We are passive with respect to the disaster, but perhaps the disaster is passivity.
— Maurice Blanchot
The ongoing crisis of capital in the form of migrants fleeing lives made unlivable is becoming more and more visible, or, perhaps, less and less able to be ignored.
— Christina Sharpe
Some artists working within the borders of Europe, and the internalized borders of citizenship and whiteness, have attempted to make art about the migration crisis. Their artworks reflect, as well as reflect upon, the failure of so many nations to arrive at a satisfactory political response to the crisis. They militate for possible solutions, occupying the unstable status of political art. This essay discusses four recent works of art – by Ai Weiwei, Caroline Bergvall, Keston Sutherland, and Florence Uniacke – that illuminate art’s troubled role in the migration crisis.
1. Where Are We Now
At an event called “Where Are We Now,” six speakers are due to talk about where we are now. We are in Athens, at the end of the summer of 2017, in an old cinema reclaimed by activists and used for refugee support activities. At the start of the event, the organizers tell the audience that the electricity supply in the building has been cut off and so the speakers will speak without microphones. As the first talk begins, an audience member tells them that it is difficult to hear. There is noise outside the building, which is a hangout spot, and people are arguing and bottles are clanking. The organizers propose that, instead of the six speakers moving towards the audience, the entire audience should move towards the speakers. So we all edge forward in our chairs, as if playing a children’s game, creeping towards the speakers. They begin again and it is still difficult to hear. The speakers read their papers, looking down at them, rather than addressing the audience.
Behind them, some footage is being projected on a wall. In the film, a government minister from the socialist party is trying to give a speech about creative innovation in a large auditorium. But he is being heckled by some people in the audience, who are denouncing him for some betrayal of his socialist principles. The minister shouts at his anonymous critics to come down to the stage to confront him and they jeer at him. The spirit of “Where Are We Now” is also of critique. Four of the speakers critique an art festival, organized by foreigners, currently underway in the city. They speak in English, since many people in this audience are foreigners, some of who have come to the city for the art festival, and some like me are on holiday. The fifth speaker is a well-known French philosopher, and he speaks without notes. He tells us freedom is not a natural state but a condition that has to be created. The final speaker stands up behind his chair and talks more clearly. He says that in the park behind the cinema, refugees, some of them children, have been selling their bodies for sex. A local anarchist group decided to go into the park to disrupt this activity, and the speaker thinks that this is a bad idea and he tells us why.
After the event, I walk back to the AirBnb apartment where I am staying, feeling some despair about the left’s failure to achieve an audience for its critique and the failure to connect critique with effective political action. The neighborhood I walk through, as in many Greek urban centres, has an exceptionally high number of pharmacies. I have a headache but it is evening and all of the pharmacies are shut. I think about the Ancient Greek word pharmakon, which, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed out, means both remedy and poison. In the migration crisis, contemporary art might be a pharmakon, a remedy or a poison. Art institutions often claim that art contains a remedy to political problems, but it seems to me that art might be a poison instead of a remedy, especially where it claims to stand for political thinking. What does art do for the migration crisis, and what does the migration crisis do for art?
2. Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Several months later, at home in New York, I encounter something on the street that stops me. On one of the “Link NYC” terminals that have replaced phone booths on the streets of the city, offering phone-charging facilities, free Internet and local information, an image of two children, looking cold and wretched. A label at the bottom of the screen locates them in a refugee detention center called Moria on the island of Lesvos, Greece. In the middle, two verses from scripture insist that hospitality is a Christian obligation. At the top, another label reveals that this is part of a series of artworks by Ai Weiwei, a famous dissident artist. I walk past again the following week and the image is gone, replaced by an advertisement for an airline. Weiwei’s series, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors (2017), includes a number of steel structures in prominent public spaces throughout New York City, offering a symbolic experience of being caged, designed to induce empathy for migrants. Its title promises, to anyone who realizes it is ironic, membership in a politics of vague opposition to national borders.
I run into another advertisement for the series: three girls walking hand-in-hand along a rocky path, strewn with litter, between the makeshift shelters of a camp. A carpet signifies the oriental nature of this place, and a discrete label locates it in Greece, far away. Bringing images of the crisis onto the streets, the series indicates that, however exotic it might seem, it is already here. But by using the aesthetics of NGOs and charities, Weiwei’s posters suggest that the solution to the crisis could be individual acts of charity. By making appeal to Christian values, Weiwei’s images flatter the Christian nation into becoming an ideal image of itself, to recognize its ethical obligations. It is easier to demand mercy than justice, easier to ask for liberality than to question the links between rich New Yorkers and the causes of the migration crisis. In her recent book In the Wake, Christina Sharpe writes: “The crisis is often framed as one of refugees fleeing internal economic stress and internal conflicts, but subtending this crisis is the crisis of capital and the wreckage from the continuation of military and other colonial projects.” By framing an ethical rather than a political solution to the crisis, Weiwei’s series avoids the more difficult question: “Where we are now?”
Weiwei’s artworks are a form of public opposition to the new president’s anti-immigration policies: one of the artworks, a gilded cage, is installed in a park near his private residence. The series was organized by the city government, which is run by a political opponent of the president, and it was crowd-funded by some inhabitants of the city, many of whom are opposed to the president. At protests against the president’s anti-immigrant policies, some citizens claim New York has always been hospitable towards migrants. “Migrants Built This City,” they say. Weiwei’s artworks are an image of what the city wants to stand for (liberal hospitality) expressed in the image of what it stands against (intolerance). But Weiwei’s artworks do not illuminate the truth about the crisis nor about New York. After all, the city is a kind of gilded cage, which has always traded in commodities, currencies, and labour, twitching the invisible strings that compel people towards the capital of capital, drawing them under fences and over oceans.
In his essay “Writing the Truth,” Bertholt Brecht offers a lesson to artists wanting to make work about fascism. He writes: “If anyone wishes to describe Fascism and war, great disasters which are not natural catastrophes, he must do so in terms of a practical truth.” Brecht illustrates this with the coverage of an earthquake in Japan by some American magazines: whereas some magazines had represented the event as an unexpected tragedy, one magazine presented a photograph of the devastated landscape with a caption that read: “STEEL STOOD.” Brecht praises this caption for what he calls its “practical truth.” Rather than focusing on the disaster, in such a way that makes it seem unavoidable, this caption announced that the buildings that were able to withstand the earthquake had been made of steel. Fascism, Brecht argues, can only be fought if its “preventable causes” can be identified. This is the practical truth that writers must make visible.
If the steel structures of Good Fences Make Good Neighbours possess a practical truth, it is an ethical one: keeping people behind fences is brutal. By extension, the art work reminds us: “Do as you wish to be done by.” This lesson is surely preaching to the choir. Weiwei’s series, the most eminent art of the migration crisis so far, is lacking not only in practical truth but also in what renders its ethical lesson impractical. Over the next few decades, climate change may cause hundreds of millions of people to leave their home countries. The current crisis may be only the beginning of a great migration and the political changes required will surely be huge, involving significant acts of imagination to overcome existing political norms. Art does not necessarily have to have an answer the burning political question – what is to be done? – but it might at least try to illuminate the obstacles to finding one.
3. Drift
One of the first serious attempts in poetry to engage with the migration crisis is a long multimedia work by Caroline Bergvall. Drift (Nightboat Books, 2014) is composed of four sections, the first of which is a rewriting of The Seafarer, an Old English poem. Bergvall mixes the Old English with what appears to be original writing and other documentary texts. The second section of the poem contains the kind of story that has been circulating with increasing regularity in recent years. It begins: “On March 27, 2011 a ~10m rubber boat overloaded with 72 migrants departed the port of Gargash.” What follows is extracts from a report compiled by members of the Forensic Oceanography team at Goldsmiths, University of London: the story of the journey of the so-called “left-to-die boat.” The boat left Libya, intended for arrival in Lampedusa, Italy, but it ran out of fuel and became stranded in the Mediterranean. Despite sending out distress signals and coming into contact with fishermen and a military helicopter, the boat was left to drift for 14 days. 63 of the passengers had died by the time the boat finally landed in Italy. Bergvall reduces the report to ten pages of spare prose.
Bergvall’s text is interspersed with surveillance photographs of migrant boats, taken from French military vessels but then distorted so as to make them almost completely abstract. The abstraction of the image also represents an obstacle to the reader’s ability to identify and sympathize with the migrants. The reader of this poem can’t know the traumatic experience of compulsory migration nor assume the authority to ventriloquize the experience of migrants. In this, Bergvall differs from Warsan Shire, whose short poem “Home” has bequeathed an unforgettable refrain to pro-migrant protests: “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” Drift is a poem for those of us whose lives are abstracted from the crisis, and it raises a problem about identification with the victims of the crisis that remains importantly unresolved.
The final part of Drift is “Log,” a fragmentary diary of the text’s composition and performance, with some meditations on the cultural representation of migration. Bergvall provides some fragmentary details of her own biography and Nordic ancestry, raising the question of how seafaring tribes settled into nations and accepted closed borders. But this constellation of materials doesn’t do much more than repeat the flat universalizing statement now common at pro-migration protests: “We are all descended from migrants.” If Drift makes the preventable causes of this incident visible, they are the inexplicable decision of the military helicopter that dispensed water bottles to the migrants and then disappeared again or the bad ethics of the fishermen who approached but didn’t help. Reading this poem, you could conclude that one sea-faring Samaritan could have diverted this tragedy. Bergvall does not speculate about the wider causes of the crisis nor the forms of political action necessary to address it. It doesn’t illuminate the im-practical truth of the crisis. That is, the social mechanisms that produce the crisis and render any ethical solutions irrelevant. Without this, the crisis remains an inexplicable disaster, in relation to which we can only be passive. If Drift is an epic poem, it is one without action, that can only drift.
This passivity rests on a theoretical assumption – common in modern, Anglo-American experimental writing – that language itself has a radically slippery quality, for which the artist is a mere conduit. An essay by Cecilia Vicuña beautifully crystallizes this view: “Language is migrant. Words move from language to language, from culture to culture, from mouth to mouth. Our bodies are migrants, cells and bacteria are migrants too. Even galaxies migrate.” This is an important, consoling vision, encouraging the reader to disavow the pettiness of national politics. In the grand scheme of things, what is the difference between refugee and citizen? Considering migration as a natural phenomenon that must not be restrained by politics is a convenient ideology for mystics, socialites, finance workers, property developers and tax exiles, who would not object to the statement: “No Borders, No Nations.” Proclaiming the true borderlessness of language doesn’t resolve the great problem posed by nationalist politics and international finance. The most migratory poetic language cannot do anything about the monstrosity of borders.
4. “Sinking Feeling”
That monstrosity is audible in ‘Sinking Feeling,’ a recent poem by Keston Sutherland. The poem appears in Whither Russia (Barque Press, 2017), a pamphlet whose cover is a lurid underwater photograph of blue water and yellow sand. It does not exactly address the migration crisis but is nonetheless intimately marked by it. ‘Sinking Feeling,’ which is nine pages of poetic prose, begins with a direct address: “I made a swing for you, dear secret object.” This sounds like a parent talking to their child or to their partner, but the object is never identified, and the poem moves through references and registers with disorientating speed. A number of times there is a refrain repeated in three languages, which appears to be the voice of a suffering person.
“that woman who used to work here on a part-time contract several years back, Haifa, she was there wearing water and she seemed high on the occasion and she said I have asthma, ich habe asthme, j’ai de l’asthme, I was moved on past an office whose door was wide open…”
It sounds as if the speaker is going to say “I was moved by her speech,” but the sentence turns in a different direction. This woman, Haifa, does not reappear in the poem but the trilingual voice is used repeatedly, iterating different kinds of suffering. The effect of this is to distance the reader from this speech, to make it sound artificial, bureaucratic and ridiculous.
The representation of people in ‘Sinking Feeling’ is constantly subject to distancing procedures. At one point Sutherland refers to “people or what represented people,” as if reporting a confusing dream with desperate precision. The poem refers directly to the migration crisis several times, in journalistic facts and phrases folded into outrageous metaphors: Sutherland compares a fantasied act of suicide to “the butchers of Deir al-Zour.” Something else is compared to “the shape of Farmakonisi or the Syrian bodies washed up near there.” The reader probably has to use Google to find out that Farmakonisi is a Greek island in the Aegean, where thirteen migrants drowned on December 23rd 2015. Elsewhere there is a reference to the Muslim people displaced from Myanmar in 2017: “Rohingya rehydrated into stateless entities.” These details might imply a pained attention to world news, but they also advertise the gratuituousness of facts learned from the media, their irrelevance to political action. ‘Sinking Feeling’ doesn’t include any statement of empathy for refugees. It’s difficult to imagine anyone connected to immigrants from Syria or Myanmar reading this poem and not being outraged by it, but that’s not the intention here. When Ai Weiwei visited Lesvos, he lay on the beach to imitate the photograph of the dead body of Alan Kurdi, a young child who had drowned on a beach in Turkey in 2015. The photograph of Weiwei lying on the beach was later exhibited as a work of art. By contrast, ‘Sinking Feeling’ places poetry itself into grotesque positions, hoping perhaps to disgust its comfortable readers into action.
Another character appears throughout Sutherland’s poem, a “drowned body.” They are identified in a weird negation: “Since evading shipwreck to be mauled with water cannon at the border of Bakondi’s Hungary is not for you.” This means that the drowned body is not a refugee who has suffered the brutal policies of György Bakondi, Chief Security Advisor to the anti-immigrant Prime Minister of Hungary. So who is the drowned body? Someone else looking for sympathy, it seems:
“an ex-partner of his was dying of an incurable disease and he had just heard that things had got worse for her. I sympathized with him admirably and tried to encourage him to speak only if he would like to, but he had a mouth full of water and seemed obstinately determined to be incapable of saying anything that got past the wisecracks and pleasantries.”
What appears to be a valid complaint, about the death of an ex-partner, appears grotesque in the context of the migration crisis. The drowned body is the subject of what the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope called bathos, or “the Art of Sinking in Poetry.” Elsewhere, Sutherland has described bathos as a poetic strategy: a satirical bringing-down of high-brow language, in such a way as to inhabit and implode a set of received poetic phrases and the bourgeois moral values they reflect. The “drowned object” is drowning in bathos, a stupidly self-absorbed voice that can’t be the true voice of suffering. There is no authoritative voice of suffering in this poem: the truly drowned are incapable of speech, their suffering always foreclosed by acts of self-interested ventriloquism.
‘Sinking Feeling’ stages a crisis of sympathy, rendering impossible our access to the crisis. It avoids eliciting a sympathy that could provide a moralistic catharsis. The problem of catharsis became visible after the shocking image of Alan Kurdi circulated throughout the world media in 2015, published eagerly by newspapers that usually stoke xenophobic tensions, and causing a brief surge of sympathy for migrants and political will. In the UK, there was a sudden demand for a political response to the crisis, which forced the government to pass the Dubs Amendment, which promised to admit 3000 unaccompanied children in the country. But when the first few migrants were admitted under the scheme, only a few months later, the same newspapers that had profited from the sympathy-inducing photographs of Alan Kurdi now attacked the government. Public opinion turned once again and the government retreated from their promised hospitality. It is this self-consuming, self-satisfying sympathy that Sutherland’s poem seems to want to avoid.
The end of ‘Sinking Feeling’ completes a dizzying series of turns around the still-unidentified “secret object,” ending in a virtuosic piece of mock-closure:
“everything is still the beginning, though something is the middle, and nothing is the end, inflated into concrete fate or pegged to balusters of air where you are made to stop, look back, go on, I am here looking at you and you are there doing it, seeing how you do, the strap on your shoulder, the eyes you abandon, that I use, how I know to, in a way, or not, for now, for you.”
Whoever it is that the poet is talking to, their partner or child, has finally converged with the refugee. The speaker’s most intimate love seems to have been extended to the suffering of others. This convergence happens as if by magic, a poetic merging of “you” and “them,” without any explanation of how we could come to care as much for refugees as we do for our families. As a form of resolution, it is poetic and not practical. If someone had come to this poem in search of practical truth, they would be left with nothing other than passionate dissatisfaction.
5. MOVE
Florence Uniacke’s poem, MOVE (published for the first time in this journal), is an account of a trip to Lesvos in the winter of 2015. The poem, which might be a notebook poem, or even a brief epic, Uniacke and her friends arrive on the island, where they visit refugee camps and volunteer their services. MOVE describes their efforts to help with dry humour and brutal self-suspicion. At the beginning, she reports “My affective state on entering this crisis,” and goes on to list: “Crippling anxiety, exhaustion & delirious energy, paralysing shame, unreachable abstract feelings.” Throughout the poem, there is a repeated return to the analogy of the personal crisis and the migration crisis, and to the risk of collapsing the two. In doing so, MOVE warns the reader about the forms of egotistical compensation offered by the crisis to those wanting to help.
In MOVE, Uniacke’s account of events is disrupted by belated emotional reactions and arbitrarily directed aggressions, as well as unexplained breaks in language and explosions of non-semantic characters, which register her empathy for what she sees and the aggressive and confused thoughts that arise. A series of violent songs call out to “CLOSE THE BORDERS” and fantasize that David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at that time, is her own untrustworthy father. These fantasies evoke the comfort that the poet’s fatherland could but does not offer to migrants and a deep discomfort at the paternalistic order that placed the smooth and disingenuous Cameron as the gatekeeper. Elsewhere, MOVE attempts to bear witness to the crisis, refusing both Bergvall’s experimental self-restraint and Sutherland’s hallucinogenic skepticism.
Uniacke goes to Lesvos to perform acts of care for others, even as she struggles to demonstrate care towards herself: “I had to pretend I was an other - someone I loved.” She tells us about her self-help, her fantasies, her fashion choices, but this narcissistic self-reflection doesn’t foreclose the possibility of encounter. She meets a “slim boy maybe 20” and they tell each other they are beautiful. Being in these spaces, around others, might be a useful way to forget personal problems. But photogenic and friendly migrants also provide an opportunity for new forms of narcissism. The poem sees this trap extending to the volunteers who arrive on the island to see the crisis unfolding and be seen. The poem mocks them in a nursery-rhyme line: “Ai Weiwei an-|d Susan Saran-| don are on a -| plane.”
At its most thoughtful and inventive, art can make visible what is absent from social visibility and uncover what is repressed from social memory.1 Unlike Ai Weiwei, whose decision to lie on the beach on Lesvos was an opportunistic betrayal of this capacity, Uniacke refuses an invitation to witness migrants arriving on the shores of the island. Instead, the scene is described as it was reported to her by Sot, the manager of a local car-hire business.
“Sot gesticulates all the tears out of his eyes, like the wind from his hands might change the tide. As he recounts the scene with his body he squints and blows from his soft thick putty face, blows his lips out big as a horn as he would have while the boat was tipping.”
The scene of trauma is reduced to a comedy, something emphasized by Sot’s name, as if the man is drunkenly trying to stop the tides with his own gesticulations. MOVE attends to the difficulties of witnessing and also remains committed to the importance of encounter.
Uniacke visits Moria, the largest refugee camp on Lesvos at the time. At the entrance to the family compound, she encounters two “G|u|a|r|d|s.” The irony of this typographic device becomes clear when the poem describes the guards: two sisters from north London, who are in good spirits, sharing some snacks. The reader is ordered to “PICTURE IT.” Then the Family Compound is described: “5ft thick cement floor, 10x10ft. heavy duty gate, 15ft. fences, extra 3ft. giant curled barbwire.” In December 2015, the governments of Europe were already trying to prevent refugees from progressing beyond the Greek islands into mainland Europe, and so the refugee camps were already effectively detention centers. After the EU deal with Turkey in March 2016, the Family Compound of Moria became an actual detention center, where refugees were held before being deported. Uniacke issues a second order, this one more deranged: “P I C T U R E I T.” Her description of the “Family Compound” anticipates the deformation of the enclosure from a refuge into a weapon. In this, she witnesses the impractical truth of the migration crisis, seeing things as they are and as they are going to be used. Faced with the so-called Family Compound, the poet sees that: “STEEL STOOD.”
At the end of MOVE, the calendar year ends and another one begins. Neither the migration crisis nor the poet’s personal crisis have ended. Like Milton’s brief epic, Paradise Regain’d, which ends with Jesus’s quiet return home to his mother after his temptation by Satan in the desert, the heroic action of MOVE has been its honesty about the temptations of the crisis. In that honesty, resides a belief in the need to move beyond the satisfactions that the crisis offers. Uniacke says, quite simply: “If you are destroyed you cannot be helpful and probably not anyway, I didn’t want to become a spectator.” But the refusal of the position of “the spectator” admits another possible error. If we don’t want to be spectators, what do we want to be? The poem doesn’t answer this, but the reader must. Two years have passed since the writing of MOVE, and today it is no less true that we can’t allow our need for affirmation, our exhaustion or desire for closure, to ignore the demands of the continuing crisis.
Conclusion: The Artists of the Crisis
The artists working within national borders, and within the internal borders of citizenship, do not represent or resist the crisis from a vantage point outside of it. We are all, no less than the migrants themselves, within the crisis.
The art-works discussed in this essay are all fixated by the image of migrants in boats crossing the sea. It is an image fixed in the European imagination, and what makes it powerful is not only the danger that the voyage poses to the passenger’s lives, but also the ease with which these flimsy boats violate the integrity of Europe. The image exposes the permeability of Europe’s physical and conceptual borders. Even where they are employed with the best intentions, these images may inspire something other than sympathy. In response to the perceived violations of Europe’s border, nations have defended their own internal borders with increasing vigour. The poets discussed in this essay are suspicious of the images of the crisis. It is worth questioning whether what is thought shocking is an expense of emotional energy that does nothing to undo our passivity. Art has a responsibility to illuminate the difference between the disaster, which renders us passive, and the crisis, which requires action. The danger of the dissident artist is that he is a messiah, suffering so that we citizens may live in peace. By contrast, the experimental artist, retreating from the difficult business of representation, seeks a kind of redemption for themselves through virtuous restraint and skepticism. Only artworks that do not claim to authoritatively witness the crisis but also show that we can’t escape it, can remain faithful to the wish for a general solution to this crisis without deceiving anyone into thinking we have achieved any measure of it.
The most important artists of the migration crisis are those who make it seem an irresistible disaster. These artists include, but are not limited to, the members of the British Conservative Party and the US Republican Party, and the other right-wing and nativist parties in Europe and North America; those members of the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party who endorse anti-migrant polities to “win back votes”; the donors who fund those parties and the think tanks that lend them legitimacy; the private security companies who profit from immigration removal centres and deportation flights, and their shareholders; the newspaper owners who wield political power against the most vulnerable, and their employees, who are just doing their jobs; everyone who is satisfied with despair or blame or critique; everyone who fails to imagine that more can be done and doesn’t do it.
January 2018