anthropology at the University of Turin and the head of the Frantz Fanon Centre (Turin). Authors address: Dipartimento di Scienze Antropologiche, Archeologiche e Storico Territoriali, Universit degli studi di Torino, Via G. Giolitti 21/E, Torino, Italy. [email: roberto.beneduce@unito.it]

Notes
1. The considerations presented in this paper are derived from work I have conducted over the past 13 years at the Centro Frantz Fanon, in Turin. The Centro Fanon, which I founded in Turin in 1996, operates within a public structure, supporting immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and victims of torture in need of psychological support, regardless of their juridical status. It offers them free guidance, psychological support, counselling and psychotherapy. Many of them are referred by other health services, and by public or religious institutions. In this centre, families, unaccompanied minors, 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 contact with other services in order to obtain legal protection, economic help, etc. For more about this experience 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 the Democratic 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, to demonstrate how much reality has been weirdly changed, thus compelling us to reconsider our usual 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 the limit assigned by nature to human deeds; it is therefore the perfect image of disorientation, unpredictability and wandering. (Blumemberg mentions that not by chance a messianic time without any sea was promised in Saint Johns Apocalypse (1985: 28). 4. Every migrant carries this repressed relation of power between states within himself or herself 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 by decades of conflictual and asymmetric relations between the two countries he links (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2000: 174).

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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 how the British administration in Asia turned what initially was a divinatory system (reading hands and fingertips) into a system aimed at identifying offenders. This is how they thereby tried to tame 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 an existence 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 meshes of the logos (Agamben, 2003: 5960, 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 juridical language, only to be turned into terms of a new social and moral grammar, the rules of which in fact 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) Rfugis, 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 habite par les coloniss nest pas complmentaire de la zone habite par les colons. Ces deux zones sopposent Le regard que le colonis jette sur la ville du colon est un regard de luxure, denvie. Rve de possession. Tous les modes de possession: sasseoir la table du colon, coucher dans le lit du colon, avec sa femme si possible. Le colonis est un envieux. Le colon nelignore pas (Fanon, 2002: 423). 12. As the Palestinian case illustrates, late-modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical. The combination of the three allocates to the colonial power an absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory. The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the target of 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 discretion as 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 of their 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 the concept of vertical sovereignty (Hass, 1996; Weizman, 2002; see also Mbembe, 2005).

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