Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Migrants and Refugees Between Aesthetics and Politics, Apr 2021

This article discusses three films that focus on migrants who departed from the Senegalese Cape Verde peninsula, braving the Atlantic in dugout boats (pirogues), in order to reach the Canary Islands. The year 2006 saw a phenomenal rise in migrants arriving undocumented at this key point of entry to Europe. Directors Idrissa Guiro, Moussa Sène Absa and Moussa Touré saw it as their mission to respond to this urgent humanitarian crisis by humanizing the all-too-common reality of failed migration. They use testimonies and autofictional narratives in order to give a voice to migrants and, in so doing, to influence public and political opinion. Guiro’s documentary film Barça ou Barzakh (2007) appears to be intended for a western audience and focuses especially on the socio-economic conditions that drive migration. Absa’s docufiction Yoolé (The Sacrifice) (2010), referring to Senegalese youth, is overtly political and targets Senegalese people as its primary audience. Touré’s fictional film La Pirogue (2012) tries to appeal to a wider national and international audience by compiling testimonies of would-be migrants and staging their attempted sea crossing. Detailed analyses of certain sequences reveal how words, images and music combine to convey the directors’ political and aesthetic goals.

This article examines how contemporary authors writing about migration turn to fantastic, spectral and mythical elements when writing about passages of transit. I turn to narratives written by Yuri Herrera and Mohsin Hamid and explore how these authors use mythology and magic to resist telling a ‘true’ story, creating what I call a stowaway aesthetic that hides away other stories in its narrative. By stowing away information and misrepresentation through magic, these authors create impossible stories that attend to archival silences. They enact a resistance against the ways in which the state extracts and polices narrative in the process of asylum-seeking. I argue that in the moments in which authors eschew realism, they direct the reader’s attention to the unknowable aspects of migrant lives that constitute an absent presence in the process of migration.

A migrant camp is a ‘non-place’ where personal identity is put at risk. Music is a means of personal adaptation in camps, even if it means allowing little place for the real reasons for displacement of the very people shaping these new hybridizations of music. The present power of music in such a place is to create strong relationships, ‘shortcutting’ both narration and the longer time needed in order to create relationships. The kind of personal advantage it is for someone to be a musician is a topic surprisingly forgotten, obscured by theoretical habits of seeing music essentially as an expressive activity directed to an audience, or as being a communicative activity. Music has a performative power different from language, as a non-verbal art having a strong and direct relationship to the body. Musical interactions on the field give migrants the ability to balance their problematic situation of refugees, shaping a real present.

This article examines the marvellous realism of two Haitian writers, past and present. Building on earlier schools of literary and socio-ethnographic thought, including Haitian indigenism, French surrealism and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s ‘marvellous real’, Jacques Stephen Alexis theorized marvellous realism at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. Some 60 years later, James Noël published Belle merveille, a novel that depicts a refugee who survives the earthquake of 2010 and embarks on a journey to understand his place among international aid groups that proliferate in the aftermath. The article suggests that Noël’s novel is both a tribute to and a creative rethinking of Alexis’s ideological commitment to the intersection of literary and social realism. It argues that by filtering events through the imaginary of the refugee, Noël interrogates the very categories of the marvellous and the real undergirding Alexis’s aesthetic and political project. After providing theoretical and historical context for Noël’s work, the article carries out close readings of Belle merveille to illuminate the ways in which its redeployment of marvellous realism delivers a critique of humanitarian aid.

This afterword reflects on the tension between art, politics and philosophy at the thematic core of this Special Issue, ‘Migrants and Refugees Between Aesthetics and Politics’. Brugère calls attention to a recent art exhibition – one that came out of her book with Guillaume Le Blanc, The End of Hospitality – at the Museum of the History of Immigration, in Paris, as a way to frame a conflict between two ideas of hospitality, or the broad ethical gesture to welcome others and the political right that more and more governments are unable to uphold as borders tighten around the globe. The afterword elaborates on the aims of the exhibition, namely, to show ‘a correspondence between art and philosophy on the question of hospitality’. Rather than a mere representation of discourse around migration, the artwork displays a praxis of the imagination, one in which cultural production by and about refugees brings spectators to recognize a shared sense of vulnerability and to question received ideas on migration. In this manner, contemporary art forms become an essential link in the ongoing struggle between ethics and politics.

Review of: La Mer à l’envers, Marie Darrieussecq (2019)

Paris: POL Éditeur, 250 pp.,

ISBN 978-2-81804-806-1, p/bk, €18.50