Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2022

Using Thing theory and a Marxist analysis of temporality, I show how identity formation in Erpenbeck’s novel relies on objects and a person’s ability to work, demonstrating how the dehumanizing effects of capitalism not only impact the asylum seekers in the novel, but its German characters as well. Although characters fight against dehumanization, Erpenbeck’s novel demonstrates that the only hope for the future lies in systemic change. Although the majority of scholarship on Go, Went, Gone reads it through the lens of Europe’s refugee crisis, I argue that Erpenbeck contextualizes the crisis, situating it in a dehumanizing capitalist system fraught with internal contradictions to show the true crisis is not an influx of migrants, but the failure of the German political and economic systems to account for them.

Since 2014 over 2 million people have arrived at the shores of Europe through irregular crossing. This has created huge socio-economic consequences for the European people. In a bid to solve this unprecedented migrant crisis, the European Union and its member states have implemented migration information campaign (MIC) as part of a remote border control strategy to curb irregular migration. In Ghana, Kofi Kinaata was selected as a goodwill ambassador and his song, entitled ‘No Place Like Home’ is part of a broader advocacy programme that was implemented in West Africa to reduce irregular migration. This study seeks to investigate the effects of Kofi Kinaata’s song on the migration intention of young people in Ghana. The study is a qualitative descriptive study involving sixteen participants in the Cape Coast Metropolis in Ghana. The study revealed that young people with the ambition of migrating irregularly are already aware of the fear messages used by sponsors of MICs, though they still want to travel through the irregular way. It is therefore recommended that investment in remote border control by European countries should focus more on reducing poverty and creating jobs in migrant source countries since these are the key factors driving irregular migration. Immigration policies by EU countries and other migrant receiving countries should also be relaxed making room for alternative affordable and safe pathways to migration. This article has also called on governments in migrant source countries to strengthen their institutions to deal with poverty and regulate migration. This will go a long way to curb the menace of irregular migrants in Europe and elsewhere.

Vietnamese diasporic refugee narratives critically engage images of helicopter rescues and crowded boats that saturate American-mediated memories of war’s aftermath. From a critical refugee studies perspective, Yến Lê Espiritu links war to displacement through these images to define the United States as a ‘militarized refuge’. For Mimi Nguyen, arrival initiates a ‘gift of freedom’ that names the indebtedness of the refugee to the state. In their critical engagements, arrival initiates debt for militarized refugees. To further their work, I problematize the celebration of arrival with what I call the fallacy of certainty. To dismantle the certainty of arrival, I examine expressions of what Vinh Nguyen calls ‘refugeetude’ in depictions of refugee journeys by Ocean Vuong, G. B. Tran, Nam Le and Matt Huynh. Employing Espiritu’s method of ‘critical juxtapositioning’, I engage Édouard Glissant’s relationality of the abyss and the opacity of the open boat to contextualize forced migration narratives within a longue durée of imperialism that Aníbal Quijano calls coloniality. Ending with Long Bui’s discussion of a postmemory generation of Vietnamese diasporic artists and writers’ use of performativity, I show how they forward critical refugee studies when they imaginatively return to the journey, articulating relationalities that cross oceans and temporalities.

This article reflects on the power of poetry to reframe the concepts of home, arrival and belonging, each of which is important in understanding the relationship between migration and culture. It traces the journey of a collective poem – ‘Grapes in My Father’s Yard’ – that was created during the Material Stories of Migration project in Sheffield in 2015; was performed at Migration Matters Festival and has since been shared in multiple digital and material formats between 2015 and 2022. The text’s trajectory demonstrates poetry’s capacity to transgress structural and grammatical norms and capture that which is absent, ambiguous and elusive in the idea of ‘home’. The poem intertwines different languages and flows between them, enacting the give and take of linguistic and cultural translation. This article draws on follow-up interviews and ongoing discussion with project participants and creative facilitators to explore how the ‘storying’ of migrant lives is an ongoing creative process that poetry can illuminate. ‘Grapes in My Father’s Yard’ articulates how post-arrival life for migrants is not a linear, forward-moving process but a kind of re-dwelling in lost homes and landscapes, the beginning of a micro-bordering which continues for years. The poem calls on us to read between the lines and to seek out the silences, as much as it asks us to listen to the words.

Using textual analysis, this article reflects on Adekunle Gold’s Ire (‘goodness’). It situates the song within the Nigerian contemporary orientation of ascribing ‘goodness’ to the Global North as a propellant for greener pasture quest abroad. It unpacks the representation of the images of time, returns, supplication and homeland opportunities for migrants who, over time, have not met their expectation(s) in host countries. The song affirms the call by ‘goodness’ in the homeland for migrants to return. This call to look back on the homeland’s ‘goodness’ discredits the assumption that there are better opportunities abroad. The discussion foregrounds Gold’s admonishment to work hard, considering that regardless of location, Ire can only be appropriated if one metaphorically waters the ground. The metaphoric resonance of ground watering underscores the contemporary construction of African youths as non-resourceful. It accentuates the understanding that the prerequisite for achieving ‘goodness’ is fundamentally the same both at home and on ‘the other side’. However, Gold impliedly realizes some hardworking individuals have not relented in watering the ground; yet, all efforts have proven fruitless. The climax of the sudden realization that concerted efforts can sometimes be futile and the fear of imagined poverty plunges the singer into a state of supplication and plea to his eda (‘destiny’) to lead him along a fruitful path. Reflecting on the track’s overarching philosophical import, the article concludes that the achievement of goodness is not a function of place, but hard work in harmony with eda.

Narratives of migration can be without movement. When people are suddenly internally displaced, for example, they become non-citizens in their former home countries and are unable to move, much less leave. In instances such as these, we suggest that it may be a temporal – rather than spatial – displacement that has occurred. In so doing, we examine one aspect of temporal displacement: the perpetual state of waiting as a potential tool of bureaucratic control. This is a tool that operates along an axis of hope and anxiety in what may be an attempt to keep people exactly where they already are. This state of waiting appears throughout Al-Tabuur (The Queue), a translated and fictionalized novel written by Egyptian author Basma Abdel Aziz. As illustrated here, Aziz’s novel challenges notions that migration inherently involves progress, and instead shows what can happen when both time and movement seemingly come to a still.