Underground Europe: Along Migrant Routes 3031161505, 9783031161506

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Traveling Along the Underground Railroad, in Europe
Chapter 2: The Strange Book of Benjamin Drew
The Refugee
Abolition Democracy
Do You Remember the UGRR?
A Contended History…
…To Be Examined…
…And Continuously Rewritten
A Name…
…A Train
References
Chapter 3: Along the Routes
Stations
Florence, Northampton (MA)
Zooming in on a Map
Subterranean Continuities
Borderland Europe
The Prose of Counter-Migrations
Counter-Camps
The Leash and the Tear
References
Chapter 4: Calais, Jungle—Tolone, Adoma Foyer
A Few Days to the End
From Leprosy to Plague? The Humanitarian Eviction
Awrak. Papers and struggles
Faggera!
A CAO’s Life
References
Chapter 5: Stalingrad/Porte de la Chapelle, Paris
Paris Camping
The Battle of Stalingrad
Siege of the Humanitarian Center
The Bubble
References
Chapter 6: Ventimiglia – Val Roja
If the Shebab Rise Up in Revolt…
The Spirit of the Rocks
Stations and Operations
Eufemia, Showing a Node of the Underground Railroad
References
Chapter 7: Calais/Paris
Reclaiming the Landscape
Survival
The Hunt
The Attempt
Le Journal de Jungles
From a First-Floor Room on the Outskirts of Paris
References
Chapter 8: Ceuta, Melilla. Spain/Morocco
Ibra and the Guards in a Borderland
Behind the Fences: Morocco, Europe
Beyond the Fences: The Enclaves as a Spectacular Filter
Porous Borders and Contested Settlements
Minor Subversion
Under Hostile Cities
References
Chapter 9: In and Around Athens
Premise: Why the Shadow?
The True Dream of Diavata
In Lavrio
Outpost Patras
Epilogue: to Europe
References
Chapter 10: Pozzallo, Sicily
Memories/Resonances/Presences
Dying, Telling
Policing Landings
The Scafista: A Smuggler Savior
Stuck in the Camp
The Mirrors
References
Chapter 11: Omonia, Athens
At the Crossroads
Outlines for the Ethnography of a Square
Runaway: Ways Out
Epilogue: Inhabiting a Crossroads
References
Chapter 12: Passages (Diaries of a Male Conductor and a Female Conductor)
Diary of a Male Conductor
Diary of a Female Conductor
Chapter 13: Epilogue: Harriet and that Last Train to Europe
Escape
Comparison
Coalition
Abolition Democracy
References

Citation preview

Underground Europe Along Migrant Routes Luca Queirolo Palmas Federico Rahola

Underground Europe “This unique and important book confronts migration and border studies with a new spatial and political figure: the underground. This underground is much more than a retracing of the clandestine or the undocumented, which have become rather familiar landscapes for migration scholarship. The underground is something new, for it recasts themes of hiding and revealing, moving and staying, evading and resisting, escaping and moving in a fundamentally new light. Underground Europe takes not only political and historical but poetic inspiration from the Underground Railroad, the abolitionist infrastructure through which enslaved people resisted the domination of the plantations in the United States before the Civil War. Bringing that experience into a conversation with borders, migration and solidarity in Europe’s troubled migration borderlands, this book offers us new concepts and new hope. Not many books open entirely new vistas on their subjects. Underground Europe certainly does.” —William Walters, Carleton University “The “unauthorized” movement of thousands of migrants with a call “To Europe” is a powerful feature of our time. It symbolises old and new border apparatuses and countering these apparatuses the heterogeneous coalitions of solidarity networks to support people on the move, in spite of everything, both at sea and on land. This “event” of our time is radically reshaping the global present. In this endless battle between forces of control and survival and solidarity there is a colour line which is indeed a race line. Slaughters of coloured immigrants as on the Spain-­ Morocco border co-exist with homilies of democracy, care, and protection. Yet migrants defy and continue their trek. Is there an underground Europe then calling back for us the legacy of underground movements of escapee slaves in the United States in the nineteenth century? Underground Europe is a possible history – a suppressed one - of a contentious borderland.” —Ranabir Samaddar, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, author of Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2017) “It is not often that you finish a book that leaves you in awe of what the authors have managed to accomplish. In Underground Europe Palmas and Rahola take us on an incredible journey: one that deftly intertwines the experiences of enslaved people escaping the southern states just before America’s Civil War, with those of present-day migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers in Europe, together with their

own impressions as ethnographers/activists as they seek to make sense of these past and present histories. Weaving their narrative back and forth from the Underground Railroad of the nineteenth century to Underground Europe, Palmas and Rahola explore what is remarkably transhistorical about migrant routes, the lives of those who travel along them, and the solidarity networks that support them. Following in the footsteps of the “History from Below” movement, and writing mostly in the first person, Palmas and Rahola sensitively and evocatively convey the migrants’ stories. We learn not only of the struggles  - the dangers, camps, walls, barbed wire, deplorable conditions, and officialdom – but also of the migrants’ resilience, determination, and their dreams. This is a powerful piece of work that ultimately introduces the reader to the possibility of a radically different Europe.” —Jayne Mooney, Professor of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

Luca Queirolo Palmas • Federico Rahola

Underground Europe Along Migrant Routes

Luca Queirolo Palmas DISFOR University of Genoa Genoa, Italy

Federico Rahola DISFOR University of Genoa Genoa, Italy

ISBN 978-3-031-16150-6    ISBN 978-3-031-16151-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Translation from the Italian language edition: “Underground Europe: Lungo le rotte migranti” by Luca Queirolo Palmas and Federico Rahola, © Meltemi Press Srl 2020. Published by Meltemi Press Srl. All Rights Reserved. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to Ambra and her parents, Georges and Cin

Preface

We finished writing this book in January 2020. Since then, it has felt like we live in another world. A month later, while Europe was entering the new world of SARS-CoV-2, the Greek police shot at people trying to cross the Evros river, attempting to push them back into Turkey. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Layen, praised Greece as a fundamental European shield against uncontrolled invasions. The “messianic” arrest produced by the pandemic blocked almost everything, and almost everywhere. This book was stuck as well, and it sat in our hands for more than six months. In that frozen time, we tried to update some of the stories and situations we encountered in our travelogue, contacting friends and comrades we met along the underground routes of Borderland Europe. It was a way to keep in touch. For us, it has been also a way to understand the political rationale that was enacted to counter the pandemic. While forcing the huge majority of European citizens into domestic immobility, the modalities of state-corporate governance forced (most) migrants to keep on working and circulating in logistics, retailing, and agriculture, thus revealing their essential role in the reproduction of our everyday life. Moreover, those who were traveling― challenging the increasingly reinforced European borders (by new health and bio/necropolitical logics)―continued their “unauthorized” movement. “To Europe” still sounded, and sounds like, a powerful and symbolic quest and recall―no matter how risky, selective, murderous, and impermeable its borders are becoming. While undocumented and unauthorized movements have relentlessly dug across old and new border devices and apparatuses, the vii

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heterogeneous coalition of solidarity networks kept on supporting people on the move, in spite of everything, both at sea and on land. Looking at the data provided by Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency), in 2020, the number of “irregular border crossings” (the formula officially adopted by the European prose of counter-­ migration) was quite stable, while in the following two years the growth of all the movements and escapes came back to the pre-pandemic level. These numbers exponentially increased in the following months due to the war, the second “event” that radically reshapes the global present. As for the pandemic, many of the security measures adopted have already been experienced by and tested on migrants (as in the case of forced confinement, from detention centers up to quarantine boats). Even the direct experience of war is something that many people on the move know firsthand, both as something they escape from and as something they are forced to face, once confronted with European necropolitical border politics. Indeed, in the last three decades a veritable war has been fought at Europe’s borders. According to International Organization for Migration (IOM), the macabre countability of the governance of migration gives back the skyrocketing figure of at least 25,000 “border deaths” since 2014. The current Russian invasion brings the war back to the core of Europe, triggering at the same time a huge movement of grassroots solidarity toward Ukrainian refugees that evokes the one experienced in the “summer of welcome” of 2015 with people fleeing the Syrian civil war. In the last months, millions of (white) Ukrainian refuges are guested in Europe, in the framework of an unprecedented politics of reception. Sponsored by the states and the EU, these schemes of border opening reveal immediately their selective logics, reproducing the color line at the operational and ideological core of state racism. In a sort of zero-sum game (and a racial one at that), the UK is hosting some Ukrainian refugees, while all racialized, unwanted people who managed to cross the Channel from Calais run the risk of being relocated to Rwanda, following the old UK neocolonial dream of outsourcing border and asylum procedures. On the eastern EU borders, all those who don’t possess Ukrainian citizenship, or whose phenotypes do not conform to the ones conceived as “European” (whiteness), continue to be hindered in their basic desire for freedom and safety. The same Polish government is building a 186 kilometer wall along the Belarus border, arguably the most

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expensive border infrastructure ever registered in Europe (356 million euros). The reality of the color/race line manifested itself in all its absolute violence in June 2022, when some of the narrators of this book, as many conductors and agents of Underground Europe, started to send us images of the slaughter―perpetrated by the Moroccan (and Spanish, and European) border police and military army―of black lives (currently, more than 40) around the fences surrounding Melilla. Those images, courageously produced by the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, based in Nador, and by many other unknown authors, have circulated underground within the networks of solidarity activists and even among migrants themselves. And, with few exceptions, they were almost censored by official European and global media. That massacre at the gates of Europe, a continent again transformed into a geopolitical battlefield, seemed to have no witnesses, and is therefore destined to remain an underground story: a story “not to pass on”, told by some underground voices, some of whom we actually encountered and listened to in this travelogue book. When we decided to collect tales of blockages and passages, traps and crossroads, long waits and sudden jumps (downplayed as games) across and within European borders, we had a map before our eyes, and a story from the past to reactivate. We refer to the map, following Etienne Balibar, as Borderland Europe; the story was the glorious and betrayed one of the Underground Railroad, or UGRR, the abolitionist infrastructure that supported thousands of runaway slaves in their escape from the chains of the plantations in pre-Civil War United States. Our intention was to project that betrayed history onto the European borderland, in search of a possible “Underground Europe”. In this attempt we were not alone, nor the firsts. Other scholars, activists, and comrades already resorted to the UGRR story as a possible way to name, explain, and redeem the European present. Our way of rereading that history might move away from that path (since that past still needs to be redeemed in the present), but allowed us to encounter a series of words (routes, abolition, coalition, and also slavery and chains) that need to be updated and translated in the present. Along the rivulets of Borderland Europe, looking for a possible Underground Europe, we conceive of the routes dug by unauthorized movements and supported by solidarity networks as spaces that are at the

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same time produced, crossed, and inhabited, forging many underground counter-spaces, crisscrossing European borderland. In this attempt, we privileged a terrestrial (or terra-centric) approach. But we acknowledged that sea space works often as an antecedent for everything that might be protracted on land. It was true for the Black Atlantic and for the revolts and upheavals that already broke out in the slave (or slaving) ships, of which the UGRR might be conceived of as a sort of inland prosecution. The same is true for Underground Europe, as a possible translation and continuation on land of the intensity and desires that push thousands of women and men into undertaking risky and often lethal journeys across the Black Mediterranean toward Europe―as well as long escape routes crossing thousands of miles and several national borders, before facing the European ones. We do believe that in avoiding to recognize such a desire and intensity―in its protracted and hindered extent and range―we, as Europeans, are politically lost. There exists and spreads out a possible, radically different idea of Europe in the way it is imagined and uttered by the margins, across its borders, and along those journeys and routes. The very meaning of a coalition among different subjects converging on these impermanent and underground routes resides precisely in materially recognizing this possible, radically different, yet always deferred idea. Arguably, this idea is echoed in what W.E.B. Du Bois (writing about the betrayed “black reconstruction”, defined as “abolition democracy”) referred to as the magnetic intensity of slaves’ “strike” and escape that triggered the convergence of different subjects around this essentially black struggle and experience. Yet, as we suggest in the epilogue of this book, if it is possible to talk about an analogous coalition, as a way of referring to the mixed, unstable, and at times ephemeral and often tactical alliances supporting people on the move within and against European borderland, even such a movement has to be articulated within a specific, re-actualized abolitionist horizon. It is this specific horizon one may glimpse in the intersectional encounters, along impermanent routes, between subjects that are differentially situated/captured in terms of class, gender, and race. While borders do precisely rely and act upon those differences, by reproducing, multiplying, and increasing their effects, any idea of abolition seeks to overcome their capture. Yet, as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore point out, abolition does not deal only with the act of erasing and tearing down something. It is also, if not primarily, a matter of desiring, figuring out, and creating a different here and now. It is likely that this drive was at the core

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of Du Bois’s notion of abolition democracy. As such, after the short summer of the “black reconstruction”, it has been violently and quickly reversed. In taking back the “old” story of the UGRR in the deep winter of present-day Europe, we felt the weight of that betrayed idea: the quest for another horizon, more democratic and (under)common. Genoa, Italy Genoa, Italy  July 2022

Luca Queirolo Palmas Federico Rahola

Acknowledgments

Going to, staying at, and returning to the different “stations”, getting to know them and narrating them would have not been possible without Hanane Idiha, Katy and Jean Marc Hazebrouck, Vincent Ferry, Lorenzo Navone, Juan Pablo Escarcena, Nicolas Braguinsky Cascini, Jose Palazon, Redouan M. Jalid, Livio Amigoni, Sara Hamssoui, Elisabetta Panelli, and all the activists from 20 K and Roja Citoyenne, Jacopo Anderlini, Massimo Cannarella, Georges Kouagang, Paola Ottaviano, Borderline Sicilia, and the No Border activists in Calais, Olga Lafazani, Giorgos Maniatis, Nasin Lomani, Yorgos Karampellas, Antonio Stopani, Andrea Contenta and Cristina, Elena, Eva, Jafar, Salman, Fecri, Nirwan, Bijan, and the other occupiers of the Plaza; Nawal from Lesvos, the volunteers from Nonamekitchen and the people on the run whom we met in Patras, Anna Daneri, Masha Salazkina, Luca Caminati, Dorothy Williams, Steve Strimer, and Josh Neves for their support and advice during our travels tracing the UGRR routes. We would also like to thank Sandro Mezzadra, Ranabir Sammadar, William Walters, Nando Fasce, Elena Fontanari, Max Guareschi, Luca Caminati, Dragan Umek, Sara Collot, Giovanna Zapperi, Antonio Stopani, Sebastiano Ceschi, Luca Giliberti, and Enrico Fravega for reading parts of the book, for their recommendations, and for the discussions, as well as Tim McNelis and Zoë Laks for proof-reading the manuscript.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The book was translated from Italian by Elena Boschi and was formatted by Elisa Marsiglia. The translation was financed by the University of Genova and the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation. This text is the collective product of the authors’ work. Only for academic purposes, the single chapters can be attributed as follows: Federico Rahola (1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 13); Luca Queirolo Palmas (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10).

Contents

1 I ntroduction: Traveling Along the Underground Railroad, in Europe  1 2 The Strange Book of Benjamin Drew  7 3 Along the Routes 45 4 Calais, Jungle—Tolone, Adoma Foyer 89 5 Stalingrad/Porte de la Chapelle, Paris119 6 Ventimiglia – Val Roja143 7 Calais/Paris167 8 Ceuta, Melilla. Spain/Morocco195 9 In and Around Athens233 10 Pozzallo, Sicily261

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11 Omonia, Athens287 12 P  assages (Diaries of a Male Conductor and a Female Conductor)309 13 Epilogue: Harriet and that Last Train to Europe317

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Writings on the shacks on the day of the eviction. Source: photo taken by the authors Fig. 4.2 Shoaib’s passport. Source: photo taken by the authors Fig. 5.1 Drawing by people in transit. Source: photo taken by the authors on the walls near the encampments Fig. 5.2 Drawing of the positioning of the stones of shame at Porte de la Chapelle. Source: photo taken by the authors on the walls near the encampments Fig. 6.1 Pages from La Bolla. Source: courtesy of Emanuele Giacopetti and Graphic News Fig. 7.1 The Jungle, one year later (October 2017). Source: photo taken by the authors Fig. 7.2 The Loop. Source: Journal de Jungles, n.8, March 2017, Plateforme de Services aux Migrants Fig. 9.1 IOM, UNHCR warning Fig. 9.2 The port as a fortress. Source: photo taken by the authors Fig. 10.1 At the literary café, Pozzallo (“Sorry if I haven’t drowned”). Source: photo taken by the authors

90 104 121 131 150 171 186 240 251 262

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Traveling Along the Underground Railroad, in Europe

If escaping means misdirecting, every escape story must be told by misdirecting—Anonymous

What ties a story about freedom in nineteenth-century America to present-­day Europe? How can we compare slaves fleeing plantations in the Southern states with undocumented migrants today, Quakers with volunteers in borderland parishes, abolitionists with No Border activists, Maroons with the inhabitants of the Calais Jungle, along the multiple routes that from the Sahara, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, or the Balkans cross into and through Europe? Distance in time and context might lead us to exclude any parallels. Without wanting to suggest a real comparison, this book attempts to use a material and narrative image, through which abolitionist struggles have taken shape on the other side of the Atlantic, to reinterpret the demands for freedom that crisscross the old continent today and which, by exercising a basic right to escape, exceed any attempt to channel “good and useful circulation” as well as any nationalist impulse to erect walls and close ports. The image we wish to translate to today’s Europe is that of the Underground Railroad (UGRR), a network of passages, intersections, and alliances―of “crossings”, “agents”, “stations”, and “conductors”―which allowed tens of thousands of black men and women to free themselves from the yoke of slavery, escaping the forced labor which imprisoned © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_1

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them, leaving behind bounty hunters, and avoiding the Fugitive Slave Laws, which, in the “free” North, could have handed them back to their old masters. That escape was not only a movement “away from” something, but also an attempt to establish new ways of living and working together in those days and at those latitudes, something in which someone could catch a glimpse of an “abolitionist democracy”. It is through these anachronistic lenses that we dig along migrant routes and around the different borderlands where the conflict on mobility takes shape, unveiling a backdrop of clandestine encounters and solidarity routes, culverts, and passage situations that we propose to call Underground Europe―a reading which, starting from the concept of autonomy of migrations, seeks to overturn a rhetoric haunted by people smugglers, traffickers, and victims. Our intention is not to deny their existence but to reveal and validate another map, one made of passages, “houses”, routes, and encounters. This book retraces a subterranean past with the ambition to write a “story of the present” which is equally karstic. Two recent novels partly contributed to triggering it: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Both of them, with different strategies, offer a fascinating account of the exodus, the journey, the violence, the hope, and the desperation which accompanies subjects on the run, but they end up resolving their escapes through a narrative device. In the first novel, it is an “Afrofuturist” strategy, an actual train made of iron and steam that even runs underground, allowing the slaves to escape the chains in the plantations. In the second one, it is a series of doors and windows that magically open, projecting the runaways into a problematic elsewhere, which is, however, free from wars and persecutions affecting an undefined Middle Eastern location. In fact, behind the train and the sliding doors opening onto the future there is an enormous amount of work, for the most part murky, made of passages, leaps into the darkness, hiding places, encounters, support, cooperation, and, above all, a real, physical, molar space. It is this heavy and slow space, covered at walking pace, that runs the risk of becoming eclipsed by the fantasy narrative devices deployed by the two novels, like things untold which are almost a given, which ostensibly ought to be kept or perhaps removed. And it is precisely this space which we intend to preserve, compare, and narrate at the same time, even in its inherent violence, as the routes built by yesterday’s slaves on the run and those built by today’s undocumented migrants are the fruit of desire and toil, courage and imagination, long waits and sudden accelerations, but also of everyday challenges,

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connections, and coalitions with those who have given them and are giving them material support. A similar immanent dimension, a precipitate of an idea of routes as passages and landscapes which are simultaneously crossed, built, and inhabited, becomes the center around which our story revolves. Paraphrasing Spinoza, to a deus ex-machina who magically solves every tragic and otherwise unsolvable crux, we would like to oppose or substitute a deus infra-machina, a worldly subject, which is mundane, collective, aware, and plural. The book is articulated into three movements. The first one is set between Canada and the United States just before the Civil War and, between myth and presumed truths, it traces the sequence of events of the Underground Railroad, a history which still remains contended and open. This part deals with the escape routes, the social and spatial infrastructure of abolitionism, stumbling upon strange books found by chance and unexpected journeys, coalitions and old stations, temporary shelters and mixed communities which, in some cases, have been turned into museums― stopovers on a civil pilgrimage, resources for a memory “not to pass on”, that can neither be reproduced as it is nor be neglected. The second one invites the reader to fade out that story as we project it onto the present, questioning the lexicon of European governance on migrations, of border and reception devices implemented to contain, select, and channel migrants’ mobility. It invites a reading of a Borderland Europe dotted with reception/detention camps, walls, and barbed wire, through the watermark of a subterranean Europe, an Underground Europe made of informal camps and transit zones woven into the landscape by the “nocturnal” routes of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. The third movement radically shifts toward the present, using the spurious methods of a multi-situated ethnography and of public sociology to explore “off frame” in search of what, despite the increasingly intensive and selective technologies and checks, enables movements around and especially within a specific border regime. Calais, Ceuta, Melilla, Ventimiglia and the Roja Valley, Paris, Toulon, Pozzallo, Patras, Athens, and all the other intersections featured in this book can be read as traps, conflict, and friction zones in the European borderland, but also as specific crossroads, “stations”, or passages of the Underground Europe. We have immersed ourselves into these places on multiple occasions since 2016, just before the “great crisis” triggered by the short “summer of migrations” of 2015, and until recently, following the movements and the itineraries of the informers/narrators we have met along the way. Most

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of their names are fictional, but their testimonies, which punctuate the evolution of the story, carry a depth that can be born out of a certain intimacy, the feeling of being involved in a similar “movement”, expressed through a series of routes which subvert the exiled, (re)nationalized, segregated, deadly, and racialized space of Europe today. Indeed, these itineraries are planned as much as they are improvised, they are practiced as much as they are wished for, but above all they are built and inhabited on a slope, which activates, models itself on, and challenges multiple border devices. Thus, the claustrophobic and stifling European borderland appears even more distant and dystopian vis-à-vis the demand for a right to free movement for everyone which lingers as a time frame in the biographies on the move encountered during this journey. But these aspirations continue to point toward the possibility of lives being freed from the liens of borders and leashes drawn where race, nation, gender, and class intersect―like in some of the nineteenth-century utopian communities that fugitive slaves and abolitionists of all colors came upon, like in the interstices and in the temporary autonomous zones that punctuate the routes of the present and that shine an altogether different light onto the ghostly image of a “fortress” of its “necropolitical” devices, and of its murderous effects. At times we try to turn off this light cast on the passage, on the space produced and inhabited by routes, for a number of reasons: because the story we are telling is ultimately subterranean; because the effectiveness of undocumented mobility is founded on the invisibility of the practices which make it possible; because against the panoptic spotlights pointed on migrants on the run it is necessary to demand a right to opacity, to remain in the shadows. This is why some stories, the most direct ones, are told by the anonymous voices of migrants and passeurs acting in solidarity, two of whom in particular are placed in unspecified locations of Underground Europe. However, we remain convinced that, albeit in different forms and with different accents, the same stories, tactics, and “alliances” can be traced in any corner of the European borderland and that this is true on land as well as at sea. Here, through the lens of the Underground Railroad, we are essentially focusing on the thick weave of “intersections, passages, crossroads”, and on the heterogenous coalitions which are formed within and against the internal borders in the European trap. But the same can be said about the “solidarity fleets” which, by saving lives at sea, support the journey to Europe and free those who embark on it from the conspiratorial grip of trafficking and of “fortress Europe”. Evoking the title of a

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famous book by Paul Gilroy, ours is an invitation to speak of a “Black Mediterranean” crossed by reversible routes and mixed crews whose intention is to land at a different port, at a different Europe. Besides, it is not impossible to see the presence of associations like AlarmPhone, Sea Watch, or Mediterranea, which monitor and support the crossings of rubber boats launched toward Europe and protect them from seizure and shipwreck, as something similar to the work of the vigilance committees that operated as the skeleton of the Underground Railroad in the free cities of pre-Civil-War North America. This is yet another weave, a rivulet of Underground Europe that we leave open and that others are already exploring. Finally, a note on the writing style. We have decided to report the experience of observation and dialogue that occurred at the different “stations” of Underground Europe in a direct style, punctuated by images, one that is decidedly narrative, thus ostensibly far from an academic style. This was obviously a conscious choice, reflecting our ongoing work on personal repositioning and driven by the need to reinvent an approach to (ethnographic?) writing which can accommodate a mix of styles and registers (descriptive, interpretive, reflexive, but above all narrative and political). The result is a story, a subjectively positioned travel diary, and a writing style that is as fluid as it can be, almost a concatenation, much like the events it narrates. Often we speak in the singular, other times in the first-person plural, bringing together our point of view as authors and that of other narrators and researchers with whom we shared the experience of traveling along the routes.

CHAPTER 2

The Strange Book of Benjamin Drew Montreal, June 2019

The Refugee When in any State, the oppression of the laboring portion of the community amounts to an entire deprivation of their civil and personal rights; when it assumes to control their wills, to assign them tasks, to reap the rewards of their labor, and to punish with bodily tortures the least infraction of its mandates, it is obvious that the class so overwhelmed with injustice, are necessarily, unless prevented by ignorance from knowing their rights and their wrongs, the enemies of the government. To them, insurrection and rebellion are primary, original duties. If successfully thwarted in the performance of these, emigration suggests itself as the next means of escaping the evils under which they groan. From the exercise of this right, they can only be restrained by fear and force. These, however, will sometimes be found inadequate to hold in check the natural desire of liberty. Many, in spite of all opposition, in the face of torture and death, will seek an asylum in foreign lands, and reveal to the ears of pitying indignation, the secrets of the prisonhouse (Drew, 1856: 1)

These words come from far away, one can sense it. In a non-immediate way and without ever naming it, they allude to a specific and extreme condition of exploitation and oppression―slavery―which, in the first place, as “original duty”, legitimizes every form of rebellion. Should this be impracticable, it forces people to escape, to take a leap into the darkness by migrating, to seek asylum and face the duty to grant it, outraged by the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_2

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story of violence and persecutions that were endured. Thus, they seem to connect, almost welding them to one another, a right to escape and a duty of solidarity, secretly yearning for―as one can also sense―radical conflict and change. Do they still speak to us today? They might, but they do so by referring to a time, subjects, a public and a political context which are in fact situated and inevitably distant. Among the possible openings for a book about migrant routes and refugees within, around, and against the borders of Europe in 2019, one could have certainly chosen something more immediate and immediately fitting, which would not have been difficult to find. But this is not the point, as these words are not meant to perform the decorative function of an exergue. Rather, they are meant to be the opening of a story, of a travelogue, perhaps also of the more general political project that gravitates around it. They are the opening lines of a text, A North-side view of Slavery. The refugee: narratives of fugitive slaves in Canada, published in Boston but written in the remote provinces of British America in 1855 by Benjamin Drew, an author unknown to most people, on whom several archives contain succinct biographies which paint the multifaceted picture of a typographer, journalist, editor, historian, teacher, radical abolitionist, as well as “an active participant in the work of the Underground Railroad”.1 It is also possible to visit Drew’s grave on the Burial Hill in Plymouth and, in the city archives, view the obituary that commemorates one of the most illustrious residents of the city “where it all began”, where he was born in 1812 and died in 1903, at the age of 91. More fragmentary news items in the archives tell us that during his long life Drew left the first landing site of the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers and was gone for a long time, living in Boston for nearly thirty years, as well as in New  York City, Washington D.C., and even in China, where his son moved, stopping by various other minor cities and towns in the north of the United States, all located along a specific “route” which he traveled several times. Among his various itineraries, there was a prolonged stay in Canada between 1853 and 1854, when he was able to collect the necessary materials for this 1  On September 18, 1850, the US Congress approved and promulgated an amendment to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 (which decreed that slaves who had fled to the North should be handed back to their “legitimate owners” in the Southern states) in order to contrast the multiple forms of resistance to this decree that had arisen in various “free” states. See Blaine Hudson (2006: 259 ss.). See also Campbell (1968) and Gara (1964: 229–240).

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book, which is, in many respects, anomalous. In fact, this is where he met different communities of slaves as well as single runaway slaves, mostly men, all fleeing the north of the United States after the approval of the second Fugitive Slave Act, in September of 1850,2 had made the condition of the fugitives―who had thus become “absconded”―increasingly risky. A series of clues therefore reveals the contours of a biography which is undoubtedly significant―that of an out-and-out abolitionist militant― but not exceptional per se; it resembles many others and, in various respects, it cannot be compared to those of more illustrious figures, women and men, black and white. Why then start from Drew and his book? One reason can be found in the concise preface to the first edition written by the editor, John Jewett, Drew’s friend and mentor, who, together with the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society, gave the author material support and backed his project: The work here offered to the public will be found, we venture to say, one of the most instructive and interesting that has yet appeared on the subject of American Slavery. It is original in design and scope and has been executed with the most conscientious care and fidelity. The author is a gentleman of high character, whose statements may be implicitly relied upon, and whose intelligence is not likely to have been deceived. As for the statements of the Fugitives from Slavery, they speak for themselves. Nowhere else can be found such a mass of direct and unimpeachable testimony as to the true character of the Peculiar Institution, by witnesses who have had the best opportunities of knowing its nature, and who occupy a point of view from which its characteristic lineaments can be most distinctly discerned. … We are confident that “A North-side View of Slavery” will prove to be not only one of the most effective Anti-slavery arguments ever issued from the press, but a valuable and permanent contribution to American Literature (Drew, 1856: III)

The sober tone of the editor, who owed his fortune first of all to the publication three years earlier of best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, seemed to waver in the face of his awareness of the value of the book as well as of his author, whom he praises in particular for his honesty, intended both as 2  In her substantial research work on the Underground Railroad, Mary Ellen Snodgrass devotes a concise note to Benjamin Drew, in which she erroneously describes him as a Boston native who was mostly active in Canada, citing A North-Side view on Slavery as the outcome of collective work commissioned by the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society (Snodgrass, 2008: 257 ss.).

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personal integrity and as adherence and proximity to the voices of the subjects that the book deals with. Among the bare words of the preface there is one detail that struck us above all else, almost a slip, that “they speak for themselves”, referring to the testimonies and the stories of the runaway slaves who found shelter in Canada and were contacted by Drew. On an immediate level, “they speak for themselves” points to the eloquent meaning of those words, which is more than enough, as they tell their simple and immediate version of the facts. On an indirect level, they foreshadow the peculiar and rather unusual character―which is in some ways revolutionary―of Drew’s entire operation, the fact that he limited himself to transcribing stories “more or less in the speakers’ own words”. It is an unconventional form of reporting for his time―as though the author had intentionally stepped back to leave space to the subjects and their voices, anticipating a whole period of literature as well as of political and sociological inquiry. Encountering a book can be a casual occurrence―at least it was in my case. I was guilty of ignoring its existence, and I came across The Refugee for the first time in Montreal, in the Roy States Black History Collection, a huge collection of rare works on black and African American history hosted in the library of McGill University. It took a subsequent visit to the Canadian National Library in Ottawa to understand the resonance of The Refugee, much like the fact that the original version of the full text was actually available online, both from the Library of Congress in the US and on the open-access website of the University of North Carolina.3 Therefore, mine was not a real discovery, at least not in the conventional sense, because The Refugee is not at all unknown, not among scholars if anything. After being reprinted in the 1980s by Harvard University Press, it was already relatively well known at the time of its first edition and made a certain impact before being forgotten for quite a long time.4 However, encountering a book is also a personal thing. Thus, as I was paging through The Refugee, I became (perhaps excessively) aware of a peculiar uniqueness (of the book itself, of the voices and the events it considers, as well as of the eccentric positioning of the author), and I discovered an unusual affinity: the peculiar “positional” proximity of that text to the idea and the plan behind this project, which was still uncertain and in 3  As far as we know, Drew was only cited in passing by W.E.B. Du Boisin in his work on John Brown (Du Bois, 1962). 4  https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/drew/drew.html.

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progress. Thus, it was more of a revelation than a real discovery. This is the origin of our willingness to salvage that anomalous story, to “incorporate” it and hopefully redeem it. Based on this premise, it is worth briefly revisiting the overall meaning of the peculiar political and “literary” operation, which today might be called dissemination, reflected in Benjamin Drew’s book. Right from its title, this text was intended as a direct contrary response to―perhaps as a parody of―a pamphlet, A South-side view of Slavery, written two years earlier by an “illustrious” citizen of the North who had emigrated to the Southern states, Nehemiah Adams, a moderate anti-slavery advocate who was later converted to the “moral benefits” of slavery. As the radical abolitionist that he was, Drew directly reacted to that book and to its propagandistic intent, giving a voice to those who had removed themselves from that world made of chains and death, both physical and social, by rebelling against it and escaping it. To the surface paternalism which characterized every defense of the “peculiar institution”, Drew opposed a vigorous endorsement of the right to escape, as if to say that what was scary about fugitive slaves was above all their movement, that minimal expression of freedom (and that enormous gesture of liberation) which found its expression in the act of staying in their place―made invisible by forced labor, tied to chains, marked by ownership―but rather of causing a scandal insofar as they were visibly “out of place”. Before returning to this aspect which, as we have mentioned, confers an anomalous historical and political meaning to the book, it is worth lingering on the peculiar tone and lexicon in the brief introduction which the author gives to the nearly 400 pages he “farms out” without further filters to his interlocutors. Because, for a book against slavery written around the mid-nineteenth century, The Refugee turns out to be rather surprising right from the outset, for various reasons. In the space of just a few lines Drew immediately gets in medias res, in his own way, standing out from the mental and verbal landscape shared by various prior or contemporary abolitionist texts. The issue of slavery is essentially discussed in material terms as plain exploitation, and in political terms as an absence of freedom and rights which legitimize all forms of rebellion, insubordination, and therefore removal and liberation. More precisely, Drew lays claim to a specific “right to escape” with respect to the condition implicitly referred to as “chattel slavery”, to which, however, he alludes using a different word: he does not speak of slaves (a term that never appears in the cited passage), but rather of a “class so overwhelmed”.

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Thus, slavery is certainly synonymous with deprivation of freedom and rights, with total tyranny and control, with ownership of lives through a punitive regime of racial terror, but it is more generally read as a form of exploitation, a “class” oppression. I did not examine the abolitionist literature of the time in depth, but I have a feeling that the word “class” does not appear often in similar texts, especially in those written before the American Civil War. What initially prevailed as a basic origin, particularly in early white antislavery and abolitionist circles, were the ethical-theological tones tied to the egalitarian and universalistic principles shared by many reformed churches (Unitarian, Quaker, Methodist, and Baptist), whereas the voices of black abolitionists (those of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Soujourner Truth, David Ruggles, and William Still) spoke above all of key themes of terror, exploitation, captivity, and “race”, and in urban progressive circles―which were essentially republican, influenced by the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau―the main themes that emerged were political-egalitarian, filtered through postrevolutionary illuminist principles. In fact, the abolitionist universe was also and especially the result of the convergence of all these origins tied back to the initial matrix, the theological one (through a creative reappropriation of the themes of Exodus and escape), as well as of a specific “feminist” stance (Blue, 2004), testified to by the central role that many women, black and white, had in it,5 which ended up generating a “coalition” that was unstable as much as it was varied, characterized internally by a more general fracture.6 Drew himself was part of this specific and heterogenous universe, close both to the more radical milieux of the reformed churches and to reformist egalitarianism, but in these pages he seems to focus above all on a 5  The main internal contrast within the abolitionist movement before the Civil War has to do with the divergence between, on the one hand, a moderate anti-slavery faction embodied by Abraham Lincoln which aims for a gradual overcoming of the “peculiar institution” and, on the other, the faction defined as “radical”, essentially represented by Lloyd Garrison and by his demands for “immediate emancipation” in terms of political and civil rights, which is characterized by an extraordinary convergence with the movement for female emancipation and, in essence, with the cause of Native American peoples. In addition to Davis (1981), see also Blue (2004) and Salerno (2005). 6  It is the case of, among others, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jakobs, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley Foster, Lidya Mary Child, Prudence Crandall, etc. On the role of women within the abolitionist movement and on the convergence between struggles against slavery and struggles for women’s rights, see Angela Davis’s fundamental work in Women, race and class (Davis 1981).

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materialist reading, precisely a class reading. Therefore, it would be worth extending our field and asking ourselves, for instance, how many other voices―not only in the New World and not only regarding slavery―were speaking so explicitly in terms of “class” in 1855; which kinds of readings, and which setting and political landscape gave rise and inspiration to a figure like Benjamin Drew. Unfortunately, I am not a historian (of Marxism or of abolitionism), so I will limit myself to suggesting a hypothesis to be tested and possibly explored elsewhere, not in this book. It is tied to the radical abolitionist circles of New England, in particular of Boston, of the early 1830s, where, partly owing to the presence of various German socialist exiles and especially following the great black abolitionist David Walker, whose book Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World written in 1829 had such an impact that it was censored in the South (Walker, 1829), a radical cell was formed around figures such as William Lloyd Garrison, George W. Benson, Isaak Knapp, Wendell Phillips, but also Lydia Mary Child. In 1833, the latter had published―implicitly responding to Walker’s invitation―a further Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Child, 1833) which, starting from its title, featured a series of elements that manifested a more general tension as, in addition to the explicit use of the word “class”―albeit in a way that differed from the subsequent Marxist meaning―it ostensibly included one of the first statements of the idea of African Americanness. In fact, in that text Child invited a rereading of the “peculiar institution” in broadened terms, which were extended globally to the “colonial question”. Moreover, she mentioned a particular proximity or “intimacy” between, on the one hand, the North American abolitionist uprising and, on the other, the revolution and radical reforms (of rights, of the property system, and of the management of plantations) which had been started four decades earlier by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti and repressed by Napoleon’s empire. Above all, she made a connection between the uprising against slavery and a series of struggles for political and civil rights (to education and to vote) with appeals for emancipation (first of all female),7 which ended up being distilled into one voice that, in 1833, spoke in the first person of a pained and direct personal experience:

7  The comparison between women and the colored race is striking … both have been kept in subjection by physical force (Child 1833: 52).s

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By publishing this book, I have put my mite into the treasury. The expectation of displeasing all classes has not been unaccompanied with pain. But it has been strongly impressed upon my mind that it was a duty to fulfil this task; and worldly considerations should never stifle the voice of conscience. (Child, 1833: 254)

Perhaps we could have started from here, from the epilogue of that text and from this “expectation of displeasing all classes” uttered in 1833 by a (white) female voice. But this would have resulted in a different book, undoubtedly more demanding than this one, which could have rewritten the history it deals with through the lens of gender or even just explored that extraordinary experiment that was taking place in New England until the Civil War: the extremely challenging construction―precarious and fraught with obstacles―of a heterogenous “coalition” of subjects of different classes, races, and genders. We will return to the meaning of this possible coalition and we will meet Lydia Maria Child again in the following pages, still in Massachusetts. At this point, for now, it is worth lingering on a series of additional elements found in the opening of Drew’s book, as it is not only a question of “class” which makes that text eccentric (and allows, for instance, to extend its reach to suggest a upside-down reading of “race” as a consequence of slavery, prefiguring the black Marxist approaches of the following century, such as those of C.R.L. James or Eric Williams). Drew uses an altogether different set of words which are equally surprising. After having legitimized escape as a vicarious right with respect to the preliminary necessity of all attempts of insurrection (perhaps alluding to the revolt led by Nat Turner in 1831 in Southampton County in Virginia and preconizing the imminent armed insurrection of John Brown in 1859), Drew describes the condition of fugitives who had to protract their exodus from the no-­ longer free Northern states to Canada using the word “asylum”, defining the subjects who aspire to such protection as “refugees” right from the title of his book. Not less explicitly, he also frames the crucial issue of the “right to escape” of those who intended to remove themselves from the leash of the Fugitive Slave Laws in modern or international terms as “emigration”. Thus, the issue of the exodus of runaway slaves seems to take on a different, exorbitant significance, calling into question orders and scales which can no longer be restricted to a national issue. However, if the unusually up-to-date lexicon contributes to isolating Drew’s work and to lending it a strange feeling of proximity, it is above all

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his methods that make a difference. What is really surprising is that with these words―migration, asylum, refugees, class, and so on―Drew introduces a rather unusual inquiry, in its contents as much as in its form, outlining a sort of apology of movement, of escapes within and beyond borders that represent as many liberation routes. His collection of stories and firsthand testimonies from runaway slaves is in fact compiled based on the different places or communities where he had met them, on the geography which was materially traced during their escape, and on reception opportunities. St Catharines, Toronto, Hamilton, Galt, London, Queen’s Bush, Chatham, Buxton, Dresden/Dawn, Windsor, Sandwich, Amherstburg, Colchester, and Gosfield: these are the places in British America visited by Drew, the names of as many communities created in Eastern Canada by the cooperation between refugees, black and white abolitionists, and solidarity committees, as well as the last haven on a protracted journey through stations scattered along the way, along the border of slavery, that Dixon-Mason line which, by shifting to the US-Canada border, generated more forks. Thus, Drew’s “voyage-out” follows a specific trajectory which reflects multiple routes and a peculiar way of living along them, transforming the surrounding landscape, which characterized a specific collective subjectivity. These are routes adapted to the circumstances, accidental and rough, often nocturnal and always clandestine, mostly self-organized but also supported, facilitated or protected by abolitionists like Drew himself, which expressed the tenacity and the relentless intensity of what the author concisely defines as “a natural desire of liberty”. Historically, these routes, which were the result of a subterranean labor and of a particular kind of cooperation, were named the Underground Railroad (UGRR). Wondering about the meaning of that strange book therefore allows us to come across a decidedly more extensive weave, with different souls, forks, bases, and locations, which generated a radically “Other” space that cannot be reduced to the borders and partitions of the official, national space. I have tried to conceive of a concise definition for this weave and for the whole political operation intrinsic in The Refugee, and the most recurring words were those of a “coalition” and of a specific “counter-space” Thus, in my attempt to follow the traces of those ways out, those routes, in their political and historical meaning, in the grassroots organization, and in the cooperation between different subjects that made them possible, I found something like the skeleton and the meaning of this book and of this project, the idea of an Underground Europe.

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Abolition Democracy We ought to ask ourselves who the actual authors of The Refugee are and who its readers, its interlocutors, its audience are… Benjamin Drew obviously had a central role, but he was above all the editor of an operation involving, besides him, a publisher, an organized group (the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society), a sensitive audience located on the two sides of a border, an explicit enemy (the pro-slavery states), an immediate opponent (the juridical capturing device triggered by the Fugitive Slave Laws), and, finally, the authentic “talking subjects” of the book, the former slaves who were fleeing the Southern states and, after 1850 and the start of the manhunt incited against them, also the “free” Northern states. Among these there were some well-known names, starting from Harriet Tubman, who met Drew in St. Catharines and whose concise testimony evokes the fate of two sisters “dragged away in chains” and the uncertainty due to a leash looming over her condition as a “free woman” preventing her from returning to her “native land”. Significantly, Tubman omits all references to the central role she played in supporting and organizing the escapes of many other runaway slaves, a role which has earned her the sobriquet of “Moses” of the Underground Railroad, a name given to her by William Lloyd Garrison, the historic leader of the abolitionist movement in Boston. If, later on, as she would be able to declare during a convention for the extension of the right to vote to blacks and women, she proudly laid claim to her incredible experience as a conductor of the UGRR (“I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say―I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger”),8 in 1854 in Canada her words were still subject to censorship, and her testimony was lost among those of over a hundred other witnesses met by Drew. This is because the single voices, some of which later became known through autobiographies and reassessments, end up flowing into a choral story like many tesserae of a mosaic, forming a collective subjectivity. As Drew pointed out: The colored population of Upper Canada was estimated in the First Report of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, in 1852, at thirty thousand. Of this large number, nearly all the adults, and many of the children, have been 8  It is a famous speech delivered by Tubman during a convention that took place in New York City in 1896 for the extension of the right to vote to the whole black population (Bradford 1869; see: https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bradford/bradford.html).

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fugitive slaves from the United States; it is, therefore, natural that the citizens of this Republic should feel an interest in their fate and fortunes. (Drew, 1856: V)

Thus, between the lines and in addition to informing us of the emergence of an actual “Black Canada” which had essentially arisen following the second Fugitive Slave Law, Drew implicitly claims the immediate co-­ nationality and the less-than-immediate citizenship (intended essentially as “voice”) of the runaway subjects. He also twists around the issue of the production of refugees against the “free” states of the North which let former slaves turn into “absconded” fugitives, irregulars. He goes further still, and, addressing his fellow countrymen, he pulls apart the racial profiling which Southern propaganda had constructed against rebel slaves through the very voices of those same subjects to whom he devoted “the majority of this volume”.9 However, as in Tubman’s case, these are voices and subjects that are always in danger and, for some of them, anonymity seems to be preferable, if not the only option. There is a lot that must be hidden and left untold in the stories collected by Drew: the uncertain and suspended condition of being under constant threat, the clandestine escape, the secret routes requiring support and protection. And why is that? What is the truth which must remain hidden between the lines of the single testimonies and in the folds of a choral, communal story? What is the implicit “unspoken” message of many voices repeating in unison, almost obsessively, their reasons for escaping, their death sentences formalized through the imposition of chains and forced labor, their fear of returning, being caught, and regressing to that state of terror? Essentially, the shared element behind the words being uttered is the very condition of possibility whereby those words can be uttered. It is the 9  Many causes, however, have hitherto prevented the public generally from knowing their exact condition and circumstances. Their enemies, the supporters of slavery, have represented them as “indolent, vicious, and debased; suffering and starving, because they have no kind masters to do the thinking for them, and to urge them to the necessary labor, which their own laziness and want of forecast, lead them to avoid. … Such being the state of the case, it may relieve some minds from doubt and perplexity, to hear from the refugees themselves, their own opinions of their condition and their wants. These will be found among the narratives which occupy the greater part of the present volume. … While his informants talked, the author wrote: nor are there in the whole volume a dozen verbal alterations which were not made at the moment of writing, while in haste to make the pen become a tongue for the dumb” (Drew, 1856: 11).

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fragility of an uncertain and sub judice status, but it is also the history and the weave of a route, a way out which has produced that specific space of enunciation―another space, a black counter-space which was built, woven, and experienced within and against American borders. It is undoubtedly significant that in the whole book the words “Underground Railroad” recur only three times, in three testimonies, as if it were that “unspoken” message which bonds the experiences of those who speak and of those who listen. And yet, it is precisely owing to this collective undertaking and to this subterranean space, produced between the folds of borders and capture apparatuses, that that book was possible, and it is to the search of something similar today in Europe that we wish to devote this book. However, it is better not to rush into things and, rather, to go back to exploring the context surrounding Benjamin Drew’s whole operation― his interlocutors, his audience, and his main objectives. The book leaps across a border in order to look especially toward the South, addressing those who, among the fellow countrymen of the collective author that gives voice to The Refugee, can get “useful” information from it: From the ties of a common humanity and a common nationality, we feel a deep interest in those exiled men. Why have they left a government which acknowledges that “all men are born free and equal”, and given their allegiance to another which does not recognize so democratic a doctrine? What circumstances have led them to prefer a monarchy to a republic? Why have they exchanged the genial clime of the south for a realm where winter holds half the year? Why have they abandoned friends and kindred, kind masters and mistresses who were willing to take care of them … to live a life of exile among strangers? What are their views of the patriarchal institution? Which condition do they find best suited to the African race, or rather to a race partly African, partly Saxon, slavery or freedom? … What is their present condition? What are their prospects for the future? These and similar questions can be most satisfactorily answered by the refugees themselves. (Drew, 1856: 13–14)

Here the condemnation of the system of slavery by the slaves themselves leads to a radical critique of American democracy. The voices of the exiles, who were forced to prefer the cold Canadian winters to the mild climate of the Southern states and the British monarchy to the chains of a republic founded on race and slavery, become the situated point of view for a rereading through an African gaze, or rather through an “African and Saxon” one―that is African American―of the “peculiar institution” upon

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which the republican order is founded. However, this is not what it is all about, because by speaking to the United States through a situated and exiled gaze, the book questions the present and the potential future of that democracy. It will take more than a decade, a Civil War, and a constitutional amendment, the Thirteenth, before that future can take shape, however fleetingly. It will be the brief summer of the Reconstruction, redefined as “Black Reconstruction” in a text written by W.E.B.  Du Bois in 1935 which was extraordinary in many respects (Du Bois, 2013; 2° Du Bois, 1962).10 In the pages of that book, Du Bois explicitly states what Drew, much like various other radical abolitionists, particularly black ones (William Still and Frederick Douglass), had grasped: “The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America, lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy” (Du Bois, 2013; 2° Du Bois, 1962). He also interprets the abolition of slavery produced by the Civil War and enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment as the result of a “general strike” conducted by the slaves during the war and of a more general convergence of political and social forces triggered by that uprising. Du Bois will call this convergence “abolition-democracy”, identifying in it the main crux and the breaking point of a constitutional and democratic order founded on class, race (and gender), as if to suggest that the only way to rise from the ashes of the Civil War and from the “unfinished American Revolution” (Foner, 1988) would be through a democracy built around the kind of coalition and counter-spaces which were at the center of that strange book by Benjamin Drew. Perhaps The Refugee does not surprise that much, or it might only surprise us. The question then is not crucial, surely not as crucial as a series of more immediate questions. Is it possible to write a similar book in today’s Europe? How should it be organized? Which voices should it collect? Which escape stories should it tell? Which routes should it support and protect? Against whom and against what should it be aimed? We believe that any possible answer preliminarily leads to a further question about the potential meaning of the word abolitionism today, obviously not in the philological sense, following to the letter the glorious experience of the movement which Benjamin Drew joined and participated in. Rather, it 10  This is how Du Bois summarized the paradox of a democracy built on the “peculiar institution” of slavery and which could be achieved in a truly democratic way only through the slaves, their revolt, and their liberation (Du Bois 1992: 66).

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would be a matter of picking up from experiences like his, those of Mary Child, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, or William Still, the invitation to concentrate on the routes and on the need for a coalition which is capable of producing, supporting, and protecting counter-spaces, passages, and corridors which turn out to be incompatible with those governed by capture apparatuses and border devices. Back then, in the pre-Civil War US, it was the Fugitive Slave Laws, but here and now, in today’s Europe, it is the different reformulations of the Dublin Regulations, the readmission agreements, the expulsion procedures, the seas, the walls, the camps, and the multiple border technologies adopted to sentence to death, govern, contain, and curb the mobility of migrants and refugees. Getting back to the “remote” history of the Underground Railroad, in which Drew was an active participant and activist, and trying to project it onto the incomparable political geography of today’s Europe can produce a different reading of the meaning of routes, escapes, and crossings that defy the multiplication of borders and the drift toward nationalism, racism, and sexism which are materially redesigning the “old continent”. Today, from the multiple color, class, and gender lines which, by intersecting one another, are radically redefining material and living conditions in (postcolonial) Europe, one can essentially escape through these kinds of routes, through the counter-spaces produced by migrants and refugees, and supported by a coalition of different subjects: a renewed “abolition democracy” which needs to be reinvented against the borders and the border devices that produce new forms of oppression, race, and slavery. Before returning to this line of discussion and trying to answer all these questions, which define the theoretical and action space of this work, it is necessary to take a few steps back, on the traces of the Underground Railroad. What do we know about the Underground Railroad?

Do You Remember the UGRR? They say that in 1842 on a plantation in Alabama The slaves unearthed a huge skeleton, the bones of a giant whale, … And the slaves looked at the huge bones and they said: These must be the bones of a fallen angel … It's easier to sail around the world in a coffee cup than to see a whale when he comes rising up. (Laurie Anderson, Pieces and Parts)

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The four large fans hanging from the ceiling of the Union Unite Church are spinning at full speed, but they are not enough to fight the early-­ afternoon heat. The stifling effect is mitigated by the fans that many forward-­thinking women have brought with them. I conform, fanning myself with a copy of the Montreal Community Contact, the local newspaper of the black community, and, as I do that, I give some relief to my neighbor, Muriel, who has kindly saved us a seat on the benches for the whole duration of the reception in the basement during the inauguration ceremony of the Oliver Jones Hall. We are in Montreal’s first black church, founded in 1906 by a group of worshippers (mostly descendants of runaway slaves) who had been rejected by all the other religious communities and located in the heart of the oldest black neighborhood of Quebec’s capital, Little Burgundy, the vernacular anglophone translation of the more chic-sounding Petit Bourgogne. Muriel seems amused, she is laughing and talking to the guests taking turns on the stage during the concert in honor of Oliver Jones, the well-­ known pianist who was a student of the great Oscar Peterson who, like Jones, grew up at the Union Unite, and she is listening, sitting in the first row. When Rane Lee sings “Body and Soul”, she elegantly claps her hands, snapping her fingers in time with the music, while another old lady who is sitting to our right, Monica, shouts out, “wow, that is jazz!” Meanwhile, Muriel explains, with a touch of understatement, that she only comes to Unite occasionally, as she lives far, in the North, but it is clear that she is very closely tied to that community and to that church. Monica, however, is definitely more of a regular and states that the seat she is occupying has been hers for over forty years. Between one performance and the other, I chat with Muriel and I explain the main reason for my stay in Montreal and in Canada. She looks at me surprised and, for the first time, I get the feeling that I appear truly exotic to her: “The Underground Railroad? And what would you like to know, from Italy, about the Underground Railroad?” Now that I think about it, I should have turned her question around: “Basically, I’m here to understand what you know and think about the Underground Railroad”. But I did not do that. It did not occur to me and so I got muddled talking in general about routes, those used by yesterday’s runaway slaves and by migrants and refugees in Europe today. Muriel gave a hint of a smile, hiding behind a polite interest. She did not add anything about the UGRR, but her curiosity and her astonishment toward me remained intact. In the days that followed, I would get the chance to fill that silence and go back

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to her perception and the current meaning of that particular experience of routes, escapes, and passages, starting from the following day, when, a few blocks away from there, I met Dorothy Williams, a historian at Concordia University, an urban activist, and a point of reference for the black community of Little Burgundy. In her attempt to interpret Muriel’s astonishment, Dorothy immediately tells me that the memory of the Underground Railroad is very much present in the history of Quebec and Canada; it is a “foundational event” celebrated in the national curriculum and included in its official pantheon. She adds that, also starting from that event (the role played in Eastern Canada and especially in Ontario by abolitionist groups and anti-slavery sympathizers who, by virtue of the non-hostility of their government and of the British Crown, received many refugees fleeing the Northern states), it was possible to build a peculiar “myth”, a national history which pushes away and removes, pardoning them in a mythical past, the persistent refractions of the color line and their ability to impose a peremptory socio-­ racial order. Thus, the memory of the Underground Railroad in Canada is above all a way of reinventing on a national scale and celebrating on a mythological level an “original” multicultural or multiracial community which is actually an illusion, ending up denying any real subsequent presence, such as that of the generations of West Indian, Caribbean, Antillean, African, Asian, and Arab migrants that followed, all of which have been excluded from that official history. Regarding this sequence of checkered events―says Dorothy―Quebec and Montreal seem to add a further variant. In terms of importance and numbers, the reception of refugees from the United States was decidedly more limited than in neighboring Ontario. Here, in any case, it is above all Afro-Francophone migration and in particular Haitian migration which represents the dark side, the bottom of the social ladder, as though the alternating misfortune of Haiti and perhaps also the rebel ghosts of Toussaint Louverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines had continued to act, fueling a characteristic negative stigma. This is precisely why―she continues―the experience of the Underground Railroad cannot be considered a shared one. On the contrary, it paradoxically turns out to be an exclusive and excluding myth, reappropriated in different stories, apologies, as well as national and local “discourses” aimed at celebrating the past and pardoning the present. This is a strange heterogenesis for a clandestine, underground experience: posthumous glorification and transfiguration into a trophy for competing narratives, as though it was a sort of cadavre exquis of which

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everyone positionally redraws the contours and contends pieces in order to build their own redeemed story. Thus, a sequence of events which are literally “underground” and partisan, partial (that is, belonging to/of “the part of those that have no part”) becomes a sort of public monument, standing out in the empyrean of a story that has been pacified so that it could be turned into a paradoxical “overground”. This process suppresses and betrays the clandestine original meaning of a series of routes and counter-spaces which are incompatible with and cannot be reduced to the national dimension. This national myth―says Dorothy―a sort of posthumous glorification and usurpation, applies to Canada as much as to the United States, but with one significant difference. In the former, as she has already explained, it is surrounded by an aura of unanimism which omits and silences the history of part of the current “multi-” population of the country where the idea of multiculturalism was born. In the second, however, it breaks up as it reflects the various phases of American political history, from the Unitarian Republican myth (heritage of Jefferson and Lincoln) to the post-Civil War reconciliation―the haze, the cancellation, and the removal during the long years of segregation and of the Jim Crow laws―up until its contended re-emergence during the time of the struggles and movements for the civil rights of minorities. And what about today? How does the memory of that history speak to the wall between the United States and Mexico, to the criminalization of all forms of solidarity with migrants, through the concentration camps for minors at the border, to the persistent white supremacist myth, to the structural and state racism denounced by Black Lives Matter? Dorothy shrugs: “yours could be a good way to get back to that history and make it live again in the present”. Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, wherever they may be today, continue to suggest that we always tell that story again to subtract it from any posthumous celebration/usurpation, to affirm its scandalous and “inappropriate” survival, and to redeem the subterranean space it has produced. Other voices―not coincidentally all female―invite us not to resign to the idea of it having become a monument. An example is Deanna Bowen, an Oakland-born artist who has been living in Toronto for years and whose work mostly focuses on the accurate, almost obsessive, reconstruction of the thousands of rivulets of the black diaspora remembered through a family history. Hers is an exercise in auto-ethnography―in addition to being an auto-analysis―in an attempt to hold together the threads of a constant dispersion. She explores the different ways of inhabiting

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constricted spaces, mostly imposed and always scattered, tying them back into a story which suggests a deferred yet possible image of “home”. “Sum of the parts: what can be named” is the title of one of her performances, an eighteen-minute monologue of rigorous enunciation, at times uncertain and emotional. According to the paper records, as far as sources, research, and memory can reach, Bowen recaps dates, places, and names of an impressive sequence of “ancestors”―from Africa and the Middle Passage, hinted at and left to our intuition, to slavery in Alabama and the move to the North or to neighboring states, marked by the long decades of segregation, up until the most recent generations, the alphabetization of the grandparents, the aunts and uncles, the childhood memories, a family name acquired by choice, and a present that tells the story of over 600 Bowens scattered across America. Thus, her words quite literally make up a living, “current” genealogy in which the here and now of a present voice rereads, explains, and redeems a past of ostensibly buried voices, of bodies that may have been subjugated, of knowledge that was probably disqualified and, in any case, excluded from history, salvaging another history within and against the official one through the sound and weight of those pronounced names.11 I do not know how intentional or central this may be in this particular genealogical dig, but I got the impression that the list of names and places uttered by Bowen ends up producing also a specific geography, outlining through those words an invisible map, the material and effective trace of moves that were forced and constrained as much as they were lived in and inhabited. After all, all of the African descendants, be they from century-­ old weaves or from first generations, tell stories in their family genealogy which are the outcome of this peculiar movement, suffered and acted on. They become dispersed, interwoven, and in this very tension, they carve something akin to a counter-space, a removed counter-history which is also a subterranean counter-geography. Nothing could be further removed from the static and immobile idea of a monument… But perhaps I am wandering off, and I still have not answered the question left hanging at the end of the previous chapter: what do we know about the UGRR? 11  This is how the performance ends: “My name is Deanna Jean Bowen, I moved to Toronto shortly after my parents’ death, and I’ve been lived here since August 1994. This project began in 1996. What happened between then and now it’s another story”, http:// www.deannabowen.ca/sum-of-the-parts-what-can-be-named/.

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A Contended History… I have spent over a month in Canada searching for the “living” traces of the Underground Railroad, which will also lead me to the United States, to some towns scattered around New England, and I do not quite know how to continue, whether I should focus on the reconstruction of facts, of the history of the UGRR, or whether I should concentrate on their interpretation. I choose something in the middle, perhaps the most boring approach, probably the most difficult: trying to bring the subterranean meaning of the Underground Railroad to the surface, starting from the different interpretations and narratives it has produced and which have been reproduced in time. My hypothesis is that, among these different versions, it is possible to identify something of a fracture, a fault line which still cuts through the fictional space of a national history, the symptom of an irreducible and unplaceable experience, a counter-space which rejects any monuments or “redemptive symmetries” (this formula comes from Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish-Said, 1986). The Underground Railroad―the historical feat involving the organization of clandestine escape and of liberation routes and itineraries from the pro-slavery states in the South to the “free” states in the North, and later, after 1850 and the Fugitive Act, toward Canada (and partly Mexico)―was an object of intermittent attention which reflected different historical moments and circumstances of political life in North America. Indeed, in the course of time, the reception and perception of that sequence of events has fluctuated, becoming (as it should be) a contended history, starting from a preliminary and more general uncertainty, a haziness surrounding its origins and name, as much as the actual size, reach, composition, organizational structure, and outcomes (in terms of escape and liberation of runaway slaves) of this particular “network”. This haziness, after all, reproduces the opaque, subterranean character of the very structure of the UGRR. “Where do we find evidence for a historical phenomenon that was, for the most part, unwritten and sometimes even unspoken?”, wonder the historians who in 1999 compiled the texts accompanying the “National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom” project, which was assigned to the National Park Service, a governmental body that manages historical

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and natural interest sites on US territory.12 These historians are certainly right to report such opacity insofar as, in the specific case of the Underground Railroad, there is no dearth of voices and, if anything, there are almost too many: those of direct witnesses, the extraordinary biographies and autobiographies of well-known runaway slaves and black abolitionists who had also been conductors on the UGRR (Truth, 1850; Jakobs & Child, 1861; Tubman in Bradford, 1869; Still, 1872; 9° ed. Douglass, 2017); the texts of white abolitionist and sympathizers (Gay, 1856; Coffin, 1876); and even the fiercely hostile and significantly alarmed accounts in the propagandistic, anti-abolitionist, and pro-slavery press supported by the Democratic Party and by the Southern states.13 This substantial crowd of eyewitnesses constitutes the corpus of primary literature which is coeval with an event whose exact origin―also and especially due to its name―still remains uncertain, almost mythical. This is because, if it is impossible to establish an exact date and location, there is still a series of myths, discordant versions, and stories on its genesis, starting from that conjured in a collective research project coordinated by the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University: In 1831, Tice Davids, a runaway slave, fled from his owner in Kentucky. Davids swam across the Ohio River with his owner in close pursuit in a boat. Davids reached the Ohio shore at the town of Ripley just a few minutes before his owner, but the owner could not find his slave. The owner purportedly said that Davids ‘must of gone off on an underground road'. Local abolitionists probably hid the man and helped him escape.14

Based on this event, Rush Sloane, an abolitionist from Sandusky, Ohio, was able to affirm that that episode “led to the naming of the Underground Railroad”. However, further research was quick to dampen all certainty, adding that “[h]istorians continue to remain divided as to the accuracy of this statement”.

12  “In 1860, the New York Herald, a fierce opponent of abolitionism, described the underground railroad as essentially a fund-raising racket that preyed on the misplaced sympathy of well-meaning whites” (Foner, 2015: 29). 13  NPS (National Park Service) 1999 (see: www.nps.gov/subjects/undergroundrailroad/ index.htm). 14  See: www.princeton.edu/africanamericanstudies/archive/index.xml?id=9503.

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Based on more rigorous evidence, Henry L. Gates, Jr., discredits such “mythological” reconstruction (in 1831, trains hardly existed15) and suggests a much later date, identifying the first use of the term Underground Railroad in an editorial published on October 14, 1842, in The Liberator, a historic abolitionist journal founded in Boston by William Garrison (Gates Jr., 2013). To support his hypothesis, Gates adds that such a date would give credit to the versions which attribute the invention of the term (which is undoubtedly brilliant) to the white abolitionist Charles Turner Torrey, still in 1842, and, citing the work of David Blight (Blight, 2004), he points out how, in any case, “the phrase did not become common until the mid-1840s”. In Gateway to Freedom. The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, one of the most recent and prominent texts on the UGRR, Eric Foner seems to suggest an older origin, identifying the first epiphany of these two words in an article appeared on a Washington newspaper in 1839: “a young slave who said he hoped to escape on a railroad that went underground all the way to Boston” (Foner, 2015: 34). Starting from this hypothetical first mention, to which he does not attribute much importance anyway, he outlines the contours of a more general event, patiently tying back together the threads of the discontinuous translation, interpretation, and (re)appropriation of this specific “contended history”, not before a further premise, as if to preempt the problem: “To what extent a clandestine network of agents in northern communities, with outposts in the South, actually existed, has long been a point of dispute among historians (Ivi: 16)”. Going back to the sources of the UGRR, the New York-based historian first of all stumbles upon a series of reports drafted in real time, for instance that by Sidney Howard Gay, New York City’s abolitionist leader and editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the official publication of the American Anti-Slavery Society.16 Despite the considerable amount of information on the UGRR’s “actual functioning and slaves’ determination to be free”, Foner points out how reports like the one written by Gay tend 15  The first fully mechanized passenger train in the United States was inaugurated at the end of 1830 by the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company. Tshe construction of actual railroads was not completed until 5 years later. 16  In collaboration with the black abolitionist Louis Napoleon, Sidney Howard Gay gave material support to over 200 runaway slaves escaping via the UGRR and produced a report, The Record of Fugitives, in which he reconstructed in great detail the actions carried out at the New York City “station” (Gay, 1856).

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to, on the whole, paint an excessive and excessively structured picture of the UGRR, exaggerating its size and, more importantly, contributing to turning white abolitionists into “the central actors of the story”. To contrast this tendency, he cites the exception represented by the extraordinary militant and testimony work of the black abolitionist William Still, whose The Underground Railroad, commissioned by the Anti-Slavery Society of Pennsylvania and published in various later editions starting from 1872, provides an essential “compilation of material about fugitive slaves who passed through Philadelphia (Still, 1872)”. It will be over two decades before we encounter the first historiographic attempt to summarize the meaning and the weight of the UGRR. It is The Underground Railroad, from Slavery to Freedom written in 1898 by Wilbur Siebert, a historian at Ohio State University, who contacted “dozens of surviving abolitionists asking for their recollections about the operations of the underground railroad” (Siebert, 1898) and, following in Drew’s footsteps over forty years later, went all the way to Canada to interview former slaves fleeing the United States (Gates Jr., 2013). The amount of material and testimonies gathered by Siebert paints the picture of a network supporting runaway slaves which, as far as it was from the idea of “a formal institution with a membership, officers, and a treasury, … ebbed and flowed throughout the decades preceding the Civil War” contributing to generating the impression (reinforced by the author himself through “detailed maps, largely a product of his vivid imagination that looked very much like contemporary railroad maps) of a highly organized system involving thousands of northern agents and a great and intricate network of stations leading to Canada”. To this structure, Siebert associates the names of over 3200 agents, “nearly all of them white men” (Foner, 2015: 25). The picture that emerges is therefore an enlarged image of an efficient and ramified network (a railway metaphor that is used perhaps too literally), and, above all, the selective and mythological image of an essentially white history, as though it were a sort of redemption from the original sin of slavery, through a sacrifice that will culminate in the Civil War. This partial version, which is redeeming as much as it is unfounded (defined by David Blight as “a popular story of primarily white conductors helping nameless blacks to freedom” [Blight, 2004: 239]), would in any case be destined to last, influencing for a long time to come both the academic and the popular perception of the UGRR and remaining substantially unchallenged until 1961, when Larry Gara, a historian at Grove City

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College in Philadelphia (from which he will be expelled in ‘62, when the McCarthyist witch hunt was in full swing, for presumed “communist sympathizing”), publishes The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. Right from its title, Gara’s book attacks the value and the method of the story corroborated by Siebert’s work. While he recognizes his indebtedness to the considerable amount of material in Siebert’s book, he contests his nostalgic, romanticized, and apologetic image of abolitionism, which leads to confusing occasional support for a fugitive slave with the reality of fleeing and the constant dedication to a project of liberation. The accusations are above all aimed at a legend which is so legitimized that it overestimates the size and the organization of the UGRR (“a myth”) and especially the role of a minority of “benevolent” white people, silencing the decisive role “of escaping slaves and free black communities in the North”.17 The Liberty Line is the prelude to a radical rewriting of the history of the UGRR, which will culminate in the struggles and movements for civil rights, reclaiming in the first place the erased centrality of a black subjectivity which cannot be reduced to a unitarian and pacified narrative. The way this story has been told, the emphasis placed on the decisive role of abolitionist circles, that official history and that national myth have indeed continued to shine the spotlight on a specific anthropological figure, implicitly white and mostly male. The period of black radicalism will contribute to marring―not only in academic debates―this ecumenically selective view, founded on the appropriation and usurpation of an essentially black presence. And yet, as Foner leads us to believe, the indispensable reclaiming of the presence of that barred subject paradoxically insinuates the risk of losing or erasing something, reducing the specific and general weight, impact, and significance of this essentially black experience. Indeed, in a series of later work, the UGRR will not only be radically relativized or cut back, but even removed. On this matter, Foner cites an important book like Rebel of the Plantation by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, devoted to the resistance, 17  The Liberty Line contributed to significantly relativizing the hegemonic position attributed to the abolitionist committees, but without denying their existence (“a small number of energetic individuals, such as William Still, systematically assisted fugitives” [Gara 1961: 93]), and it should be credited for reaffirming the authentic subject of the UGRR, showing the extent to which slaves mostly had freed themselves receiving little support, at least until their arrival in the “free” States of the North.

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the struggles, and the fleeing of slaves from the plantations system. Through a detailed reconstruction of the different sabotage, subtraction, and evasion tactics adopted by slaves, the two authors, rather, highlight how “a far larger number of slave ‘absentees’ ran off for a few days or weeks, hiding out in the vicinity and then returning to their homes, than ever reached the North (Hope Franklin & Schweninger, 2000: 27)”, and, for this reason, they do not mention the UGRR, which is only cited in passing twice. This is also true of the earlier, pioneering work by Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolt (Aptheker, 1943), an equally meticulous and ostensibly more extreme reconstruction of the forms of resistance carried out by slaves (spontaneous revolts, systematic theft, hunger strikes, and even suicide, in addition to escape),18 in which the terms Underground Railroad features only three times. Is it worth asking questions about the reasons for these omissions (if not outright denials)? What do they reflect? What is it that they (do not) tell us? If, clearly, the history of the UGRR is usurped and mythologized, is it really fair to relativize it until it is effectively removed rather than investigate the reasons for such a mythologization and to reclaim its reach as a specifically black experience? As much as it is objectively unavoidable and irrefutable, the revisionist tendency inaugurated by Gara is not the last chapter in the brief history reviewed by Foner, who actually closes the introductory paragraph of his book citing renewed critical interest―also through a reevaluation of Siebert’s work―by a whole generation of subsequent historians. Alongside this re-emerging academic attention, Foner also identifies a specific revival in terms of “public history”, halfway between local pride and spectacularization, which he looks at with skepticism and criticizes, although he ends up recognizing its implicit pedagogical function.19

18  “Sabotage, shamming illness, ‘stealing,’ suicide and self-mutilation, and strikes were common devices which plagued slave-holders” (Aptheker 1943: 76). 19  “Meanwhile, independent of the scholarly debate, the underground railroad has enjoyed a resurgence as a focus of public history. A major museum, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, opened in Cincinnati in 2004. The National Park Service has developed a variety of valuable educational activities related to the subject (as well as a bicycle “adventure” along underground railroad routes), and numerous local groups have been engaged in identifying sites where fugitive slaves were hidden. While prone to exaggeration for reasons ranging from community pride to the desire to increase tourism, such work has deepened our understanding of how local activists assisted fugitive slaves” (Foner, 2015: 16).

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Thus, the impression one might get is that of an accommodating epilogue, a sort of happy ending that glosses over what is actually at stake in this contested and contended history―and it does not seem to be completely unfounded. This is another reason why, at the risk of being somewhat repetitive, it is still necessary to linger on the terms of such a contrast between, on the one hand, a reading that is “mythological”, ecumenical, pacified (if not spectacularized―a monument) and, on the other, the necessary partisan rewriting and reappropriation of a historical fact like that of the Underground Railroad. It is also necessary to try to examine that specific fault line in depth, on the premise that, given the kind of ultimatum that they seem to impose (between a history that can either belong to everyone or not be at all), both versions (and undoubtedly the first one more than the second) end up losing the basic political meaning of an experience which still remains radically anomalous precisely because it is partisan. This is because in the end the key question, which is necessarily indebted to Gara’s work, has to do with the place and the specific and inevitably uncomfortable meaning which, as a “black experience”, the UGRR takes on in the general history of the United States (“a war for the country’s soul”, as suggested by Bordewich, 2005) as much as in any possible attempt to subsequently historicize it, which is also a symptom of its peculiar unplaceability. But again, it is better not to say too much and proceed gradually.

…To Be Examined… Among the relativizing effects which the revisionist approach has contributed to triggering, it is worth mentioning another one. It is the debate on the actual size of the Underground Railroad, which has caused a sort of “figures war”, both regarding the network, size, the agents and subjects involved, and especially regarding the runaway slaves who actually escaped, were liberated, and were able to reach the North and Canada safely. Regarding the latter, a series of contributions, among which an article by Gates (Gates Jr., 2013), have painted a drastically reduced picture with respect to the hypothetical figures that followed on from Siebert’s original emphasis. Without going into much quantitative detail and limiting ourselves to giving a sense of the numerical oscillations, it suffices to say that, while the calculations provided by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center estimate that over 100,000 runaway slaves passed through the UGRR network in the space of almost 30  years (still

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compared with almost 4 million slaves who were still in chains in 1860), other sources provide decidedly lower figures. Citing the work of Hesseltine (1936: 258), Herbert Aptheker talks about over 2000 slaves who, each year between 1830 and 1860, “passed into the land of the free along the routes of the Underground Railroad” (which adds up to a total of about 60,000 people). These figures are revised down even further by Gates who, based on different sources and reports, estimates between 25 and 40,000/50,000 fugitives who actually reached the abolitionist states of the North. Based on the work of Franklin and Schweninger, Gates arrives at the surprising figure of over 50,000 fugitives who, every year in the period leading up to the Civil War, escaped but remained in the states of the South (Gates Jr., 2013). However, of these, as Blight suggests, “only few made it to freedom” (Blight, 2004: 245). It is a figure which may have been revised down excessively (it is worth remembering that in 1855, Drew already estimated that even just the number of refugees who had arrived in Canada after 1850 was 30,000), and, by contrast, Foner talks about an average oscillating between 2000 and 5000 fugitives passing through the UGRR each year in the period leading up to the Civil War. Of course, whether it is 30, 40, 70 or 100 thousand, it is still too few, “not enough” as Gates rightly points out. It is enough, however, to constitute a serious problem for the owners who were prepared to pay a $300 bounty for every single fugitive slave (Aptheker, 1943: 89) and to trigger a series of alarmed reactions, which now seem ironically hilarious, like that of a southern doctor, Samuel A. Cartwright, who claimed to have identified a previously unknown disease, “drapetomania”, a compulsive predisposition to escape (from dràpetos, “runaway” in ancient Greek) which seemed to affect slaves. In any case, looking at figures allows us to put the mythological reach of the UGRR which characterizes all “official” narratives into perspective. However, figures alone are not enough, and it would be necessary to integrate the anonymity and dryness of data by shifting the focus onto the concrete figures made of flesh and bones. Who were those 30, 40, or 100 thousand fugitives who walked the freedom line? To contrast the idea of whole families on the run, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, despite almost never mentioning the UGRR, suggest that 80% of them were young males: the strongest ones, who generally fled alone (Franklin & Schweninger, 2000). This version was corroborated by both Blight and Gates, according to whom “young slave women were much less likely to run away because of their family and

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child-rearing responsibilities” (Gates Jr., 2013), as if to hint at the weight of gender juxtaposed with that of color in defining a hierarchy of oppression (Davis, 1981)―in addition to the well-known fact that in the economy of slavery, reproductive labor was even more important than―the precondition to―productive labor. As for the idea of whole families on the run, fueled by a lot of subsequent literature―not only academic―Gates appears rather skeptical, “families with children did attempt flights to freedom, but such instances were rare” (Gates Jr., 2013). The size and the specific composition of the population that was on the run are undoubtedly essential aspects needed to understand the historical meaning of a fact (not of a myth) like the UGRR. They allow us, among other things, to understand not only the size, but also the difficulties, the limits, the violence, and the terror which fundamentally surrounded (and were challenged by) this specific historical fact. And yet, once again, the impression one gets is that when talking about the Underground Railroad, what is at stake is different, that it is not so much a matter of figures, and that behind and through these numbers there are other, more general matters, on the overall and contended meaning―from a political, historical, and “geographical” point of view―of this essentially black history. Just touching on quantitative issues and hinting at actual fugitives, Eric Foner seeks to recover this overall meaning by painting an up-to-date and detailed picture of the material organization of the UGRR: The picture that emerges from recent studies is not of the highly organized system with tunnels, codes, and clearly defined routes and stations of popular lore, but of an interlocking series of local networks, each of whose fortunes rose and fell over time, but which together helped a substantial number of fugitives reach safety in the free states and Canada …The “underground railroad” should be understood not as a single entity but as an umbrella term for local groups that employed numerous methods to assist fugitives, some public and entirely legal, some flagrant violations of the law. (Foner, 2015: 41)

Based on this elaborate picture, Foner is able to reach a sort of conclusion in his attempt to account for the alternating fortune and the recent re-evaluation of this specific endeavor: The popular appeal of the underground railroad is not difficult to understand, even apart from the inherent drama of escaping from bondage. At a time of renewed national attention to the history of slavery, the Civil War,

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and Reconstruction, subjects that remain in many ways contentious, the underground railroad represents a moment in our history when black and white Americans worked together in a just cause. (Ibidem)

“A moment in our history when black and white Americans worked together in a just cause”: admittedly, behind the understandable willingness to find a balance and salvage the general sense of that specific historical experience by reintroducing it into the present, one gets the feeling that this is a compromise, almost a mediation, which ends up agreeing with official versions by corroborating a “national myth”. Perhaps, it might have been more appropriate to simply speak of “a moment in the US history” when slaves freed themselves mainly relying, along their flight and liberation paths, on the support of some free blacks. This is what David Blight suggests between the lines, restoring the absolute centrality of an African American subject: Much of what we call the Underground Railroad, was actually operated clandestinely by African Americans themselves through urban vigilance committees and rescue squads that were often led by free blacks. (Blight, 2004: 246)

This is an ostensibly indisputable reconstruction, which only has one problem, a detail, perhaps a minor slip, related to the specific “us” on which it is based. Whichever collective formation it may allude to, it simply is not a present “us”―it is not “us” who named it Underground Railroad, and, if anything, this name belongs to the past. To be more precise, it belongs to the black Americans who, although they were not the first ones to utter it, still created the reality it designates, made it possible, making it work from the outset as an encoded formula, an umbrella term used to name the escape and achieve it as a collective undertaking. As for Blight’s words, there is still a margin (“much of what”), in addition to the indication of an “us” to be used in the past, that calls for deeper examination. Henry L. Gates, Jr., suggests a different interpretation of this specific plural subject in a definition of the UGRR, which does not seem far from Foner’s: The Underground Railroad and the abolition movement itself were perhaps the first instances in American history of a genuinely interracial coalition, and the role of the Quakers in its success cannot be gainsaid. It was,

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­ evertheless, predominantly run by free Northern African Americans, espen cially in its earliest years, most notably the great Philadelphian William Still. He operated with the assistance of white abolitionists, many of whom were Quakers. (Gates Jr., 2013)

Opposing any national myth, Gates still seems to reflect Foner’s words, adding, however, a decisive detail: he speaks of an “interracial coalition”, citing the assistance and the support to that essentially black experience given by white abolitionists, mostly Quakers. Thus, his words somehow end up getting close to those of W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction: the idea of an “abolition democracy” founded on this specific, possible coalition, the most general convergence of political and social forces triggered by the uprising and the escape of slaves. Starting from these fragile premises, it would be worth examining further the radical split at the heart of this contended history and trying to reread its tension in light of the idea of abolition democracy. If, as Gates, among others, suggests, the Underground Railroad is a black history that still involved (or rather fascinated) a certain number of white abolitionists and, also through this convergence, effectively challenged borders and contributed to redesigning a peremptory geography regardless of figures and of its actual size, is it possible to identify a more general meaning, real and not mythological, in this specific partisan history? What would it involve exactly? To further correct Foner’s conclusion, we could talk about a moment in American history when black people, especially slaves, challenged the order, the “material constitution” of the United States, contesting its organization and inverting its geography, and some white people supported them in this “antislavery enterprise” (as the abolitionist Governor of Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, called it). However, it would be necessary to preliminarily highlight the obvious fact that runaway slaves were not acting for or in the name of America, but rather for their own liberation. We should also add that it was precisely this “elementary gesture” of insurrection and liberation, its incredible organization, preparation, and fulfillment, and the convergence of some white people onto this specifically black “territory” that ended up leaving a fleeting but irreducible trace, an anticolonial tension, on the history and the geography of the United States―almost an internal overturning of the imperial expansion and racial order which the “manifest destiny” of that country was projecting onto the world (Kaplan, 2002). Finally, it would be necessary to suggest that it is precisely this trace that ostensibly represents the most relevant

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heritage, the most significant (as well as inconvenient and, for this reason, betrayed by every possible national history) political outcome and sign of the entire sequence of events of the Underground Railroad, beyond its actual size.

…And Continuously Rewritten The thing is that to be able to read this particular trace and this specific tension, it is necessary to recognize, in a preliminary phase, the equally obvious fact that the UGRR did not emerge or develop “out of nowhere”. The main task (and merit) of work like that carried out by Foner, of the history it recalls, reweaves, reopens, and redeems, precisely consists in the meticulous exploration (although essentially limited to the New York City area) of all that precedes, surrounds, indulges, and reflects such a tension and such a subversive trace, creating its trigger, making it possible, safeguarding its duration: Biographies have appeared of such key underground railroad figures as David Ruggles, Robert Purvis, and Jermain W. Loguen, the “underground railroad king” of Syracuse. Scholars have also begun the difficult task of exploring covert systems of aid to fugitives within the slave states as well as lines of communication between slave communities. The most recent general account of the underground railroad, by the independent historian Fergus Bordewich, follows Gara in noting that the number of fugitives has been exaggerated, but it traces the emergence of local groups in the North that assisted runaway slaves. Far more, however, remains to be done in analyzing how vigilance networks functioned on the local level, and how they built connections with groups across the antebellum North. (Foner, 2015: 41)

Thus, without ending it, the history which Foner recaps can be ideally prolonged and continuously restarted, rewritten, and redeemed, gaining new perspectives, starting from the crucial role played in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, or Cleveland by vigilance networks.20 Continuing in 20  Vigilance Committees were city-wide protection and support networks for runaway slaves, which were created between 1830 and 1850 by black abolitionists (in New York City by David Ruggles, in Philadelphia by Robert Purvis and William Still, in Boston by Lewis Hayden), with support from mixed local committees, and they actually functioned as the structure of the Underground Railroad, forming its material framework, as “the most effective instrumentalities”. For a direct reconstruction of the way the committees operated, see Still (1872) and Smedley (1883).

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this direction, we are likely to stumble upon figures like the already mentioned William Still, Robert Purvis, and David Ruggles, and get even just a partial idea of the enormous risk, the hazard, and the courage of a militant abolitionist choice, not only in the years leading up to the Fugitive Slave Laws.21 It is also a history that will have to be measured against the peculiar alternation between night and day, light and shadow, which punctuates that sequence of events (subverting the dialectic between visibility and invisibilization which accompanies and presides over the “production” of a race), to discover, for instance, that “rather than operating entirely in secret, the underground railroad was a quasi-public institution” (Foner, 2015: 43). However, besides the tactical need for resonance and “publicity”, recognizing the extent to which “the frequent exposure through the public prints, of the modes of escape of fugitives, and of the expedients employed to prevent recapture …, played into the hands of ‘pursuers’ and made the task of the runaway ‘tenfold’ more difficult” (Ibidem). Starting from this hazardous threshold, it will then be a matter of rereading the violent blackmailing and persecutory impact of the Fugitive Slave Laws, “which required citizens to assist in the capture of fugitives and overrode local laws and procedures that impeded their return” (Ibidem). This constitutes an outright invitation to inform which will become a prescription, as it imposes on all American citizens the duty to not only not collaborate with the fugitives, but also report them and hand them back to the authorities. Today, we would call this a “duty to inform” and therefore an implicit “criminalization of solidarity” which, however, turns into an equally implicit invitation to what an illustrious abolitionist like David Thoreau will define “civil disobedience”, if it is true that “[i]ndividual encounters with fugitive slaves and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law forced ordinary northerners who had no connection with the abolitionist movement to confront the question of the relationship between individual conscience and legal obligation” (Foner, 2015: 47). Moreover, still following Foner, a history that is reopened in this manner will have to redeem the sacrifice of those who paid the highest price for their gesture of rebellion, liberation, support, and disobedience, by recovering its memory also in the fate of Charles T. Torrey, the one who allegedly coined the name “Underground Railroad”, actually “a Yale-educated 21  Being an abolitionist or a conductor on the Underground Railroad, was about as popular and as dangerous as being a member of the Communist Party in 1955 (Gates, 2013).

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minister, who died in the Maryland state penitentiary in 1846”, and by going back to the antecedent of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer, in Illinois, who was killed in 1873 in the attempt to escape the fire started at the newspaper offices by an angry pro-slavery mob. And again, in the different fate that looms over runaway slaves, and persecuted black and white abolitionists, such a history will have to recognize the profound weight of the color line and of its intersection with class in the continuous production of a “lynchable and deportable” race. Finally, to steer clear of excessive beatification, this history will be able to trace different motivations, certainly more material ones, in the collaboration with runaway slaves, as in the case of the ramification of the UGRR in the South toward the border between Texas and Mexico, where aid could also go through a sort of tariff, a price to pay to passeurs (most of whom were part of the white or Mexican underclass) who were exposed in any case two equally high risks (Mareite, 2018). Also at these latitudes, such a history will end up coming across further and unheard of “alliances” between natives and fugitives, and in persistent Maroon communities, like in the case of the extraordinary experience of the black Seminoles (Aptheker, 1939: 167–184; Price, 1996; Twyman, 1999). Thus, in this history that is continuously rewritten and that requires constant rewriting, we will end up acknowledging the political trace and the incommensurable weight of a more general tension. It seems paradoxical to celebrate it in a national history (with which it actually turns out to be irreducibly incompatible), and it seems at least rushed to relativize or deny it as a legend or still as a myth. Like in a game of mirrors―one infinite reflection which generates as many “symmetries of redemption”― both reactions end up placing a sequence of events whose specific and general meaning lies in its unplaceability, by uttering a definitive, “historicized” word. After all, this unplaceability is shared by all histories of minorities: the unplaceability of a partisan history within a national one; the unplaceability of a heterogenous and mixed history within a minority and partisan one. For this reason, this history continues to insist on the present, preserving a specific trace, a particular tension. How to define both of them? Perhaps, once again, it is necessary to start from the trace of something akin to a “coalition” as an unbalanced, asymmetrical, and ongoing process, and from a specific tension that retraces what Du Bois called “abolition democracy”.

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A Name… Let us try to recap then. If we consider this specific contended weave and all the conditions, reductions, sentences, warnings, and “uses” it contains, what kind of history are we looking at? As an essentially, originally, constitutively, but not exclusively black partisan history, the Underground Railroad is not a myth―if anything, it is the opposite, a “counter-myth”. Of course, it was not as extensive as some have made it out to be. Ostensibly, its structure and organization were not even typical of a network. Moreover, it is likely that most of the information that surrounds it and tells its story is deceptive, exaggerated; that the active (and redeeming) role of white abolitionists was significantly inflated (and often fabricated); that escapes from plantations did not lead, in the majority of cases, out of the Southern states or that they sadly ended with a return to them; that its history was actually rather restricted to a minority group, perhaps selective, and also marginal. However, in any case, that minority history was immediately called this way by those who, like Harriet Tubman, William Still, David Ruggles, Frederick Douglass, and many others, cooperated to make it happen and materially open escape routes, traveling along them and organizing them. For these reasons, it turns out to be a sequence of events which is heterogenous and discontinuous as much as it is dotted with routes, itineraries, and clandestine spaces, all held together and almost built around one name. What’s in a name? It is necessary to recognize that, whichever side one might read it from and whichever possible “us” it may have come out of, the name Underground Railroad is at the very least extraordinary. Gates himself points this out: “The ‘Underground Railroad’ was a marvelously improvised, metaphorical construct run by courageous heroes, most of whom were black”. After all, if it is true that we “live by metaphors”, the UGRR was also this: a marvelously improvised, metaphorical construct, from which it is possible to extract a series of indications or perhaps only words (metaphor, improvisation, construct) that are worth insisting on. It is in fact a name, a construct, an act of naming that reflects a specific tactic of masking, overturning, reappropriating, and subverting, which, as Amiri Baraka suggests, played a key role in the African American historical experience and cultural practice, the black diaspora (Baraka, 1994). It did so by recapping and articulating its “displaced” history; by echoing it in the stolen notes of blues and jazz; by heightening improvisation to an

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aesthetic form, a communication method, and a cultural strategy; by resignifying imposed standards, codes, and tracks; and by always producing “something new and different” (Coltrane). However, behind and within this extraordinary name, the UGRR was above all an experience of exodus, always sourced from imposed “white” codes, but retranslated into a subterranean and subversive practice―in so far as “the way the Bible tells the story of slavery, of the desert crossing and of the arrival in the Promised Land re-evokes the history of a people that had experienced the terror of slavery and the suffering of racial discrimination” (Glaude, 2010: 9). Thus, the reappropriation and the use of that story, which is at the very least central to the “white mythology” of the settlers of the “New World”, end up destabilizing any possible sharing or posthumous mythology, marring the very “melodramatic narrative structure of the myth of the Underground Railroad and of America in general” and “exposing the fundamental internal contradiction, that of race, which haunts the United States” (Ivi: 11). It is in fact a name that has designated and materially traced another space, different and new, within and against that defined by the borders which guard(ed) the system of slavery and the production of a race, against any posthumous pacification and any national monument.

…A Train Liberty line, Gateway to Freedom, Passages to Freedom, Fleeing for Freedom, Routes of Escape, Bound for Canaan—the books on the Underground Railroad often have evocative titles. They almost seem to reflect a euphoria which, however, is bound to be shattered, denied, and contracted, like a betrayed future promise. There is a poem by Langston Hughes, written in 1947, called Freedom Train. It refers to a “railroad campaign” of cultural propaganda and diplomacy promoted by President Truman and funded, among others, by Paramount and the Rockefeller Foundation, a mixed train for white and black people to celebrate the New Deal in postwar America, a fast north-­ to-­south line which, however, was immediately forced to confront the persistence of the color line and of the Jim Crow laws. Hughes recaps its itinerary, citing its stations in reverse and re-evoking its historical weight, and he implicitly juxtaposes that new route, already shattered, with another one, another Freedom Train traveling in the opposite direction. Its

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clandestine history, its incredible feats, the courage, the hopes and fears that traveled on it. Thus, he ends up conveying the desolate sense of a brutal heterogenesis, the violence of a usurped name and of a history triumphally celebrated by the “winners” on the traces and on the ruins of an obliterated reality, which was trampled on and overturned: I read in the papers about the Freedom Train I heard on the radio about the Freedom Train I seen folks talking about the Freedom Train Lord, I've been a-waitin for the Freedom Train! Washington, Richmond, Durham, Chatanooga, Atlanta Way cross Georgia. Lord, Lord, Lord way down in Dixie the only trains I see's Got a Jim-Crow coaches set aside for me. I hope their ain't no Jim Crow on the Freedom Train, No back door entrance to the Freedom Train, No sign FOR COLORED on the Freedom Train, No WHITE FOLKS ONLY on the Freedom Train. I'm gonna check up. I'm gonna to check up on this Freedom Train. Who is the engineer on the Freedom Train? Can a coal-black man drive the Freedom Train? Or am I still a porter on the Freedom Train? Is there ballot boxes on the Freedom Train? Do colored folks vote on the Freedom Train? When it stops in Mississippi, will it be made plain Everybody's got a right to board the Freedom Train? I'm gonna check up. I'm gonna to check up on this Freedom Train. The Birmingham station’s marked COLORED and WHITE. The white folks go left The colored go right. They even got a segregated lane. Is that the way to get aboard the Freedom Train? I'm gonna check up. I'm gonna to check up on this Freedom Train. If my children ask me, Daddy, please explain

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Why a Jim Crow stations for the Freedom Train? What shall I tell my children? You tell me, cause freedom ain't freedom when a man ain't free. … A Freedom train, That’s yours and mine!

How can we redeem the subterranean history of the first and only Freedom Train, which was betrayed and almost ridiculed by the second one? Essentially, as we have seen, this can be achieved by telling it again, by recapping its itineraries and its stations, and by bringing back to the surface the weave of a counter-space that exists within and against the geography marked by the color line and retraced by the new railroad to which Hughes alludes. This counter-space is woven through by routes that cross borders, create corridors, live in them and resignify them, configuring the land―or, rather, the subterranean―equivalent of the idea of the Black Atlantic suggested by Paul Gilroy (Gilroy, 1993), because, after all, this is the history of the Underground Railroad.

References Aptheker, H. (1939). Maroons within the present limits of the United States. Journal of Negro History, 22, 167–184. Aptheker, H. (1943). American Negro slave revolts. Columbia University Press. Baraka, A. (1994). Il popolo del blues. Sociologia degli afroamericani attraverso il jazz. Shake Edizioni. Blight, D. W. (Ed.). (2004). Passages to Freedom: The underground railroad in history and memory. Harper &. Blue, F.  J. (2004). No taint of compromise: Crusaders in antislavery politics. Louisiana State University Press. Bordewich, F. M. (2005). Bound for Canaan: The underground railroad and the war for the Soul of America. Harper &. Bradford, S. H. (1869). Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. W. J. Moses Printer. Campbell, S. W. (1968). The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. Child, L. M. (1833). An appeal in favor of that class of Americans called Africans. Allen & Ticknor. Coffin, L. (1876). Reminiscences of the reputed president of the underground railroad; being a brief history of the labors of a lifetime in behalf of the slave. R. Clarke &. Davis, A. (1981). Women, race and class. Random House.

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Douglass, F. (2017). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. CreateSpace Independent Publishing. (original edition 1892). Drew, B. (1856). A north-side view on slavery: The refugee: Narratives of fugitive slaves in Canada. Oxford University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1962). John Brown. International Publications. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2013). Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New Brunswick, Harcourt. Foner, E. (1988). Reconstruction. America’s unfinished revolution, 1863–1877. Harper &. Foner, E. (2015). Gateway to freedom: The hidden history of the underground railroad. Norton &. Franklin, J. H., & Schweninger, L. (2000). Runaway slaves: Rebels on the plantation. Oxford University Press. Gara, L. (1961). The liberty line: The legend of the underground railroad. Kentucky University Press. Gara, L. (1964). The Fugitive Slave Law: A Double Paradox. Civil War History, 10, 229–240. Gates, H. L. Jr. (2013). Who really ran the underground railroad? https://www. theroot.com/who-­really-­ran-­the-­underground-­railroad-­1790895697 Gay, S. H. (1856). The record of fugitives. Columbia University Library Rare Books and Manuscript. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ ldpd_4078801 Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Verso Books. Glaude, E.  S. (2010). Il melodramma della razza. L’esodo e l’“Underground Railroad”. Filosofia Politica, 24(3), 431–446. Hesseltine, W. B. (1936). A history of the south, 1607–1936. Prentice-Hall. Hudson, J.  B. (2006). Encyclopedia of the underground railroad. McFarland & Company. Jakobs, H., & Child, L. (1861). Incidents in the life of a slave girl seven years concealed in slavery, written by herself. Oxford University Press. Kaplan, A. (2002). The anarchy of Empire in the making of U.S. Culture. Harvard University Press. Mareite, T. (2018). Abolitionists, smugglers and scapegoats: Assistance networks for fugitive slaves in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1836–1861. Mémoire(s), identité(s), marginalité(s) dans le monde occidental contemporain. http://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/2731 Price, R. (Ed.). (1996). Maroon societies: Rebel slave communities in the Americas. Johns Hopkins University Press. Said, E. (1986). After the last sky. Palestinian lives. Pantheon.

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Salerno, B.  A. (2005). Sister societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America. Northern Illinois University Press. Siebert, W. (1898). The underground railroad from slavery to freedom: A comprehensive history underground railroad. Dover Publications. Smedley, R. C. (1883). History of the underground railroad. Arno Press. Snodgrass, M.  E. (2008). The underground railroad: An Encyclopedia of people, places, and operations. Routledge. Still, W. (1872). Underground rail road records with a life of the author: Narrating the hardships, hairbreadth escapes and death struggles of the slaves in their efforts for freedom: Together with sketches of some of the eminent friends of freedom, and most liberal aiders and advisers of the road. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates. https://archive.org/details/undergroundrailr00stil/page/n9/mode/2up. Truth, S. (1850). Narrative of Sojourner truth: A Northern slave. Boston/ Northampton, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/truth/1850/ 1850.html. Twyman, B.  E. (1999). The black seminole legacy and North American Politics, 1693–1845. Howard University Press. Walker, D. (1829). Appeal to the coloured citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America. Boston. https:// babel.hathitr ust.org/cgi/pt?id=nc01.ark:/13960/t2m62tw67&vie w=1up&seq=11

CHAPTER 3

Along the Routes New England, July 2019

…that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger—(Benjamin, 1940)

Stations Redeeming a history means first of all understanding which of its elements still speak to us today, in order to reopen it. It also means reading between the lines, between the folds, wandering around its ruins to rediscover traces and release what was left unredeemed (Kracauer, 1960, 1969), like the ghostly matter of the only real and underground Freedom Train that Langston Hughes contrasted with his “ironic” response, with the history written by the “winners”. At stake, perhaps, there is the possibility of (re) discovering a future in the filigree of the past, and the other way around. In the specific case of a contested and contended history, of a partisan history like that of the UGRR, the words obsessively repeated by Toni Morrison in the epilogue of her masterpiece, Beloved, seem to apply: that “not to pass on” which comes back like a mantra referring to the story of a woman, Sethe (the literary transposition of a real figure, Margareth Garner), who kills her own daughter to spare her a future of slavery and is forced to live with her ghostly presence, a creature made of flesh and water that comes back to haunt her, day and night (Morrison, 1987; Gordon, 1997). As noted by Alessandro Portelli, “pass on” can mean both “hand

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_3

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down” and “omit” (Portelli, 1993). Therefore, the story of Beloved is something that can neither be handed down intact and celebrated, nor omitted or forgotten, but rather it is something that must be continuously and obsessively returned to. We believe that the story of the UGRR, too, is a story “not to pass on” and that, rather than being embalmed and turned into a taxidermic monument, it ought to be retold and reopened. But how? If there is and there was a “Black Atlantic”, a counter-space woven through by alternative routes whose irreversibility subverted the institutive violence of the slave trade, of the Middle-Passage, and of the black diaspora, it is possible to think of the historical experience of the Underground Railroad as a sort of land equivalent of that water story. It can be viewed as a space built on similar routes, articulations, and horizons of reversibility, but measured on a different scale, a step-by-step scanning, “at walking pace”. To be more precise, it can be thought of as a counter-­ space that is articulated through a series of more or less provisional stations and as the fruit of encounters, of a specific cooperation, and of a possible coalition between different subjects―slaves on the run, freed black people, and some white people acting in solidarity. From this point of view, the routes are translated into something far more material, dense, thick, and articulated than the axiomatic dimension of a simple direction or way, and they take on the intensity of a series of passages, stations, and communities―all “undercommon” and impermanent places built on the run, by fugitive people recognizing each other and cooperating along their escape route (Harney & Moten, 2013). In these terms, it is a materially produced space, “inhabited and built” (gestures which Martin Heidegger invited us to think of as juxtaposed and synchronous), lived in rather than simply traveled or represented. Thus, the historical and political sense of the UGRR, of this contested and contended sequence of events (in which the “soul of a nation” is still at stake), can be learned not just from a weave of itineraries to escape the chains of slavery and the race line, but also from a way of inhabiting them by resignifying a territory, by producing just as many counter-spaces, temporarily freed zones. This was already partly stressed by Benjamin Drew on his journey to Canada to conduct a census of a series of endpoints of those routes. Among these, in particular, there was Buxton in Ontario, a community founded in 1849 by the Presbyterian pastor William King on behalf of the Elgin Association. In 1857, Buxton came to host more than 800 black

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settlers, two schools, and over 1000 cultivated acres (Hudson, 2006: 103) and was considered “in many respects the most important attempt made before the Civil War to found a Negro refugee colony in Canada” (Landon, 1918: 360). On his part, after having reviewed the different reports produced by the Elgin Association and personally recorded the constant increase of the community’s population, of the number of houses, of the available schools, of the harvests, and of the animals, and before directly giving voice to the people of Buxton, Drew concluded his report with these words: The settlers at Buxton are characterized by a manly, independent air and manner. Most of them came into the province stripped of everything but life. They have purchased homes for themselves, paid the price demanded by government, erected their own buildings, and supported their own families by their own industry; receiving no aid whatever from any benevolent society, but carefully excluding donations of any kind from coming into the settlement. (Drew, 1856: 297)

Places like Buxton were autonomous in a way that was perhaps excessive, almost autarchic (a sort of material projection of Drew’s rigorous protestant ethic), but were by no means unique, and in The Refugee there are many more examples: St Catharines (where Harriet Tubman lived for nearly ten years), Amherstburg, and the Dawn Settlement in Dresden. Or, again, the Refugee Home Society established in Windsor by Henry Bibb, a runaway slave and militant abolitionist from Kentucky, who also wrote an autobiography of remarkable impact and reached Canada in 1850 with his wife, Mary, with whom he started a community that supported fugitives by offering them “supplies, tools, training and protection from slave-­ hunters”. Bibb died in 1852, and Drew did not get to meet him, but he met his wife and visited the school she had founded for “the new young arrivals”. Her final notes describe an organized association that assists “the refugees from American slavery to obtain permanent homes, and to promote their social, moral, physical, and intellectual elevation” (Drew, 1856: 324). Permanent homes, better “social, moral, physical, and intellectual” conditions―all of these are characteristics that originate from a specific way of experiencing and inhabiting a place, turning it into a home, building it while living in it. These very characteristics can be found in many other towns, near the border and further inland into Canada, scattered

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around Ontario, New Brunswick, as well as Quebec. These places were end stations of the UGRR, all of which turned into resident communities, some of which are still inhabited today or have been reconverted into “overground” museums, historical sites, and monuments. In fact, after 1850, the northward journey via the UGRR found its final landing place in Canada. In the majority of cases, however, this was the prelude to a return during the Civil War and to the subsequent short summer of the (Black) Reconstruction. Today, those places, the communities that were built and inhabited by fugitive slaves, also with the support of the Canadian government, of the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society, and of private Canadian citizens, bear witness to the existence of just as many more or less provisional and reversible destinations, shelters, and forced landing places which were turned into “temporary cities” by the effects of the Fugitive Laws. If this is true, what is left on paper, on a map, is essentially the outline of a deferred route dotted with inhabited spaces, “temporarily autonomous” communities. However, it is a route that found its watershed at the border between the United States and Canada and that, before 1850, was fueled by a constant movement, mainly within territories south of that border. South of the US-Canadian border, the routes of the Underground Railroad turned and sedimented into freed territories as well as transit zones, many of which were ephemeral and were eventually dismantled. Precisely owing to their provisional and reversible nature, and in the different directions that have animated them and traveled them, these routes ended up leaving a trace, materially building a different political landscape. This trace and this different landscape can be found in a series of dots on the map which are more or less visible and well known―from the big sanctuary cities of the abolitionists, headquarters of the vigilance committees and incubators of the UGRR (New York City with David Ruggles and Frederick Douglass, Boston with William Garrison, Philadelphia with William Still and Harriet Tubman, as well as Cleveland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Detroit, Milwaukee, etc.), down to a myriad of small communities scattered along the way. One of them was Rokeby in Vermont, where a sort of agricultural commune developed around the Robinsons, a local Quaker family. In Rokeby, various fugitives who were hosted, hidden, and helped ended up becoming permanent residents, and the town was turned into a museum where, among other things, one can access a full collection of all the issues of The Liberator, the historic abolitionist newspaper of which Garrison was the director. Today, visiting Rokeby has a strange effect. It allows one to see the orderly layout of the buildings where the

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fugitives lived, the austere sobriety of the Robinson’s family home, the care that goes into managing the museum built next door, perhaps joining a couple of local tourists, after visiting hours like we did, with the suspicion that we would be looked at as strange guests, intruders in an intimate history, in a local pedagogy. In fact, those working in Rokeby―the guide, the director of the museum, her collaborators―do not appear at all surprised by our “exotic” presence. Rather, they seem absolutely aware of the “intimate and global”―and therefore simply political―nature of the history of that place. Personal and general like the story of Simon and Jesse, which is reconstructed in the rooms of the museum. They were “two fugitives from slavery who found shelter here in the 1830” and who stayed, “absconded”, until after 1850. Routes, even near their final destination in “Canaan”, were never just experienced as corridors, but also as crossroads, encounters, and “homes”. An essentially analogous sensation can be experienced in Farmington, the Connecticut town which, in 1840, hosted the famous trial of the mutinied slaves of the Amistad, who were detained/hosted on the premises near the local First Church of Christ on Main Street. Once again, we arrive late after stopping in Hartford, the place where, in 1843, Frederick Douglass was forced to deliver one of his most passionate abolitionist speeches on the porch of the local church, “since he was not allowed to speak inside”. Following the traces of that distant trial, along the same Main Street where the church and the premises that were once “inhabited” by the Amistad rebels, it is possible to stumble upon a signaled itinerary, dotted with plates that indicate sites and shelters of the UGRR. On a Sunday afternoon, we wander along Main Street with all the historical buildings closed. Following one of the plates, we walk into a courtyard where a children’s party is being held. Our presence arouses the curiosity of the parents, a young WASP couple originally from Boston who moved to Farmington two years earlier. They listen with astonishment to the reasons for our visit before welcoming us into their home and showing us the under-stair closet where, toward the end of the 1840s, a runaway slave was thought to have hidden for several days. The couple and their children are obviously aware of and seem proud to live in a house with such a past history. They tell us that many other families in the neighborhood, which is predominantly white and middle class, participate in a series of activities organized by the local church community to support migrants and refugees detained at the Mexican border―“maybe it is the ghost of the Amistad, or of this house”.

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The list of UGRR sites, particularly in the states of New England and the Midwest (but not only), is long, almost endless, and it is curated by a specific federal program, the Freedom Trail, managed by the National Park Service, the government body that protects places of historical and natural interest on a national level. Among these sites, rather arbitrarily, there is one in particular whose history of encounters and crossroads, however ephemeral, one cannot “pass on”.

Florence, Northampton (MA) Steven Strimeris a youthful man, but he is well into his sixties. He works in a copy shop that has two branches, the main one in Northampton and the second one in Amherst, the nearby university town where, more or less during the years of the Civil War and within the confined space of two small houses separated by a driveway and a garden, the poetry of Emily Dickinson bloomed and came to life. Today, those two houses and that small park have become a museum where one can follow the invisible threads which, by holding them together, explored something that was intimate as much as it was universal and unfathomable. Steven knows the forks of that thread, but he deals with other things for a living―publishing (like Benjamin Drew) as well as other forks and other threads. To be more precise, in Florence―an ancient industrial district of Northampton which has now turned into a residential neighborhood―Steven, along with a handful of volunteers, activists, and students, manages a small museum on the Underground Railroad and a center for education named after David Ruggles, hosted in two old houses that were saved from real estate speculation. Not far from there is the house where, 170 years earlier, a former fugitive slave named Basil Dorsey (who was rescued by David Ruggles in New York and subsequently settled in Northampton) lived and which he turned into a UGRR shelter and station. At the entrance of the center, a sign reads “Here everyone is welcome, and nobody is a foreigner”, suggesting how past events are distantly intertwined with present ones. These are essentially twines, stories of intersections, of a bunch of houses, farms, and mills, all located near a street, today’s Nonotuck Street. They are also stories of a series of encounters which led that neighborhood and that street to becoming the place of transit and residence of Lydia and David Child, Frederick Douglass, William Garrison, Wendel Phillips, as well as David Ruggles (who died there), Soujourner Truth (who lived there for fourteen years and to whom a statue has been dedicated in the square

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above Nonotuck Street), and especially of hundreds of women and men in transit, who found a more or less stable “home” there. All of this essentially started with an organization and the traces it had left behind. It is the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI), founded in 1840, by, among others, Samuel Hill, an abolitionist from Boston who had moved to Northampton after Garrison had given him the mandate to start a utopian community which Frederick Douglass, after staying there several times, defined as “a place to extinguish all aristocratic pretensions. There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, no black, no males, no females (Douglass, 1898: 130)”. Indeed, the history of the NAEI begins with the idea of a substantially autonomous commune, with the attempt to build a free workplace, without class, race, or gender boundaries, and a place freed from property (Clark, 1995). Strimer reconstructs the passages of this communal “entrepreneurial” history, made of acquired plots and fields, of houses, mills, farmsteads, wells, and granaries that were built or taken over, of imported fair-trade crops―sugar beets (as an alternative to sugarcane, which symbolized the southern plantations), silk made from mulberries, and cotton picked by free hands. The economic management of the community turned out to be complex, and, in the space of less than five years, the NAEI was forced to shut down. Meanwhile, however, Lydia Child, who had started the sugar beet farm of the NAEI with her husband before moving to New York in 1841 to become the director of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, had recommended Florence as a shelter for David Ruggles, who was wanted in New York City for leading the local vigilance committee and had become partially blind. This is where Ruggles lived until his death in 1849, after joining the NAEI, creating a hydrotherapy center to cure himself and others, and reorganizing the local UGRR station, which had become one of the main nodes in the region. Sojourner Truth had a similar history to that of Ruggles. She arrived in Florence from New York City in 1843, and, despite her initial skepticism, she lived there for over fourteen years. This is where she composed her famous autobiography (Narrative of Sojourner Truth), delivered her first anti-slavery speech (the prelude to a “voyage-out” that saw her speak in twenty more states of the Union), and met with Frederick Douglass several times. In 1850, Florence recorded the highest percentage of African Americans of Massachusetts, the majority of whom were fugitive slaves. After the approval of the Fugitive Act, their presence decreased sharply, but not all of them fled elsewhere or to Canada. Following the issuing of the decree on October

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29, 1850, its Town Hall hosted a crowded assembly, which was promoted by the Northampton Community based on an appeal signed by, among others, ten fugitives including Basil Dorsey, and in which the response and collective opposition to the new law was debated. The assembly, as reported by the Northampton Courier, was very well attended and ended with a unanimously approved document which―starting from the premise that “the late Fugitive Slave Act is not only at war with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and our Republican Constitutions, but barbarous, despotic, and desperately wicked in its purpose, and provisions”—declared that “constitution or no constitution, law or no law, we will not allow a Fugitive Slave to be taken from Massachusetts”.1 Indeed, Sojourner Truth took over Samuel Hill’s house and lived in Florence/Northampton until 1857, while other members of the community, including Dorsey, continued their protected action―first as “absconded” and subsequently as free citizens―as conductors and teamsters of the UGRR throughout the years leading up to the Civil War.

Zooming in on a Map To recap this series of events, encounters, crossroads, and passages, Strimer reconstructs the history of every single building, and he keeps coming back to the community struggle that started a few years earlier to save the old premises, which now host the museum and the center for education named after Ruggles, from repeated urban renewal projects. In particular, he cares about making a point that the old house at 225 Nonotuck Street is located in a neighborhood which, in the mid-nineteenth century, was home to black and white laborers who lived together and cooperated: “It is only one of the many houses, buildings and testimonies of the mid-­ nineteenth century that still survive in Florence, like Nonotuck 191, the house of conductor Basil Dorsey; Meadow 101, Ross Farm, the NAEI agricultural center that in 1847 was transformed into a UGRR station and recently declared a site of historical interest by the National Park Service; and then Park 15, the house of Sojourner Truth, or the dam on the Mill River that supplied energy to the first factories that opened in Florence as well as to the community silk and cotton mills founded by Hill and Child”. As he speaks, Strimer points to a series of maps of Northampton and the UGRR hanging from the walls of the small museum library. All of 1

 Northampton Courier 10/29/1850 (see: https://basildorsey/1850fugitiveslaveact).

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them are cut through by lines, itineraries, and directions, but each one of them is strewn with dots to the point of coming apart and disappearing. The exercise he suggests is rather simple: a close zoom-in on every place along those lines, inside the routes, takes on a history of its own, becomes rich with detail, and turns into a “home”, a space which, however ephemeral, is built and inhabited―pointing, to quote one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems, to another way to “dwell in possibility”. Then, the sense of the routes comes from the sum of all these dots as well as from their direction which, as a whole, defines a more general landscape, another space, a counter-space inhabited and built―this is perhaps the geography “not to pass on” of the Underground Railroad. Next to this weave of routes, passages, “homes”, and communities, there are more stories, which contribute to taking the picture apart prismatically in time and space. They are stories of subsequent returns, mostly from Canada, also to join the Union army, sometimes in exchange for forty acres of land and a mule after the Civil War, and upon returning from the Southern states. However, they are mostly stories of other routes in other directions―toward the south, toward Mexico, and through California and Florida, crossing state borders, and establishing contacts and further coalitions between subalterns, with Native peoples who had also been confined or pushed toward reservations (Navajo, Creek, and especially Seminole). There are also “minor” stories, narrow-gauge escapes, through swamps or makeshift camps that were not far from the chains of the plantations. This exoduses which were mostly (but not always) swiftly interrupted by a return to those chains and, even more frequently, by being sent to the gallows and lynched, filling southern trees with “strange fruit”. Regarding this obscure number, any possible census seems difficult. In their research on the everyday escape, revolt, and resistance practices carried out by slaves, David Blight, Herbert Aptheker, and John Hope Franklin paint an exorbitant picture of minor secession and exodus movements, giving the general impression of a sort of “offscreen” history, a marginal history which exceeded the contended and contested one, but was somehow “orderly”, often mythologized, recorded, and, in any case, organized by the UGRR. Therefore, the map of the UGRR must be scaled up, extended, and reconfigured to the point of overflowing, keeping together a whole other series of dots, stories, and situations: camps of hunted and absconded Maroons and cimarrones which, because of their dispersion, frequency, and persistence, reflect from a distance the experiences of the quilombos in

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Brazil as well as in other Spanish and French colonies dating back to one or even two centuries earlier. In these cases, these were mixed communities (creole, mestizas) that were less ephemeral and improvised, held together by the escape and the threat of being caught, which, in the best of cases, led them back to their chains and, in the worst ones, to veritable extermination wars whenever the size and organization of these communities were such that they threatened the material interests of the plantations’ economy and the national political interest (Aptheker, 1939: 167–184; Cobley & Thompson, 1990; Forbes, 1993; Klein, 1986; Leaming, 1995; Porter, 1932: 287–367; Price, 1996; Wright, 1986). However, if the dispersed experiences of the quilombos were founded on just as many more or less ephemeral “autonomous republics” of slaves fleeing the plantations and therefore were “land” histories, the continental and in particular the Caribbean experiences of the Maroons were also connected with other routes which were essentially maritime. They led to ports and pirate hideouts, the “rebels of the Atlantic”, through a series of connections which were “new and unexpected … accidental, contingent, transient, even miraculous” (Linebaugh & Rediker, 2001: 11), finding a sort of equivalent or nomadic and aquatic antecedent of the communities and coalitions that would later develop around the UGRR in the ships and in their composite and mixed crews. These routes also led once again to the Atlantic, to what would become the black Atlantic. Thus, in addition to becoming exceedingly articulated and infinitely vaster, more heterogenous, and dispersed, the map acquires a different scale and consistency made of land and water, and woven through by scattered directions, most of which were without a destination. At the same time, it takes on a peculiar depth, spatial and temporal, and ends up reflecting a specific trace (geographical, historical, political, and even emotional) which fuels itself despite and precisely through its difference and distance. Wittgenstein perhaps would have defined it as “a family resemblance”. More recently, Lisa Lowe and Sandro Mezzadra suggested conceiving of this trace, respectively, as a form of “intimacy” and “resonance” (Lowe, 2015; Mezzadra, 2020; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2011), to designate a series of words, experiences, and practices which (un)intentionally speak to one another, establishing connections and defining the escape and the exodus as moments of rupture and struggle which are essentially anticolonial. Is it possible today to use this history, which is so extended and spread out, by establishing another kind of “intimacy” and “resonance” on the

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basis of a distance that is not only spatial but also temporal? And, provided it is possible, how should it be approached? To what and to whom should it be associated? If, as we believe, it is a history about escape routes and itineraries, and about ways of inhabiting them and of forming coalitions along the way, what is at stake is above all a question of “intensity” of strength, and, secondly, of maps of yesterday and of today.

Subterranean Continuities In a 2017 online article, Barbara Krauthamer, a historian of slavery and African American emancipation movements at Amherst University, suggests reading the social movements and mobilizations that developed in “sanctuary cities” against the measures adopted by the US government (the expulsion decrees and the procedures for the deportation of irregular migrants and the indefinite detention of many of them, especially minors, near the Mexican border) by getting back to the history of struggles against and resistance to the Fugitive Act of 1850. The article has a significant title, “Before Sanctuary Cities: How Black Americans Protected Fugitive Slaves”, which indicates a precedent for current resistance practices against the migration policies of the US administration. Indeed, Krauthamer starts from the present, from local communities and institutions (activist networks, solidarity committees, churches, and volunteers) which protect undocumented children and adults from the threat of deportation and expulsion by hosting them or helping them in their escape. Particularly, she mentions the work of jurists, lawyers, and judges who continued to challenge the criminalization of such networks, as well as of local officials, administrators, and mayors who directly supported the sanctuary cities movement by disobeying federal laws. In fact, the current climate of siege, made of intimidations, criminalization, blackmail, and invitations to report, immediately brings back to mind the persecutory climate which was established by the Fugitive Act. This parallel seems even more appropriate if we consider the origins of forms of resistance and protection from the effects of that juridical device, which came from runaway slaves themselves as well as from social environments close to the reformed churches, thereby attracting a heterogenous “progressive” world (radical abolitionists, black and white people, but also Socialists, “idealists”, and “utopians”). It is also important to remember that they were legal struggles, fought through appeals and obstructions as well as through more or less open and public practices of civil

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disobedience, and forms of organization. This gave rise to a series of city committees and of support and active solidarity networks which flowed into what was called the UGRR. It is as if the spirit of the vigilance committees and those networks lived again and was echoed in the present. However, what is at stake is more than just a question of analogies or the reproduction of escape situations and protective networks for the runaway slaves of the past and the undocumented migrants of the present. There is (much) more at stake than that, something akin to a comparable intensity in the political nature of escaping, in the subjectivity of those who escape, and in the persistence of borders, of chains, and of race, class, and gender lines which continue to weigh on and haunt the postcolonial present like “ghostly matter”. Indeed, Krauthamer points out how that history, which reverberates or resurfaces in the struggles of the present, was essentially a black history that found its symbolically and materially central figures in the likes of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. That history also put a peremptory African American seal on modern US or American history: “African-American history is American history. Black people’s lives, their words and actions, including their commitment to defying the laws of slavery, helped define the meanings of freedom and citizenship in the United States”.2 It is worth asking ourselves how much weight that seal carries today, reflected in the words of other black radicals, from Du Bois to James Baldwin and many others: the centrality of the black question, of race as a product or effect of slavery (Eric Williams), and that of chattel slavery, of the chains and the plantations system in the logic of accumulation of racial capitalism (C.R.L. James, Cedric Robinson). This is because the chains of the plantations and juridical devices like the Fugitive Act, which held up that threatened order, position themselves at the intersection of a form of power whose “coloniality” (Quijano, 1998) was intertwined with race, class, and gender. As underclass, outcasts, or, more radically, “abject/ objects”, slaves embodied a kind of living, productive and reproductive labor marked by property and race, made invisible by forced labor in the plantations and by domestic and reproductive labor. And their escape, the exodus from the chains of that system, its organization through essentially black subterranean networks and routes, paradoxically becomes a moment not only of resounding action, insubordination, and rupture (a “general 2  https://theconversation.com/before-sanctuar y-cities-hererds-how-blackamericans-protected-fugitive-slaves-72048.

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strike” in Du Bois’s words), but also of visibility and unveiling of the absolute violence and terror of a patriarchal regime normalized by the “coloniality of power”. Through escape and defection, slaves ceased to be invisible and “in their place”―in the darkness of plantation labor, in the axiom which imposed a right place for race, class, and gender―becoming outrageously (hyper)visible and out of place, in the wrong place, at the heart of democracy and of American citizenship, by leaving their decolonial mark on it. From this perspective, we can consider the UGRR as a tactical history which is about light in the shadows and about shadows in the light at the same time. In the latter case, as suggested by, among others, Ralph Ellison and Edouard Glissant, the shadows were also synonymous with protection, shelter from the spotlights and the capture apparatuses of an order which ranged from the racialized and segregated urban space to the bounties of slave hunters; they also expressed a right to invisibility as much as a resource to build, in the shadows, other ways of life and kinds of society which were essentially mixed, Creole, or Maroon. While in the former case the escape, intended as re-emerging from the shadows of “a culture of terror and a space of death” (Taussig, 2004) and of a state of almost absolute domination and exploitation, ended up unmasking that which was meant to remain in the dark. Escape becomes a lien of, so to speak, naturalized oppression and violence, leaving a mark of deceit and sparking the possibility of another space, of a counter-space woven through by deferred routes toward freedom. Yet, if it is possible to find a continuity between that tactical alternation of light and shadows in the movements and escapes of undocumented migrants as well as in the disobedience practices of those who support them and oppose capture by the Fugitive Laws of the present, what is at stake is not only a past history or a history that is only American. If we follow the global branching, the connections, “resonances”, and “intimacies”, which were established in space and time by that essentially black sequence of events made of subaltern routes and possible coalitions, we can trace the contours of a more general subterranean history, one that is also made of light and shadows, producing routes, possible counter-spaces, and other coalitions, and reproducing the same intensity and intimacy. In an essay written just before this book, Maurice Stierl focuses on the figure of the “migrant/slave”, which combines two opposed notions (one mostly associated with intentionality and movement, and the other with coercion and confinement) and is repeatedly evoked in “anti-trafficking”

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rhetoric, in debates on new slaves and on illegalized forms of passage which are “trans Mediterranean toward Eu-rope”―giving rise to a representation of migration as an involuntary, if not outright, illegal experience. By analyzing the strategies of depoliticization of migrant subjects insofar as they are victims of trafficking and bodies to be saved or left to die, and the parallel dehistoricized representation of slaves as body-objects, passive subjects, and mere instruments, Stierl invites us to identify other possible and real elements of continuity and “resonance” between these two figures. In the wake of the shipwrecks and slaughters of the Middle Passage that paved the seabed with “ivory bones” (out of a total 14 million deported human beings, only 9 million went on to constitute the “longer-­ surviving enslaved Atlantic workers”) and balls and chains “gone green” (Glissant, 1997: 6), Stierl associates the “migrant/slave” with the drowned that turning the Mediterranean Sea into an endless cemetery, interpreting both as the tragic outcome of just as many, different forms of “mutiny”. Like Krauthamer, he then goes on to discuss the criminalization which, behind the rhetoric of trafficking, cumulatively invests presumed or actual passeurs or smugglers as well as nongovernmental subjects and organizations that are active in rescuing lives at sea (callously dubbed “sea taxis” by the Italian right), and he associates it with the rhetoric aimed at pre-Civil-­ War abolitionists. By re-establishing this possible (and precarious) field of comparison, slaves and migrants may share a basic resonance (a specific “intimacy”, if we like), which is essentially found in their acts of resistance, sabotage, and liberation, overturning any “paradigmatic figure of subjection” and any reading which merely sees them as “objects” or “abject” (to be transported, rescued, or left to die). On these premises, Stierl ends up identifying the black Atlantic and the historical experience of the UGRR as precedents for current migratory movements within, around, and against European maritime borders (a Black Mediterranean) and land borders (a European Underground Railroad). Following Saidiya Hartman and her invitation to let the voices of slavery be echoed by their “descendants” (Best & Hartman, 2005), he also suggests almost a filiation in the experience of escape/rebellion of contemporary migrants: by evoking slave rebellions on land and at sea, “if one had to draw comparisons between historic slaves and contemporary migrants, beyond often crude visual associations, one would need to do so by enquiring into moments in which both enacted escape to a place of perceived freedom” (Stierl, 2019: 20).

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On our part, whichever angle we wish to look at this from, excluding the complementary perspectives of criminalization and/or victimization, we believe that postcolonial migrations of the present (be they forced or not) aspire to a similar, specific “place of perceived freedom”, and thus continue to express the same peculiar intensity. In doing so, they reproduce a game of lights and shadows not unlike that which punctuated the capture strategies and the desertion and escape practices of runaway slaves and, more generally, of the black diaspora. These migrations situate themselves at the intersection between extractive dynamics and a racial capitalism whose coloniality continues to define the global present. We believe that it is at this very crossroads or intersection, on the movements and the routes traveled by migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers within, around, and against the borders as well as on the renewed chains and capture apparatuses through which their presence and their lives are being contained, curbed, and governed, that we ought to build any possible reactivation of the spread out and exorbitant history of the UGRR, any genealogy, and any possible comparison between that history “not to pass on” and its potential, branched out continuations in the postcolonial geography of the present. Therefore, it is an exercise or an effort of imagination, historical and geographical at the same time. It is a continual trespassing which, around the color line and in the name of race, ties together past and present US history and pushes us to discuss also the postcolonial Europe that has been remodeled and redefined in the past years by the governing of a “crisis”, which is simultaneously/alternatively economic, financial, political, and therefore is a borders, migrations, and asylum “crisis”. However, if it is possible to trace and reconstruct a genealogy of the routes and of the movements of migrants, refugees, and undocumented people within and against European borders in the history of the UGRR, of its routes, traveled and inhabited, and of its counter-spaces, outlined and produced, it is also necessary to ask questions about the trajectories and the endpoints of this genealogical exercise. A discussion on the legitimate direction (ascending? descending?) of a genealogy could be endless and may not be irrelevant. Starting from the present and going back to the past using, that is, the first (human anatomy) to explain the second (the ape)―usually turns out to be a good method (anachronistic, essentially Hegelian). Here, we may have opted for the opposite direction, but we still (and obviously) had the present in mind. Our way to evoke a past like that of the UGRR essentially responds

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to the urgency of this present, more precisely to the possibility/necessity to reread the movement of migrants and refugees within and against the European borderland and the filigree of the routes that were dug out and inhabited by the UGRR. This might involve searching for a point of rupture, the “eruption of the forces” (and therefore suggesting a plural subject, a coalition, a possible “abolition democracy”), bringing back to the surface yesterday’s and today’s buried stories, “subjugated knowledges”, disqualified and marginalized, and fugitive lives. As we approached this project, right from the title, we had two objectives: giving a future back to the past (by trying to redeem it) and giving the present a specific historicity, a historical weight―that is, writing “a history of the present”. We believe that it is precisely this twofold possibility and this peculiar reversibility which confer meaning to every genealogical gesture. To this, we must add the perception of (and trust in) a particular historical and geographical “horizontality”―an “intimacy” following Lisa Lowe’s intuition, which is spatial and temporal―because, after all, we are still dealing with a past/present history of chains, race, exploitation, deaths, and borders. Above all, this is a history of struggles, escapes, and routes within and against those chains and borders, which means it is also a history of maps. So, let us start from these, and with different, perhaps more technical language, let us try to short-circuit them someway.

Borderland Europe The UGRR was not a railroad, but a series of networks and intersections, mostly ephemeral, which opened up like gashes in the mesh of a specific map propped up by borders (those that established the outer limits of the plantations, the counties, and the states of the South, the Mason-Dixon line, and, after 1850, the border between the United States and Canada), producing just as many “counter-spaces”. It was a set of routes which were traveled and inhabited, woven through by stations, houses, and passages, and destined to dismantle the chains of slavery and mix up (but certainly not abolish) the peremptory violence of the color line―the centrality of race, the cast-iron social hierarchy of the order imposed by the plantations system, and an implicitly white and male idea of belonging and citizenship. If we look at the movements of migrants and refugees within and around the current European borders it feels like we are talking about

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another history and another world, but it is not impossible to identify something that is potentially “close”: a similar, possible “counter-space”, one surrounded by borders which may be even more cast-iron and tied to different chains, which are perhaps less peremptory and literal, and certainly more mobile and flexible. It is above all a question of intensity, of routes and directions, of spaces traveled and inhabited within the color line and inside a specific map. Which map are we talking about exactly? The (impossible) map of present-day Europe is, first of all, the result of the juxtaposition of different geographies of crisis (European territories have not been this fragmented and torn apart since the end of the World War II). At the same time, this territory is being yanked, and its topology appears to be the outcome of the constant (re)assembling of a specific “borderscape” propped up by walls, islands, fences, barbed wire, overcrowded camps, forced corridors, and centralized biometric archives, but also by makeshift camps, illegalized routes, and deferred northbound passages. To find our way around, we would have to abandon the illusion of an actual map and, rather, start from a series of retro-actions or counter-­ maps. This would allow us to obtain the image of a stretched out and “striated” space, produced by the juxtaposition and concatenation between, on the one hand, movements of subjects in transit (migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers) which are mostly forced, routes which are imposed, blocked, attempted, and dug out, and on the other, the specific border regime which, during the various “crises”, was assembled in the attempt to govern, contain, filter, and distribute its reach (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013; Walters, 2006; Bojadžijev & Mezzadra, 2015). Thus, the impression we get is, above all, a battlefield, a kind of “drifting” within and around the European borders, which is reflected in the metonymy of a sequence of names and places: Idomeni, Lesvos, Chios, Lampedusa, Ceuta, and Melilla; but also Calais, Ventimiglia, Briançon, the Brenner; or Bihac, Velika Kladusa, Lipa, Sid, Narewka, and so on. Once again, it is an impossible map, an incoherent sum of scattered dots that can come together in an overall discourse of closure, and yet remains contested, fragmented, and marked by a series of wounds and frictions. If we look at it from the outside, from its external borders, such a geography acquires a possible definition by continuing to suggest and even by reinforcing the (vexata) impression of a “fortress”, of a space that is impermeable as much as it is incrementally selective, sealed at its margins by

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mobile, peremptory, and violent land and water borders.3 To tragically summarize this shielded dimension, which forces people on increasingly risky and congested journeys and crossings, the European space turns out to be a deadly one, surrounded by an enormous (but somehow measurable and measured)4 number of bodies, of shipwrecks with or without spectators and of “left-to-die boats” (Heller et al., 2012), of bodies caught in the stifling mesh of its borders. These are precisely “border deaths”, which are far from accidental, and are as widespread and increasing as they are structured and “state-sanctioned”. Such a backdrop gives us the sense of a more general “necropolitical” space, which Achille Mbembe invites to consider as complementary to the biopolitical and constitutive one of a government rationality defined at its root by colonial domination (Mbembe, 2003). It is possible to find here something akin to a sovereign exercise of power, though in the indirect sense of an act which produces a fundamental in-distinction between life and death and, therefore, of a decision whose effects are distant, located in a gray area, as if to dissolve any partitive and geometric opposition between letting and making die. This is because the borders of (post)colonial Eu-rope, be they external or internal, have always killed like this. And it is this essentially racist dimension, as “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore, 2007: 28), which continues to emerge from the impossible mapping of the European crisis. Yet, there exists another complementary image that must be juxtaposed to the one of the “fortress”, and another geography of Europe that has been produced by these crises. Both of them may appear less spectacular or peremptory if compared with the first, and, nonetheless, they turn out to be even more incisive and decisive in their ability to shape and redesign 3  This impression is the product of the extension of readmission agreements with third countries (Turkey, Tunisia, Niger, Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco, and Afghanistan) which shift European borders, making them work ahead of time and from a distance; of a maritime control whose primary objective is not to rescue lives but rather to force them to be repatriated (to Tunisia, to Morocco, to Libyan and Turkish concentration camps or directly to their countries of origin); of the adoption of a “hotspot approach”, with identification and selection centers and camps located directly on the external borders, which imposes a logistic rationality of preventative, differential, and hierarchical filtering on those who arrive or land. See: Garelli, Tazzioli (2018). 4  See: https://unitedagainstrefugeedeaths.eu/about-the-campaign/about-the-unitedlist-of-deaths/.

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the physiognomy of Eu-rope and to selectively capture, differentially and hierarchically, those who attempt or manage to cross it. It is an image or a geography which, starting from the proliferation of borders between and within single member states, conveys and translates the profoundly uneven nature of these territories, their being torn apart and splintered into a series of islands, enclaves, buffer zones, corridors, and camps which, in fact, coincide with the irregular and striated space experienced, crossed, and inhabited by the illegalized population in transit. To define the political quality of this space, Etienne Balibar has resorted to the term “borderland” (Balibar, 2009; Walters, 2009), alluding to an extended and potentially deferred border zone which is fragmented and racialized, marked, that is, by a proliferation of devices and border signals by virtue of which any idea of fortress ends up looking inadequate―if anything, because it shatters. It is in the reciprocal interference and tension between the external projection of the image of a fortress and the actual internal production of a borderland that the impossible map of “Eu-rope” must be situated―and placed against the backdrop of a more general “European question” (De Genova, 2017), the constantly reupdated trace of a “historical substance”, of a past/present defined by the colonial experience (Mellino, 2019). Such a selective and striated space, populated by just as many hierarchized presences (which Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson define as a “multiplication of labor” mostly built on “race management”), can be read as the generalized outcome or the reflection of a specific “sovereign machine of governamentality” (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). The fact is that we must preliminarily imagine this machine and the proliferation of borders defining it as reactions to something that “anticipates” or, in any case, determines them, establishing a specific relation. To use an image, a plateau among the thousand defined by Deleuze and Guattari, we could imagine a heterogenous “capture apparatus” which responds and shapes itself according to a specific and equally heterogenous “nomadic machine”. Thus, we might investigate the peculiar assemblage, the isomorphic twine that the two plateaus end up establishing, reshaping one another (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Accordingly, the image of the fortress ends up taking on the features of a hologram or the more material and criminal elements of a deterrent―that is, of a ferocious response to routes which keep being redefined and modified by challenging it. On the other hand, the complementary dimension of a “borderland” turns out to be a more general battlefield marked by a series of dots and names scattered on that

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impossible map, which stand for just as many frictions and conflict zones (that is, contended spaces, cut through by bordering and racialization processes as well as by routes, itineraries, and practices of resistance and crossing). Those conflict zones constitute a spectacle “within the borders”, within the reversibility of light and shadows which characterize them. A methodological indication extrapolated from the idea of an autonomy of migrations suggests that we start from the movement, on the assumption that this always precedes and exceeds any attempt to govern it (Mezzadra, 2011; Papadopoulos et al., 2008; De Genova, 2017). It also invites us to follow its trajectories and routes to see which specific assemblage of borders it triggers and which circumvention, escape, and subtraction tactics it enacts. However, all of this must start from the way this movement is translated and framed by the sovereign machine of European governance, by its lexicon and capture apparatuses.

The Prose of Counter-Migrations Official European documents on migrations are an atypical kind of textual material produced by actants that do not necessarily coalesce (European Commission and Parliament; mixed control agencies like Frontex, Europol, and the IOM; supranational institutions like the UNHCR, NGOs and volunteer associations; as well as the various Departments of State; Departments of Interior; and Departments of Defense of member states, and so on). What emerges from the way in which these documents tend to represent the “object” of their attention, if anything, is a lack of imagination. Within an objectifying discourse and behind the insistent use of metaphors ranging from scientific to physical or hydraulic, to biopolitical or military (quotas, flows, push and pull factors, hotspots), a specific formula, which was adopted about twenty years ago, now seems to recur more frequently in the run-up to recent events. It is an anodyne definition used to designate a series of behaviors and phenomena which are not very predictable or linear when the institutions attempt to govern them. Their official definition is “secondary movements”. But what does this formula identify exactly? Which subjects, phenomena, and behaviors does it define as it cumulatively identifies and classifies them as “secondary”? To answer this question, it might be useful to refer to a specific historiographic experience which developed in Kolkata toward the end of the 1980s under the name of “subaltern studies”. Forty years after India’s independence, a group of historians found themselves coming to terms

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with an immense archive, with the intention to deconstruct its premises. They intended to (re)write the history of postcolonial transition in the Indian subcontinent starting from the white spaces, the censorship and omissions which had hitherto characterized the hegemonic historical discourse―the British colonial one as well as the postcolonial one of the Indian elites. In other words, this was about bringing to the surface, as a symptom of a problem, other maps, other wishes and desires, the subjective mark of the subalterns which the “prose of the counter-insurrection” (Guha, 1988) concealed and neutralized through the aseptic language of official reports and accounts. In the end, even the lexicon of European governance of migrations could be read in these terms. In this case, the objective would be to bring to the surface―between the lines of official speeches, briefings, and reports―a set of practices which are essentially spatial, mostly intentional, and not even too chaotic (neutralized in the formula “secondary movements”), as a concealed symptom of a specific presence and of a different geography of Europe. This is how a report presented by the European Parliament in October 2017 generically defines “secondary movements”: [T]he phenomenon of migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, who for various reasons move from the country in which they first arrived, to seek protection or permanent resettlement elsewhere. (EU Parliament, 2017)

It clearly is a synthetic definition which is meant to be returned to and developed into points later on, but which already features a series of implicit references that call for an in-depth analysis, starting from the idea of a “first country of arrival”. In this case, the term refers to the Dublin Treaty of Regulations and to the obligation whereby the first country where “migrants” arrive and are intercepted must identify them, collecting sensitive data (biographical and/or biometric, which are recorded on the centralized SiS-EuroDac archive), recording any asylum applications, and restricting their movements to their national territory. Without dwelling on the clear contradictions and the imbalances in European reception policies, it is worth highlighting the first significant slippage registered in the very vocabulary adopted in the report. If, in fact, the itineraries leading up to the EU’s external borders are originally almost exclusively described as “flows”, even disorganized but essentially unidirectional and defined in

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terms of pre-established routes (something which logically should correspond to “primary movements”), upon coming into contact with a European border territory and device that maintain it, these flows turn into something that is less linear and predictable, as if by breaking on to the first political obstacle in their way they reorganized themselves into a series of possible rivulets and branches. Here appears the most heteroclitic and disorganized movement (mostly in the plural), synonymous with a (further) governing problem. Obviously, the report does not limit itself to recording such an evolution, and, with the intention of getting to the bottom of it, it continues by providing a first interpretation of this phenomenon, alluding to the immediate consequences in relation to a gradual scale of potential infringements: While most asylum-seekers seek protection in countries close to their countries of origin, some are compelled or choose to move onwards from or through countries in which they had, or could have sought, international protection, to other countries where they may request such protection. Such secondary or onward movements are often done in an irregular manner, that is without the prior consent of the national authorities or without an entry visa, or with no or insufficient documentation normally required for travel purposes, or with false or fraudulent documentation. (Ibidem)

Here, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the formulation of an axiom, a “rule” which defines or establishes an abstract criterion―the idea that the majority of asylum seekers are seeking protection in countries close to their own―on which a gradual scale of exceptions including fraud and felony involving the falsification of identity is defined and built. Nothing other than the evident truism whereby any exit or escape from one’s own country must involve passing through neighboring countries can support such a statement. Nevertheless, starting from such a truism, this text establishes a norm based on which we are supposed to infer standards of “rational” behavior, a direction of orderly flows. Thus, it speaks of movements in ideally predictable, regulated, and regular terms, implicitly establishing the existence of a transgression to this criterion of readability, which is nothing other than the effect imposed by the logic adopted to govern such movements. This text still contemplates the possibility, notwithstanding the initial assumption, that migrants and asylum seekers are compelled (without specifying, at least not at this stage, by whom or by what) or choose to

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move onward, and that this choice, whether it is induced or not, is in conflict to varying degrees with the forms of movement defined as the rule. This rule, materially speaking, is the criteria established as legitimate based on the Treaty, a formal authorization to move internally, a permit or a visa granted to reach a third country, and so on. It would be worth wondering about the meaning of the word “compelled” as referred to in these different practices, and we might highlight how, in the case of “secondary movements”, it takes on a meaning that differs from its conventional use, which describes one of the most recurring aspects of primary movements when read as forced migration: “trafficking”. It is as though, between the lines, behind the (trafficked) victims and the potential (legitimate) refugees, there was an unintelligible route, not only an escape as expression of a simple survival instinct―an insistence to move, a desire and some aspirations which exceed the protection and reception tamed by the institutions and turned into just as many transgressions and irregularities. The following statement, the specific “will to know” behind the prose of this briefing, partly contributes to clarifying this mechanism, the denial of a “desiring” element, and the implicitly political aspirations of migrants and asylum seekers’ movements which are classed as “secondary”: There has been growing interest among academics and stakeholders in the reasons why asylum-seekers prefer to make an application for asylum in one country over another, both in Europe and beyond. (Ibidem)

Referring to a constellation of knowledge (and powers) to get to the bottom of the motives of abnormal conducts that contradict the “first country” axiom (whether that country is safe or not) produces a list of realistic, ostensible, and sympathetic/comprehensive reasons based on the need for actual access to protection, to family reunion, to the possibility of better living and working conditions, and so on. However, there is more to say about such “sympathetic” interpretations. For instance, we could highlight the fictional premise on which the unified subject that conveys and states them is positioned and constituted. This can be done starting from a clear fact: Portugal, Italy, Greece, or Spain, and perhaps even more so Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, are not exactly the same as France and Belgium which, in turn, are not Germany, Denmark, or Sweden, which probably are not the United Kingdom, the United States, or Canada. That is to say, if secondary “onward” movements are reined in within a space, a Treaty, a set of norms, and a discourse that bind

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them to fixed points within that space, their existence questions the very territory of statement implied by that briefing, the hologram of a unified, federated space which is conceived as homogenous. Their routes are a material indictment of the “uneven geography of Europe” produced by the crisis and, as suggested by those who compared the march from Keleti station in the summer of 2015 with the Salt March promoted by Gandhi in 1946, “they vote with their feet” against the effects of any re-­negotiation of the debt or of the memorandum imposed by ordoliberal governance (De Genova et al., 2015). None of this can be explicitly stated in that briefing. The knowledge it relies upon suggests an acknowledgment of how these subsequent routes can be determined by material opportunities which are “objectively different”, by the weight of “colonial legacies”, by reunions that are not strictly about families, and so on. However, such knowledge does not allow reading the itineraries and the places chosen by the subjects of these “secondary movements” as alternative to the geography they presuppose and to the specific protection and reception model they support. More specifically, the report and its knowledge cannot admit that the routes of those who are identified as the subjects of secondary movements can be constituted “along the way” and that rules can be established “as they go along”, within and against any attempt to know them from above and to govern them. They cannot admit that these movements are mostly curbed, forced by governments’ interventions and by the very border devices they contribute to triggering and to which they react in terms of opposition, resistance, and “insurrection”. Ultimately, they cannot admit that the movements and behaviors classed as “secondary” are the expression of an idea and of a map of Europe which are radically “other” with respect to those implied and materially reproduced by that briefing, whose tone and prose, after all, are not so distant from the rhetoric of those slave owners who wondered about the disease that compulsively induced slaves to escape, or from that of those British Raj officials when, equally bewildered, they had to account for the constant insurrections of the subalterns. It is essentially this dimension―emerging, for instance, from the tenacity with which, after every systematic dismantling, new informal camps are built all over the borderland―which animates the report between the lines, ending up giving rise to the subsequent representation of secondary movements as a “problem” and to the irregularization and criminalization of the subjects of these movements. Indeed, despite the omission of any justifiable causes and reasons as well as the focus on the implications and

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on the immediate effects of secondary movements, there is a change of register in the prose of the final part, which alludes to supposed risks of exploitation and trafficking to which asylum seekers are exposed (despite being within European territories and without identifying any causes or responsibilities); it denounces a pressure on the reception capacity of the single countries; it invokes the need for more homogenous and standardized asylum policies; it invokes the likely hostile reaction of the public opinion; it configures possible abuses of the protection system (“multiple asylum applications and asylum shopping”); it highlights how these movements can create tensions and frictions between different member states, with the consequent tightening of control measures, extension of detention, and increase in recourse to deportations. It also climaxes into the description of a process of criminalization which culminates in a list of punitive interventions and of opposition to secondary movements, not before restating the objective of a harmonization of protection policies in the context of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which is able to inhibit and limit this phenomenon: Whereas the main objective of CEAS instruments is to provide a common level of protection, their preambles also state that harmonisation ‘should help to limit the secondary movements of applicants for international protection between Member States’. For this purpose, some of the instruments provide for:

–– the possibility to withdraw reception conditions from asylum-­ seekers (Article 20, Reception Conditions Directive); –– the detention of applicants (Article 8, Reception Conditions Directive); –– the reduction of procedural guarantees under certain circumstances (Articles 31, 32, 33 and 43, Asylum Procedures Directive). (Ibidem) Beyond the implicit willingness to set legitimate refugees apart from “bogus refugees”, that is economic migrants (De Genova et al., 2016), and the intention to use asylum as a selective instrument to simply control, govern, racialize, and criminalize migrations (Valluy, 2005), it is worth focusing on the seeming schizophrenia which characterizes the prose of this briefing. An understandable phenomenon, which, however, is classed as an “exception” to abstract criteria taken as the norm, is simultaneously

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a security issue and an irregular behavior to be inhibited, opposed, and repressed. But what are the ambivalences, oscillations, and deviations between the lines of its aseptic language a symptom of? The thesis we would like to put forward, as it will have become clear, is that what is defined as secondary movements is the expression of a kaleidoscope of practices, behaviors, and conducts that, whichever angle we look at it from and beyond the multiple and different reasons and conditions it may reflect, exceeds and implicitly contests the governance of migrations, and the juridical and material devices with which it is equipped. Namely, it embodies an excess, a form of resistance which does not coincide with or resign itself to the material map and the internal borders of the European borderland. It is essentially this form of “insurgency”, foreclosed by the prose of governance, that we will focus our attention on in the following pages, in the attempt to bring to light the war behind the pacified language of “secondary movements” and to read them, paraphrasing the original title of an important book by Partha Chatterjee (2006), as what could be defined as a “politics of the confined”. All of this, however, cannot be done before observing one final slippage, almost a slip, in the prose of this briefing. In the last few lines, the subjects of secondary movements suddenly become “absconded”,5 at large and hidden like the runaway slaves searching for a “passage” toward the states of the North and Canada, or the Maroons fleeing the sugarcane plantations system owned by the Caribbean colonial companies. An absconded person is someone who is escaping and hiding out, but also someone who operates in the shadows and becomes invisible within the folds of a discourse which their very presence decisively animates and intentionally seeks to subvert.6

5  “An applicant who has absconded, or is likely to abscond, would have residence restrictions in the Member State imposed, or be detained, and would not be entitled to material reception conditions (save for emergency health care) when present irregularly in a Member State other than the one in which they are required to be present” (see: https://www. europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/608728/EPRS_BRI(2017) 608728_EN.pdf). 6  The very etymology of the word “absconded” goes back to the Latin absconditus which, for Ernst Bloch, may suggest a further, original, and unexpected condition (see: Bloch 1970).

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Counter-Camps What does it feel like to be “absconded”, fugitives, and hunted? We would have to ask Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and those who, like them, led or embarked on “a flight to north” in the years of the Fugitive Act leading up to the American Civil War. Their answer, often reported in first person, would not be very different from the one we might get today from the migrants, refugees, and undocumented persons caught in the European borderland and classed as subjects of secondary movements. If the former described nocturnal itineraries and daytime breaks in swamps or in “safe houses”, journeys pointed toward the northern star of a “perceived freedom”, and improvised camps and communities built and inhabited on the run, the latter tell us about routes that are no less hazardous, driven by a similar aspiration and heading toward the same star―that is, punctuated by a similar alternation between light and shadows, a similar regime of (in)visibility, and often organized around temporary places, more or less improvised. This is because, in actual fact, the European borderland is strewn with makeshift camps, for the most part informal, “clandestine”, and semi-­ hidden, built overnight and inhabited by the protagonists of secondary movements who can count at best on the support of a series of subjects and groups acting in solidarity that, in turn, are hindered and persecuted by national and European authorities. In the majority of cases, these are extremely precarious places that sometimes reach exorbitant sizes, mostly growing around, next to, or in the shadow of overcrowded official and emergency centers, like in the case of Moria and of its double, Pikpa, on the island of Lesvos. However, these “spaces in the shadows”, which make them similar to the Maroons’ encampments if not to the more extensive quilombos colonies, often tend to proliferate in regions located at the margins, surrounding the external borders,7 along specific routes which point

7  Like in the case of the Gorougou forest, just behind Melilla, or in the Balkans, in Bihac, Sid, Lipa, and Velika Kladusa, or even further east or south, along the Greek border with Albania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, or the Polish one with Belarus.

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to just as many new passages and therefore trigger further encroachments by the capture apparatus.8 In the majority of cases, these “absconded encampments for the absconded people” involved in secondary movements seem to be generated through a process of “meiosis”, of doubling and proliferation, going on to configure the correlative, which is often harsher, more precarious and temporary (as a sort of “off-screen” or side effect), of what I have defined elsewhere as a “camp-form”.9 However, as “off-screen”, they can settle more or less fleetingly also in the very center, in the heart of Eu-rope, emerging in the public space of major continental cities (in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Athens, Milan, or Rome), in parks and squares, in the vicinity of train stations and transit areas, or in the rusty shadows of abandoned areas. In any case, they are more frequently built and assembled just up against an internal or international border (in Calais, Ventimiglia, Briançon, Bolzano, Trieste, Gorizia, and so on) as crossroads or waiting rooms subject to the turnover of a heterogenous (mostly male), temporary, and ever-­ changing population of subjects in transit, many of whom are bound to be violently removed and dispersed once they have been deprived of any further opportunity to move, with the few means available to them (mobile phones, tents, blankets, even shoes) confiscated or destroyed. The different size, temporality, and localization of these “eruptions” make it hard to keep them within an overarching discourse: no categories then, no shape or form in a broad sense. Indeed, it is possible to identify a series of fractures and substantial differences within this particular 8  In the course of 2019, in order to hinder these “secondary” passages (which, however, exceeded the territories of the European Union), Frontex, the European agency designated to control external borders, started to operate directly in Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania, as well as in Croatia and Slovenia. By violating the limits of its mandate and its legitimate radius of action, it directly intercepted, pushed back, or repatriated, with the support of national police forces and armies, thousands of migrants and asylum seekers in transit through Greece, Turkey, or Bulgaria, who were taking refuge in the squares, stations, or markets of Sarajevo and Belgrade, in towns and villages on the Croatian border, or in places deeper into Kosovo and Albania, along the rivulets generated by the reconfiguration of just as many possible itineraries (see: Minca 2019). 9  In short, by “camp-form” we mean a specific confinement apparatus in which various subjects who, for various reasons, are considered “out of place”, exceeding codified forms of belonging, can be contained and territorialized. Its genealogy refers to the dichotomous geography of imperial colonies, finding in the colonial subject the first internable and deportable figure; its “global” spread invites us to problematize the overcoming and the trespassing of that superordinated geography in the postcolonial present (Rahola 2003, 2010, 2011).

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“informal form”. In some cases, as already mentioned, the impression is that they operate as emergency solutions, improvised and precarious, acting as a mimetic supplement in the shadows or as an explicit exit strategy with respect to official reception and containment facilities. In other cases, however (like in Calais, Ventimiglia, or Bihac), their very existence seems to trigger and produce (almost incite) that of institutional camps, pushing the latter into the shadows by turning them into the reaction which reimposes (mostly through a container, the new logistical “modulor”) an otherwise intolerable use of public space and an otherwise ungovernable movement made up of illegalized routes and ways of inhabiting them. In fact, despite being hidden and invisibilized, these camps are actually placed under the everyday spotlights of a form of control which is obsessive as much as it is intermittent and normally external, from a distance. Scrutinized like fires seen from afar, debated and contested by the public opinion (still from a safe distance), they are systematically stigmatized as a threat to security, as scandalous instances of illegality, abuse, danger, and insecurity. They are thus labeled as unhealthy, indecent, “indecorous”, uncivilized, primitive, and wild environments, and therefore are alternatively defined as jungles, ghettos, forests, and habitats of (un-)urban outcasts. A peremptory process of racialization affects these places as much as the subjects that inhabit them, as if to weld them together, suggesting the existence of an appropriate space, the “right place” for a detained and invisibilized race inside the containers of an official camp (or chained in a plantation nearby). Thus, it is not surprising that these informal places are constantly under siege and are systematically dismantled, that their inhabitants are evicted and relocated to institutional reception and detention centers hundreds of miles away through spectacular police and ethnic cleansing operations which are often hyper-mediated, justified in the name of public health and safety. Frequently, in particular when they are located on the margins of Eu-rope, these camps are simply removed once the media attention has fizzled out, to then be potentially rebuilt a few days later and a few meters away, in further shadow zones. In any case, the impression one gets is that of dealing with specters, zombies, or ghosts which, like all the ghostly matters, haunt and cause obsessions. All of these concealed ingredients are reflected in the racialized traces of places which are also “absconded”, latent, and clandestine― places which, in this case too, must be read between the lines of the prose of counter-migrations, like the harsh and precarious stations of a route protracted toward the place “of a perceived freedom”.

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Indeed, if we take a closer look at them from within―which is what we are about to do here―these makeshift camps turn out to be specific temporary crossing and meeting zones, where different biographies, itineraries, and languages concentrate and sometimes mix, sharing, in their overall precarity, spaces, resources, experiences, and knowledge based on more or less known or secret word of mouth and maps. As much as they are segregated and often crossed by internal tensions reflecting “ethnic” or national borders and conflicts, they can produce a specific economy and a currency of their own, one made of barters and various services (legal or not), and even a specific language, a vernacular that tactically reflects, like a form of mimicry, that of European governance and is filled with words like “asylum”, “fingerprints”, “Dublin”, “humanitarian or subsidiary protection”, removal or expulsion “papers”, or acronyms like “CAS, CARA, SPRAR, CAO”, and so on. On these ambivalent terms (where material and symbolic violence are diluted in a tactical or mimetic reappropriation), they end up forging a specific relationship with the outside world by filtering and retranslating it. Such a relationship is then deepened and amplified by the fact that these are also specific contact zones, in so far as the material survival, if not their actual existence, is mostly the result of cooperation between migrants, refugees, undocumented persons, and members of NGOs or groups of activists, militants, and volunteers who, as Barbara Krauthamer suggested in relation to the United States, seem to “reactivate” the abolitionist networks that had arisen to support the revolts/ escapes of runaway slaves by challenging various intimidations and a more general criminalization. These forms of cooperation and of more or less ephemeral coalitions can be characterized by different intensities and found at different latitudes―from transient distribution of food or medical assistance in places where people are exclusively or hopefully just “passing by”, down to more organized and stable situations. This is true of the Roja Valley, a sort of “autonomous Republic of hospitality” which was created in an inlet on the border between Italy and France. Another example which is in many ways exceptional but by no means unique is the City Plaza, a four-star hotel located right in the center of Athens. After closing down in 2014 due to the effects of the crisis and of austerity, it was reoccupied two years later by a “coalition” of activists, migrants, and asylum seekers. They turned it into a peculiar “station”, a commune reminiscent of Buxton or Florence, where different subjects of secondary movements who had mostly passed through

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the islands of the Aegean Sea or through the northern border with Turkey (but also some who had relocated to Greece from other European countries) were simply able to “stay”, to reorganize their own journeys and their own routes by even trying to reinvent the surrounding public space. In his strange book, Benjamin Drew devoted a detailed report to similar places, and he stopped there during his journey to Canada. The second part of our book, just as with many accounts and diaries of travels within (and against) the European borderland, will be devoted to this heterogenous world of crossroads situated within a more general trap. There would be much more to say about these informal and occupied spaces, just as many ostensible stopovers or stations (“colonies” or communes) of a possible Underground Europe: more data to provide and stories to tell. Besides, some of them are relatively well known and widely explored―from an ethnographic, journalistic, and also architectural perspective. Sometimes they have even been praised as possible utopian cities, forms of spontaneous and instant urbanism (as in the case of the Calais “jungle”― Tosatti, 2017). But it seems questionable to say the least that vitalist and serendipitous interpretations of this sort could really grasp their actual material sense and reflect their harsh, violently precarious, and above all temporary and tactical dimension. Nonetheless, they can be considered not only as concrete and even creative expressions of a specific practice of inhabiting and crossing a space, but also as material instances of a specific intensity which supports a series of routes pointing toward an abstract yet possible space generically named “Europe”. In order to get an idea of this drive or intention, it may be useful to look at these ideas through a specific cartographic gaze, from above, and to situate them geographically and politically by understanding the (in) visible thread that holds them together. In other words, it is a matter of asking how the assemblage of itineraries, directions, and journeys that coalesce in those encampments clashes with a specific border regime and what it materially signals. We should begin with a clarification, perhaps a correction, by suggesting, for instance, how even from afar, from above, these spaces do not limit themselves to pointing to an “off-screen”, the informal correlative of a given form or a “camp-form”, functioning rather as its peculiar “reverse shot”, as counter-camps. Secondly, we should suggest that this temporary and precarious dimension, which is nonetheless oppositional and contrary, ends up becoming loaded with a more general, geographical, and political meaning, something akin to a breach, crossed and inhabited, which is the

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expression of other directions within and against the European borderland. This is because, in the impossible map that they outline, these “temporary autonomous zones” and these provisional ways of occupying and inhabiting them reflect just as many drifts which, most of the time, are continuously improvised and remodeled depending on the capture apparatus that looms over them. However, taken altogether, they convey the sense of a “subterranean geography” that cuts through and rearticulates the European borderland. Thus, what emerges is the relationship between all these dots or “spaces of representation” and the objective and violent “representation of space” synthesized in the idea of a borderland (strewn with reception/detention/identification camps and with the borders hypostatized by these material devices). It is a sort of “dance” which is macabre as well as often lethal (dotted with frozen bodies “off the beaten tracks” of the Balkan route, caught in the barbed wire and in the nets which, like a “litany”, surround any border zone, wounded by the national police dogs, mangled on the rail tracks of a Eurotunnel, and asphyxiated in a container), yet continuously (re)opened at that very high price. The relationship between the routes dug by the absconded people of secondary movements and the assemblage of the border devices triggered by them, the modernized “chains” through which states (and something else that cannot be called anything other than Capital) seek to govern, contain or exploit their presence, generate a sort of loop―a set of “situations” which shape one another without interruptions, without a final word (just the first one, “movement”), turning into the unstable, spectral, and continuously challenged image of a borderland. This has the bitter and stifling taste of a trap, but it can also be a crossroads. There would be much more to add, also with regard to this last image. For instance, we should explore the specific “logistical reason”, summed up in the shape of a container (and dotted with corridors, hubs, digitalized platforms, archives, hotspots, and special zones governed by specific synchronized operations that impose orderly flows and selected geography― Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019), which invests the mobile assemblage of borders and is reflected in the prose of the European and global governance of migrations. And we should, in turn, examine the relationships established by this reason with a possible “counter-logistical” one enacted by these encampments and by the movements and spatial practices defined as “secondary”. Perhaps, this might bring us to read all of these

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underground locations and practices in terms of an overall “drift”, as a kind of détour similar to some situationist excursions within and against the pre-ordered space of the modern metropolis. What may be at stake, in this case, is a peculiar feeling of “being lost” and absconded, somehow evoked by the anonymous Latin line “in girum imus nocte”,10 as an experience which goes from being a condemnation to turning into the possibility of another space and another gaze―that is, of a specific Maroon perspective and thus of a decentered and marginal point of view, a “situated epistemology” (Haraway, 1988, 2000) which can be used as the starting point to “destabilize any vision that fixes Europe within racialized and normative imaginaries of nation-states and national identities”(Aparna et al., 2017: 437). Here, through similar lenses, we propose a more intentional and finalized reading of this eccentric position and condition in the filigree of a “set of junctions, networks, and intersections”, all located along a specific route, guided by a similar drive, a northern star, and fueled by a kind of abolitionist tension. After all, it is precisely this deferred route which represents the (in)visible thread that connects all these dots into an impossible map, the chaotic assemblage of counter-camps within and against the European borderland. And it is on these premises that we are brought back in time to the experience of runaway slaves, to their voices and alliances which resonate into the present (Hartman, 1997). More precisely, this takes us back both to the ability to organize and inhabit the escape by creating a counterspace together, as well as to the instruments and devices adopted to counter or govern it in the attempt to re-establish an order, a capture, and some chains. As a matter of fact, even absconded slaves, the rebels of the plantations, were fleeing from a specific capture apparatus, a border regime juridically defined, after 1850, by the Fugitive Act and actually, before that date, by the bounties and the asphyxiating manhunt instigated by slave hunters. More generally, their escape was synonymous with a flight and subtraction from a form of confinement and captivity which was literally imposed through a chain, as a sign of immobility, constraint, property, or chattel.

10  In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (roughly translated as “We go round and round at night and are consumed by fire”) is a famous anonymous palindromic line attributed to an alleged ancient Roman poet (maybe Lucretius) as well as being the title of a 1978 Guy Debord movie.

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Over that escape loomed the terror of a new capture, forcing people into a sort of perpetual movement toward a “place of a perceived freedom”. Despite being contained and trapped, most of the subjects of secondary movements that wander around the meanders of the European borderland are induced to perceive themselves as constantly on the move, through and to Europe. Unlike runaway slaves, these renewed fugitives have to face and confront different, less literal “chains” which, however, may work as “reenactments” of the Fugitive Laws―through the various updates of the Dublin Regulations, of re-admission agreements, internal deportations, and so on. That is to say that they are captured in the striated space of the European borderland as subjects that can be potentially detained, repatriated, or even deported, and they are actually exploited and compelled to a relentless movement. In the very act of dismantling an informal camp and of moving and dispersing its inhabitants toward a myriad of official centers scattered elsewhere, like in the de-territorialized archives of biometric data built to hinder “asylum shopping” or in the adoption of ad hoc management that induces a sort of perpetual Brownian motion (between reception and detention centers or among different renewed plantations), one can find the sense of a flexible and mobile government strategy which seems to reflect and follow the tactics at stake in the illegalized movements of migrants and undocumented persons. More precisely, a strategy that governs “mobility through mobility” (Tazzioli, 2020) by containing, channeling, and directing it in space and time, turning movement itself into a regulatory principle. Thus, if the present is still a time of chains (and of slavery), instead of binding bodies through the static terms of property and captivity, today’s chains seem to impose an indirect mark and yoke by setting a specific (im) mobility and a forced (in)visibility. Accordingly, it is a matter of understanding the violent relationship between the “autonomous drive” that props up the unauthorized movements of migrants and refugees and the capture effects imposed by a border regime which, besides being incrementally selective, becomes in turn increasingly flexible and mobile―as well as ostensibly abstract by responding to a series of data, figures, and codes. And it should be also a matter of finding a word or an image to represent this relationship, synthesizing the violent transition from a fortress to a borderland―that is, the violent encounter in which, in the aseptic prose of counter-migrations, primary flows are rearticulated into secondary movements. But how can this be achieved?

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The Leash and the Tear As Michel Foucault suggested, the exercise of power, as a relation over other relations, is also (if not primarily) a matter of “conducting” (Foucault, 2004). It is so even as an act of governing by separating bad and good circulation. As in the case of modern urbanism, this could be achieved by filtering and selecting, accelerating or slowing down, that is, by prompting some forms of mobility while inhibiting others. Yet, something may change when mobility becomes an overall environment and when the very principle, position, and functioning of this logic, elicited by the movements prompted by allegedly bad circulation, becomes, in turn, mobile. In these cases, we ought to figure out a tool whose “elasticity” significantly differs from the static rigidity typical of barriers, walls, and chains, as well as from the peremptory order of a block or a rejection―all elements which are nonetheless increasingly present within and around the European borderland. And the first image that comes to mind could be the prosaic and everyday one of a leash. Indeed, a leash allows for the governing of movements through movement, it imposes narrow-gauge itineraries, it yanks and leads people back, forcing those who are captured into a sort of perpetual circular motion. Under its lien, then, every movement becomes, so to speak, secondary. By limiting and outlining the perimeter of the radius of action of those who are tied to it, it contains more than holding back, imposing a peculiar regime which is ostensibly induced and forced. Moreover, a leash is a seal of property, of a peculiar “belonging”, as well as of control and surveillance. What materially remains on the field, on the impossible map of Borderland Europe, is thus a myriad of places, situations, and dots scattered along a deferred route in which the game between the leash of a mobile capture apparatus and the subjects who try to free themselves from its grip manifests itself in all its intensity. If Lampedusa, Lesvos, Ceuta, Melilla, Pozzallo, or other points in the hotspot archipelago (places where subjects are classified, filtered, and “tied” to selection, reception, and control strategies) can be considered as the points in space-time where people

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are marked (biographically and biometrically)11 and the leash affixed, all of the internal borders along which the subterranean character of secondary movements visibly re-emerges (such as Calais, Ventimiglia, or Patras) represent as many limits of its radius, the points where the harnessed subjects attempt to subtract themselves from its centripetal (or centrifugal) force, and where the stretched leash becomes particularly visible. It is as though two opposite forces, two similarly intense movements in opposite directions, defined and almost produced those localizations. To put it simply, we could describe them, respectively, as the subterranean force which pushes toward “the place of a perceived freedom”, as a drive to subtracting oneself, of tearing away and of escaping, opposed to the reactive force of enticement, confinement, and disciplining, all the way to detention and further deportations. In the peculiar tension established between forward escape movement and that of capture/containment/removal, a violent energy is created which, by reverberating in concentric circles, produces a striated territory and a multiplication of borders, frontiers, and barriers―a trap, Borderland Europe. However, at the same time, it strews that territory with just as many breaches and crossroads, filling it with stations, shelters, trenches, and pillboxes of a possible Underground Europe. A hotel or a squat occupied and self-managed by a coalition of migrants and activists; the harsh living conditions of a systematically dismantled yet incessantly rebuilt makeshift camp; the most discreet but no less deliberate gesture to leave a reception camp, even just for a “trip to the center”; the reiterated attempt to cross or overcome the wall, the fence, and the barbed wire that surround a national border―it is in this whole constellation of more or less subterranean and everyday situations and gestures that one can recognize the search for just as many tears on a leash, the construction of routes and passages which, by challenging it, aspire to another geography, to the nearby/faraway deferred place of a “perceived freedom”.

11  With the introduction of the hotspot “approach” it is difficult to subtract oneself from the fingerprints and the database of Eurodac into which they flow; as documented by the many testimonies collected by Amnesty International (2016), fingerprints are often taken through coercive measures that violate the human rights of migrants and refugees, while various kinds of institutional violence appear as endemic in border situations. Official EU data confirm the exponential growth of fingerprints present in Eurodac between 2015 and 2017: if at the end of 2015 there were 3,179,353, at the end of 2017 there were almost twice as many, 6,106,992 (see: EU-Lisa: https://www.eulisa.europa.eu/Publications/Reports/ 2017-088_2016%20Eurodac%20Annual%20Report.pdf).

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Since a leash has the immediate pretension to lead subjects by rebuking them, having them keep up, guiding them, imposing a direction, a pace, and a sort of orbital motion,12 the set of practices which opposed its imposition can be interpreted as attempts to lead oneself autonomously and in a different way. These attempts can, in turn, drag with them other subjects while mobilizing others in solidarity. Again, Michel Foucault offered en passant a concise definition of what, in his opinion, could be thought of as alternative to the pastoral power of the Roman Church. In the attempt to retrieve a word to designate a series of idiosyncratic and reluctant practices and behaviors vis-à-vis the pervasive economy of a power whose exercise aimed to lead the herd of worshippers as much as individual souls (“omnes et singulatim”), he ended up choosing the (by his own admission) unattractive term “counter-­ conducts”. Namely, he adopted this formula to point to a whole series of historical experiences (from the radical communities of some reformed churches in the seventeenth century to utopian, anarchist, and socialist political groups of the nineteenth century) and of individual or collective actions which mimicked and seemingly indulged the pastoral power of the Church by inverting, however, its premises and by subverting its outcomes and direction (Foucault, 2004; Davidson, 2011). Literally, although Foucault does not state this explicitly, a counter-conduct could be imagined as an attempt to conduct ourselves “together” in a different way through forms, “territories of the self”, and collective practices, often improvised, which originate the idea of a subject, a temporality, and a dimension of space that are all radically “other” and implicitly opposed to those imposed by a pastoral power in so far as they subtract themselves from its hold and give life to another landscape (Rahola, 2015). However difficult it may be, it is not impossible to recognize just as many counter-­ conducts in the underground routes dotted with makeshift counter-camps, small revolts, and singular infractions committed by absconded people which are neutralized into the category of “secondary movements” and caught in the European borderland. Indeed, by triggering the leash and suffering its consequences, their movements seem to mimic its action, its 12  This can happen through a sadistic game of snakes and ladders, characterized by removals and deportations which take people back to the starting point, through the proposal of a financially supported repatriation to the country of origin or, finally, through an invitation to re-enter the limbo of institutional reception, rectifying the crime of subtraction and the “scandal” of autonomy.

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leading criteria, its lexicon, and the devices it uses (permits, protections, camps, and corridors), but they do so to subvert its direction and hopefully free themselves from its hold,13 by reversing the molar, static nature of camps in the molecular temporariness of an encampment and by turning a trap or imposed corridor into an inhabited route and a crossroads. Various critical works on the prismatic geography which is simultaneously suffered and produced by contemporary migrations have cast light on the specific political meaning of containment spaces, camps, and corridors, highlighting their mostly spurious, hybrid, and especially contended nature: [W]hile borderlands and borderlines remain significant, a series of new locations―what we term corridors, camps, and spaces of confinement―have emerged as key sites to understand the practice of sovereignty through borderwork. … Just as states and affiliated organizations attempt to impose sovereign control over people on the move, people use new corridors and informal camps to refuse to submit to sovereign state control. (Jones & Johnson, 2017: 2)

Focusing on the peculiar (almost heterotopic) heterogeneity of the image of the “corridor”, Bernd Kasparek goes as far as suggesting a paradoxical form of “belonging”, not a literal one obviously, but nevertheless aware and deliberate, for many people on the move: Asked why they do not leave the corridor and pursue an alternative path, the [migrants’] answer is that if you leave the flow, you are lost. Outside the corridor, you are subject to the regime of asylum, detention and deportation. Only inside the corridor, you are allowed to move. (Kasparek, 2016: 7)

Perhaps various Maroons escaping the bounties and the Fugitive Laws and camping out in communes along just as many possible “corridors” or 13  Those who manage the leash mostly rely on criteria of “race, nation, and class” to tell apart asylum seekers and European citizens, regular migrant workers, and irregularized subjects without a residence and transit permit. However, if the color and race line acts as a compass in the articulation of checks and of legal travel possibilities, this very line is also bound to become blurred through a mimetic game of juxtapositions and a series of tactics. From organizing the border crossing on the busiest transit days to camouflaging as European citizens, marring the presumption of whiteness attached to a salary, these tactics operate in the name of arbitrariness and discretion, uncertainty and doubt, fluidity and risk, to elude the weight of the leash.

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routes could have given the same answer. However, this is not the only point, because we could ask a further set of questions regarding, for instance, whether we are really only and exclusively referring to imposed transit zones when we speak of corridors. In other words, is it possible to inhabit a corridor without just using it to move, constrained and contained, from one room to the other? And, again, can we really take for granted that there is an “outside”―the implicit “without” in Kasparek’s words―with respect to these new (extra)territorialities? Which and where would Europe be (placed) in relation to the corridors and borders that surround and cut through it? What aspects would set its “political and geographical core” apart from these margins? If it is true that whole territories can be, at the same time, enormous buffer zones, “traps”, camps, and just as many intersections, encampments, and corridors, which meaning is acquired by the abstract place toward which the desires of people on the move converge? In some way this is a provocation, but only to a certain point, because similar questions keep resurfacing more or less explicitly in the journey within and against the European borderland, to which the second part of this book is devoted. All of these questions gravitate toward a more general issue: the possibility of thinking of this Europe not only as a sequence of traps and borders, but also as a more general corridor, a continuous crossroads, and a potential escape route. The very idea of an Underground Railroad in Europe today fundamentally originates here, but it is, above all, a bet on the possibility of overturning this infinite corridor by inhabiting it and creating new (subterranean?) spaces where action is feasible― stations or “communes” which subtract themselves from its expulsive logic as much as from its extractive hold, from the effects of preemptive exclusion and differential inclusion which Eu-rope continues to produce. Defining the behaviors of the subjects of secondary movements and of those who support them as “counter-conducts”, therefore, means betting on this possible overturning; it means understanding the attempt to loosen and ultimately break the hold of the (in)visible leash used to govern and exploit them as the creation of another space, of a different way of inhabiting it, of another temporality as well as of a new “subjectivity”, hopefully heterogenous and collective, or coalesced―what Du Bois defined as “abolition democracy”. Once again, in this case, this horizon obviously cannot be taken for granted or premeditated. If runaway slaves, the rebels of the plantations, escaped not to create “another America”, but to immediately subtract themselves from its chains, the protagonists of secondary

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movements, the rebels of Borderland Europe, are moved by a similar immediate aspiration, the indefinite place “of a perceived freedom”. However, we could add that it is precisely this “basic gesture” of subtraction and escape, its difficult and often incredible fulfillment, the spaces it inhabits and produces, and the convergence of other subjects beyond national, racial, and gender lines onto this precarious as well as undocumented territory, that end up leaving a fleeting but different trace, a possible “decolonial” tension, in the present of Europe. By reconstructing the contended sequence of events of the Underground Railroad, we invited a reading of this trace as the most relevant legacy, the most significant (as well as intolerable for any unitarian and national mythology) outcome, and sign of that specific history of routes, escapes, and coalitions. If it is possible to trace something similar in the European borderland, starting from a series of “absconded” camps located along a deferred corridor and from a multiplication of routes supported by subjects acting in solidarity, we suggest that it be called Underground Europe, and we think that this too is a history “not to pass on”, that can only be told in fragments, step by step, station after station, along migrant routes. For this reason, following in the footsteps of Benjamin Drew―only 170 years later and 6000 kilometers away―we have tried to explore it.

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CHAPTER 4

Calais, Jungle—Tolone, Adoma Foyer October–December 2016

A Few Days to the End Wasteland of Calais, Monday, October 24, 2016, 7:00 am (Fig. 4.1): this is the official date of the dismantlement of the camp, a promise that will be kept.1 There is an extended line-up of police, 3350 officers, about one for every three residents (Défenseur de droits, 2016). For a few days, journalists and cameras from all over the world―there are more than 700 credited media operators―have been invading the site which everyone― residents and citizens alike―agree on calling “the jungle”. The story behind the name of the space is significant: the first ones to settle in makeshift shelters amidst the shrub used the Persian word jangal (forest) which is later compressed and resignified into “jungle” by NGOs, humanitarian agencies officials, and volunteers. The term, as Sophie Djigo (2016) points out, exits the literal register to enter the metaphorical one, and, from then on, for everyone, it will be known as “the jungle”, with its load of stigma and colonial allusion. And yet, the jungle soon turns into an emblem, in so far as its inhabitants use this space/time built on the edge of the official city to affirm an invisible presence (“we’re here and we’re not hiding”), a desire for autonomy (“we want to go where we decide to go”), a collective dimension 1   For a visual record of this chapter, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGU-ke7yl0.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_4

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Fig. 4.1  Writings on the shacks on the day of the eviction. Source: photo taken by the authors

(“there are many of us”), an organization (“the jungle where you’ve segregated us, is the world we’ve been able to build”).2 This is one more reason why the jungle-emblem must be dismantled. It is called “jungle”, even though there are no trees: they have been cut down to make surveillance on the site and on inopportune movements more efficient. However, there are plenty of cafes, grocery stores, hammams and hairdressers, all sorts of churches and schools, billiard rooms, even a cinema and a theater. It is not by chance that, at the end of February 2016, a first demolition hit all of the southern part of the city (Briké, 2016), where the institutions of sociality were concentrated; on that occasion, the only place that was spared was a large Christian church of Ethiopians and Eritreans which perhaps the bulldozers and the courts were ashamed to destroy. 2  The forests of Gourougou and Belyounech just behind Ceuta and Melilla, where thousands of people live camped out and are subjected to constant evictions, are also called the “ghetto” by their own residents. There, experiences of self-organization emerged from the community in order to succeed in “jumping” across the valla. When we travel there in November 2018, the large encampments have been destroyed and people in transit are living in conditions which mean they are even more vulnerable and scattered, forced to constantly flee from the Moroccan border police’s violence.

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However, everything is slowly reborn in tighter spaces. So, at the end of the summer of 2016, the media convey the resolution by the authorities to put an end to the presence, which has become disquieting, of what is almost a global city revolving around mobility, a self-built springboard which is, however, blocked. On the one hand, there are thousands of people coming from Asia and Africa who have gradually become stranded here as the border has become increasingly sophisticated, impermeable, and technological. On the other, there is something which exceeds the biological reproduction of life precisely because it equips itself with those time frames and spaces of sociality that make up urban living. After the Brexit referendum, here we are on a possible external border of the union. However, this is also an internal border toward a non-­ Schengen zone whose crossing has been practiced, contested, and contained for at least two decades. The Centre d’hebergement et accueil d’urgence humanitaire of the Red Cross opened in Sangatte in 1999. In origin, it was crossed by people fleeing the war in Kosovo. When Smain Laacher (2002) carried out his research between 2001 and 2002, he mostly came across Iraqis and Afghans in transit, the debris of a new cycle of imperial wars. None of the interviewees wanted to apply for asylum in France. All they wanted was to cross this small stretch of sea. This enterprise was mostly successful, which is precisely why the official camp―a place of truce, convalescence, and rest for people in transit, and “a place of tolerance of clandestine migrants heading to Great Britain” for other commentators who were more sensitive to the reasons of the state―was shut down by the then President Sarkozy in December 2002. We arrive at the camp 14 years after the closure of the Red Cross center and we stay for four days. It has been a long time, and now there are forts, fortifications, devices, sensors, kilometers of metal fences, and construction works protecting the border by reason of the bilateral agreements between France and the UK which organize the control regime and distribute its costs.3 We are part of a varied group of researchers who have met here. Hanane and I will become inseparable travel companions on various legs documented in this book. Marc is the first narrator4 we meet along the way. In Sangatte, not far from where the Red Cross center was located, he now teaches kite surfing 3  With the Touquet agreements of February 2003, control over the UK border is moved onto French territory. 4  Taussig (2004) invites us to replace the term “informer” with “narrator”.

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at a small school-hotel which he created after roaming around Asia and Latin America: two small rooms for rent in a garden, a hangar with sailing equipment, and a tractor that pulls an inflatable boat down to the beach become the backdrop of our landing on the field. Marc’s ways are cynical, direct, and likable. “I hate journalists, what are you doing around here?” He instantly labels our awkward attempts to explain the work of a sociologist: “You’re not journalists, but voyeurs, you love to observe the poverty of others”. Marc has a clear idea: (1) a migratory flow cannot be stopped; (2) if it is stopped, a blockage is created; (3) dismantling serves no purpose, because the settlement will grow back; (4) the problem is political and the British have a major responsibility; (5) the French do not have the strength to turn the situation around and impose themselves; (6) the media discourse has destroyed the reputation of the place and now it is difficult to work in tourism. If I were Marc, I would teach migrants to kite surf their way to the UK. “You can get there in two hours with no checks” he says. But no migrants have ever turned to his school. Sadly, they would rather hop on trucks and passing trains. However, among his clients there are many CRSs (Companies for the Security of the Republic). Much like the migrants, thousands of police officers from all over France have also settled in the area over the last twenty years, generating exchanges and markets. Security creates jobs. For that matter, I have also been making a living thanks to migrants for nearly twenty years, researching their lives and producing discourse on their destinies. We ask Marc if he has ever been to the jungle and he gives us a perplexed look: “Why should I go there, what have I got to learn?” we suggest that he come with us; he starts laughing and hopes that we are able to satisfy our voyeuristic desire. (Extract from camp journal, Friday, October 21, 2016)

Over these long four days, we will be wondering about Marc’s claim about our being voyeurs. Who are the voyeurs? Those who enjoy watching what must not be watched, what is intimate and rough? Are voyeurs those who observe through the keyhole without being seen by those who are being watched? Are voyeurs those who watch without entering a relationship with the other, without giving the other the possibility of returning the gaze, of contesting, of saying something or inviting an exchange? In characterizing us as voyeurs, Marc is telling us, at the same time, that he watches through the eyes of others. Indeed, the jungle and the lives of its inhabitants are the obsessive and continuous object of conversations, but they are also something external to direct experience. Its narrative

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construction is born out of the big industry of communication and politics. It is on the redundant and incessant stream of news and comments that the people of Calais learn what is about to occur a few kilometers away from their homes.5

From Leprosy to Plague? The Humanitarian Eviction In October of 2016, unlike in 2002 when Sangatte closed down without any alternative relocations, the institutional rhetoric insists on hammering home the humanitarian nature of the operation in a dance of “compassion” and “repression”, following Didier Fassin’s (2005) intuition on the moral relationship between the state and migration policies. The two terms keep recurring in the press and in the news flooding TV schedules and websites: dispositif and mise à l’abri. The former affirms the power of the state’s bureaucratic and project-driven rationality, while the latter characterizes it in humanitarian terms: it is not only a matter of evacuating, but also of building an alternative and temporary space-time controlled by the powers of public authorities who are able to disperse and frame a concentration of people which has become scandalous and inopportune. It is this discursive artifact, impregnated with compassion, reception, and repression, which reaches Marc and generates debates in the public opinion. But what is it that reaches the very people it is about? How does the state speak to the soon-to-be evacuees/dismantled? Are there other informal actors speaking to the residents of the jungle? And how do these residents speak―if they speak? Amidst the rubble, can we find relics/ objects of the ongoing battle? We are not claiming to give an ethnographic account after the birth and death of an informal camp which has claimed to be a city.6 What we do intend to do, however, is focus our attention on the seemingly marginal details: small objects, both textual and narrative, that have appeared over the four days of our stay at the camp, which comes to an end with the launch of the institutional dispersion apparatus. 5  Conceiving the jungle through the external perspectives which constitute it, conceiving it through the gazes of the citizens of Calais, not through those of the jungle’s residents, is the documentary literature operation followed by Carrère (2016). 6  For a reconstruction of a more general history of the place, which constantly alternates between settlement and expulsion, see Anonymus (2017), Agier (2018), and Ibrahim and Howarth (2018).

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Today it is Calais and yesterday it was Patras, the forests behind Ceuta and Melilla as well as the more ephemeral and less dense situations along the routes that cut through migrants’ Europe, which help us to understand the distinction between, on the one hand, “camps” intended as the institutional production of a concentration and of a segregation, an outside space where excess humanity can be confined (Rahola, 2005), and, on the other hand, “encampments” be they urban or rural. In the latter, subjects in transit or subjects whose movements are juridically and effectively hindered build collective spaces of everyday life, of waiting, of resting, of convalescence, of self-organization, of knowledge accumulation, and of circulation of resistance practices and tactics (Agier, 2013; Babels, 2017). These encampments are not only places where other lines of power and therefore new oppressions are built, but they are also constitutive moments for the social capital needed to continue the journey as well as for markets/fairs where trafficking networks can sell their products to a willing clientele. The Calais jungle does not only speak of autonomy, given that its origin lies in an act of segregation carried out by the public authorities (Briké, 2016); in fact, the parallel city was born in April 2015 from the wish of the Prefecture and the mayor to free the urban area from the thousand small informal encampments―little gardens, areas under bridges, abandoned factories and houses, rail and port interstices―which cut through it and reimagine it as a consequence of the closure of the Sangatte Red Cross camp in 2002. As documented by Sophie Djigo, the police can now tell any migrants found going through the city to “Go jungle! Go Jungle!” Outside, along the external perimeter, there is a selective siege: an enormous military security cordon7 filters crossings 24/7, preventing the arrival of building materials, discouraging contact with the citizens’ territory, surveilling access to the port area, and pushing back those who keep “breaching” the border. Inside, there is a mix of ethnic, linguistic, and community self-management as well as flourishing of humanitarian, charitable, militant, artistic, and religious actions of different kinds and quality, which make the material and symbolic lives of the residents possible.

7  However, 1200 CRS officers permanently staying in Calais from the summer of 2015 (Djigo, 2016) constitute a consumer base which definitely interests hotel managers and others in the commercial and entertainment sector.

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The birth and death of the Calais jungle can be read not only along the lines of the incessant struggle for the autonomy of migrations (Mezzadra, 2015; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013; De Genova, 2017) in the face of border regimes, but also by finding inspiration in the Foucauldian genealogy of the prison in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977): leprosy as an exclusionary project and the plague as a disciplinary project. What happens if the lepers’ camp takes on a life of its own, carrying out a dangerous resurrection? Between the large and provocative encampment and the last and definitive dismantlement of October 24, 2016, nineteen months go by. This time, the state accompanies the end of a world through their proposal for a device of inclusion, subaltern suspension and dispersion, and accompaniment―which is uncertain and contrived at the same time―toward asylum procedures: its name is CAO, Centre d’Accueil et Orientation (reception and orientation center), and its function is to affirm a principle of order and trackability following the unforeseen consequences of managing the phenomenon through the “leprosy” method. The objects/relics shown in the following pages materialize the ambiguous and conflictual relationship between the state and the residents of the jungle around the CAOs, which represent a disciplinary formula and a specter curbing the autonomy of movements and desires.

Awrak. Papers and struggles Upon our arrival on the night of Friday, October 21, the residents of the jungle continue their activities related to the dream of crossing, although there are rumors and never-ending discussions on the imminent destruction. This is our first impression of the place: We say goodbye to Marc and his kite surfing school of police officers. Night is falling and, in our pockets, we have some phone contacts of Sudanese people who went through Ventimiglia and are now in Calais. The city is empty, and it is a Friday night. On the streets we do not see any movements, few cars, little police presence, few passers-by, and no faces that do not look French at first glance. The word “jungle” has a colonial and barbaric flavor. Hic sunt leones, it seems to suggest. In order to find it, one has to go past the port, pass by kilometers of fences and barbed wire, wander around purifiers, chemical

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plants, and drainage canals on the industrial outskirts, getting lost in a sort of oasis dedicated to the care of wild animals. But maybe we just got lost. We see the reinforced concrete foundations of a large wall under construction. We remember the technical-aesthetic debates which had appeared in the local papers about planting trees along the internal part for the benefit of drivers to embellish the wall, while leaving it smooth externally to prevent migrants from climbing on the roots. … Some CRS vans begin to appear … we are on the right path. All of a sudden, small groups of youths whose style is a mix of ethnic, homeless, and urban rapper emerge and form a line heading toward unknown places. They appear on paths where cars can no longer proceed and they disappear between supermarket warehouse and truck parking lot. We also ask them for information on how to reach the jungle, a sound which runs fast on their lips following the tones of their different languages: gingol, giangol, giungol, giangli, and so on… Shoaib and Mafuz come from Pakistan. We stop them in this surreal landscape when the light has already faded; they are heading toward a destination which is unknown to us and we ask them to take us to the encampment. Everything is simple. A bit of English, a bit of Arabic, and it only takes a few minutes for them to change their plans and get into the car. There are six of us now. Squashed. They are smiling, we are smiling. The taste of the unknown. A few minutes later we are there: under a highway exit, police, tear gas, metal grills, stones flying and hitting the grids, trails of light in the night, and flares. “It's nothing, it’s nothing, go, go, get in, get in!” they say. “Every night it’s like this. We set off some fireworks to distract the police and see if someone manages to get across”. We exist, what can we do? The encampment seems to be in the grip of a litany of clashes between police and protesters of which we cannot quite assess the extent. We see a truck drive past spitting water: “We have fun when they throw water, so we wash ourselves … to take a shower at the camp you have to wait for hours”, comment the two new passengers as the car feels tighter and tighter and the smells of bodies blend with the tears and tear gas stink in the air. After roaming around and talking for a long time, they ask us to be taken back where we found them. They are going to try to get into a truck again. They disappear into the night among the branches. “Shoaib”―I yell as a last goodbye―“what’s going to happen if they evict the jungle?”. “There are some who say we should fight, I don’t know … we keep trying to leave, then we’ll see”. (Extract from camp journal, Friday, October 21, 2016)

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Shoaib and Mafuz did not talk about the CAO—that option is not part of their plans. Both of them already have Italian social security numbers, ID cards, and humanitarian protection documents which they show us carelessly. If they are here, it is because they came out of the reception system which wanted to keep them in Italy. The following morning, we get into the jungle to try to find them again; we are immediately intercepted by a substantial group of Kuwaiti Bidoons8; they have used up their families’ money and they are tired, with many middle-aged men who have been traveling since the start of the Arab Spring between 2011 and 2013. They have found each other here in a part of the camp after traveling through and stopping over in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Belgium. Joussef accompanies us through the jungle. At every corner, groups of people are having heated discussions. Sheets and pieces of paper are going around. They are everywhere and well visible, hanging from tents, torn on the ground, and in people’s hands. Different truths try to prevail. On one side, the state speaks, and, on the other, it is anonymous activists. The words from the outside, the words of the state, reach the jungle through a giant A3 leaflet with the name of the Prefecture of the Pas de Calais, the logo and the colors of the French Republic, as well as the corollary of liberty-fraternity-equality printed on it. 9 The written text points to a possible fate, a choice which the residents of this place are asked to make; the message is repeated in two-sided format in nine languages (below is the original text in English) and is accompanied by images to show the way to the buses that will take people to the CAOs: Everybody living in the Calais jungle will have to leave in order to be sheltered in one of the French reception and counselling centers.

8  Bidhouns are stateless shepherds, Shiites, people who have fled repression by the Al Sabah royal family. According to Amnesty International (2018), over 100,000 Bidhoun residents were still without citizenship in Kuwait. See also Beaugrand (2011). Bidhoun is the actual term through which the group we met defined itself, which in Arabic means “stateless”. 9  A noble political program which appears, through the eyes of those who have their feet in the mud, who can hardly wash themselves, and who carry on their bodies the physical signs of the fractures from jumping onto trucks and trains or from being beaten by the police, somewhere between mocking and surreal.

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Social workers will be on the North zone daily. They will help you to join the RECEPTION POINT, where departures for the counselling centers will take place. The RECEPTION POINT will open every day at 8 am. There you will be taken in charge and guided to the buses. In these centers decent and suitable accommodation and meals are provided. This welcoming and resting time will give you the opportunity to think about your personal project. You will receive help and the necessary information on the procedures that you will need to follow if you have applied or wish to apply for asylum. If you have started procedures in Calais, your file will be transferred to the place where you will arrive.

What is that statute of this object? What is its style/register? Bruno Latour (2005) invites us to take the ethnography of things back into research, accepting objects/documents as subjects capable of acting and of producing actions. Bureaucratic artifacts produce material life, which is precisely why they ought to be the object of description and interpretation processes (Giudici, 2014). In the above-cited text, the state speaks assertively, giving orders―leave the camp, go to a CAO―and explaining a procedure. The sheet also illustrates what they will be able to give people (a right to the reproduction of their lives) and for how long (an unspecified time of truce), associating it with a required objective (rethinking their personal project, namely avoiding crossing the Channel)—in other words, repression and compassion, but also a certain pastoral dimension10 which is about correction and management of subjects toward spaces, projects, and time frames punctuated and organized by the institutions. At the same time, the words of the state remain deliberately confused on many aspects. How much time at the CAOs? Are the CAOs places of freedom or of limitation of movement, configured as semi-detention centers? Which fate awaits the thousands of people in the jungle who have already been fingerprinted in another country and are therefore subject to deportation and relocation within the borders of Europe under the Dublin regulations? The paper object under discussion here is not a bureaucratic artifact tied to the allocation of a personal identity, but rather it is an

10  On the birth of the state’s pastoral power and on the constitutive mix of moral and police, see Foucault (1982).

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advertisement―an invitation and a wish―with a cogent force that wants to rewrite a future, different from that which the subjects hope for, in order to classify/arrange―within an archive of identities and a map of places―subjects who can no longer be held back inside a nondescript leper colony for people in transit. Indeed, reactions to the CAO invitation are varied, precisely because the world of presences which have accumulated here is varied. Are they clandestine migrants? Are they refugees? Are they asylum seekers? Are they economic migrants? Do they still have the energy to travel? Are they young and strong? Perhaps the only common denominator is the fact that they inhabit this place, that they inhabit this place together to try to burn the border. Last night, Shoaib and Mafuz had already revealed a field of practices and positions. “Between Sudanese and Afghans, there was a war in the last months to manage crossings. The Afghans won and there were some casualties”, says Shoaib peremptorily. The lines traced in the jungle are many and often invisible: they are age and color lines, ethnic, national, linguistic, lines that have to do with people’s available capital, and class lines. There are those who have been fingerprinted (the so-called “Dublined” in the welfarist-­ humanitarian jargon, that is those who have been intercepted by the device of the Dublin Regulations and can be sent back to the last stopover, often in Italy, Greece or Spain) and those who have not been fingerprinted (who enjoy greater freedom of movement, because they are still unknown to the Schengen system), but there is also a substantial group of refugees who have already been recognized, with documents which allow them to circulate freely within the Schengen space, and who continue their journeys or whose jobs revolve around the economy of the camps. There are those who pay for the crossing service and those who try on their own―the free riders―because they have fewer financial means. There are those who reach agreements with truck drivers (which are worth a lot) and those who stealthily get into trucks for a lower price. In short, if the jungle is a city, it is also a capitalist city, with its own rich and poor, bourgeois and proletarians, traffickers and trafficked. (Extract from camp journal, Friday, October 21)

We walk past dozens of informal groups of people talking about pieces of paper and many ask us questions, they tell us to translate, to make sure they understand the meaning of those words in English and in French. The questions are always the same. Will I be deported if I have been

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fingerprinted? Can I aspire to go to the UK? Will I be forced to remain in France, even if I have got so close to my final destination? Will I be able to choose the French region where I go? What should I do? However, it is not only the state’s wishes and proposals that the residents are discussing. The second text that is going around is anonymous; nobody appears to have signed it. It is a body of text written exclusively in Arabic and is associated with a list of websites and Facebook support pages (Phone Credit for Refugee for solidarity phone credit, Right to Remain Toolkit for legal and practical support, Refugee Infobus to get and post information on travel toward the CAOs, InfoCAO to tell what happens once arrived), and it includes a form to fill out and submit to state officials in order to demand a set of rights (legal support, medical examination, and a trusted interpreter). Here is what this creased sheet, less glossy than the previous one, outlines in its main passages, in a way that is just as assertive as the institutional document: This is an invitation to leave. The destruction of the camp is forthcoming. Remember that your story is your strong point which will determine your chances of getting asylum. Asylum individualizes you and can separate you from your travel companions. It may be that your meeting with the state during the interview will generate fear and terror, as you will have to talk about difficult and personal things. We invite you to do some simulations and prepare to tell the story you will want to be telling. Always demand that each meeting be recorded. Take a break if you don’t feel like continuing with the interview. You have the right to refuse interpreters who work for the government of your country. We invite you to participate in associations or demonstrations with the locals. Make friends with the locals, as they are a form of protection. If you are isolated, it will be easier for the government to do what they want with you. Write down a list with numbers of lawyers and local friends. Create a strategy and work to organize with your travel companions.

The text, attributable to the No Border world―now proscribed but active in Calais for many years and present on the ground since its

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inception11―invites the residents to distrust the state, demand rights, and maintain a collective dimension of action and sociality with the “locals” (that is, the citizens of Calais), in order to make the effectiveness of their resistance and the success of their projects more effective. The document suggests actions and, at the same time, offers a warning. If the voice of the state gives orders, guarantees reception, but leaves other aspects which are relevant for their choices unaddressed, the anonymous voice of the activists provides a list of suggested tactics. Thus, it prefigures a counternarrative, indicating a set of counter-conducts to implement in order to face the evacuation and its consequences. Much like the state, the anonymous activists are aware that the end of the jungle as a space reinvented by the “lepers” is inevitable. Unlike the state, they reveal in advance how to resist the plague or how to “inhabit” the plague, that is, how to turn CAOs into arenas for new battles. There are two words in particular which generate fear among the people, in so far as they short-circuit with the word “reception” invoked in the institutional text: “fear” and “terror”. We have repeatedly wondered both about the meaning of “fear” and “terror” and about the reason why the

11  With a decision by the Prefect of October 23, 2016, it was declared that the state of emergency for the whole Calais area would last until November 6, thus reinforced the impossibility to access the operations area for all non-authorized civilians. As denounced by the Défenseur des droits (2016), the official motivation expressed in the Prefect’s text is to protect refugees from violence by the No Border activists; thus, using the activists as a bugbear, lawyers and legal support are prevented from accessing the site. By organizing solidarity camps, mass demonstrations, and symbolic occupations of ferries, and by providing punctual legal support and accompanying the struggles against the first demolition of the jungle through a hunger strike and by sewing their mouths shut (see, for instance, https://calaishungerstrike2016blog.wordpress.com), the aim of the No Border activists to distinguish themselves from “humanitarian” aid workers consists in promoting the political subjectivation of the people camping out and creating the conditions for what Rigby and Schlembach (2013) have defined as an “impossible protest”. The residents of the jungle move within a constellation of power relations which have different meanings: financial ones with the traffickers to continue their journey; aid and reproductive ones with the humanitarian aid workers; political ones with the activists to reclaim their rights; and, let us not forget, aesthetic-cultural ones through the repeated presence of alternative architects, town planners, film directors, photographers, artists, writers, illustrators, and performers of all kinds. The story of the jungle is also the story of an incredible investment of energy and social capital which historically no other refugee camp may have ever enjoyed. The presence of the state, on the other hand, manifests itself through courts, police, and material-technological infrastructure aimed at containing movements.

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relationship with the state that offers us a dignified bed, sanitation, and a hot meal must occur through such an emotional register; some people experience fear and terror from the multiple episodes of violence which they have already had to experience at the origin of their journey or at the multiple crossing points that have led them to Calais. In these small and continuous chatty gatherings, the objects/documents are debated, crumpled, insulted, and cited. In the discussions, the two texts get mixed up, as fear and confusion spread. We—like all the other white people not wearing a uniform, who are wandering around the jungle in those days—are called upon to contribute opinions, support interpretations, and confirm hypotheses. Inside, the encampment is bursting with movement as people take their tents down, sell clothes, gather luggage, burn wood, ask for information, and leave messages of hope and protest on the sheds. However, normal everyday life also goes on: under the grids protecting the highway toward the port, there are people playing ball games, cricket, and lifting weights. Police officers have not yet entered the jungle. We only see journalists, activists, and humanitarian aid workers. The latter have been appointed by the state to softly manage the passage from the jungle to the station from which the buses are leaving, where people will be directed toward a fate they have not chosen, based on their personal details and vulnerability profiles: minor age, family unit, and women. In this context, humanitarian aid workers have been operating as the left-hand of the state,12 allowing for expulsions without the use of physical violence; tomorrow they will receive their reward through the deputized management of the CAOs and of the other reception apparatuses for refugees. Before the institutional device is deployed, thousands of people abandon the site to keep their travel options open; they would rather disperse in small groups than be dispersed, they prefer mud and their dreams to the lack of freedom. We leave the jungle before dawn on Monday, October 24; it is 3  am, and a young man on a bicycle is heading toward the Eurotunnel, which is about 15 kilometers away, to try again to get across. We listen to his words: My name is Mohammed, I come from Ethiopia. I’m an Oromo. Oromos are repressed. I’m going to London. I want to go to London. This time I’m

 On the right- and left-hand of the state, see Bourdieu (1998).

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going to try to go to London. Life is better there, I think life is better. I don’t know about tomorrow. I know that tomorrow the jungle will no longer be there. I’ll go somewhere else. It’s not good here. France is not good. My family is at home. My family is in Ethiopia. My father is in jail because he is an Oromo. It’s hard. The jungle is hard. I have a dream, I have a dream in my life. My brothers and my family are in Ethiopia. I must “jump” for them. Maybe, one day, inshallah, I will make it.

“I must ‘jump’ for them”. Family mandate, obligation, and demand; fatalism and determination to keep going. In any case, unwillingness to be blocked by the state and its CAOs. On the contrary, the group of Kuwaiti men know that they can no longer make it; they have been stuck in Calais for too long. They will accept the CAO to get a truce and, for now, get through the winter: “The jungle is hell”, they say, “but how can we be good and positive about life if in here we are animals?” Shoaib and Mafuz, on the other hand, still have morale and family money; they choose to keep going. Together, we enter a fried food shop― neon lights, working-class environment, pastel colors―and the few people in there give us surly looks, as though we had taken back to the city the beasts that had been removed from the jungle. Little by little, they calmly explain to us a plan that sheds light on the specific and more general “economy” of the place: We’re going to a truck parking lot near the LIDL supermarket. There, you jump over a fence and then, with this cutter, you open the tarp and you hide inside. You have to pay, $2000, to get into the parking lot. Now there’s a group of Afghans, before them there were the Sudanese and before them still the Kurds, who stop you from getting in. Then you take a chance with the police, in the truck you risk dying asphyxiated, and you have to hide under everything. When your family has run out of money to pay for your crossing, you remain trapped in here. If we don’t get across tonight, tomorrow we’ll go and set up camp elsewhere.

Economic and family capital stratifies the array of possibilities and of practices even inside the jungle; if you play alone, you risk more because the clandestine crossing industry controls and keeps hold of the best and safest gateways. Those who do not have such capital hop on a train or on a truck, risking their own lives and often losing them, as in the case of a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, a friend of Shoaib’s, who flew off the truck’s roof and was then run over before their eyes. They show us a phone

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snapshot of this boy, of whom we know nothing, in a group with other friends, all Pakistani, smiling, posing in the biggest shanty town in Europe, wearing clean and colorful clothes. Looking at the picture, we understand that, in addition to economic capital, it also takes a certain physical capital related to age and training as well as a certain character formation, a habitus of “jumping” and crossing which naturalizes and de-problematizes the risk. When people “jump” they have nothing with them. No luggage: their friends will mail everything later once they have reached their destination. Shoaib is a little over 20 years old, he comes from an averagely wealthy family from Pakistan, and he has been traveling for two years for a cost of $10,000 following the Balkan route. His, as he will allude to, is a made-up story; his name is made up, from being Pakistani he became Afghan in Italy to enter the asylum process. Together, we look at the scans of all his documents uploaded online: passport, Social Security number, and other Italian documents. Shoaib is a tactical machine who outguesses checks. At some point, he shows us a piece of paper written in English and French (Fig. 4.2): “You see, if the police block me … I show this and then I pretend I’m mute”, and he starts to gesticulate, laughing. In this piece of paper, Shoaib uses his real name (which he covers) and his real country of origin (Pakistan, inadvertently covered by his finger; “agence”, a garbled translation from Google Translate to say “country”) precisely because in the attempt to enter Great Britain he does not want to be traced back to his Italian identity. The state wants to see him through papers and documents which he no longer recognizes as his own

Fig. 4.2  Shoaib’s passport. Source: photo taken by the authors

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(Scott, 1998; Cabot, 2012), but he travels with nothing but his body and this little piece of paper, improbable and ungrammatical, which designates him as a victim but, at the same time, concretely reveals his ability to have agency. This piece of paper, oily and dirty, but slowly pulled out of his wallet and displayed with a gesture loaded with importance, through which Shoaib plays at representing himself as part of a vulnerable category to be protected, is meant to build a more benevolent relationship with the state and with its more immediate face at the time of crossing: the police, a body whose violence on migrants in transit in Calais has been widely documented. Moreover, pretending to be mute is a contingent tactic, written on a piece of paper, the only document that will accompany his attempt to cross; as far as the art of resistance (Scott, 1992) is concerned, this textual and performative gesture is part of a vast territory of struggles and informal knowledge, to change name, age, identity, gender, nationality, fingerprints, marital status, and Social Security numbers. This is how the people we have met react to documents, procedures, and other bureaucratic artifacts through which states try to channel migrants’ movements and autonomy, to classify and individualize stories and trajectories, to build archives and organize their opportunities, their rights, their freedom and its deprivation. Awrak―Arabic for “documents”―is the term which many residents of the jungle use to define the state’s proclamations and the demands, the invitations by the No Border activists, but also their own pieces of paper.

Faggera! It is like the roar of a goal in a stadium; they tell us that it is the cry Faggera!―“explosion” in Arabic―which is spreading and echoing among the tents, porta-potties, containers, and mud each time some group of residents celebrates the successful crossing of one of its members, as if to celebrate the destruction of this pile of pieces of paper around which the border and the attempt to contest it are built. According to figures provided by the French Ministry of Interior to the press, around 6000 residents of the jungle will choose to try the CAO option; many of them will flee the CAOs in the following weeks out of fear of the Dublin Regulations or because of the desire to keep trying to “jump” toward Great Britain.

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According to the data from the monthly census carried out by Help Refugees and Auberge des Migrants,13 the jungle reached its peak in September 2016 with 10,188 residents, and, by virtue of a process of self-­ expulsion due to the spread of the news of the eviction, it went down to 8143 at the end of October. In that same period, the number of minors―a category which, thanks to the bilateral agreements with the UK, has more chances to cross the border with family reunion visas14―grew to almost 1500. In the two months preceding the eviction, 4000 people resumed their journeys, refusing the humanitarian offer of the French state, and to these we should add all those who, in the following months, fled and left the 451 CAOs where they had been scattered and placed. Such complexity in the movements of entry and exit from the camp, of inflow and escape, is none other than proof of the heterogeneity of the desires and the conditions of migrants and people in transit. The experience of the “humanitarian destruction” of the jungle which we witnessed begins to sediment some of the metaphorical categories around which this book is conceived. The autonomous encampment, which was born out of leprosy, evokes the routes that have fed it, but also the idea of following a route backward through its stories; and this route, in the accounts that we begin to collect, recalls the stories not only of traffickers and entrepreneurs of clandestine migration, but also of solidarity circuits which allow people to cross and take breaks, a veritable Underground Railroad that, amidst migratory prohibition and the economy of illegality, digs tunnels which are more or less visible, more or less effective, more or less usable. Calais is the last station, where the railroad partly re-emerges and thousands of people come to light, make themselves visible, become stranded but, at the same time, gather strength to try the “jump”―like those in front of the vallas in Ceuta and Melilla, another imposing and merciless technological device―and try to finally reach Great Britain, where some of them have relatives and where just as many cultivate the dream of a capitalism which includes them. During the days of the eviction and faced with the plurality of choices of people in transit, we also start to reflect on “tears” and “leashes”, metaphors of movement through which the ambivalent relationship between the pastoral powers/ 13  According to the data provided by the activists of Passeurs d’Hospitalité, see: https:// passeursdhospitalites.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/bidonville-de-calais-recensementdoctobre/. 14  The issue of minors is dealt with from a narrative perspective by Coulin (2019).

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pretenses of the state and protest practices can be read. Creating a city of people in transit in place of the leper colony is a tear; leading people back to a CAO is a reaffirmation of the hold of the leash. The self-built city by those who dreamed of crossing becomes extinct in October 2016. Before the bulldozers of the Prefecture of the Pas de Calais spring into action, anonymous fires destroy it. Faggera! Explosion! It is better to be the one to cancel what you created rather than to live through the humiliation of being reduced to rubble by others. However, reading the local press after some time, only a few months after we were there, everything seems to have gone back to the way it was before. Humanitarian aid organizations, often challenging local orders which forbid the distribution of food to migrants, dish out thousands of meals per day. The big emblem-jungle is no longer there, but there are multiple little slums where enormous numbers of people in transit try the “jump” or impose an increasingly scandalous presence. The authorities will yet again be called to choose between “leprosy” and “plague”. Rather than solutions, evictions, CAOs, walls, and deportations appear as gestures evoking other gestures in a never-ending dance, a never-ending game of chess which is also made of papers (proclamations, documents, interviews, transcriptions, auditions, and so on) and paper barricades. Of Mohammed, the Oromo man on a bicycle, we no longer have news. We followed Shoaib and Mafuz until May 2017: they continued to camp out on the coast, in France and in Belgium. They went down to Rome to renew their documents and, from there, they went to Germany to look for work, then we lost track of them. Conversely, the group of Kuwaitis mostly moved to the CAO in Toulon, where we went to visit them after meeting them in Calais.

A CAO’s Life “On the way from Genova to Marseille they search for clandestine migrants, on the way back they search for drugs”. With these words, the Flixbus driver lets us on board, describing the pattern of police checks along the highway. We are heading to Toulon, two months after the eviction of Calais, to see Youssef and the group of Bidhouns we met at the camp again. Now they have been “captured” by the state, “Dublined”; caught on a leash which combines control, humanitarian aid, compassion, and repression, they have officially become asylum seekers in France. Youssef already applied once in Sweden; his escape around Europe began

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after the authorities had denied him refugee status. Many of them have gone through Nordic countries for reasons which remain unknown to us. The group of fifty Kuwaitis from Calais has partly scattered, partly stayed together. Some of them keep attempting the crossing and are living in fields or makeshift places not far from the old jungle; they explore new ports from which it is possible to get into a truck to England. Others have accepted remaining in France or have embraced the possibility of a protected shelter as a winter truce. Here in Toulon, there are about ten of them. These three days of meetings and shared living are all in Arabic; Hanane is not translating the words we collect segment after segment like she used to do in Calais. I observe without focusing too much on the flow of words. I sink into a kind of mute ethnography. In the foyer of Adoma,15 the CAO where they have been placed and where we now are, the stories of nearly 50 years of migrations to France are sedimented. They are miniature stories: 7-sqare-meter rooms lived in by generations of individual workers. For instance, there is Khalil, a man who has been living encapsulated in a space of this size for 35 years. His family is in Tunisia; he works, he is close to retiring at this point, and he is sending the money back home. He is proud of his job as a builder, he is proud of having built a house for himself and for his children even before he stopped working; he complains about the youths who are lazy. We meet many other old men like him: stories of poverty, working class, and migration. It is another world, another time compared to Youssef and the Kuwaitis, who come from families of shepherds and have not been called to fuel the industrial development of France. What we are witnessing is also an encounter between two eras of migration.

15  Formerly SONACOTRA (National Society for the Construction of Accommodation for Algerian Workers), a cornerstone of housing integration policies and of the management of migrant workers in France, it changed its acronym in 2007 to ADOMA, ad domus, Latin for “toward home”. As of 2018, the institute managed nearly 63,000 apartments, confirming its role as the first housing welfare organization (see: https://www.adoma.cdc-habitat.fr/ adoma/L-entreprise/Mediatheque/Rapports-d-activites/p-88-Rapports-d-activites.htm). See also Bernardot’s (1999, 2008) research work.

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The organization of the foyer is individualizing. It constructs isolated subjects: each one has their room, and each one has their own locker. The collective class dimension used to be built in factories, through the trade union and the party. Many historic residents eat alone in those seven square meters; in the communal kitchens we mostly see refugees who insist on cultivating their collective identity as a traveling community. Elderly migrants, the permanent ones, feel some kind of envy toward the newly arrived―the evacuees from Calais. We keep listening to them muttering complaints, social envy aimed toward the last ones: “They don’t pay for the room, it costs us €360. We’ve had to work to make a living, they have been taken into care”. Hacine―a homeless man of Algerian origin who was born in Toulon―has been living in a garage for a year and a half; now his little balcony on the foyer is full of objects and plants, trinkets of all kinds, and fishing rods with which he catches his own food. “Do you see the phones these refugees have?” This is how he draws a line between him and them, a clear demarcation across which stories cannot be reunited. With the exception of Hacine’s balcony, the majority of the spaces of the foyer, individual and communal, are bare, without any signs of personalization or individual aesthetic; it could be a hospital, a prison, or any other total institution. Although here the institution is light: there are no filters or entry checks. At the entrance there is just an enormous metal device; they are mailboxes, but it could be an art installation. A Pakistani refugee whispers to me that those are reserved for the “permanent” ones, while they are temporary, birds of passage. It is this bare and abandoned side of the spaces which evokes the presence of definitively temporary zones (Rahola, 2003), also for those who have been in these rooms for decades: their lives have landed here by chance and here they have remained stuck. What we have in front of us now is a hospice for elderly people with a good degree of autonomy, who react by getting irritated and gossiping; the newly arrived are the refugees, and a new round has begun on the carousel. Unlike the historic residents, Youssef and the Bidhouns move around as a group: they pool their weekly checks, cook together, and spend most of their time in the kitchen, where they share typically feminine chores: shopping, preparing meals, cleaning and cutting vegetables and meat, and tidying up the communal spaces. This bothers the permanent ones, who do not hide their feelings, locked in their cubicles and accustomed to leaving (and seeing) the communal spaces empty and silent. If we had to continue our research in this foyer, we could re-evoke the figures of the rooted ones

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and the external ones through which Norbert Elias (Elias & Scotson, 1965) observed the spread of discrimination and inequality among workers that had settled in the same neighborhood at different times. Within the reproduction of daily life, waiting is the major activity of the group. With their asylum applications submitted, they wait for the interview in Paris and then for the outcome. The permits they show us expire in April 2017. In Calais, life used to go by with the desire to organize the journey and make it happen. At the Adoma foyer in Toulon, desires have been kidnapped by an institution which guarantees a certain degree of social protection: the Bidhouns, who have always been without documents, have an address, their mail arrives, and they receive a check, even though they cannot work. And yet, that of the institution is not a very engaging hold; it is a containment, one might say, of inopportune movements. In the foyer, we do not see any projects for integration in the local community, significant relationships with the workers, educational work, or work training: we see papers and documents which the Kuwaitis show us as though they were magical objects. Perhaps this lack of purpose and action is only specific to this foyer, emphasized even further by a sad “welcome” banner decking out the entrance to the building. Today, the Bidhouns received a letter which recognizes their free access to health care, a fundamental social right. Hanane translates from French into Arabic, and they joke around and rejoice, talking about teeth and treatments. Little by little, the bureaucratic routine that goes through welfare services works to break up the group and create individuals through their entitlement and in their singularity and loneliness before the institutions: welfare differentiates and classifies, produces situations and clear rights. Youssef, for instance, is waiting for his dossier from the Swedish authorities so that his paperwork can be re-examined in light of the French law; his case and his fate will be different from those of the other group members. The elders―65-year-old men who in Kuwait had camels or sheep―are still hoping to reach England, where some of them have parts of their families. We struggle to understand why they left their country, one of the richest in the Arab Peninsula. They do not look like militants or activists repressed by a government, but like people adrift at the mercy of a geography they do not understand and which overdetermines them. Reading the texts they are submitting for their asylum applications, there are recurring shared elements: claims related to obtaining Kuwaiti citizenship, the impossibility of exit from their statelessness, public demonstrations for which the price to pay was prison, torture, and, finally, exile.

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On Friday night we have a long conversation about politics with Youssef. At some point, lowering his voice, he tells us of all his admiration for Saddam: “Us Bidhouns wanted Saddam to occupy us, we were on his side”. And he shows us a picture of the Iraqi dictator on a state visit in Paris, “not like the descendants of the Kuwaiti royal family”. It is as though he were putting the idea of the Republic above that of the Monarchy. He sides with the Republic. He continues in a less explicit way: “I don’t remember the war, when Iraq entered Kuwait, but I clearly remember the consequences for us”. His relationship with his country of origin is a mix of love and hate. He hates the ruling caste―the Bidhouns, the authentic inhabitants of that place, who exclude them from that paradise of wealth, but it is a wealth which he also loves and partly desires, which he perceives as something of which he was unfairly deprived. They are the pariahs in a kingdom that floats on oil money, the cursed orphans on a treasure island they were deprived of but which they constantly have before their eyes. Hanane reads the story of Hessa, a young Kuwaiti woman who studies at the American University in Paris16: a story of money in abundance, of hefty government grants, of jewels and privilege of all sorts, a story, like many, of a family from the ruling oligarchy. This is how Hessa answers in her interview: “My father has just given me a watch worth €30,000 as a gift”; and again: “Each month I spend about €1,000 on clothes”. Conversely, Youssef is stateless due to that same government, and he is applying for asylum, fleeing one of the richest countries in the world. When I awkwardly try to explain that we write books and make films also to tell their story, with the little funding we can get from a public university system devastated by budget cuts, he answers that it is better this way, because “money is dirty, it comes and goes, but it dirties everything”. After Saddam and our discussions about rich Kuwaitis, we end up at a bar-club, a small space with some hipster-bohemian pretenses. Alcohol flows. To make it flow it takes money. We act as gatekeepers for Youssef and the Bidhouns. We get them into places where they would never go; to consume, in addition to the overcoming of cultural and social barriers, an initial chip is required. This is another reason why the life of the group reproduces itself in a self-confined dimension: the Bidhouns always stay together, generating strong ties which saturate their existence and transcend generations. It is a physical state and a state of mind that, in some way, we are perturbing. 16  See: http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2012/05/29/hessa-etudiante-koweitienne-paris-8660-euros-par-mois-232559.

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Hussein suddenly joins us. He has just arrived from Finland after an adventurous journey: he has crossed half of Europe coughing up €2500 to a taxi driver who took advantage of his condition as a clandestine migrant. As soon as gets in, after telling us about the humiliation he received from the German police, he states with eyes full of emotion: “After one year spent in the middle of a forest in Finland, I feel that I’m in Europe for the first time. I see people who enter into a relationship with me, I feel human”. On his phone, he shows us pictures of him under the snow in a lunar landscape: that was his place, his center, as an asylum seeker. Far from everything and from everybody, probably appropriately dressed, nourished, and protected, but excluded from any significant relationships, socially and psychically deprived. Once again, compassion and repression, a leash which protects and, at the same time, excludes from the relationships through which we build a sense of purpose and belonging to something new. Thinking about the forests or the fields near the Arctic Circle, we see the work of state thought (Sayad, 2004) on refugees: subjects to keep at a safe distance. Escaping this kind of protection is the tear made by Hussein; during this moment of nocturnal recreation, so far from the camp-form, he looks like a child who has just discovered heaven. Around 1 am, a group of about ten women of different ages comes into the bar, dancing in front of us. The Bidhouns watch this scene as if it were a theatrical incursion: halfway between coarse and liberated, with skimpy clothes and a self-assured attitude, the women’s behavior is probably seen as an attempt to seduce, as they take center stage and attract everyone’s attention. The Bidhouns are attracted. We accompany them into the throng that takes shape and becomes confused; we dance together; we bring our stories closer. Hanane targets the eldest woman, she orders a bottle of wine and she tells her about the origin of this situation, from the dismantlement of Calais onward. Pragmatically, she is looking for someone to take over our role, a potential agent of a local Underground Railroad to switch over to. The woman asks us: “In practice, what can we do to help them? We only live in apparent wealth here, but life is hard, it’s difficult for us, too”. Youssef and his group do not need money, but words and relationships, bridges to get them out of themselves. They have two hours a day of French lessons available to them, but they do not attend. In the limbo of their wait, they do not talk about work, education, or future projects. It is an empty time, suspended, which they find hard to fill with new things; to live the wait in a different way, it also takes the ability to develop a curiosity toward the place. After all, if Calais was a segregated

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space, outside of the city, this foyer is only a five-minute walk from the city center, a vast space where one can run into people and situations capable of transforming and enriching the social capital of the group. And yet, they struggle, they remain petrified. After several hours spent staring at the sea from a bench at the harbor, Riad, the eldest among the Kuwaitis who in his country used to trade camels, has found an elderly French lady who takes care of him: he tells us about the double bed, clean clothes, and a more spacious house. He shows us a Godfather-style picture of him, and another in which he poses like a Bedouin aristocrat. The young ones seem to find it harder to open their lives to this place; after almost two months here, they do not know anybody, they have not built new significant relationships, and they live in a bubble. Where do they hang out in Toulon? The seaside promenade, a huge Carrefour supermarket, the station, the mosque; the night life quarter where we spend all night until dawn was actually unknown to them. We spend all of Sunday nursing our hangovers. They cook us a meat and rice dish. It is a sort of official invitation; we are part of the family. With Hanane, we would like to collect interviews and record voices and images, but ethnography takes longer, and we are only just beginning to tune in with their lives as institutionalized asylum seekers. We stay with the group in the foyer: I help with the cooking; I do not talk a lot and I do not hear much of Hanane’s continuous chattering. Operating in the long time frame of ethnography has a cost. A lot of boredom, as Taussig wrote in his masterful work on the villages on the Pacific coast of Colombia in the passage from gold to cocaine (Taussig, 2004). You need to set aside your productive rush, your craving for instant results, and settle into the time frame of the people you are observing. It is like shedding your skin and putting on different clothes. With difficulty, because in the beginning they fit a bit tight, they hurt when you are wearing them. Then, when you are in them, they wrap themselves around you and hold you in another space-­ time of which you can feel the centripetal force. They begin to spend hours in this bare kitchen, with a camera thrown in a corner recording sleepily, without much care for visual aesthetic criteria, repetitive chants, infinite cigarettes, quick conversations and long silences, sounds of knives cutting and dishes that need washing, phone calls on speakerphone and videocalls with all the dots of the transnational Bedouin network, from Finland to England, from the homes in Kuwait to those who are wandering around Europe trying to rejoin the group, like Hussein who arrived last night. Every so often, Youssef asks Hanane to reply on his behalf to

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anonymous girls on French dating chats; will the digital and the erotic Frenchify the Bidhouns? We eat with our hands, even though they have given us the only two plates available in sign of respect and distinction. We find some space in the communal tray, and we try to learn the art of putting food in our mouths without forks; our hands are wet, with liquid dripping between our fingers and lips, but we share and find pleasure in that oily, dirty feeling. We feel part of a ritual, while the permanent residents going through the communal space where we are sitting look down on us disapprovingly. Hours later, once darkness has descended upon us, we get back to walking aimlessly around the city. At the station, the Bidhouns meet two families of Syrians with children, thrown on the benches and waiting to spend the night there. Without hesitation, they decide to help them find a place to sleep. They take them into their care, involving us in it. They are thinking of taking them to the foyer, but then they change their minds for fear of sanctions, and they decide to all pitch in to pay for a room for them; they invite us to participate. The group has expanded―now there are about fifteen of us walking, with the pushchairs and the veiled young mothers in the back―time runs faster as we search for a hotel, while we try to keep up with the contours of the new story that has started: two families traveling after the death of the head of their household, from Morocco, where they used to work, heading to Paris, called by some network of fellow countrymen. They get across to Melilla, a border which is uncrossable for many, by simply showing their Syrian passports and paying the guards on the Moroccan side. In the last few days, Aleppo―which has just been reconquered by Assad, Putin, and the Hezbollah militias―has been at the center of international news; although all that is filtering through are the contours of what seems to be a new Srebrenica massacre, journalistic accounts and political declarations are oozing Western guilt. Many of the refugees that we meet along the route (along which we are traveling backward) complain with different tones about the preferential treatment reserved for Syrians, a national group that enjoys high success rates for their asylum applications wherever they go, like a higher class within the world of refugees. Many of them are strategically pretending to be Syrians to keep moving on. In the end, the group finds a solution at our hotel, where they enter Ikea-colored rooms and disappear from our sight after asking for help to connect to the Wi-Fi. They had €50  in their pockets, which they had

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scraped together at the mosque―the same mosque that threw them out onto the street and refused to put them up, perhaps out of fear of the antiterrorism laws and of the French authorities’ checks. The bill for the hotel is €140. The difference is covered by us and the Bidhouns. Youssef tells us that it is their duty to help those who are in trouble; a few hours earlier, we heard them speak with tenderness of a Roma woman who lives in a trailer not far from the foyer. We resume our wandering around the city in search of food. It is 9 pm, and I cannot help thinking about what the two Syrian families are going to eat for dinner. Our night ends at a pizzeria, a small takeaway place in the center of Toulon. The pizza chef has Neapolitan grandparents and grew up in France: his associate’s parents are from Morocco; the driver who delivers their pizzas is Tunisian. They immediately show interest in the stories of the refugees, comparing their own lives as the sons of immigrants with those of this new generation that is traveling and fleeing. They are the same age, which might be why the space is transformed and becomes confused little by little. The young man who has just arrived from Finland starts to make dough, invited by the descendent of the Neapolitans; the pizza goes in the oven, while the associate of Moroccan origin buys everyone drinks. Arabic and French are spoken. Stories are told about Bidhouns and Berbers, about wood ovens and working for yourself, about flours and tomato sauces coming from the south of Italy, about journeys and persecutions. We are surprised; much like the first night, the second one ends with new relationships, friendly places, and safe ports which begin to dot the city. A non-hostile cartography. It is 1 am. We start heading back to the hotel. On the street, under the porticos and the bus shelters, many people sleep lying down on cardboard. Youssef and the Bidhouns are touched. They would almost want to repeat their gesture with the Syrian families. They stop … because there are too many people. To me, however, it is normal to see people sleeping rough; it does not initiate a desire to support them. Poverty on the margins has become natural, even in its obscene visibility. Youssef asks how the French state can allow this. He is a subject to whom, for better or worse, the state has guaranteed a roof over his head after the humanitarian scandal of Calais. It is a strange feeling. After all, what he is telling us is similar to the democratically racist comments of the BlaBlaCar driver who took me from Nice to Toulon: “We, French people, don’t really see refugees in a good light, we wonder why them and not our homeless people”. The following day, Saddik, a 21-year-old Sudanese man from the foyer who was evicted

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from Calais, also repeats the same question: “Why does the French state take so much care of us, why … if there are French people sleeping rough?” I mumble something about wars and the responsibilities of the West as the first producer and exporter of weapons. He comments sarcastically: “If Europe is the cause, it’ll also have to be the solution”. We do not know, we are not so sure. I say goodbye to Youssef and the whole group; they are now playing with a book to learn French, they try to pronounce useful expressions for everyday life. The cold sun of the last few days is gone, I leave of the foyer under torrential rain, I walk along the cemetery and head back home. In the course of 2017, we accompany various members of the Bidhoun group to Paris for their interview with the commission. Almost all of them succeed in obtaining asylum in France, with documents valid for ten years which allow them to work. Only for those evicted from Calais, the state has given in, making an exception to the Dublin Regulations and to the system of transfers to the first country of arrival; in the CAOs and in the cities where they have been scattered, demonstrations against the risk of deportation, connections with the locals (as advised in the No Border leaflet on counter-conducts), escapes from and revolts in the centers have contributed to this unprecedented result.17

References Agier, M. (2013). Le campement urbain comme hétérotopie et comme refuge. Vers un paysage mondiale des espaces précaires. Brésil(s) Sciences Humains et sociales, 3, 11–28. Agier, M. (Ed.). (2018). The Jungle: Calais’s camp and migrants. Polity Press. Amnesty International. (2018). Amnesty International Report 2017/2018. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL1067002018 ENGLISH.PDF. Anonymus. (2017). Calais, face à la frontière. Textes & entretiens. Le Mas d’Azil: Niet!éditions. Babels. (2017). De Lesbos à Calais: comment l’Europe fabrique des camps. Le passager clandestine. Beaugrand, C. (2011). Statelessness & Administrative Violence: Biduns’ Survival Strategies in Kuwait. The Muslim World, 101(2), 228–250.

17  On the continuation of struggles against “Dublin” deportations to France, see Kohler and Paradiso (2019).

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Bernardot, M. (1999). Chronique d'une institution: la Sonacotra (1956–1976). Sociétés contemporaines, 33(34), 39–58. Bernardot, M. (2008). Loger les immigrés: La Sonacotra 1956–2006. Editions du Croquant. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Contre-feux 1. Raison d’agir. Briké, X. (2016). Calais: une étape dans l’exile. Ethnographier les résistances dans un camp auto-établi. Pensée Plurielle, 2, 107–119. Cabot, H. (2012). The governance of things: Documenting limbo in the greek asylum procedure. POLAR, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35(1), 11–29. Carrère, E. (2016). A Calais. Adelphi. Coulin, D. (2019). Une fille dans la Jungle. Grasset. De Genova, N. (Ed.). (2017). The borders of "Europe": Autonomy of migration, tactics of bordering. Duke University Press. Défenseur des droits. (2016). Rapport d’observation. Démantelèment des campements et prise en charge des exilés Calais-Stalingrad. https://www.defenseurdesdroits.fr/fr/publications/rappor ts/rappor ts-­t hematiques/rappor t­d%27observation-­demantelement-­des-­campements-­et Djigo, S. (2016). Les migrants des Calais. Enquête sur la vie en transit. Contre-­ feux Agone. Elias, N., & Scotson, J. L. (1965). The established and the outsiders: A sociological inquiry into community problems. Frank Cass & Co. Fassin, D. (2005). Compassion and repression: The moral economy of immigration policies in France. Cultural Anthropology, 20(3), 362–387. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and the power. Critical Inquiry, 4, 777–795. Giudici, D. (2014). La vita materiale dei mondi burocratici: certificati medici, procedure di asilo e ricerca etnografica. Mondi Migranti, 3, 109–122. Ibrahim, J., & Howarth, A. (2018). Calais and its border politics from control to demolition. Routledge. Kohler, C., & Paradiso, C. (2019). Dalla Jungle ai PRADHA: le traiettorie di un movimento politico contro gli accordi di Dublino in Francia. In I. G. Fabini, O.  Firouzi Tabar, & F.  Vianello (Eds.), Lungo i confini dell’accoglienza. Migranti e territori fra resistenze e dispositivi di controllo. Manifestolibri. Laacher, S. (2002). Après Sangatte. Nouvelles immigrations, nouveaux enjeux. La Dispute. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-­theory. Oxford University Press. Mezzadra, S. (2015). The proliferation of borders and the right to escape. In Y. Jansen, R. Celikates, & J. de Bloois (Eds.), The irregularization of migration in contemporary Europe. Detention, deportation, Drowning (pp.  121–135). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor. Duke University Press. Rahola, F. (2003). Zone definitivamente temporanee. I luoghi dell’umanità in eccesso. Ombre Corte. Rahola, F. (2005). Rappresentare gli spazi del fuori. Note per un’etnografia dei campi profughi. Antropologia, 5, 67–83. Rigby, J., & Schlembach, R. (2013). Impossible protest: Noborders in Calais. Citizenship Studies, 17(2), 157–172. Sayad, A. (2004). The suffering of the immigrant. Polity Press. Scott, J. C. (1992). Domination and the arts of resistance. Hidden trasncripst. Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state. Yale University Press. Taussig, M. (2004). My Cocaine Museum. Chicago University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Stalingrad/Porte de la Chapelle, Paris November 2016–May 2017

Paris Camping When, at the end of October 2016, the Calais settlement is evacuated, there are large security-humanitarian logistical and media operations, about one-third of the people who were camping out there decide not to accept the institutional proposal of provisional admission into the reception and orientation centers (CAOs) scattered all over France. We could say that they are enacting a tear, rejecting the leash, and choosing to remain on the Underground Railroad. Some of these subjects, so as to not give up on their desire to achieve the British dream, add to the population of a myriad of micro-­encampments on the northern French coast, while others flow back into Paris. At that time, the capital turns out to be a stopover and a fundamental node―as a cosmopolitan space crossed and structured by thick transnational networks―along the route which, from the Balkans and the Mediterranean, leads north. Sciurba (2009) has documented an analogous process following the closure of the Red Cross center in Sangatte in 2002, when a significant percentage of that traveling population was sent back and went on to occupy the public parks of the X Arrondissement of Paris. From this perspective, transit is punctuated by the restrictions of a forcefield, a sort of pool table whose rigid sides allow for infinite caroms which, however, must remain within the same game area: in trying to question any © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_5

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hydraulic model to explain it, the hypothesis of the autonomy of migrations is based on a reading of the itineraries and of the turbulent geographies they outline (Papastergiadis, 2000) as the combined effect of institutional confinements and localized trespassings, of bordering regimes and of debordering tactics. One of the effects of this field game is the production of routes and stopovers, spatial-temporal places of waiting, and redefinition of groups of people in transit, of their opportunities, and of their expectations (Shapendonk, 2012). To return to the pool metaphor, it is necessary to ask questions about holes, immersion points, and escape opportunities. Calais and the other micro-settlement on the northern coast represent an “end-of-the-line” terminal from which people try to “jump” across to Great Britain, while Paris is configured as an infrastructural “inpost”, a crucial station of the Underground Railroad where different flows get mixed up and are put back together, organizing and imagining the following steps of the journey.1 In this chapter, our aim is to document, from an ethnographic perspective, fragments of everyday life in Paris’s urban encampments―the main places where people stay in this hub―trying to map elements of relationships, exchanges, solidarity, and conflicts between migrants in transit and other relevant institutional and noninstitutional actors. The return flow from Calais, a sort of human backwash, occurs in a context which, since the fall of 2014, had already seen the proliferation―on a minor scale and always in the vicinity of train stations in the north of the city―of encampments and solidarity mobilizations2 as well as of repeated repression and evacuation interventions by the police and the local authorities. These encampments, as the researchers from Babels have emphasized (Babels, 2017), can be explained not only by the effect of an increase in flows along the Balkan and Mediterranean routes, but also by a chronic and intentional inadequacy of reception devices aimed at asylum seekers on a local level; a leash characterized by a poor capacity to discipline secondary movements, unlike the Italian one which, from 2015 until the start of the Five Star Movement-Lega coalition government, tried to hold 1  This dimension is somewhat similar to the one we will discuss in relation to Athens in the following chapters. 2  See, for example, the experience of the Chapelle Debout collective, which, together with refugees, has occupied buildings, stopped evictions, blocked deportation flights, and organized humanitarian support.

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as many arrivals as possible within the circuits of a semi-detentive reception system. Not until November of 2016, a few days after the eviction of the Calais camp, did Paris City Council open a humanitarian transit center at Porte de La Chapelle, with a 400-places capacity, which will be followed by the inauguration in January of 2017 in Ivry of a center aimed at women with the same capacity. This is minimal and belated provision to face the emergency, which shows the desire of the national and local authorities to contrast any possible pull factor in the metropolitan area. Our reflections are based on our presence in the Stalingrad settlements in November of 2016 and in the Porte de La Chapelle settlements in May of 2017 (Fig. 5.1). How can these places be qualified? Both of them are informal and spontaneous encampments involving thousands of people with an intense turnover, whose birth and internal functioning do not directly depend on an intervention by the state or by other deputized NGOs. They are not part of a humanitarian government. On the contrary, these concentrations of refugees in transit through Europe, heterotopias and places of shelter for significant segments of the traveling population (Marchetti et al., 2016; Agier, 2013), materialize the failure of the institutions and of public policies which, not coincidentally, repeatedly seek to disperse and reduce the occupied spaces. Moreover, and unlike in Calais, we see ways of living which are situated within the everyday flows of urban

Fig. 5.1  Drawing by people in transit Source: photo taken by the authors on the walls near the encampments

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living, specifically of working-class neighborhoods where the colonial and migratory history of France has become stratified. Tents, mattresses, and sleeping bags are side by side with businesses, footpaths, major arterial roads, train stations, metro stations, public gardens, schools, associations, and social services agencies. Finally, although these spaces carry within them the signs of a radical exclusion and of the vulnerability of the subjects involved, they fuel a dimension of collective protection, of production of imaginaries and practices―in short, of subjectivation. Thus, an interesting deviation is produced in relation to Agier and Lecadet’s (Agier et  al., 2014) definition; these are mirror places of “an exception” and of “an exclusion”, but they are not “extra-territorial”, because they do not lie outside the fences of the official city. On the contrary, despite being constantly evicted, they are produced and reproduced within the social and communicative nodes of the metropolis. They are not “jungles”, spatial and temporal quarantine zones which, as in the case of the Calais settlement, are resignified by their own inhabitants to the point of alluding to the attitudes and the rituals of urban living, but rather, they are recurrent concretions which are fueled by the social, symbolic, and political exchanges made available by the city. They are “meeting points”, to use the term proposed by Mogiani (2017) to describe the occupied factories just behind the port of Patras, potential testing grounds for struggles, connections, imagining and acting, creative writings and remixes. They are stopovers in the turbulent geography of the Underground Railroad, capitals of a Europe of exile.

The Battle of Stalingrad I arrive in Stalingrad in early November of 2016, a few days after witnessing the dismantling of the refugees’ city in Calais. At the exit of the metro station and further down all along Avenue des Flandres, there is a multitude of tents, hundreds of them, with people from Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. They have found shelter under the metro bridges or under the tarps that cover, like an improvised roof, this kind of rambla; the pedestrian area is completely taken up by the encampment, where tents and other camping gear have become part of the city. On the sides of the street, there are some water points and some mobile urinals―signs of a minimal institutional presence. Instead, I observe as ordinary people distribute food and staple goods from parked cars and vans.

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The people who are camped out, mostly young men, but also women and children, are resting, playing, and chatting sitting on the benches. Meanwhile, white French women are moving around between different groups, giving information or helping people decipher pieces of paper. Many cafes in the surroundings, managed and frequented by people of immigrant origins, are open to the presence of the people who are camped out, making their restrooms available. The Claude Lévi Strauss Library and the adjacent premises of Paris City Council become, in a sort of homage to the master of anthropology, places to receive information, access Wi-Fi, and charge phones. Stalingrad is now an emerged node of the Underground Railroad, and the informal solidarity organized around the encampment becomes a precious indicator of this. I am here, asking around from tent to tent, also to look for Mageed, my informer-narrator, who is a little over 20 years old. He left Darfur, where he used to study Fine Arts, six months before, and has been living at the camp for ten days in a tiny tent with a travel companion. I get his contact from the volunteers at the church in Ventimiglia, where Mageed offered his services as a translator while he was waiting to get across. At the various stopovers along the route, people keep in touch, and, step by step, they build a transnational support and information network loaded with emotional value. Volunteers collaborate with other volunteers, migrants who have got across support migrants who are still behind, and volunteers and activists assist traveling migrants. Erica is a volunteer nurse and a parishioner on the Italian side of the border. From her words, I sense that I am in some sort of initiation ritual, like the passing of the baton in a relay; I have also become part of the Underground Railroad. Erica is entrusting Mageed to me, and, at the same time, she is asking me in a peremptory tone to, in turn, entrust him to someone reliable, which I will not fail to do. This is what she says to me: “Luca, you’re in Paris. Go look for Mageed immediately, see how he’s doing and try to help him. I haven’t heard from him for a few days, and I want to make sure he’s fine and he can continue. Call me as soon as you find him and tell me who the volunteers working at the encampments are”. After all, like we have theorized elsewhere (Queirolo Palmas, 2018; Queirolo et  al., 2015), doing ethnography is also “doing things together”, accepting the dimension of exchange and of a greater symmetry between researched and researcher, finding a common ground for action from which we can make the learning of a social context spring in a maieutic way, focusing on its restrictions

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and its opportunities; producing relationships on the ground is nothing other than producing knowledge. When I finally find Mageed, his main problem is the cold and the temperatures which are rapidly dropping; he is inadequately dressed and has scabies. Unlike some of his other travel companions, he has managed to avoid the intensifying Eurodac checks: he has not left his fingerprints, he has not been “Dublined”, so he enjoys greater freedom of movement, greater freedom of choice of the final destination of his journey. During these days spent on the asphalt of Paris, he has been listening with interest to the stories of those who have just returned from Calais, but his plan is to wait for the right occasion to join an unspecified cousin in Belgium. I’m young, I can do it. Even if I’m tired and I feel like stopping. The day is long here, there’s nothing to do, I don’t get around a lot because I’m afraid of being stopped. Every now and then the police come to take people away. They take their fingerprints and give them an expulsion order; the social workers warn us beforehand when the police come, and we leave. … We thought that in Europe there would be more rights. Anyway, I have only one objective, I want to continue my studies. In the meantime, I stay here, every now and then I go to the house of a Sudanese friend from Paris and take a shower.

Mageed and I spend several days together in the bars of the neighborhood, and he helps me to reconstruct his journey; we wander around the Emmaus charity shops, looking for clean clothes to replace his infected ones, and medical clinics to get treatment. Accessing the dermatological service at the hospital immediately turns out to be impossible: the doctor on duty refuses to see him because he does not have any documents; all he has in his pocket is a letter from Paris City Council, given to him by the library workers, which certifies his condition as a camped refugee. Instead of responding to his need to be taken into care for his scabies, the doctor directs him to a long bureaucratic procedure involving different offices of a healthcare administration which is geographically spread out all over the city. Our urban explorations begin early in the morning and are interrupted around 12:30, the time when informal food distribution organized by private citizens usually takes place; in the end, Mageed’s medical needs will also be met not by the institutions but by a mobile unit made up of volunteers affiliated to Medecins Sans Frontières. The life of the encampment does not just develop outward, but also inward, as it is constantly crossed by a current of actions and discussions of all kinds.

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Luca, now I have to go back, we have a workshop. We are organizing to keep the street cleaner and we are discussing the importance of being kinder and more hospitable with the French and with the people from the neighborhood. Then those from the social center will tell us how to interpret a city map and where to find the resources we’re missing (clothes, cleaning…). I have to translate from Arabic into English.

At the camp, Mageed comes into contact with a solidarity network which, via BlaBlaCar, takes him to Lille; from there, he crosses the border and joins his cousin in Belgium, thanks to a Sardinian restaurant owner who emigrated to France for work. The Stalingrad-Flandres camp is evacuated on November 4, 2016, by 600 police officers: of the 3800 people who were staying there, some are taken to temporary protected shelters―CHU (Urgent Accommodation Centers), that is gyms and schools―far from Paris, some are expelled or detained. All of the institutional narrative on this operation takes a humanitarian perspective: like in the case of Calais, this is about mise à l’abri, putting people in a safe place, but also about mise à l’écart, quarantining people from wealth and from the potential danger of flows and urban exchanges. Following Didier Fassin’s (2005) insight, institutional modes of intervention and the economy of migratory policies are the expression of two registers and two logics, the repressive one and the compassionate one. Those who observed the eviction testify to the willingness shown by many of the camped people to “be adopted” by the device, their docility when led onto the buses3 heading toward an uncertain and temporary place of rest; at the same time, other accounts convey the intensity of people’s escapes from those very centers for fear of expulsions and of a rigid application of the Dublin Regulations procedures. The relationship people in transit have with the “leash of reception”―an ephemeral and temporary protection whose contours are difficult to read―appears to be a mix of tears and compromises, depending on the quality of the institutional offer and on the positioning of individuals in terms of capitals, desires, and opportunities. In any case, the Parisian encampments, much like those in Calais, become spectacular, disquieting, and scandalous presences with respect to 3  See, for example: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2016/11/04/l-evacuationdes-4-000-migrants-du-campement-de-stalingrad-va-­­bon-train_5025375_3224.html.

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which the authorities are obligated to give answers through a register that is not only centered on security. The violence of the institutions resides in the “objectification” of subjects: excess humanity considered as an object to be moved from one place to the other without much care, information, or consideration of their will and desires. This is how the report of an authoritative institutions of the French Republic, the Défenseur des droits (2016: 30), sarcastically describes the humanitarian operation: Around midday all the migrants left without ever having been informed of their destination or of the kind of facilities where they will be hosted; the City Council services involved in the evacuation operation generically evoked “a place where your situation will be examined”.

Different actors, whom we have partly seen crossing paths with Mageed during his time in Paris, crowd the urban encampment: political solidarity groups and volunteers bringing humanitarian support, associations marked by ethnic or religious belonging, public sector workers from the left-hand of the state providing those camping out with more or less secret support, smugglers selling transit services, and No Border networks, in addition to the obvious police and officials from the right-hand of the state. Moreover, this place becomes proof, a litmus paper, for urban cosmopolitanism (Garcia Sanchez, 2016), as the neighbors―inhabitants, parents, and business owners―are involved, through disagreements, frictions, conflicts, and solidarity, in new exceptional uses of that space: exposures of intimacy, matters of hygiene, permanent assemblies that deviate everyday routines, as well as the normal ways of walking through and living in the neighborhood. The totality of these actors and of the connections between them― much like the reactions of support, indifference or contrast on the part of the inhabitants―circumscribes and structures the potential social capital and autonomy in the construction of the route and of the journey by those in transit. Thus, we try to imagine these encampments as surfaced, visible nodes of the Underground Railroad, a hub where they can rest, accrue resources, and, possibly, make political demands before resuming their journey. The institutional dispersion operations also seek to disarticulate the space of this accrued and accruable capital, of its possible conversions into political, symbolic, and mobility capital; in this sense, in addition to being a place of provision of due minimum protection, a temporary

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reception center also represents a moment of power in which the institutions take back control and demonstrate that they are performing a sovereign gesture of surveillance and classification, curbing the subjects’ free movement practices. The aforementioned actors―the right and left-hand of the state, the different solidarity networks or those operating in the clandestine crossing industry―come back in a similar way as elements of the landscape at the various points crossed by Mageed from when he landed in Italy up until his arrival in Paris. At the landing centers in Sicily, at the social centers or the occupied houses in Rome and Turin, at the church in Ventimiglia and at the mosques, at the welcoming homes of common citizens in the Roja Valley, thousands of people in transit come to a first level of socialization and to a political learning process in the face of institutions which define and circumscribe the opportunities and constraints of mobility and of citizenship; they learn to develop the tactics and arts of resistance (Scott, 1990; Saitta, 2015) in answer to the strategies of the authorities and their rhetoric couched in terms of “flows management”. There’s nothing exceptional about Mageed’s story, if it were not for the fact that in the summer of 2016, he manages to escape fingerprinting, which had started to spread as a result of the “hotspot” approach4 and of the consequent load of institutional violence which, as documented by Amnesty International (2016), at times tragically turned into torture at Italian landing sites. For him, the Parisian encampments become a moment to meet people, share experiences, and find his way, which unfold in a city and in its working-class neighborhoods, filled with associative experiences and unpredictable relationship opportunities. Obviously, far from any irenic and romanticized perspective, suffering and vulnerability are ubiquitous; in part, people’s age and bodily capital allow them to bear the strenuous side of this experience. The collective dimension of the route and of its multiple and shifting stations―and especially of the route situated in a cosmopolitan context―allows people to move within it and fuel old and new social capital networks: those tied to national, ethnic, and linguistic origins, but also those punctuated by citizens acting in solidarity who progressively become the targets of legal

4  On the implementation of the hotspot approach in Italy, see Chap. 10 on Pozzallo in this book.

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stigmatization campaigns.5 Thus, each evacuation of these encampments becomes a violent action of disaggregation and breakdown of this collective and potentially political condition of people in transit, a sudden reduction, to get back to the Marxian reasoning on class and conscience, from a condition “for itself” to a condition “in itself”. I stay in touch with Mageed for many months, exploiting the advantages of an ethnography which by now can also be developed online, through social networks and the modes of representation which are projected in them; after a few days in Belgium, he decides to go back to France, give his fingerprints and apply for asylum, in some way to close his journey. This is how he describes the path that allows him to first enter a CAO and then obtain documents valid for the next ten years and refugee status: I went back to Paris, looked for an encampment and waited for the police to surround us to evacuate us. You know, Luca, there’s one thing I learned in Stalingrad … in these situations we used to be afraid of the police, now it is us who look for them.

In his case, like in others, the eviction (with its rituals and its logistics) becomes something which is not feared, but rather desired, provoked,6 a sort of street negotiation and trade union exercise, a tactic. The term Mageed uses to describe the operation surprises me: se faire nasser (to be kettled) like fish in a trap. It is a term used, but also a practice repeatedly endured, by the protesters of Nuit debout in the spring of 2016 when 5  Hundreds of groups and associations with different leanings, secular and religious, signed a petition in 2016 to oppose the criminalization of solidarity. They turn the stigma into their emblem and call themselves Delinquents Solidaires (see: http://www.delinquantssolidaires.org). 6  However, it is worth noting that the arbitrary and disproportionate use of violence on the part of the police toward migrants, people in transit, and other vulnerable and marginalized categories is a common and recurrent practice, especially in situations which are hidden and given little visibility by the media. Beyond the humanitarian rhetoric which surrounds these devices, collective and urban space has some potential to protect these people from this kind of abuse. A survey done among the refugees in the Calais camp, in which about 15% of the people we are referring to participated (870 people out of 5550) and which was carried out in February 2016 by an international researchers’ collective (Refugee Data Project, 2016: 16), reports the following results on police practices: 69.9% of the interviewees said that they were regularly forced to breathe gas, 42.4% said they were beaten, 26.4% said they were subjected to verbal abuse, and 2.8% said they suffered sexual violence.

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demonstrations were encircled and closed by the police to discourage participation by preventing people from leaving the cordons. In that case, activists tried to subtract themselves from confinement, while now considerable groups of people in transit and camping out invoke a truce, the possibility of resting, but also an opportunity to be admitted into the asylum devices, actively seeking to be nassé par la police. The above-cited report of the Defenseur des droits mentions 30 mass dismantling operations of urban camps in Paris between June 2, 2015, and November 4, 2016, a number which clearly indicates both the proliferation of these sites and a structuring of this metropolitan space as a place of passage and waiting, as a hub in the European geography of exile, a battlefield between, on the one hand, mobility regimes―with its selection, filtering, containment, and circulation devices―and, on the other, the autonomy of migrations.

Siege of the Humanitarian Center The exchange, relationship, and negotiation dynamics in the urban camps described above are reproduced on a larger scale when the City of Paris opens its humanitarian center located in Porte de la Chapelle, a northern gate on the city’s outer ring road. This facility deals with different aspects of protection, sorting, and checking; its main aim is to organize, frame, and divert transit, offering accommodation only for a few days. What changes now, compared to Stalingrad, is the physical proximity between the encampment and the institutional camp, a fortress to occupy and, if possible, to “distort”. If Stalingrad was an encampment close to the stations with trains heading north, symbolically and spatially evoking the desire to keep traveling, Porte de la Chapelle is now a concentration, almost a demonstration, in the face of an institution. If the Calais jungle pushed against a border, with its dreams of leaving, the tents of Porte de la Chapelle push against an institutional facility, a device to manage the internal border. Indeed, since its inception, this facility has been under attack, “besieged” by the thousands of people who camp along the arterial roads and boulevards around its perimeter. Here, too, there are several police operations focused on clearing the area, achieving ephemeral and temporary results. My ethnographic access point consists of volunteering in a support group (Solidarité Migrants Wilson) made up mostly of women from the neighboring commune of Saint Denis; for months on end, their main

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activity has been bringing breakfast to urban campers every morning. For several days, from 9 am to 12 pm, I join them in order to actively get to know the context; my observation begins the day after the mass eviction of May 9, 2017, affecting about 1600 people, most of whom were sent to temporary reception centers. I quote my diary notes from those days: The City of Paris first reception center called la Bulle is located just past the outer ring road, railyards, bulky waste depots, an employment office, and a half-hidden Roma camp. This facility is under constant pressure from thousands of people coming from informal camps … to be taken into their care. Where there’s an institution, there’s a camp. Yesterday there was yet another major "humanitarian" eviction. This is the 33rd operation of this kind since June 2015. It’s a nouria, to use Sayad’s term, a cyclic flow of people. Is it often the same people? Today all that’s left are traces of these camps, shoes, blankets, torn sleeping bags, water bottles, socks and other objects. Mountains of garbage. The area all around them is guarded by a massive deployment of CRS (Republican Security Corps) armed with rifles to prevent new settlements. The distribution of meals by volunteers has not stopped. New people join this endless cycle. There is no solution, just more or less theatrical answers. Around the camp, here much like in Stalingrad, there is a working-class neighborhood whose population is mainly of African and Maghrebi origins: everywhere I look, I see posters for the Algerian electoral campaign, in addition to writings in Arabic and Tamazigh (Berber). The face of a Caribbean woman says from the walls “Someone like you”, inviting us to vote for her in the legislative elections in June. Not far from the camp, a plaque reminds us that 700 Jews were deported from this neighborhood during the Second World War. (Excerpt from field diary, May 10, 2017)

The local authorities and the Prefecture act together to hinder the establishment of such camps through ordinances against solidarity. This is how the post by the collective I’m part of denounces this situation: Shame on you! By order of the Prefect, any distribution of food and drink around the city center is now prohibited! After the seizing of their blankets, after the searches, and after the stones, we move on to the next stage: migrants are prevented from eating. 8:30am: while we go to the police to make our presence known, we are forbidden to distribute food. (Facebook post by the Solidarité Migrants Wilson Committee, February 16, 2017)

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Fig. 5.2  Drawing of the positioning of the stones of shame at Porte de la Chapelle Source: photo taken by the authors on the walls near the encampments

Another control strategy is of a material nature: the installation of large stones (Fig.  5.2) to prevent people from lying down and sleeping—a technique that embodies an architecture of exclusion designed to defend public spaces from intruders, poor and marginalized people. Urban design―the shape of benches, the watering systems in public parks, the presence of water fountains or toilets, the subway timetable―thus become devices of a political technology of space ostracism aimed at certain collectives, ways to make “spaces defensible” (Newman, 1972). At the same time, the camp becomes a place of political, artistic, and humanitarian action; wherever an official camp is set up, not only is there an informal camp, but there is also the organization of associative and solidarity work. The “shame” of the stones is quickly channeled into a public art performance by sculptors without borders; on the material symbols of exclusion, the words “equality”, “freedom”, and “fraternity” are engraved, the subversive words that dominate every official document of the French Republic. Other artists’ collectives organize painting and drawing workshops with the people of the camp; traces of political representation and of the production of imaginaries are hung on the walls of the neighborhood. Lines and colors speak to passers-by of shipwrecks, wars, prisons, helicopters that shoot from above, journeys, border crossings, long trajectories, unnerving waits, hope and longing for freedom, which connect migrations as individual choices and political-military powers in a global history;

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to quote one of the thousands of writings on the stones at the camp, “your bombs, our shipwrecks”. A third control strategy uses electricity and night patrols to locate and drive away people who are sleeping in hiding. My learning spaces are the queues for breakfast distribution, where I chat with the volunteers and the campers. This is where I meet Safi, a young Afghan who has obtained refugee status in Italy and has now joined a group of friends on the move; he will show me around the place, like Mageed did in Stalingrad. There must be about 300 people in line, asking for food. A few minor initial quarrels … then the line forms and becomes orderly. As I get out of the subway, there are blankets at the corners of the street. There are those who have been trying to get some sleep. … Safi tells me that at night the police walk around with sticks that give small electric shocks to wake people up. Their strategy is to remain close to institutional places to try to get in or make sure that they are still sheltered, even temporarily, when the fatigue becomes overwhelming. Almost all of them are young in their twenties, almost all of them men, with some local homeless people. The food comes from bakeries that donate it in solidarity, then each volunteer adds something. All of the people behind the food tables are women; women feeding men, in a context in which care is a feminine endeavor. In the line, many young men ask white people for information, showing them pieces of paper or addresses. An older Afghan gentleman points to the application he has submitted to a British office to obtain a Visa; he will have to wait here for three weeks to receive an answer. A Sudanese young man without shoes asks a volunteer for help; as he does that, he pulls out a piece of paper showing a Macron election campaign leaflet. Safi speaks perfect Italian, he has all his documents and in Bari he was a baker. He knows Italy through the soldiers he met in Hyerat: “They were nice, I decided to come to your country. Now that I have all the documents, I can travel, but it’s impossible for me to work outside Italy and there is too much unemployment in your country”. The relationship with bureaucracy is fundamental for everyone, it is a progressive socialization to a world of papers, offices, questions, queues, and waits. There is no more food left, some of the young men get scattered, some lie down on the asphalt to rest. The way into Paris is lined with trucks. The CRS watch and filter people accessing the Bulle. Since we are white volunteers, we get through without problems to bring the tables we used for the food distribution back to the humanitarian center. The space was clearly designed by an architect, it has its own informal aesthetic and, at first glance, it looks pleasant. Under the tent structure, a group of around 20 people has

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managed to be taken into care by this facility and is waiting to get through the first interview. The security staff are black, the Emmaus volunteers are often white. The incoming flow depends on the outgoing one, on the transfers to the Centre de Accueil. The higher the number of places becoming available, the higher the number of people getting in. (Excerpt from field diary, May 10, 2017)

In 1903, Jack London immersed himself into the proletarian districts of the East End of London, and, after becoming part of it for a short time, he described their inhabitants as “the people of the abyss” (London, 1903). In the slang used by the vagrants of that period, “carrying the flag” meant spending the night in the streets without being able to sleep; the poor wandered around the city in search of shelter and the police followed them to keep them awake until dawn came and some volunteer or charitable center would give them a cup of hot coffee. Safi and the guys in the queue are also carrying the flag now that the camp has just been evicted and the new tents have not been pitched yet; a critical mass is needed to reclaim that space. And now there are only a few people crowded in front of the humanitarian and institutional base. Yesterday’s crowd has thinned out. It must have been hard to sleep at night with the police waking you up. At 9 am when I arrive, many young people are lying down against the nets that separate the road from the access to the official camp and are trying to get some sleep. On my way out of the subway station, I meet the group of Afghans from yesterday … one of them had Italian documents but lost them. He is running between the Italian embassy and the Afghan one and he keeps getting bounced around from one to the other. “We no longer want to go to England, too difficult, we’ve been trying the Jungle and Dunkirk for months … but nothing”. One of them did time in the CAO after the eviction in Calais and now he is out with his papers in order for ten years. But he cannot find a job and he is on the streets. The wheel starts turning again. “I don’t want to go back to Italy, you are good, you give documents, but there’s no work there”. Thanks to Safi, I talk to a group of Eritreans … they tell me that they’ve been in Paris for twelve days … and that it’s been twelve days since they last took a shower. They ask me why the police won’t let them sleep at night, why they use electricity against them. They have tried four times to go to France from Ventimiglia and all four times they were pushed back. Now they’re here. They don’t know what to do or where to go. (Excerpt from field diary, May 12, 2017)

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This circulation is often without results or breaks, recursive and exhausting, also made of pushbacks, deportations, imprisonments, and humanitarian centers. In this context, camps, springboards for departures, and temporary breaks are created along with pressure spaces in which demands are made and networks of social capital are born, connecting transient campers and local people. Defensible spaces can turn into site of struggle. Repeated evictions reveal that the hydraulic and daily functioning of the institutional mechanism does not hold up and that places of shelter are in short supply; in the name of urgency, humanitarian evacuation operations do broaden the basis of reception with new temporary reception facilities, but they only provide an ephemeral, short-term solution.7 Let us now turn our attention to the inside of the Bulle, thanks to the anonymous testimony of an institutional worker: You ask me what this Centre is for. Simple, it’s about freeing Paris from refugees. It’s also a cosmetic and clean-up operation. You can only enter a CAO once; if you’ve already been there, perhaps after the eviction in Calais, they won’t accept you at the Bulle. You stay here for a few days, you have your interview at the Prefecture, and then you leave to be transferred. You don’t choose the place, take it or leave it. Many don’t want to end up in the middle of nowhere and reject. But they take advantage of these few days to rest and wash. Many refugees have social networks around Paris, they don’t want to leave the city. The intention, however, is to get them to leave. There are few of us here, sometimes we lose it, and there are many of them. The other workers and I tell them they should give different names so that they can access these facilities again and not be left out; I don’t judge the people in transit who try to circumvent the regulations. Some volunteers and workers, on the other hand, see them as scroungers … they don’t look at the political issues around all this, they just see their role as a job. If those who come here have already lived on the streets for a bit, they’re better at handling French bureaucracy. The first arrivals, those who have just come up from Ventimiglia or have arrived from the Balkans, are more inexperienced. Among the young men camped out here, there are some who tried to get in here by digging tunnels under the road, or by climbing down with ropes from the périphérique (Paris’s ring road). Violence is mostly outside, in the scrum to get in. Often there’s violence between the different travel communities that are largely ethnic, linguistic, and national communi7  After the operation of May 9, on July 7, there is another evacuation, with 2800 people camping out in front of the center.

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ties. In here we have no problems with alcohol, Islam protects us from this. The desires of those who pass through here? Above all, a house, a roof over their heads, a job, and a car. But they don’t spend much time here, there’s no time for us workers to build personal relationships. The bulk of the work is done outside, in informal contexts. At Stalingrad, much like at Porte de la Chapelle, there’s been some great associative work, food, legal assistance, guidance, building life stories for asylum interviews, political struggles … the evictions have destroyed, they try to wipe all of this out. (Interview with worker X, Porte de la Chapelle, May 15, 2017)

The “queue” is the point of access to the sheltered space of the institution and the point where violence between groups can occur, the point where a way to access this place becomes a commodity that’s traded in more-or-less criminal ways. Then, despite being a bit nervous, the worker gives me a sheet with official figures on the productivity of her workplace.8 From the Bulle, people are accompanied to the CESA (Center for the Examination of Administrative Situations), located at the Prefecture. At the end of February 2017, statistics revealed that out of 3288 accesses, 16% did not show up at the offices and therefore had to leave the humanitarian center. The people in transit processed by this device through the CESA are classed as “known to Eurodac” and “unknown to Eurodac”. The former are “Dublinable”, while the latter are “non-Dublinable”. Those known to the fingerprints database account for 90% of all the people processed by the CESA, a sign of the effective functioning of the capture machine downstream (Rahola, 2009). How does one get out of the Bulle? Those who are Dublinable and are channeled toward temporary and emergency housing (CHUs, 50% of checkouts) continue to be ideal candidates for deportation and relocation. A second heterogeneous grouping, made up of people who are Dublinable (with characteristics that make them more vulnerable) and people who are not, is channeled toward more structured and less temporary places (CAOs, 30% of checkouts), which are scattered all over France and where they can submit an asylum application or perhaps have the procedure that would lead to their deportation to other European countries stopped. 8  The sheet read: Groupement d’Intérêt Public, Habitat et Interventions sociales pour les mal-logés et les sans abri, Statistiques CPA Dubois arrêtées au mercredi 22/02/2017 inclus (minuit). (Public Interest Group. Housing and social provisions for people in precarious housing conditions and homeless people. CPA Dubois Statistics, updated on Wednesday, February 22, 2017, at midnight).

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Finally, those who are refractory to administrative control, those who refuse to have their situation reexamined, are discharged and left to their own devices on the streets (20% of checkouts), joining the ranks of the modern-day people of the abyss. The oral testimonies collected among the workers and people in transit/camped out there, as well as the internal statistical accounting/categorization, shed light not only on the functions and desires, but also on the struggles and hidden practices of resistance which revolve around the implementation of this control device. The humanitarian center clearly appears as a capture and surveillance machine, a device for the administration of the internal and external border, a leash which is partly meant to deport and partly meant to open spaces where people in transit can establish roots. Yet, its articulation and its deployment must face moments of protest, circumvention and hidden resistance tactics on the part of multiple actors (workers, migrants in transit, citizens acting in solidarity). If, on the one hand, making these presences fixed within institutional protection devices―however provisionally―disperses existing groups, on the other, it consolidates and builds new potential groups around specific demands, whose members have been socialized around struggle practices through the networks and the political, social, artistic, and cultural actions that fill every informal camp. After the evacuation of the Calais Jungle in October 2016, about 7000 people were sent to the CAOs. If, on the one hand, this temporarily decompressed the northern border, on the other, it turned guidance and reception centers into places where conflict, new solidarities, and new demands could be articulated. As we have seen, the Minister of the Interior finally surrendered by suspending, only for the Calais collective, the application of the Dublin regulations and allowing them to reapply for asylum in France.

The Bubble As we have seen, La Bulle (the bubble) is the term workers, citizens, and people in transit/camping out there have been using to redefine what is officially known as the “Humanitarian Reception Centre for Refugees”, supervised by the City of Paris and managed by proxy by Emmaus Solidarité. If, in a metaphorical sense, “the bubble” evokes a moment of travel and transit, with its condition of wait and suspension, from a material point of view, the humanitarian and spectacular scandal of informal camps stages the unfolding of struggles and disputes within and around

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the device. Sometimes, these precarious settlements are called “bubbles” by the people who inhabit them. This is the text accompanying visual materials which were produced in different languages when there was a camp at Balzi Rossi in Ventimiglia, near the French border, in the summer of 2015: Let’s raise our heads, walk, and fight. What’s certain is that we’re not going back. Our space is a bubble. A suspended place. Sometimes we like it, together we built it. But a bubble, you know, doesn't last forever. A bubble floats a little and then bursts. We’re here, floating and unpredictable. We’re tired of waiting, for a moment we dream, and if the bubble bursts, we’ll make a big racket.9

Even if the reception device―with a string of often indecipherable and changing acronyms (CAO, CHU, CESA, CADA, and so on)―is both “welfare” and “Dublin”, the right-hand and the left-hand of the state, humanitarian and custodial, care and deportation, the “barbarians” put pressure on it from the outside to get in, to take a break, to try to find stability within the fault lines of the system, by producing new asylum applications, or to flee again and dive into the depths of the Underground Railroad when the deprivation of freedom to which they are subjected prevails over the opportunities they are being offered. The Bulle becomes a plastic representation of the walls of the official city to which people request some form of access, be it temporary or permanent. The camps, which have now turned against and toward the institutions, become strongly politicized sites where the heterogeneity of local solidarity networks and people in transit becomes thicker, with people who may or may not be fingerprinted, Dublinable, recognized as refugees in other countries who are getting back on the road, expelled from reception and protection facilities, or denied. These places of friction, control, surveillance, and protest are not only configured as space and time bubbles in which people in transit and those acting in solidarity with them search for resources and balance, but they are also the starting point of communities of practices and learning, pedagogical moments, dynamics of interaction and production of expanded and mixed social capital, of subjectivation and production of a new post-national citizenship. This is what 9  In Chap. 6 on Ventimiglia, we will go back to exploring this visual object designed by Emanuele Giacopetti, promoted by the No Border Base, and published by Graphic News.

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Safi tells us during a game of ping pong under the marquee at the Bulle and after having shown off with some irony a panoply of official Italian documents (driving license, social security number, identity card, and national health service card): I ran away from Afghanistan because my father was a teacher and the Taliban burned down our school. I’m here to help my friends who are trying to go to Calais and then to London. We collect documents of all the states, the more we collect, the more freedom of movement we have. If we manage, we also change our names, cards, and identities. Now I’m going back to Como to retrieve the books I left there. I’d like to become a mediator.

As Martina Tazzioli suggests (Tazzioli, 2020, 2016), the internal and external border device responds to this excess of mobility with a surplus of institutional mobility by disaggregating, moving, relocating, deporting, and putting people in transit back on the road, which does not eliminate the temporary production of institutional facilities where migrants’ movements are recorded. On the one hand, there are the official centers in all their incarnations, and on the other, there are the camps. This is not a binary logic, but rather a space of relation and circulation, a field of positions,10 stances, conflicts, and hegemonies, where what is at stake is the autonomy of and control over mobility. Hence, the leash and the tear dance together. Since 2011, camping indefinitely in urban spaces has become a form of protest: Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Casbah in Tunis, Gezi Park in Istanbul, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, Zuccotti Park in New York City, Omonia in Athens, Place de la République in Paris, just to name a few, have rewritten the forms of insurgency of social movements, against authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and austerity. Observed through this lens, the self-production of a city parallel to Calais and the informal Parisian camps, in all their diversity, can be fully considered as a part of that story. Camping out, being evicted, being taken into care, finding windows of opportunity in the right to asylum, fleeing and escaping the surveillance of the leash―all of these moments are some of the cyclical nodes within the field of play that is the journey in all its turbulence, the possibility of the Underground Railroad in all its ambivalence and  Terminology-related Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) field theory.

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indefiniteness. The camp as a meeting point and a site of struggles thus evokes the clamor of a relentless battle for a fundamental freedom, that of movement, which, as Zygmunt Bauman (1998) reminded us, stratifies the humanity of the third millennium along a clear and radical line. At the insistence of the Minister of the Interior, the Bulle was closed in the spring of 2018, after more than 25,000 people went through it. And yet, in May 2019, the City of Paris opened another temporary center to deal with the constant refugee emergency. More than two years after I was at Stalingrad and Porte de la Chapelle, almost everything has remained essentially similar, a kind of inclined plane in which the practices of the different actors involved are repeated, often with greater intensity. Thousands of people are living on the streets, dozens of police operations dismantle informal camps, stones and fences are placed to prevent people from staying overnight, while informal solidarity continues to support the people of the abyss and the authorities persist in sanctioning food distribution. For example, in a post published in June 2019, the committee with which I participated in breakfast distribution wrote: “fines, identity checks, a ban on distribution, threats to take people to police stations, physical intimidation using gas … the pressure on us is increasingly intense”. In this sense, the criminalization of solidarity is perhaps one of the most obvious signs of the existence of underground railroad stations and stopovers which, in addition to being effective, have become visible. As reported by the associations and the informal committees, the objective is to push them away, to move them out of the neighborhoods and networks― “outside the walls”―forcing refugees to move constantly to prevent the camps from becoming established: tents, personal belongings of all kinds, blankets, and medicines are destroyed and taken to municipal landfills. The fear among those acting in solidarity with migrants is that “Paris becomes Calais”. I lost track of Safi, who wanted to take a group of Afghans to Calais, but I picture him somewhere, cultivating his dreams of studying and training, having collected new documents to guarantee his freedom of movement in a Europe with internal borders. I know for sure that this is what happened in the case of Mageed. He married a young French woman in Toulouse and is now attending a master’s in political science, for which he sends me his enrolment certificate with pride. He writes to me via Facebook to say that every now and then he goes back to Ventimiglia along with other refugee friends with a load of basic necessities and to say hello to the parishioners and the peasants who helped him reach the other side.

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References Agier, M. (2013). Le campement urbain comme hétérotopie et comme refuge. Vers un paysage mondiale des espaces précaires. Brésil(s), Sciences Humains et sociales, 3, 11–28. Agier, M., Lacadet, C., & (dir.). (2014). Un monde de camps. La Découverte. Amnesty International. (2016). Hotspot Italy: How Eu’s flagship approach leads to violations of refugee and migrant rights, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur30/5004/2016/en/. Babels. (2017). De Lesbos à Calais: Comment l’Europe fabrique des camps. Le passager clandestin. Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: The human consequences. Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago University Press. Défenseur des droits. (2016). Rapport d’observation. Démantelèment des campements et prise en charge des exilés Calais-Stalingrad, Paris. https://www. defenseurdesdroits.fr/fr/publications/rapports/rapports-­t hematiques/ rapport-­d%27observation-­demantelement-­des-­campements-­et. Garcia Sanchez, P. J. (2016). Le cosmopolitime et la binarité à l’épreuve des ambiances: Trouble, vulnnérabilité, labilité, urbanité. Ambiances, tomorrow. In Proceedings of 3rd International Congress on Ambiances. Septembre 2016, Volos, Greece (pp. 635–640). London, J. (1903). The people of the Abyss. Grosset and Dunlap. Marchetti, C., Manocchi, M., & (a cura di). (2016). Rifugiati in transito attraverso l’Europa. Mondi Migranti, 1(2016), 21–38. Mogiani, M. (2017). Borders as meeting point: Migration policies, and the migrants’ resistance in the port and border area of patras. Anthony’s International Review, 12(2), 62–88. Newman, O. (1972). Defensible spaces. Crime prevention through urban design. Macmillan. Papastergiadis, N. (2000). The turbulence of migration. Globalization, deterritorialization and hybridity. Polity Press. Queirolo Palmas, L. (2018). Scrivere e fare sociologia con le immagini. In R.  Serpieri & A.  L. Tota (Eds.), Quali culture per altre educazioni possibili? FrancoAngeli. Queirolo, P.  L., Stagi, L., & (a cura di). (2015). Fare sociologia visuale. Suoni, immagini e movimenti nell’etnografia. Professional Dreamers. Rahola, F. (2009). La macchina della cattura. I campi come dispositivo di controllo della mobilità migrante. Mondi Migranti, 3(2009), 69–81.

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Refugee Data Project (2016). La longue attente. Combler les lacunes en matière de données relatives aux réfugiés et aux personnes dépalcées dans le camp de Calais. https://passeursdhospitalites.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/rrdp_rapport_ la-­longue-­attente.pdf. Saitta, P. (2015). Resistenze. Pratiche e margini del conflitto nel quotidiano. Ombre Corte. Sciurba, A. (2009). Campi di forza. Percorsi confinati di migranti in Europa. Ombre Corte. Scott, J.  C. (1990). Domination and the art resistance. Hidden transcripts. Yale University Press. Shapendonk, J. (2012). Turbulent trajectories: African migrants on their way to the European Union. Societies, 2, 27–41. Tazzioli, M. (2016). The government of migrant mobs. temporary divisible multiplicities in the border. European Journal of Social Theory, 20(4), 473–490. Tazzioli, M. (2020). Governing migrant mobility through mobility: Containment and dispersal at the internal frontiers of europe. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(1), 3–19.

CHAPTER 6

Ventimiglia – Val Roja June 2015–June 2019

If the Shebab Rise Up in Revolt… To take a closer look at how the Underground Railroad works, we follow in reverse the route taken by Majeed as well as by the many migrants we met in Calais and in the camps around Paris, and we go back to the French-­ Italian border: Ventimiglia and the Roya Valley, the Balzi Rossi rocks facing Menton or the mountain trails crossing the French-Italian border, are among the key areas where we have long been present as a collective of activist ethnographers―to use a term that combines research endeavor and public action (Reedy & King, 2019; Juris & Khasnabish, 2013)―and whose transformations we have documented in our other works (Giliberti & Queirolo Palmas, 2020; Queirolo Palmas & Rahola, 2018). As it has already become clear, the American UGRR is surrounded by myths, numbers, stories, and songs, maps whose origin and truth are often confused and impossible to prove. After all, even today, the effectiveness of one’s escape and passage through it is directly proportional to the invisibility of places and timings, shelters and routes, vis-à-vis the panoply of devices―from databases to drones, from international conventions to army patrols―whose objective

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_6

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is bringing to light and contrasting everything that constitutes secondary movements within the internal borders of the European Union.1 But how can one write an ethnography of something that needs to remain underground in order to be effective? How can one tell without betraying? How can one make public something that is largely built through gestures and actions which are considered illegal and subject to sanctions under criminal law? Some of these are the same questions that in 2017 tormented Claire, a pensioner who used to work in the healthcare sector and runs one of the fundamental nodes of the solidarity route on the French side of the Roya Valley; for her, giving visibility to the support for transit, on the one hand, leads to the militarization of the area and, on the other, opens the public debate on migrations, since “if we remain confined, there will certainly be someone who goes through quietly, but that’s the end of it”. The point Claire wonders about is how to articulate the practical aspects of giving support to free movement while claiming it publicly and engaging in political struggles―a question that can only have punctual and contingent answers that are as reversible as the irregular transit routes that are born and die depending on the various restrictions encountered along the way. Sometimes the “solidarity railroad” emerges and manifests itself, also in conflictual forms, as it clashes against the system of checks, while sometimes it runs “underground”, allowing small groups to circumvent the passeurs’ charges and the police checkpoints. On the Italian side of the border, Matteo, a precariously employed social worker in his thirties, says this as we reflect on the march of June 2017, which saw hundreds of migrants trying to walk up torrents and mountain trails to reach France: “here conflicts are sudden, you can’t tell when it’s going to break out, but they do break out. There are moments when the shebabs2 get up and leave, and you have to decide which side you’re on”.

1  And, following an inverted logic, this is happening after an adequate Search and Rescue system has been progressively removed from the central Mediterranean―crossings on boats and dinghies are being kept under wraps as much as possible, and independent action and testimony are being criminalized so that the solution to the “problem” of migration is left to the sea. 2  This Arabic term meaning “young people”, “guys”, is used by activists to redefine those who are traveling by their generation in order to escape the ethnicizing and reductive gaze of biographies.

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The implementation of checks at the French-Italian border in June 2015―accompanied by the militarization of the area and by mass push-­ backs―was still in force more than four years later. As was declared with a hint of pride by the prefect of the Maritime-Alps region, in 2017 there were over 50,000 pushbacks of migrants into Italy from France through the Ligurian crossing3; these figures are higher than the 17,048 recorded in 2016 in Ventimiglia (Ballerini & Barabino, 2017). These figures point to the growth in the number of people crossing (and in the number of attempts to get across, given that each person in transit tries multiple times before succeeding) from 2015 to the present, which bears witness to the fact that this border is one of the main stops along the routes leading to Northern Europe. Internal borders have thus made a comeback, borders which are rigid for some and permeable for others, and where a modular system of checks keeps crossings smooth for categories of welcome subjects such as tourists, consumers, and cross-border workers. At the same time, the pushback procedures for undocumented migrants in transit are implemented on a selective level, building techniques and a knowledge of recognition and distinction (Aris Escarcena, 2018), which can ensure the permeability of the border for categories of welcome subjects such as tourists, consumers, and cross-border workers. In all cases―in more or less time, one way or another―those who persevere manage to overcome the obstacle; according to data from Refugee Rights Europe (RRE, 2017), 73% of the migrants in transit who were interviewed said that they had been stuck in Ventimiglia for less than 3 months. And yet, even in this context, like in many others, civil society broke into the battlefield of migration governance (Ambrosini, 2018; Ambrosini et al., 2020). Indeed, everywhere, anti-migration movements exist alongside a thick network of support groups and initiatives, while the very players of institutional control have to deal with local mobilizations by a plurality of informal players. The path I am following seeks to connect ethnographic accounts of research with some cultural artifacts produced by the transit support groups, both for internal logistical and protection needs, and to give visibility, legitimacy, and support to the idea of freedom of movement for everyone. My intention is not to provide a chronological history of border 3  George Francois Leclerc, press conference, La Repubblica, 27/12/2017, http://genova. repubblica.it/cronaca/2017/12/27/news/ventimiglia_nel_2017_respinti_in_ 50mila-185295112/.

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struggles starting from the activists’ voices or map acts of disobedience as others usefully have done (Lucia Le Maquis, 2017; Lendaro, 2018). The aim is to take the fragments that were evoked earlier as traces and evidence, clues, suspensions/emergences, moments when a certain cultural, artistic, narrative, and organizational fervor bears witness to the continuation and the development of a solidarity route, crystallizing an image of the counternarrative I am looking for―that of a contemporary Underground Railroad. From such a perspective, attempting a cultural study of the Underground Railroad looks like an innovative way to contrast the hegemonic image, a doxa as Bourdieu (1992) would put it, of widespread, natural hostility, and inhospitality. In this chapter, I will deal with various artifacts: a graphic novel, and an art installation that reassembles drawings left by the shebabs, practical guides aimed at people in transit or the “conductors” of this new-­ born Underground Europe. All this material documents the practices and desires, fears and emotions, risks and challenges at a crucial crossing point―Ventimiglia and the French-Italian border―where the sudden comeback of a border within the EU has given visibility to the struggles of the players involved in this challenge. The traces/evidence that will appear here come from subjects involved in the experiences that are being recounted; the authors of the texts or of the artwork partly overlap and get mixed up with the players who are concretely involved in offering support and solidarity to those passing through these areas.

The Spirit of the Rocks The Bubble is a graphic novel by the No-Border Station in Ventimiglia, a self-managed camp that started out in mid-June 2015. The work―signed by professional illustrator Emanuele Giacopetti and published by a publishing house called Graphic News―is defined as choral writing, as emanating from an imagined No-Border Nation; the first edition dates to September 2015, a few days before the eviction that brought that experience to an end.4 Between text and images, people in transit and activists, alternative communicators and artists, a narration situated in a third space takes shape which seeks to capture the experience of the station as a momentarily 4  All the tables can be viewed at: https://www.graphic-news.com/stories/la-bolla-diventimiglia/.

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autonomous place and time. But who is entitled to talk? Let us begin from the first few pages of the text to observe this confusion in the first-person narrator: How can we tell this story? And yet, it has to be done, so we’ll try. There’s Mohammed who cries when he talks about the sea, the prison and all the stuff he’s had to suffer. Filomena is also crying, because she won’t be able to talk to Mohammed anymore. He’s left, the police told her to go away and not come back. … Deep friendships were born between those who are travelling and those who’ve been by their side, the hostility between us and those who built tens of borders around us is just as deep.

Mohammed and Filomena become paradigmatic of the deep relationships that are formed in the camp, in front of the armored vehicles protecting the border, between migrants in transit and the young activists from all over Italy. Matteo, one of the key players at the No-Border Station, talks of that period with a hint of nostalgia, using the expression “the spirit of the rocks”. On those rocks activists and migrants found shelter from the charges of the Italian police; on those rocks they brought water and tents to protect themselves from the sun in the long summer; on those rocks they imagined the words and ways to build a concrete protest, to “pierce” through the border. In the assemblies and on those rocks they became human again because, as Matteo said, “this was the first time that the refugees were approached and touched without masks and gloves”. The text in The Bubble informs us that the aim of this station/camp is the self-organization of those who are traveling, that the police and the smugglers are the enemies to defeat. And yet, the web of relationships and practices is surely more articulate. On the one hand, the police and the state are never homogenous entities, as demonstrated by the fact that on the Italian side a hidden practice of laissez passer (Ambrosini, 2019; Pinelli, 2017) has often prevailed. On the other hand, the smugglers are often mere operators of the illegal border economy who sell services and useful information at a modest price. As Ambrosini (2019: 41) put it “ they may be well integrated in the communities of fellow countrymen in exile and personally convinced that they are offering a service to their customers, providing them with the means to fulfil their aspirations to freedom of movement and a better life”. Livio Amigoni (2020) highlighted the presence of a service dimension which is occasionally infra-political (Scott,

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1992), gathering the stories of smugglers in Ventimiglia. This is what Adam, the main leader of a Sudanese network, said: I don’t call them passeurs, I call them collaborators. They take up to 50 euros. They’ll take you all the way to Nice, Monaco. … We have one thing: collective life and sharing. Did you see where we live? On the beach, on the river, on the streets. If you work and today you’ve helped someone to win [cross the border], with the money you’ve earned you have to buy food and share it. We live together, we give information, food, brotherly talk, open the mind …, even if the police push them back, we give them the motivation to keep going. We accompany them all the way to the other side; no-border activists stop halfway, they’re afraid of the crime. (Ventimiglia, July 2019)

In the words of the interviewee, the smuggler is the “collaborator”, a figure imbued with solidarity and community politics, though the institutions, the mainstream media, but also to some extent the social movements tend to see nothing but profit and coercion in them. As many studies in other geographical locations have confirmed (Lagomarsino & Ramirez, 2009; Alpes, 2013; Belloni, 2016), the perception of their “clients” is rather one of ambivalence, between love and hate, one could say. It is not uncommon to find writings along the paths. On the one hand, there are recent signs updated by supportive scout groups or climbers/ trekkers collectives; on the other, a despising cry―Mort aux passeurs!― aimed at those who try to sell a costly and fraudulent passage to the other side of the border. Musa, who is Sudanese like Adam, unquestionably rejects those who sell a passage and intuitively highlights the inverted relationship between self-organization and trading transit services. If the former decreases, the latter increase their fares. There was nobody in charge or managing the situation, right from the start when the first solidarity groups joined us. They explained to migrants how to take the bus, the train, the trail, and we were free to decide on our own when to try to cross the border. If we’d started a migrant collective, it wouldn’t have worked out. We were very different, we weren’t all from the same country, we didn’t understand each other. … One night, I recall, four people arrived at the camp. I was on security duty. We sent them away, we knew they wanted to take people to charge them for the passage. They couldn’t stay with us. We’re free to get across on our own, without money. (Ventimiglia, July 2019)

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Musa speaks the language of the No-Border Camp, of which he was one of the key players; the connection between and the coexistence of different stories―not of the same ethnic origin, like with the Sudanese who facilitate the passage of the Sudanese almost as a service―is central to his discourse. Musa identifies with the radical language of the graphic novel which also denounces the ambiguity of solidarity, reception, humanitarian work, and compassion as the other face of repression in the moral economy and in the discourse on migrations (Fassin, 2005). This is from the introduction of The Bubble (Fig. 6.1): We are enemies of the borders and for us solidarity is a weapon that should be used well. We organise together and together we imagine a new world, a new life against the deaths we’ve seen on land and at sea. No, we’re neither good nor pretty. We’re black, tired, and angry. Neither the sea nor the desert have killed us. Traffickers, dinghies, and lorries have been our story for years. The powers that today are opening their arms are killers. It’s always the same who build borders and hand out convictions. Their mouths are full of human rights and reception.

Translation from Italian: The rules of the EU don’t enter the bubble. “Since we left, this is the first place where we’re not told what to do or compelled to do something. We are the ones who decide”. Because the bubble is, at the same time, an outpost of the struggle and offers migrants material support. Here one can find legal information on border policies … it’s a place where people can catch their breath during their journey. In front of what used to be the tourist office, which has now been closed for years, a people’s canteen was established, in open violation of the Mayor’s ordinance which bans food distribution to refugees organized in the sheer spirit of solidarity. Such militant language turns, little by little, into the strength of the images and a plot that is simultaneously easy to grasp and evocative―the encounter between those who aspire to freedom (of movement) and those who mobilize for that same right. The first are dark-skinned, the second are white. At first, they are separate, but then they begin to get to know each other and get confused with each other, like Filomena and Mohammed. The camp is thus a political demonstration and an emotional connection that has been going on for three months. It is made of meals cooked together and improvised showers, it develops through never-ending

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Fig. 6.1  Pages from La Bolla. Source: courtesy of Emanuele Giacopetti and Graphic News

assemblies in a Babel of languages, it is told by global communication operators thanks to the codes of spectacle and emergency, it spreads noisy mass protests, like “beating the border” with pans and lids, and transgressive action that is less visible but more effective.

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The spectacle and the noise of the protest are often a smokescreen before the eyes of the powerful and allow migrants to get across unnoticed elsewhere and more discreetly, as its excessive visibility is distracting and creates a shadow cone where the solidarity can “pierce” through the border. As Monica, an Italian activist, told me on the way back from a demonstration in Menton: From the Balzi Rossi rocks, via strange routes, the Sudanese left with the phones of the comrades from Marseilles who picked them up at the railway station and gave them a place to sleep. If necessary, they helped them to continue their journey towards the north where there were other no-border groups. It was a diffused reception system along the way, we kept it going for a while with some coordination. (Menton, February 2018)

Like in Benjamin Drew’s book, which we discussed in the opening chapter, this graphic novel never speaks of Underground Railroad or solidarity routes; it takes them for granted as soon as it begins to experience them through the filter of self-organization and of the daily practice of contesting the border. This bubble―“a station”, “operations”, and “conductors”, to use the terminology of the nineteenth-century UGRR―not only forms and disappears to then reappear elsewhere in explicit or disguised ways, through new codes and languages, but is also incorporated into stories and biographies which are different from those of the radical left that appear to be hegemonic in the experience of the Balzi Rossi outpost. Tribunals, police, and prefects give penal sanctions through multiple devices to those who have taken part in the No-Border Camps and supported the breaching of the border.5 Let us listen, for example, to the voice of a cross-border woman who works in tourism. She might be about fifty, and she does not hide her sympathies or her actions. I’m a bloody southerner, but I’m also Latin American. These kids, when I feel like it, I take them over to the other side. I do it because I’m a mother and I can’t bear to see them lying on the floor of the station. I’ve been poor, too, I lived in my car for two months. I was tried because I’d hidden them

5  At the end of the summer of 2016, sixty activists received expulsion orders issued by the Police Office with motivations like public order and endangering society, which prohibit their residence in, or transit through, the Ventimiglia area.

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in the boot … but I keep on doing it. I don’t do it for money, but out of humanity. (Menton, May 2017).

Let us call her Alma. She also partly shares―and puts into practice―the spirit of the rocks. She’s not a militant, she is not educated or well-spoken, so she cannot legitimize her transgressive actions. She’s a poor border worker, like many others in this area. The tables of The Bubble can only marginally resonate with her imaginary; in fact, she is an individual player, outside any political strategy, and embodies what we might call “ordinary no-bordering”, a way of challenging the border that takes the shape of a single gesture of simple but natural humanity. And yet, Alma is too, without her knowledge, a conductor of the Underground Railroad, if we let the metaphor guide us regardless of the existence of a plan and of an organization―which does not exist even among support networks. She too has been through several trials, not unlike the thirty-one activists of the No-Border Camp who were tried by the tribunal of Imperia for various charges in June 2019 (occupation of public soil, resistance, and outrage against a public officer). Alma’s story does not have the dignity of a cultural artifact, even though, if one stops to think about it, her direct and proud way of telling her story has an aura of simplicity and self-evidence in the eyes of an improvised audience of which I am a member, listening to her in a café in Menton.

Stations and Operations Despite the eviction of the No-Border Camp on September 30, 2015, undocumented migrants and refugees have continued to arrive in Ventimiglia. The impossibility of getting across generates a wait, which, in turn, generates more camps, more support relationships, as well as more types of encounters―for instance, with the worshippers at a parish that hosts women, children, and families or under a motorway bridge where hundreds of people find shelter and in front of the cemetery where French solidarity groups from the Roya Valley distribute up to 800 meals per night in a large square. Alongside the historical No-Border activists,6 little by little a heterogenous coalition develops which brings together pensioners and scouts, worshippers from local parishes, European exchange 6  Some of which have starteds this testimony and denunciation project: https://parolesulconfine.com.

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s­ tudents, neo-rurals, Northern European travelers, and professionals from various sectors (healthcare, law, catering, research, and so on). Here, like in other borderlands, an informal transnational support space emerges which is not easily controlled as it is not directly financed by the institutions. Many of the people involved in these networks define themselves as solidali (those who give solidarity) also to overcome the stigma and the penal risks associated with the No-Border label. The following is a fragment of ethnographic description of one such encounter: After eating, an online radio takes over part of the square. Music alternates with interviews and stories connecting struggles in different border contexts. They talk and dance together―the French pensioners who brought food, the young Italian solidali, and the migrants in transit. It is a strange feeling seeing those who are camped, who earlier were lying among rubbish under a bridge and now are smiling and moving around full of joy. On the mike managed by Musa, a young asylum seeker who has decided to live with the solidali, people scream together: “Paris, Paris” or “ourria, ourria” [the Arabic word for ‘freedom’]. After the dance, a group of chefs from Nimes announce that they’ve prepared a special dinner for Sunday and that it will be possible to eat sitting at tables with tablecloths, not on the ground. The worshippers of some sort of alternative faith distribute prayers in digital format and look for converts. The music stops and, after the last few kicks to a ball, migrants go back under the bridge. Many will be trying to cross the border again tonight. (Field notes, September 2017)

They “pierce” through the border as free riders, whether alone and in small groups, or thanks to the paid services of their fellow countrymen (more or less honest, more or less affordable), but also through the “white”, free solidarity of the locals. Amina, a young university student of immigrant origin, tells me, “we go around under the bridge all day, we know the shebabs and we try to help those who want to get across”. In the following fragment, for instance, the close links between religious groups based in Italy and pro-support networks on the French side emerge clearly. This is how the two “conductors” of the Underground Railroad explain under their breath what they do: Giorgia: Here we have an informal list with some priorities, if there are children whose mothers are already on the other side or the other way around, mothers who have to reach their families. The French come and get them. But we always prefer to have a safe contact for hospitality on the other side.

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Jeanne: I take them to the other side, but only if I’m handing them over to someone. I don’t leave them on the street. We only do it if there’s an organised route. (Ventimiglia, July 2016)

Actually, this level of coordination is ephemeral and contingent, much like the system built by No-Border activists in the days of the Bubble. The image of the railroad conveys a level of organization and precision that is far from being real, although it embodies the spirit of collective practices and individual behaviors which are widespread along the routes. The main activity of solidarity networks consists precisely of offering indirect transit support, for example, by producing communication materials, as in the case of the online guide published in January 2019 in Arabic, English, and French,7 which gives indications on how to cross the French-­ Italian border with maps, tips on how to behave with the authorities and how the authorities behave, useful numbers and addresses, visual tables based on symbols to facilitate communication. Another activity consists of creating a parallel geography of “safe places”. Near Ventimiglia train station, an ordinary café, which has now closed, had become a crucial spot to get together and socialize, a little space-time dimension in an urban context that is often hostile. This is how Delia, the owner, recounted her experience: Some solidali bring me food, clothes, toys. I accept everything except money. Migrants are not a business for me. Prices are affordable for all. It all started last year. It was hot and on the pavement on the other side of the street, in the shade, there were children sleeping on the ground with their mothers. I didn’t have any customers, so I told the mothers that they could come in to get away from the heat without buying anything. They were hungry and we gave them food. It happened through word of mouth among them, go to Mami, she’ll treat you well. Now I’ve become, as the locals put it, ‘the immigrants’ café and the locals have stopped coming, I’ve lost all my customers from the area. I’ve been isolated, I’ve had fines and inspections. I can’t make it to the end of the month. Why do I do it? Because I’m three times an immigrant. My parents are from the south, they came to the north and then left for Australia, where I grew up. In this city there were signs that read ‘We don’t let houses to southerners’. Many of my fellow countrymen and women don’t remember that. And when we came back to Italy, I became an immigrant again. I know what it feels like to have the finger pointed at you. (Ventimiglia, September 2017) 7

 See: https://borderguide.info/en.

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On the French side in the Roya Valley, the solidali, united in the Roya Citoyenne association, have created a widespread network of domestic hospitality (a few hundreds of families) which soon attracted hostile action by the authorities (Giliberti, 2020). Taking an undocumented migrant in one’s car, without breaching any borders, has penal consequences as per ̇ the articles of the Code de l’Entrée et du Séjour des Etrangers et du Droit 8 d’Asile (CESEDA) aimed at prosecuting those who support their stay and circulation. During a coordination meeting that I attended, the participants discussed what to say to the police in case there is a checkpoint, how to avoid checks and take the migrants who have already got to the French side to the solidali’s houses, and how to behave in case of arrest. Steph suggests that people “pretend they don’t know anything and say they picked up a hitchhiker”, while Muriel replies: “but can’t we just say we’re taking them to the hospital?” Then Elisabetta―a retired language teacher―tells us that every now and then the groups gather to have training workshops on arrests with simulation activities and role-plays. There are also more structured documents around. The first one is called “Small defence manual for preventive detention”,9 and it is signed anonymously by “the people of the Roya”. The manual reports testimonies by people of the valley who have been subjected to preventive detention (GAV, Garde à Vue, in French) and offers various kinds of advice on how to resist in difficult situations. It is a simple handbook to inform those who have chosen civil disobedience on the possible ways of minimizing its legal consequences. A second text, signed by the collective Délinquants Solidaires, is called “Délit de solidarité. Le guide” (“Solidarity Crime: The Guide”).10 This pamphlet gives a simple and clear answer, based on existing law, to the following questions: “Can I carry undocumented persons in my car?”; “I’m a taxi driver. Can I be accused of helping irregular foreign nationals if I take them for a taxi ride?”; “Do I have the right to host an undocumented adult?”; “Will I spend the night at the police station if I protest against a brutal expulsion?” The introduction highlights a double movement from which the guide gets its sense of urgency and its legitimacy. On the one hand, there is the growth of individual support actions  Code on the entry and stay of foreigners and on their asylum rights.  This question remains open at the time of writing, as the legislators wonder about the possibility and opportunity to rewrite the incriminated articles, adding new exceptions (Muller, 2020). 10  See: https://www.lacimade.org/publication/delit-de-solidarite-guide/. 8 9

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and of collective mobilization on the issues of migration and borders. On the other, we have the generalization of penal trials and actions which criminalize non-institutional solidarity gestures. It is a contended field if we note that in the wake of the recent wave of civil society protests in July 2018, the Conseil Constitutionel ratified, in the name of the French republic’s value of fraternity, “the freedom to help others, with a humanitarian purpose, without considering the regularity of their presence on the national territory”.11 Together, the two above-mentioned texts―the manual and the guide― show the work of a largely invisible civil disobedience which emerges as a battleground and a debated issue in police stations, in courts, and in the world of communication on either side of the border. Criminalization thus becomes a sign of the appearance, of the public manifestation, and of the concrete evolution of solidarity routes. During the spring of 2016, on the French side of the Roya Valley, a large self-managed camp took shape on the estate of an organic farmer. Here, with some variations depending on the periods, hundreds of people in transit take a break, waiting to move on. Most of them come from the Ventimiglia bridge―some have arrived on their own, some with the solidali, some with the smugglers. According to the estimates of Roya Citoyenne which funds it, throughout its existence the camp has received about 2500 people. This is how Abdel―a volunteer from the outskirts of Paris―described the place: “here people rest before setting off again. … It’s a camp that has something human in comparison with the other ones, there aren’t many rules, it’s like life, we organise together”. As I listen to Abdel, I look around with wonder. I am under the olive trees on a steep slope where the terracing is occupied by tents. Several washing machines are spinning while tens of blankets that need to be sterilized are piled up in a designated area (the volunteers explain that cases of scabies are frequent). Toothbrushes of all colors are dangling from the washbasin. A big covered veranda is the center of social life. The letters of the alphabet are hanging from the beams that hold it up, together with postcards about migrants’ dreams and wishes stuck all over. Guitars and drums lie leaning against the trees. The rest of the furniture consists of broken armchairs and long tables for the meals. I notice some greetings by 11  See: http://www.roya-citoyenne.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/manuel-de-­ dfense-gav-et-suites.pdf.

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people arriving and leaving carved on a wooden wall and an enormous map of France with many marks, dots, and possible routes. The hens get around undisturbed among the people. Among the tents there are also a few trailers that we are told have come from the sky by helicopter. When I look up at the mountains above us, I see three military garrisons looming over us, controlling the campers’ activities day and night. The foreign legion and the border police guarantee a patrol of the mountains and trails 24/7. Like many other activists, Cédric―the social organizer of this camp from which for some time it was possible to continue on, thanks to the humanitarian corridor granted by the authorities to hand in asylum applications in Nice12―also has to defend himself in different legal proceedings, as he has been accused of facilitating migrants’ circulation, passage through and irregular residence in France. Here is what he told me about how his project started and what his aims are: Last week there were 130 of us in the house. Two guys were blocked by the police and when they were asked where their family was, they answered: “At Cédric’s”. It’s nice, we try to overcome the humanitarian dynamic whereby “the little white man helps the poor black man”. Here at the camp ground it’s full of young people who just want to live free and without persecutions. … You can see the energy that there is here. At first it was me, I had to coordinate almost everything and now it works collectively. Imad and Abdul take care of the legal advice. I can leave, go away, and things would keep going. … The gendarmes sometimes ask me: “Cédric, are the refugees at yours all alone? Aren’t there any white people? (Breil, July 2017)

Cédric’s words, despite the stories and trajectories being different, paint a similar emotional picture to the Balzi Rossi camp―not a total institution, but a place filled with encounters and relationships where self-­ management is central to its day-to-day functioning and where people find ways of moving on and continuing their journey. More generally, the stations and the encounters generated in these ephemeral places13 are crucial 12  See the film made by Luca Giliberti and Massimo Cannarella (2018). Transiti. La valle solidale (Laboratorio di Sociologia Visuale, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 8dwJ4b4oCRA). 13  At the time of writing, both the bridge in Ventimiglia and the camp where migrants in transit used to stay in Breil no longer exist, although new places keep sprouting back up on the two sides of the border.

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sites of observation and analysis as they can spread a narrative, articulate a critical reflection, and act as incubators for cultural creativity.

Eufemia, Showing a Node of the Underground Railroad Genova, June 2019. Under a strange wooden pier placed in front of the Sea Museum, a rabbi, an imam, a Catholic priest, and the chancellor of the university inaugurate an installation that uses art to tell the story of a research, transit, and activist experience on the French-Italian border. Over their heads, a few LED signs keep showing fragments of the public discourse on migrations juxtaposed with information and accounts aimed at destabilizing it. The incredible statement “Libya is a safe harbour” by a former Minister of the Interior (M. Salvini) flows alongside verses from the Aeneid, “What breed of men is this? What homeland allows such barbaric traditions that even deny us hospitality in the sand? That declares war on us and forbids us from setting foot on nearby land?” and the desperate cry of a Tunisian man, “Fish are better than worms”, calling for escape. On the posts of this pier, a potential safety anchor that is hard to cling on to, are the drawings of the shebab in transit retracing the emotions of their journey. The graphic marks are then accompanied by written fragments taken from the interviews of this research project and by photographs documenting life under the bridge. Those who have spoken and taken photographs are not the same people who did the drawings, but the three codes―words, images, and drawings―make up the moral and experiential landscape of the worlds we have encountered under a motorway bypass bridge in Ventimiglia. Thus, there are drawings of a turtle lifting the migrants and opening the sea, of a dinghy heading to Italy from Libya, ploughing through the sea, of the European Union that turns into an octopus, or a never-ending net of barbed wire, and even of Giorgia, the unknown protector of the migrants to whom its anonymous author dedicates a memory full of affection, as he watches the turmoil of a battle along the fence. Words add complexity to the drawings, introduce life stories, build layers of meaning like in a montage, and are crystallized as possible comments, interpretations, and associations. Finally, the photographs place the lives of the campers, authors of the drawings and of the words, in a concrete space.

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This is how the artists and curators introduced the installation called Eufemia14―one of the cities of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities: “A free land where it’s not goods that are exchanged, but rather stories and memories that, through drawings and words left on paper, become the testimonies of hundreds of migrants. Starting from this premise, we have imagined Eufemia as a landing place, a harbour, a pier that reflects (on) the phenomenon of migration”. Eufemia/place pre-dates Eufemia/exhibition.15 The latter becomes an object which tells the story of the passage by combining a plurality of gazes, an artifact that retranslates the Underground Railroad as a possible public story. Eufemia/place was, in the definition of the activists that built it,16 one of many free-spots that dot the solidarity routes, a temporary node in the geography of passage. The area in front of the campers’ bridge soon becomes the space-time of a kind of sociality that is autonomous and ethnically diverse, welcoming and useful at the same time. Inside its groundlevel rooms, much to the neighbors’ astonishment, clothes and sleeping bags are handed out, trainers and maps are provided to tackle the trails, phones can be recharged, and there is Internet access; the shebabs enter into contact with a legal information service and collect a hygienic-­sanitary kit, simply find shelter from the cold, or have a drink of water (the fountains have been shut down by the city council and camped migrants are drinking water from the river, which makes them sick). It is no coincidence that the local authorities are accusing Eufemia of wanting to keep migrants by the Roya River. To their eyes it is just one more glitch, an inappropriate hub, much like the distribution of food and blankets, and the existence of a bathroom or a water tap were considered inappropriate. In this temporary shelter, without a plan or artistic direction, the shebabs start leaving drawings and words on A4 sheets, as if they were

14  Installation by Milotta/Donchev. Photographs by sEmanuela Zampa. Curated by Amina Gaia Abdelouahab and Anna Daneri (Genova, 2019). 15  20 K is the name of the collective that started Eufemia/place. Among its collaborators there are volunteers from all over Europe and Ligurian scout groups, militants from self-­ managed squats, and Italians who are second-generation immigrants, in addition to a group of doctors and nurses who bring drugs and visit people under the bridge. See: https://www. facebook.com/progetto20k/. 16  See a short visual presentation of Eufemia at: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=nHKBru-ARIw. The Exibition catalogue: https://www.laboratoriosociologiavisuale.it/ new/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Catalogo-Eufemia-Ita-Eng-WEB.pdf.

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messages in a bottle. Here are some of the texts that were translated and included in Eufemia/exhibition: we crossed the Mediterranean Sea, with air-inflated plastic boats, this is a serious adventure for our lives, thank God we’ve made it here. I see my life like that of the other migrants, here it’s not easy, you have to fight for everything, never give up, someone’s waiting for you. When you lose for the first time, don’t despair. Some think that Italy isn’t beautiful, but they want to go to Europe. If we work hard, we’ll make it. Make yourself, change your life.

The texts are full of adventures, struggles, determination, commitment, and efforts, in a style that at times is poetic, and through them a plan for the future unfolds in relation to a past made of suffering and exclusion. These are the most frequently recurring words: route, dream, body, boat, mum, friends, passport. Beside them are a panoply of flags, nostalgically evoking the country of origin and denouncing the injustice of those in government. Religious references abound, the fatalism of their gaze finds its counterpoint in resistance, their political claim to rights and opportunities goes hand in hand with nostalgia for their country or family, while the encounters along the way and the very experience of the journey generate deep transformations. It is as though new layers of political socialization were added to the stories of subjects that already see their departure as a consequence of structural violence. Let us listen again to these messages abandoned at the border: Darfour. Thanks to the Italian people, to the humanitarian associations for their help. They have given [me] a new life. I won’t forget what you’ve done for me and for others, human rights and freedom for all. In the name of Allah. Sweet dreams are safe routes. Words are like a passport. Talking to ignorant people is like talking to the water. I had a dream, living the way my body wanted, but I live with my body the way life wants. If you want to find your dream … don’t give up, to reach the entrance [Italy] we ride on impossible boats. An unknown future. To build a beautiful future let’s go, in the end we don’t know what’s written in our destiny. To find my dream, I took the impossible boat, even if the road is long, I always go in long roads.

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These, like a thousand more scribbled words, tell the stories of subjects far from thinking of themselves as victims; rather, it is a sense of moral strength and determination to move forward at any cost which pervades the choral story which, little by little, takes shape one drop at a time. The term “freedom” keeps coming back everywhere, something that manifests itself concretely through the desire to cross all borders to search for a new life elsewhere. Writings, drawings, stories, encounters that are born informally within Eufemia/place come together and, by mixing the language of ethnographic research with that of art, turn into Eufemia/installation―an object that can be thought of as an installation on the strength and the suffering of migrants and refugees, but even more so as an installation in which the connections and the encounters developing within a node of the Underground Railroad produce a public voice. As in the case of the drawings made in the prefabricated buildings of the Sécours Catholique in Calais―which will be shown in the next chapter―the creative process finds its necessary condition in the freedom of the space within which it is inscribed, in its being external to control, to the “leash”. This process of effervescence, this tear in the hegemonic narrative, could hardly take shape within a more institutional framework, such as that of the Roja Camp run by the Italian Red Cross, the facility which is officially delegated by the Prefecture of Imperia to welcome and conduct a census on people in transit. As researchers, even we must get through multiple filters and authorities in order to be granted access to this facility; the entrance is guarded by dozens of police officers responsible for the fingerprinting rituals. Only after this can the humanitarian side of the operation begin to take charge of the migrants. In February 2018, after getting through the recognition and fingerprinting area, a social worker kindly welcomes us in front of a desk on top of which sits a stack of files on minors who escaped the facility and whose disappearance has been reported to the competent authorities; she speaks in a way that sounds “envious”, as though she were competing to attract migrants under the bridge. This is what she says: I don’t understand why refugees don’t come here, what they’re afraid of; it’s the traffickers who convince them to stay under the bridge. If we want to bring people here, we need to get rid of informal solidarity under the bridge. I was in favor of the mayor’s ordinance to ban food distribution in the city.

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And yet, our interlocutor has no doubts about the implicit function of the camp, whose operations have been progressively colonized by the needs of its temporary guests: We don’t have a statute now, we don’t really know who we are and what we’re doing. It’s obvious that we support transit, but we can’t say that. Since August we’ve only carried out a handful of assisted repatriations, over a hundred relocations to reception centers and new asylum applications, but thousands of people have gotten across and gone to France. Here they wash, rest, and then get back on the road as soon as they can. The average time people spend in this facility is less than ten days.

While Eufemia/exhibition is starting to move within the internal borders of Europe, Eufemia/place no longer exists. It was there for eighteen months. After protests and pressure, in December 2018, the owner of the building did not renew the lease. Other spaces of encounter and passage, of support to migrants in transit, have taken its place. As we have seen, even the camp under the bridge no longer exists. Small groups of shebabs live in hiding along the river, on the beach, or in conditions of further marginality, isolation, and risk. Ventimiglia has partly been cosmetically cleared of the “scandalous” presence of camped migrants, following the mainstream logic of promotion of a town that sees itself as touristy but not cosmopolitan, commercial but not open. In addition to the drawings, the words, the photographs, the texts, and the graphic novel discussed in this article, all of which tell us about the invisible cities and routes that the migrants in transit and the solidali have brought to life, there are other objects that could make this Underground Europe more visible if we tried to follow Latour’s (2005) insight when he invites us to bring the ethnography of things back into research, seeing objects and documents as subjects capable of acting and producing action. Bureaucratic artifacts produce material life, which is why they ought to be the object of description and interpretation. Where to look then? On the edge of mountain trails, in the ravines, in the middle of the bushes or among the rubbish piles, hundreds of official papers, expulsion or preventive detention papers, ID cards, train fines, and identification issued by all kinds of authorities are torn up and stepped on, showing how one of the tactics to move forward consists of making one’s passage and origins as anonymous as possible. In these papers it is the state that speaks assertively,

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giving orders … whether they are disregarded or despised. Tearing up the papers of power ironically references and inverts the process of spoliation through which, according to Goffman (1961), total institutions capture people, making them their own. But that same gesture of liberation perhaps contributes to a reclamation of an identity, of a story―a new start from scratch that allows new identities and new stories to emerge. Coming from nowhere, being nobody, or being everybody to try to get everywhere―a practice, sometimes chimerical, sometimes blessed with good fortune, that clashes in a permanent hand-to-hand battle with large databases meant to archive faces and fingers, stories and passages, turning them into biographies and bureaucratic memory. For many migrants in transit that we have met, challenging these apparatuses is part of the risk of their journey, but also of a certain fatalism in relation to their destiny, like in the case of Dawood. Our encounter, which is documented in the next chapter, is the source of much of our knowledge of Calais. Despite being subject to the Dublin regulations in Italy, Dawood cautiously decides to get fingerprinted in France, hopes for the best, and dreams of a computer system failure. In the end, he rejoices after conquering refugee status for the second time. If these papers are torn up, if the journeys go on despite everything, if the power of the smugglers market is contained, if the cosmopolitan encounters on the borders generate new opportunities and social capital, it is also thanks to the existence of a vast and heterogenous support coalition which is indeed a contemporary Underground Railroad. Its existence and its actions, its cultural work which I have tried to recount and explore through evidence and traces, challenges the dominant narrative of hostility and inhospitality as the only shade of the national sentiment toward migrations and asylum. December 2019 After the summer, according to activists who have been monitoring the border area, the numbers of those who try to get across have progressively grown. They keep track of it when they offer breakfast to those who have been expelled by the French authorities. In November, they reached peaks of over 600 people deported each week. They also tell us that, since the start of social protests in France, there has been unrest even in the police forces, border crossings have been left unstaffed and at last migrants are free to get across.

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References Alpes, M. J. (2013). Law and credibility of migration brokers. The case of emigration dynamics in Cameroon. IMI. Ambrosini, M. (2019). Accogliere, governare e integrare l’immigrazione: una questione di civiltà. Fondazione Ermanno Gorrieri. Ambrosini, M. (2018). Irregular immigration in Southern Europe: Actors, dynamics and governance. Palgrave. Ambrosini, M., Cinalli, M., & Jacobson, D. (Eds.). (2020). Migration, borders and citizenship. Between policy and public spheres. Palgrave Macmillan. Amigoni, L. (2020). Smugglers and smuggled migrants: Among Sudanese Passeurs in the Border Regime of Ventimiglia. In L.  Amigoni, S.  Aru, I.  Bonin, G. Proglio, & C. Vergnano (Eds.), Debordering Europe: Migration and controlla cross the Ventimiglia region. Palgrave. Aris Escarcena, J.  P. (2018). La paradoja del taxista: Ventimiglia como frontera selectiva. Mondi Migranti, 2(2018), 99–114. Ballerini, A., & Barabino, P. (2017). I migranti transitanti: il caso di Ventimiglia. In Dossier Statistico Immigrazione (pp. 130–134). Roma. Belloni, M. (2016). My uncle cannot say no if i reach Libya: Unpacking the social dynamics of border-crossing among eritreans heading to Europe. Human Geography, 9(2), 47–56. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago UNiversity Press. Fassin, D. (2005). Compassion and repression: The moral economy of immigration policies in France. Cultural Anthropology, 20(3), 362–387. Giliberti, L. (2020). Lotte di frontiera. Nuove ruralità e mobilitazioni sociali in Val Roja. Ombre Corte. Giliberti, L., & Queirolo Palmas, L. (2020). Solidarities in transit on the French-­ Italian borders: Ethnographic accounts from Ventimiglia and the Roya Valley. In M. Ambrosini, M. Cinalli, & D. Jacobson (Eds.), Migration. Borders and citizenship. Between policy and public sphere (pp. 109–140). Palgrave Macmillan. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Doubleday. Juris, J. S., & Khasnabish, A. (2013). Insurgent encounters. Transnational activism, ethnography, and the political. Duke University Press. Lagomarsino, F., & Ramirez, J. (2009). I coyotes del Pacifico. Quito-Los Angeles A/R. Mondi Migranti, 2(2009), 147–160. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network-­theory. Oxford University Press. Le Maquis, L. (2017). Nous ne ferons pas marche arrière. Luttes contre la forntière franco-italienne a Vintimille. Le Mas d’Azil: Niet!éditions,.

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Lendaro, A. (2018). Désobeir en faveur des migrants. Répertoire d’actions à la frontière franco-italienne. Journal des Anthropologues, 152-153, 171–192. Muller, O. (2020). Solidarity crime at the Border: a Lesson from France. In M. Ambrosini, M. Cinalli & D. Jacobson, (Eds.), op. cit, pp. 89–107. Pinelli, B. (2017). Borders, politics and subjects. Introductory notes on refugee research in Europe. Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, 1, 5–24. Queirolo Palmas, L., & Rahola, F. (2018). Il guinzaglio e lo strappo. Mondi Migranti, 2(2018), 29–37. Reedy, P.  C., & King, D.  R. (2019). Critical performativity in the field: Methodological principles for activist ethnographers. Organizational Research Methods, 22(2), 564–589. RRE (Refugee Data Project) (2017). In Dangerous transit. https://refugee-­ rights.eu/wp-­content/uploads/2018/08/RRE_InDangerousTransit.pdf Scott, J. C. (1992). Domination and the arts of resistance. Hidden trasncripst. Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Calais/Paris October 2017–October 2017

Reclaiming the Landscape At Calais-Freithun, the last stop before the Channel tunnel, there are more soldiers and police officers than passengers. The station is fortified, with barriers everywhere. As they leave the platforms, soldiers in uniform film everyone who gets off the train with a GoPro camera on their chest― possibly for facial recognition or to build a visual archive of potential new border violators? Around the tracks, the ground has flooded, and the shrubs have been razed to the ground to make it harder to get through and to allow for better panoptic control. We think back to Mohammed, the Oromo on a bicycle, who tried to get on the moving train convoys the night before the end. Who knows if he succeeded, if he persevered with his imperative, or if he was swallowed up by the necro-politics (Mbembe, 2003; Mellino, 2018) of the border: “I have to jump, I have to jump for my family”, he repeated to us with determination and fatalism. We haven’t heard anything about him. A kind, elderly couple lead us into the city. “Nothing has changed― they say―the migrants are always here”. Their words sound like a simple denial of the words of praise used by the French institutions to celebrate the success of the humanitarian eviction.1 But what are conditions of 1  For an example of an institutional assessment of the humanitarian eviction, see the Report by J. Vignon and J. Aribaud commissioned by the Minister of the Interior and Housing, 31st October 2016.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_7

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migrants here compared with the time when the city-jungle still existed? We wonder about this with Hanane, exactly one year after that event, as we get back to Calais. The perception of the elderly couple―who do not hide their benevolent and supportive attitude toward refugees while talking about how good Slavic food is in Paris, where their son is studying at university―is partly similar and partly distinct from the reflections of Marc and Katy, the friends with whom we have been staying since yesterday, during the camp’s destruction. Then, Marc and Katy had generously welcomed the Kuwaiti Bidhoun group into their home: “Now we don’t talk about it as much. Before, Calais was associated exclusively with the issue of migrants, Calais was the jungle, period. For twenty years, this was the only thing people talked about”. For the two of them, overcoming an obsessive journalistic refrain that erases the place’s history, however partially or temporarily, is a kind of symbolic redemption―a welcome one, because Calais is also capable of being something else. I think back to the opening of Erving Goffman’s “Stigma” (Goffman, 1963): a letter to an agony aunt in which a little girl complains about a collective gaze that only focuses on one part of the body―a hole where the nose should be―not considering any other quality or characteristic of the self. Or I think back to Zizek, when he imagines “envy” as a way to qualify the condition of symbolic suffering of those who are not seen; in this case, a small provincial city, with a long working-­ class tradition behind it, overshadowed by a global history, by a cosmopolitanism of the poor, which dominates it. Marc was a train driver on the night trains that connected France with Italy and now makes a good living working in small real estate operations. Katy, the daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, works as a cleaner and as a carer for an elderly lady. We had met them in October 2016 in a special café, Au Minck, where all those who come and go, both people who have been there before and strangers, shake hands in an infinite ritual of friendship. Both of them grew up in working-class families. Katy says: “Everyone here has become racist, it’s terrible. My father is Italian, yet no one ever made me feel different when I was a child”. Marc says: “My mother worked in lace factories, making dentelle, a special local product, and all of us here are children of the working class. There were few bourgeois people. We always thought we were the same. People told jokes about foreigners, but in the end we were all workers … Today? Do you have any

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idea how many votes and leaders went from the communist party, which has always ruled here, to the national front?” Even if that world is over, a shattered working-class community, made up of elderly people and unemployed families, users of social services and young people without prospects or education, has regrouped. In the absence of a class struggle against bosses who have either disappeared or become invisible and abstract, resentment and social envy have slowly formed, aimed at those at the bottom of the pile―refugees―who have become public enemies par excellence, welfare scroungers who take advantage of care provided by a state that has abandoned its duty of care toward poor French people. “French people first!” is what the Fascists of the National Front have been shouting for many years, invoking the principle of national preference. Recently, their counterparts in Italy have followed suit and have quickly shifted from their secessionist stance to playing the role of champions of the homeland from North to South. On the other side of the English Channel, the tune doesn’t seem to change. This is what an English tourist who has come to stock up on low-cost wines in a specialized supermarket in Calais has to say: “All those who want to work are welcome here. But do you know why they’re leaving? They’re coming for our benefits. We don’t want those people”. Meanwhile, a woman who is missing half her teeth is loading the car with crates of alcohol and adds with vehemence: “I work for £7 an hour and you know why? Because I have to pay tax. And you know what for? For the refugees’ subsidies”. Proletarian anger dumped toward the bottom of the pile, against other poor people: this is the strength of racism, an effective symbolic and cultural addition to organize the labor market and govern the lower classes in times of crisis. However, racism and racialization are also sources of comfort for all the locals―poor, marginalized, excluded, and uneducated people―who are under the illusion of escaping the condition “of not being seen” to finally access consideration and symbolic recognition under the spotlight of national belonging. In brutal accounting terms, the owner of a night bar points out instead: “We made a lot of money. 3000 cops and 3000 humanitarian workers. Many meals and hotel nights. Complaints against refugees are hypocritical”. We go back to the house where we had stayed during the days of the eviction; only a year before, on the table in the living room we had opened a large map of France―with Marc, Katy, Youssef, and his Bidhoun friends―circling possible preferred destinations for people being relocated to the CAOs. This is how many of the Kuwaitis arrived in Toulon. We then

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spend one night―“the last night of the Jungle”―with Katy, in Youssef’s shack, and we interview him about his past and his future, while out there wood, tents, and furnishings begin to catch fire; on that occasion, Katy entered the city of refugees―so close and yet so far away―for the first time after having turned her house into a temporary place of rest and comfort. “I want to see that place before it’s destroyed!” she told us angrily, asking Youssef to accompany her where she had never been. The time of the cosmopolitan city, built by refugees in transit and solidarity against borders (part Dante’s inferno, part utopia), is also over; and now we are in a new phase that we are about to explore. Perhaps the best way to do this is to go back to the starting point, to the initial camp, which is located under the highway that leads to the port, in front of a factory spewing out poison. At the end of October 2017, the hustle and bustle of the “camp-city” had disappeared, and all that was left was a large sign that read “Access prohibited”, while a second sign celebrated the “Reconquering of the landscape”. The site had been entirely vacated, and now nature could regenerate undisturbed―the only trace of its past was a huge expanse cleared by bulldozers (Fig. 7.1). Digging through the sand and the soil, in a sort of contemporary archaeology (Hicks & Mallet, 2019), we unearthed the signs of what once was a city and a battleground: toothbrushes, tin cans, cigarette butts, plastic food packaging, hair and razors, and empty tear gas canisters scattered everywhere. This “Reconquering of the landscape” policy also reflected the state’s desire to prevent the establishment of a site where collective memory could settle, stopping traces from building a story, a counternarrative from the point of view of those who had lived in the camp. In order to fulfill the main goal of this ethnographic project, I follow Djigo’s (2019) suggestion to oppose a “politics of trace”, concerning the removed signs and obscured words that show how migrants and refugees were able to act and resist, to the “politics of trackability”, based on the multiplication and convergence of surveillance technologies, such as mass-fingerprinting or the construction of vast databases which constantly track all “inappropriate” movements around Europe (Broeders & Dijstelbloem, 2016). Although the “camp-city” was no longer here, migrants continued to arrive: in October 2017, there were over 700 in the area (RRE, 2018). As I gazed at the almost lunar landscape of the old settlement, I suddenly met Mohammed, who had come from Ethiopia and told me in English: “I went to wash myself back there in the pond. The water is cold and dirty,

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Fig. 7.1  The Jungle, one year later (October 2017). Source: photo taken by the authors

but that’s what we have”. His appearance in the midst of that enormous sandy expanse pierced through the veil-image (Didi-Huberman, 2012) of a definitive solution. I had returned to Calais to find Dawood―a young Afghan refugee who had arrived six months before from Italy and whose contact I had gotten from a No-Border activist―in search of a local guide to understand everyday life at the border. When, almost as a joke, I asked Mohammed if he knew him, his answer was: “The Afghans stay with the Afghans, the Africans with the Africans, this is the rule. Where we live, they don’t live, where we jump, they don’t jump”.2 This gives us a clear sense of a social organization in which ethnic, national, and language divides are revealed

2  “Jump” is a common term used by migrants in transit to refer to the practice of getting across borders by jumping on trucks, over fences, and over walls.

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in all their power, now more than ever as the spatiality of the settlements is no longer concentrated, but dispersed.3 A network of different sites had replaced the old “camp-city”; this new spatiality was the variable outcome of power relations, of the struggle between local and state authorities, on the one hand, and of the supporting advocacy coalition helping people in transit, on the other (Birey et al., 2019), which brings together associations and groups from different backgrounds, including Catholics, Muslims, humanitarians, No-Border militants, second- and third-generation migrants, and volunteers from all over the world. The logic whereby dangerous subjects were tolerated as long as they were concentrated in a distant and segregated space has become outdated. The new hegemonic rhetoric is that of war on the so-called pull factor, on every possible rooting point (point de fixation): bathrooms, showers, tents and sleeping bags, food distribution, and makeshift shelters have become the targets of constant repression. While the sites that offered provisions were separated according to ethnolinguistic criteria, they were also distant from one another, forcing migrants in transit to be constantly wandering around the area in an attempt to “contain them through mobility” (Tazzioli, 2018), causing moral and physical exhaustion. For instance, Mohammed showed us his “home” for the night: a deposit, a hill made of black material in front of a graphite factory. It was almost noon, and I followed him to a makeshift food distribution point on Rue des Verrottières. As we walked, dozens of young migrants were sleeping in the streets; unlike homeless people in urban areas, they had nothing next to them. At lunchtime, hundreds of hungry people―mostly Somalis, Eritreans, and Ethiopians—came out of a bush dragging themselves with ragged clothes, eyes full of sleep, as they approached a tiny buffet set up under a pylon by a group of young English volunteers. Mbembe (2003), through the lens of necropolitics, talks of subjects experiencing “death in life”; indeed, several reports (RRE, 2018, 2019) have documented a dramatic fight for survival, highlighting the situation of extreme vulnerability in which migrants and refugees found themselves one year and two years after the eviction.4 3  According to the RRE (2018: 9), one year after the eviction, Afghans were the largest group present in Calais (27.9%), followed by Ethiopians (23.2%), Eritreans (22.8%), and Sudanese (18.9%). 4  Moreover, between January 1999 and April 2017, 192 people lost their lives in the attempt to cross the border (Babels, 2017).

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After wandering around the different sites where migrants gathered to receive assistance, Hanane and I finally met Dawood, whose base was a large shack near the showers on the Route de Saint-Omer with all the other Afghans. This was managed by the Secours Catholique, one of the main French associations working in border solidarity, and it only opened in the afternoon, as the Town Council, which owned the site, did not want any indoor facilities where people could sleep. Outside the Secours barracks, dozens of Afghans were washing rags, drinking tea, smoking, and resting after a long night spent attempting to jump on trucks. Inside, a retired art teacher was holding a painting workshop, some nurses were helping injured migrants in a first aid room, and an American film full of special effects was being screened. The inside walls were a treasure trove of drawings and paintings that described the experience of Calais better than any interview. Dawood accompanied us on the visit, like a guide at a contemporary art exhibit; he had bright blue eyes, he was tall and of very thin build, he was just over twenty years old and always had a smile on his face. From this moment on, Dawood and his traveling companions, Ashraf and Massoud, who were his age and with whom he shared a language, origins, and desires, would be our guides, introducing me and Hanane to a jagged geography made of state racism, solidarity, violence, acts of resistance, and silent transgression: with them, we spent days wandering around not only truck parking lots, food distribution points, makeshift camps, industrial sheds, but also bars, restaurants, squares, and beaches in Calais.

Survival A writing on the walls of the Secours Catholique denounced the denial of basic needs: “Calais, no food, no water, no peace”. The drawings showed people taking shelter under the trees, besieged by insecurity and all kinds of dangers, people invoking sleep or dreaming of England beyond the barbed wire.5 The photos from Dawood’s and his friends’ phones showed small makeshift camps, drainage ditches turned into shelters for sleeping, queues for food, or gatherings under bridges on a rainy day. Dawood said: “I didn’t know the great camp, I arrived later. But now is the time of the real jungle. Here in Calais, people treat dogs better than humans”. He invited me to follow him; we left the barracks and took a 5  Indeed, the drawings have been turned into a traveling exhibition (see: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=UjFdJgn4jkI&t=5s).

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path through the meadows which gradually became obscured by a thick undergrowth. As we walked for about twenty minutes, we could hear the nearby highway and the noise of the trucks―an inescapable soundscape. We walked through small groups of tents, built with plastic sheets and other recovered materials; some people were sleeping, others were playing cards or cooking eggs and tomatoes on burning wood. There was garbage everywhere, torn clothes on the ground, men treating their wounds. The bushes became thicker and thicker; we pushed back brambles, crawled on the ground, and finally reached a small clearing of a few square meters, where a camping tent was pitched. The vegetation was like a canopy, hiding the tent from sight. Around this little spot, there were a lot of water bins. I did not see any luggage or personal items; their lives were bare, without property. Nonetheless, Dawood’s Afghan friends were very proud to show this treasure they had conquered through their words: “We did an interview with a Dutch girl and she gave us a tent; we’ve been living together since then”. If, on the one hand, this ethnographic account emphasizes an “art of resistance” (Scott, 1990) which depends on the solidarity of traveling groups, hiding techniques, remaining on the margins, and building new social capitals, on the other hand, it shows a painful reduction to homelessness (European Observatory on Homelessness (EOH), 2016) since, unlike in the “camp-city”, newly displaced people in Calais did not have any safe or stable places to live. They invited me into the tent, where time went by quickly between conversations about their journey, the present, their favorite singers, and future projects. Under this sort of shell, the music that accompanied our conversation spread hope and strength, creating a kind of surreal cheerfulness that transcended the material poverty and tragic nature of the situation. Ashraf brought us back to reality: “We only have the clothes we’re wearing. When they’re torn or too dirty, we find other clothes and throw these away. We must stay light in order to live and get across”. What was important to survive in this hostile environment? They mentioned two things: smartphones, which were used as flashlights, to stay in touch with people, listen to music, use the GPS to find parking lots, or monitor the direction of the trucks on which they are traveling; and personal documents to prove their identity and remove them from anonymity. Suddenly, Massoud added: “Among us Afghans, we recognize each other by the fingerprints we leave behind and the documents we’ve got: we are Greek, Bulgarian, Italian. Half of us here are Italian”. Then he got out of the tent and started digging until he found a dirty bag wrapped in

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multiple layers of clingfilm with an Italian Social Security number, an identity card, a residence permit, and a public healthcare card. “In Italy we were in a state-run center in a small southern town―he says―but our dream was to move around Europe. If they deport us, we’ll go back to Italy, not Afghanistan. Our Italian documents are a safety net”. These accounts showed not only the camouflage tactics enacted by migrants to resist a hostile environment, but they also prefigured the potential constitution of a European post-national space from below through their desire to keep moving (Schapendonk, 2017). Dawood accompanied his friend’s story with a new photo gallery on his phone and his Facebook profile, showing the different stages of a long journey that is not only made of continuous suffering, but also of happy moments and enriching encounters―although, with each picture, the physical deterioration of a body that gets thinner and thinner becomes evident. Evening was coming, and we headed out of the bushes, under a viaduct, to the food distribution point. It was drizzling, and dozens of Afghans were sitting on a patch of grass on the edge of a road. Somewhere we heard the buzzing sound of a generator to which mobile phones are connected. The meals were delivered in single-portion plastic trays, which soon became garbage. Then people quickly disappeared as they walked back into the darkness of the night. In the following days, with Dawood and his friends, we kept coming across similar situations in which the lives of migrants in transit depended on humanitarian assistance. The state had not only abdicated all direct and indirect responsibility to meet the basic needs of migrants in transit, but it had also been actively contrasting with all available means―the law and legitimated violence―any civil society organizations involved in solidarity efforts. Following Goffman’s concepts (Goffman, 1963), if the refugees are “the discredited”, the support network embodies “the wise”, those who are close to the group, who are also stigmatized. Thus, the role of humanitarian workers changes, as they are no longer seen by the authorities as allies to whom they can delegate the management of emergencies (Sandri, 2018), but as an enemy to be pursued, accused of attracting migrants in transit by providing assistance and of keeping them in a vulnerable state (Giliberti, 2020). The intimidation tactics against volunteers range from systematic identity checks to parking fines, threats, insults, and physical violence. Similar findings on the criminalization of solidarity have been reported by Amnesty International (2019).

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In fact, only a few months after the eviction, a large group of associations had turned to the Court of Justice to be granted the right to build a reception emergency center in order to cope with the mass return of migrants in transit. In June 2017, the Court of Justice in Lille rejected the request, but urged the authorities to provide toilets, showers, and water fountains; it also authorized food distribution, which had previously been banned, as long as it took place on the outskirts of the city. Calais City Council and the French government appealed, but they lost. This is how Jules, a manager at Secours, assessed “the war for water” that ended in September 2017 with the victory of the associations and the installation of fifteen taps, twenty toilets, and twenty-eight showers, which are now accessible indirectly through a complex bureaucratic procedure involving shuttle buses, shifts, and coupons: “the policy of the City Council and the state is to bring down the number of migrants to zero. We are considered enemies. When we opened our facilities to supply water and guarantee basic hygiene to refugees, the City Council blocked the entrance with a huge skip for building debris. This is the level of the confrontation. Skip versus showers”. It was only in March 2018 that the French government finally took over the responsibility to provide food. Maia, a No-Border activist who had been living in Calais for several years,6 critically pointed out: “These days, refugees are even more ‘assisted subjects’, they totally depend on associations. Now it’s difficult to encourage self-management and build political struggles with them. Humanitarian workers give them food and migrants, who are in dire need of it, relate to them only to get assistance”. Indeed, as Salvatici (2015) argues, the humanitarian logic is paternalistic and claims to speak on behalf of passive victims; it concentrates on the present, it is politically neutral, and it does not change the conditions of the reproduction of a painful life (Ticktin, 2011); in this perspective, some scholars have insisted on the “humanitarization” of the border (Walters, 2010), a narrative that also shaped the eviction in Calais. Since the beginning of the “camp-city”, all the players involved in guaranteeing the survival of migrants had been holding weekly meetings; when I attended one of these meetings, they discussed the situation one year after eviction and which position to adopt with the Prefecture. With winter coming, the participants agreed on the request for a covered space to 6  No-Border activists, unlike volunteers and NGO workers, used to live and sleep in the “camp-city”.

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get shelter from the rain and cold. Listening to those who guarantee survival, the distinction between the humanitarian and the political gets blurred because solidarity workers must constantly engage in a battle to provide migrants with toilets, water, food, and a safe shelter from police brutality. The politicization of the humanitarian logic (Mezzadra, 2020) has become a crucial issue; as the director of one of the main NGOs operating in Calais said in October 2019 during a public discussion, “we could keep distributing blankets and food forever without ever changing anything. Maybe we should strike to push for new government policies”. From the migrant perspective, daily survival depends almost entirely on the assistance provided by this network. Their relationship with NGO workers and volunteers is often a subordinated one between givers and receivers (Djigo, 2019; Fassin, 2012), but also a tactical one; as Barnao (2004) has shown in his study on surviving on the streets, displaced and homeless people are creative subjects who develop survival tactics to preserve their bodies and health. However, we must not forget that the immediate causes of the harsh living conditions faced by migrants and refugees in Calais are the zero-tolerance policies enforced through continuous police operations. Unless we focus on institutional violence, it is impossible to understand why migrants wander, have difficulties resting, washing themselves, eating, and finding shelter; it is this condition that has produced what I would call “the real jungle”. The end of the “camp-city” has exponentially increased the vulnerability of people in transit, as they are forced to engage in a constant struggle to cover their most basic needs. In this new context, the dispersed archipelago of small shelters is neither a place for the emergence of a sociopolitical space of struggle nor a secure refuge where to build collective identities, knowledge, and narratives of border transgression.

The Hunt In the drawings on the walls of the Secours shack, there were several men in black―policemen looming―on one side, while on the other the migrants were trying to rest under a tree. In these representations, policemen are not there to protect but to threaten people’s safety; they have oversized feet and hands, and gas canisters are their main weapons. These images are hunting scenes. Every night when we reached the tent, Dawood told us to keep the flashlights low so as to not be located: “They often come at dawn or when

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it’s dark, first they identify our settlement with drones, then when they arrive they destroy the few important things we have: documents, telephones, clothing, food, blankets, curtains, and shoes. We’ve been good at hiding, we’ve tried to go deeper into the bushes, and we’ve been living here for two weeks”. Ashraf added: “When they find us, they beat us and humiliate us with their batons”. I looked at the hospital bracelets they had around their wrists: “These are our protections. We pick them up when we’re out and about―he continues―and when the police come, we say we’ve just left the hospital”. All the informants we met during the fieldwork emphasized elements of the same story. The worker at the mobile toilets that were installed after the NGO’s court victory told us that “migrants arrive here in the morning to wash themselves and they are exhausted. The police don’t let them sleep at night. They have to keep running. Sometimes I let them into the maintenance truck to help them get around or let them sleep in peace”. Or, in the words of an Eritrean boy who was listening to the conversation: “Every night we sleep in a different place, so we can’t be found and beaten by the police”. A volunteer working in food provision told us that “sometimes the police drive the refugees to the middle of the countryside, tens of kilometres from Calais; sometimes they confiscate their documents”. A spokesman of the Secours Catholique claimed that “it’s gratuitous and repeated violence. Unfortunately, we have no tangible evidence, only oral testimonies. But the Prefect tells us that no one has made any complaints, that the police operate fairly and respectfully”. Dawood closed the circle: “Yes, the police beat me, of course I said it in Court, I showed the bruises. But they wanted proof and they were convinced that I could have got hurt by trying to get onto a truck”. In this climate of general intimidation, of hunters and prey, which affects even the volunteers, the Afghan group tended to stick to the areas allocated to them in this concrete jungle: “We’re afraid, we don’t dare to go downtown, there are always problems with the police and the locals. We stay here, between the bushes and the food distribution point. Then at night we leave and try to jump”. For many years the City Council had been expressing hostility toward migrants in transit by making services such as swimming pools and libraries inaccessible to them. Furthermore, according to data from the RRE report (, 2018: 21) on the situation one year after eviction, about 40% of people on the move had suffered physical and verbal abuse from the people of Calais and 92% claimed to have been the victims of police violence, mostly involving pepper spray and beatings,

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but many had also reported injuries due to dog bites. As Babels (2019) researchers have pointed out, entrusting the resolution of social issues to the police inevitably results in violence. Institutional violence was denounced not only by Human Rights Watch (, 2017) in its report, evocatively titled “It is like living in hell”, and by local associations in different Courts, but also by the prestigious Défenseur des droits (2017), an official body of the French Republic which, after a field visit, stated: “The desire to no longer see migrants in Calais leads to intolerance towards any kind of shelter. … Migrants can no longer sleep, stop or rest, and remain in a state of constant alert. They are visibly in a state of physical and moral exhaustion”. Even a report by law enforcement inspection bodies (IGPN et  al., 2017) confirmed this overall scenario. Over a period of six months following the dismantling of the “camp-city” (from May to August 2017), the report highlighted a constant pressure, a relentless fight against any possible shelter, listing the number of actions carried out: 80 “anti-squat” operations, 195 sites, and 91,000 kg of objects destroyed (2017: 33). In line with this data, according to the RRE report (2018: 23), 85% of respondents claimed to have been awakened at night and removed from their sleeping spots, violently and without any alternative being offered. The accounts of Dawood, Massoud, and Ashraf clearly represented individual expressions of a shared, widespread experience. Such uses of police forces were justified by the Prefect of the Pas-de-Calais in humanitarian terms: “What is really threatening human rights are the indecorous and unhealthy conditions in which migrants live in wild camps. This situation cannot be tolerated by the state. For this reason, the President of the Republic is committed to ensuring that no woman or man sleeps on the street and in the woods”.7 If we explore the representations produced by migrants in transit, the way the police operate evokes the iconography and the rituals of hunting in its double meaning: catching/destroying and chasing away. The hunt in this case does not target animals, but rather it produces animals (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2007), reducing humans to prey, left wandering in fear and insecurity, in a process that echoes the colonial moment, as Fanon (2005) masterfully highlighted, in which dehumanization feeds the animalization of subaltern subjects. Those in transit react to this 7  A letter of the Prefect, published by the local press in Calais on November 27, 2017, in answer to the complaints gathered by migrant support associations.

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unprecedented deployment of force by developing different tactics: hiding and increasing mobility, searching for new shelters every night; developing ethnic ties; trusting and depending on assistance networks for basic needs; staying on the edge of cities and avoiding public places; posing as victims in case of danger, for example, by passing for minors or pretending to be sick. What can the state offer to those who surrender and give up on the dream of crossing the border? There are four facilities (CAES-Reception and examination centers), as the Prefect assures the local press, which provisionally accept those who intend to undergo an assessment of their administrative condition for a short period (a few days).8 These facilities function as devices to move people away from the scene of a border struggle and perform classification exercises in view of future deportations. Needless to say, their attractiveness for the hunted―“the human prey”―is very low; as a social worker in one of these institutional facilities whispered to me, “we ourselves advise migrants against applying for asylum in Calais, because the Prefect said and repeated that he will apply Dublin. We recommend staying for the shortest possible time, resting, showering, then running away”. In Calais, like in Ventimiglia or Ceuta and Melilla, the aim of flows management policies is to send refugees back along the route they have just taken, inflicting psychological suffering and physical exhaustion, producing a space that is locked and permanent at the same time. The eviction of October 2016 had been a paradigmatic moment in the politics of compassion and repression; a year later, however, all that remained was institutional violence. On the part of the state, it was not about sheltering, but rather continuing to destroy the temporary shelters that migrants in transit kept building in the interstices of a hostile territory. The report of the French Ministry of the Interior and Housing (Vignon & Aribaud, 2016) after the eviction helps us to shed light on what is at stake. According to their indications, it was necessary “to reduce the flow of migrants who manage to arrive in Calais”; “to work on the secondary flows coming from Italy”; “to fix the flows upstream from Calais;” to stop informal solidarity from acting as a pull factor and to prevent the opening of any reception centers in the Pas-de-Calais region that “undoubtedly constitute an opportunity to attempt the border crossing”; to build a transit facility far from the city of Calais which remains “locked at night to 8  According to the RRE report (2019: 36), over 80% of respondents did not have access to any information on their rights and opportunities to change their current situation.

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avoid border violations” and whose goal was to send back all those who arrived. Finally, it was crucial “to seize the opportunity offered by the end of the slum to turn over a new leaf and establish a completely new dynamic based on a rigorous management of flows and on the rule of law (2016: 13)”. This “completely new dynamic” is precisely what I observed at this stage in my research; hunting and survival, harsh inhospitality, and widespread institutional violence showed that the “jungle” had not been dismantled, but rather that “the real jungle” emerged after the destruction of the large “camp-city” in October 2016, which to some extent had provided protection from police raids up to that point. The condition of being reduced to the status of “prey”, forced to constantly move, activates the continuous reproduction of the archipelago of small shelters, blocking the potential development of collective practices, narratives, and knowledge.

The Attempt The collective effort to break free from the hunt is the “attempt”; the sites where the border is challenged are called “trying places”―parking lots, petrol stations, gates in the port area or in the Eurotunnel―and they are defended by significant technological investment and continuous virtual and physical surveillance (Akkerman, 2019). For many, including Dawood’s group, the “attempt” would take place at night. Every day, after the evening food distribution, they would rest for a few hours in their tent, and after midnight they took an improvised path between the highway and the bushes until they reached a large logistics center. They would return at dawn to rest, police permitting. One night Hanane and I followed the group to the place known among the Afghans as Seithan, the devil’s parking lot. Although the name appeared to be a tribute to danger due to repeated confrontations with security agents and truck drivers, there was a pervasive religious dimension supporting everyday life in the jungle. Dawood and his friends, for example, performed spiritual preparation exercises, praying and repeating three hundred times a verse of the Koran stored on their mobile phones before trying to get on the trucks. Then he said: “Each one of us has the right to try, every Afghan. It depends on the order of arrival at the truck parking lot. We try two at a time, there is a queue and a shift. Here it is free, if you have money, don’t come here. Your family pays a truck driver who pulls up somewhere else, in a quieter and less controlled spot. You can only try in your parking lot,

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the Afghans’ one, not in the others”. Attempting to get across does not only require constant exercise and physical work for which the body is fundamental―a certain “warrior capital” (Sauvadet, 2007) due to the constant confrontations with the different border guards―but also a resistance and mental perseverance supported by a collective ethic that sees crossing into the UK as the only goal. The “trying places”, times, and techniques varied between groups and national origins, also depending on their economic capital. Near gas stations during the day, there were mainly young black men from sub-­Saharan Africa or from the Horn of Africa; they moved around in small groups as they kept trying to hide in the trucks that were stopping for gas or for a rest. The police were also constantly patrolling the area with their vans; teams on foot, pepper spray and batons in their hands, they wandered around the parking lot chasing the young migrants. It was like a kind of ballet that had no end and lasted all day long. Many of them looked like minors, they were wearing few dirty clothes. When I approached them to talk, they recognized me from the food distribution over the previous days. “It’s fun to play with trucks”, they said, laughing, “today we even managed to do a douggar9 on the highway”. The joy brought by the attempts to cross emerged along with the thrill of the challenge, the tenacity to repeat, the desire to win the border game, a kind of playful and voluntary risk-taking (Lyng, 2005). Those who are seen as prey by the police are seen as predators by truck drivers, whose reactions range from compassion to hostility; in fact, in the border game, the truck is the prey, the trophy. Much like the police have expert knowledge of where migrants seek shelter, including how to locate them and stop them, those who attempt to cross share knowledge about routes and different transport options. Dawood often told anecdotes about food and other objects―“the treasure”, as he called it―that he was lucky enough to find in the bowels of the prey. In a kind of food chain, those who are hunted must hunt to survive. In this context, hope, faith, and perseverance are crucial, as an Eritrean boy at the gas station said about the “game” in which he engaged during a moment of rest: “two got through yesterday, two today. We keep at it until we succeed. God willing”. Even the drawings hanging on the walls of the Secours Catholique 9  Term of Sudanese origin which designates a traffic block made of all kinds of materials. At the time of the “camp-city”, douggars were also used to bypass the fees imposed by smugglers to access the trying sites.

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reflected this emotional landscape in which that “somewhere else” that was really near was idealized; Britain was represented as a faraway dream, blocked by endless barbed wire, yet masses of people tried to reach a brighter future. Some institutional documents help us to get a sense of the extent of border transgression activities; it is a microphysical battle in which thousands of people are involved. According to the aforementioned report by the French Inspection Services (IGPN et  al., 2017: 19), in 2016, the police had discovered 23,567 migrants inside the Calais port facilities; in the first eight months of 2017, this figure was reduced to 8184. At the same time, 40,384 intrusions were prevented in 2016, while 16,308 were prevented in the following observed period.10 On the other side of the Channel, a document by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (2018) reports that the number of illegal immigrants―that is the successful crossings―discovered in British ports went down from 1119 in 2016/2017 to 882 the following year. A rough comparison of these sources shows that, despite the fact that attempts to cross had more than halved after the eviction, the number of those arriving from the other side of the Channel did not fall proportionately. To return to the beliefs of the young Eritrean I had met at the gas station, which overlap with those of Dawood and his friends, their collective hope was driven by some evidence of success. Port checks are indeed random in order to avoid bottlenecks in the circulation of goods and passengers; as the Chief Inspector (2018: 30) realistically―and bitterly―admitted, “the only way to stop all clandestine entries into the country would be to scan all vehicles, but this is not possible given the volume of traffic on the route”. Even now, when the camp-city no more exists and the violent action of state authorities has produced an archipelago of informal settlements, the possibility to cross is still open. The migrants’ attempt to “pierce” the border, whatever the intensity of violence and the ways of dwelling these spaces and temporalities, remains the center of their agency and is the crucial practice which defines their very condition and self-­ representation: renouncing to the attempt means to quit the social and psychic landscape of transit.

10  These figures refer to the overall number of attempts, not to individuals attempting to cross, as migrants in transit generally keep trying multiple times a day, every day.

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Le Journal de Jungles Thus, the needs of commerce fuel chance and luck, which strengthens people’s faith in the crossing; and it is precisely this moral strength, this resistance, which must be broken, making the local area, the backstage of the place where people attempt to jump, increasingly inhospitable. Moral strength is supported not only by the solidarity within the travel groups and by the constant communication between those who are ahead and those who are behind along the route, but also by the relationships that develop with the people who are part of the Underground Railroad. In a small town in the inner part of the region, we witness the meeting of a network of people who welcome migrants in transit in their homes; several young people who escaped evictions in the region have been welcomed in similar contexts. The makeup is similar to that of groups active in the Roja Valley, on the French-Italian border: elderly people, pensioners, teachers, civil servants, alternative and neo-rural farmers. Jean brings us the experience of the Norrent Fontes camp that has recently been evicted and distributes a flyer connecting all the informal settlements, the Journal de Jungles, produced by activists and migrants in transit: “We provide people with individual support, we certainly help them to get across. We know where Said, Fatima, and Antoine went. … We tried to defend the camp, it was well-structured, and we had gotten rid of the passeurs who imposed their fees. The Mayor and Prefect have stood in our way however they could. Now the migrants are still here, only in more precarious conditions in the middle of a forest. We need flashlights”. The Journal is the most evident manifestation that each camp along the route is also a railroad station where, in addition to humanitarian support and the artistic/narrative work done to denounce, there are also less visible but constant forms of support to mobility producing different kinds of connections and complicity between activists and migrants in transit. Faced with solidarity networks, the authorities have been enforcing an increasingly hostile and repulsive space―a hunting ground―aimed at destroying the border transgressors’ bodies and souls through a politics of exhaustion (De Vries & Guild, 2018): sleep deprivation, beatings, reduction to an animal-like existence, expulsion from public spaces and facilities. The institutional goal remains to decompress the space through multiple orders aimed at putting those who have trespassed back in their place through asylum, if applicable, a “relocation” to the first country of arrival in line with the Dublin Regulations, or expulsion to the country of origin.

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In this context of utter inhospitality, which is diametrically opposed to sanctuary cities (Bauder, 2016; Bauder & Darling, 2019), those in transit become like wild animals fighting for survival in a jungle. Yet, it is precisely through this struggle that migrants and refugees’ agency develops. Rather than accepting to be victimized or engaging in broader social movements, Dawood and his friends displayed a broad repertoire of actions and tactics through which they constantly engaged in the border game and which allowed them to stay human and resist institutional violence at the border, by increasing mobility and spatial circulation, by camouflaging, by becoming invisible to those on the outside, and by strengthening their esprit de corps. As previously mentioned, data from state authorities from both sides of the Channel has shown the persistency of successful border-crossings despite the production of a space of inhospitality. Recently, this trend has been confirmed by the growing success of migrants inventing new ways of crossing the Channel through dinghies and little boats (Maggs, 2019). The infrastructure which enables migrants to continue in their attempts to cross into the UK is also the solidarity promoted by the civil society, which develops in every border battleground. As in other contexts, solidarity associations and informal groups in Calais have also been criminalized for trivial activities and forced into legal battles to defend migrants’ most basic needs. By so doing, they have started to elaborate new debates and practices that question the traditional dichotomy between the humanitarian and the political, blurring the distinction between humanitarian volunteers and political activists. The history and management of migrants in transit in Calais in the last twenty years seems to repeat itself in a familiar cycle (RRE, 2019), through a constant commuting between camps and interstitial spaces, squats, jungles, “humanitarian” evictions, and deportations. Even the newspaper distributed by Jean, which brings together information, drawings, illustrations, poems, fragments of interviews, tips and memories about crossing in English and French, uses the image of a closed circle, a loop (Fig. 7.2) to describe the same daily reoccurrence of survival, hunt, and attempts that we have tried to recount in these pages. Migrants, as we have seen through their traces and voices, become prey and predators at the same time, while trucks become magical objects that can break the loop to which they are chained; around this metal box―a shipping container, as containers often constitute the architecture of institutional camps (Menghi, 2018)―desires are built, and, in its bowels, there is food which is earned through individual effort rather than coming from

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Fig. 7.2  The Loop Source: Journal de Jungles, n.8, March 2017, Plateforme de Services aux Migrants

aid. Its wheels lead to the treasure island across the sea. The truck, however, is often found in the devil’s parking lot, and, come to think of it, all of Calais is the devil’s parking lot. It is therefore likely that many will abort their attempt and come back in search of other ways, as did Dawood and his companions after a cold winter, many arrests, and many beatings in twelve months of vain attempts.

From a First-Floor Room on the Outskirts of Paris A year after this ethnographic experience, in October 2018, Hanane and I met Dawood again and spent a few days with him in a working-class Paris neighborhood. He shared a tiny apartment with two new roommates, but he had a roof over his head, he was not persecuted by the police night and day, and he no longer had to rely on food distribution to eat. Indeed, he proudly welcomed us with delicious home-cooked Afghan dishes. Once again, like when we had been together in his tent, he told us: “My friends are my family, I share everything with them”.

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He was lucky with the assessment of his administrative situation; even the system gets it wrong, and, since it had not recognized his fingerprints in the Eurodac archive, it accepted a new asylum application. Dawood is no longer traveling. Now his goal is to settle in France. Only one of the five young men in his Calais group has arrived in Birmingham; he hears from him every now and then, but by now he has understood that there is no heaven across the English Channel. Like he did before in the undergrowth, he now moves around the subway like a cat; he is fast and loves to walk. We accompany him to familiar places: he does not speak French yet, and he has never seen the Seine riverside promenade―we are the ones who introduce him to it―but he proudly takes us to Montmartre where he lies on the lawn and looks at the city from above. “Every now and then I do a day’s work in construction, ten hours for 40 euros. But it’s hard to get paid by the bosses, you have to chase up the money. The State offers a language course. … I have been there, there are too many people who didn’t want to learn, a waste of time, I left”. He is genuinely excited about Paris. He now enjoys a right to anonymity and indifference that at last makes him feel free; his is just one of hundreds of thousands of migrant lives and potentially foreign faces in a cosmopolitan space. “When I was a child, they told us that Paris is washed with the scent from the sky―he says jokingly―but all I could smell up to Calais was the spray used by the police. In Calais I weighed 50kg, I’m 180cm. Now I weigh 65 kg”. Freedom is a recurring topic in the conversations that suddenly come up as we wander aimlessly; inheriting a condition loaded with obligations within a family, religious, and village history, is the weight that crushes the biographies of many. Dawood, like others we have met in the Afghans group, is part of the third generation of people on the run: his grandparents from the Russian invasion, his parents from the American war, and finally they left to escape the Taliban. “In Afghanistan you were forced to go to war. My mother tried to resist the militias, telling them that I was the oldest, that my father was sick, and that I had to work for the family. I also fled so as not to take part in their wars”. At the Villette park we come across an open-air concert; black and white people, veiled women and scantily clad women, elderly people and children dance together without distinction. Dawood gets into the party mood, and when we walk away, he says: “All these people mixing together is so different from Calais, so different from Afghanistan. There it’s all

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about your family’s history. You may have trouble due to things your grandfather did. Even if you have nothing to do with it and you don’t know anything about it, you bear the responsibility. Here it’s better, you’re an individual, I want to be an individual. We left because we were sick of an imam telling us how to behave. We left in search of freedom. Think about it … one day in Calais I was handcuffed, they had found me inside a truck. I looked the policeman in the eye and told him I’d come to Europe so that I would no longer have to live through oppression … and he looked at me, almost with affection, and set me free!” In Paris, Dawood has not set foot in the camps where those who are traveling stay. He has left the jungle and its rituals; now he is becoming an immigrant. Rihan, his roommate, exemplifies the turbulent and reversible nature of this condition. His biography has taken him through Calais multiple times: “I lived in London for eight years. In Birmingham, I worked as a pastry chef. They didn’t give me asylum and so, after losing the last appeal, I went to Italy to get my documents. I was afraid I would get deported to Afghanistan. I’ve been to Germany, Holland, and now France. In the UK, life was good even if you were irregular, there was no racism. You can live there safely as an illegal immigrant. The police don’t look for you, you work and shut up. I tried to go back to the UK, but I couldn’t”. In the subordination of his condition, Rihan is well aware of his place in the world; he follows European politics and reads up about the growth of racist and fascist parties. Given his age and experience, Dawood listens to him like one would listen to a teacher: “You see how we immigrants live here”, he says, showing us the bare space they share, “and then they accuse us of stealing their jobs! If I had stolen some Frenchmen’s job, I’d be rich in these ten years of migration. But look how I live. In Calais I was arrested while I was trying to get across, I spent a few months in a detention center in Paris and, ironically, I almost got deported to the UK because my last pieces of paper were there! But then something went wrong … and they freed me in France. Now I’m here, working in the construction industry as an illegal. I took up smoking hashish in Europe. Too much tension, too many worries”. The third young man in the group has never been through Calais, but tales about that place linger in every discussion. Often there are even different versions, a sign that there is no official truth, but rather variable balances in which the figures offering solidarity, trafficking people for a fee, and perpetrating violence are constantly confused. Rihan continues:

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When I got across for the first time, each station was controlled by a group. You had to pay to get across, to try. Then there was a free zone for those who had no money―of all origins and all colors―but these were the places with the lowest chances of success, because the best places are occupied by those who do business. Payments are originally made through third parties. When you arrive on the other side, the money is delivered to the organization. In Calais, no one has cash. Those who used to handle trafficking before, in the times of the big camp, have now gone back to Paris. Here in Belleville, I saw one of them on the street the other day. They are out of work or involved in petty crime.

To keep stimulating reflections on the journey, we buy them a large map of the world to hang in their room. It is the only sign of color on the dirty beige of the walls; the rest of the space consists of a rug, two foam mattresses without sheets (one single and the other double), and some blankets, while the nails on the walls are used to hang clothes. We are sitting in a circle; there is always hot tea to drink, while sometimes someone goes to do things in the kitchen. Small cockroaches crawl on the floor. Dawood begins to tell us about pieces of his journey from Kabul to Istanbul and then up along the Balkan route, until he entered Italy; dozens of drawings collected during our research in the different border zones appear before my eyes. Mountains, cold, sea, cars where they spent hours and hours in the trunk, police, dogs, violence, prisons, waits, wild landscapes, night, and breaks, which were necessary to raise some money and move on; “my journey cost 4000, up to Serbia. Then I moved on by myself. To get across in Calais, you had to pay to use the parking lot through a third person in Afghanistan”. Somehow, speaking from another place and at another time, Dawood downplays the narrative of self-­ management which he had told us about at night in the devil’s parking lot and according to which only the rich pay for VIP service. Fazal, the third young man in the group, was a helicopter pilot in the Afghan army and speaks perfect English; he shows us photos as a bodybuilder in several national competitions and says he would like to work in the field of fitness in France. He also defected and arrived in an Italian SPRAR (reception facility for refugees and asylum seekers), where he collaborated with a university professor from Trieste. Fazal likes to talk about high-level subjects: “I study psychology and anthropology”, this is how he introduces himself. He is not a university student, but he is fascinated by

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the sciences; Dawood and Rihan call him “the philosopher”. “Unfortunately―he tells us―I realized that here it is titles and pieces of paper that count, but not knowledge. Still, I spend my hours reading and studying”. After Italy, he somehow arrives at a reception facility in France, which, however, he flees again: “They sent me to a house in the French countryside. There was nothing, no young people, nothing, no prospects. It was depressing. I lost the check money, but I came to Paris, I’m better off here”. From time to time, I keep receiving messages like these via WhatsApp: “Luca, I have a problem with religion. What can science say about God?” “Luca, I’m going through a crisis, I no longer believe in God but in science”. I cannot comfort him in his doubts, except by sharing my atheism with him. The last update I receive evokes working-class stories: “Luca, I got my French documents and now I work in a car factory outside Paris”. Now Calais seems far away for this group of young men who have decided to interrupt their journey and gain immigration status in France instead of Great Britain. Yet, no matter how far they are, they always talk about Calais, just like they talk about Afghanistan all the time. “When I was in Calais, I didn’t think about problems”, says Dawood “but now, looking back at myself after a year, I don’t recognize myself. I wasn’t afraid back then. If I think about it today, it was unbelievable that I wasn’t afraid of that life in the woods. Now, Calais scares the shit out of me. I left because there was too much violence. And because I wasn’t closed in on myself but was talking to everyone, at some point the other Afghans accused me of being a police spy. In Calais, people are so aggressive that remaining a good person isn’t easy”. The philosopher comments and everyone agrees: “Calais is like Afghanistan. In Afghanistan educted people speak English, but everyone is a warrior, you have to be a warrior”. As Pierre Bourdieu has taught us (Bourdieu, 2003), violence is circular and sooner or later any structural, systemic, institutional, or vertical violence turns into interpersonal, horizontal violence. The structural inhospitality dumped onto people by the authorities as a symbol of the way things work on a local level and the way people are reduced to a life of savagery which inevitably produces interpersonal violence have ended up overlapping in the experiences of these former migrants in transit in two places, Calais and Afghanistan, which are seemingly unfathomable.

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References Akkerman, M. (2019). The Business of Building Walls. Transnational Institute, Stop Wapenhandel, Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau, https://www.tni.org/ files/publication-­downloads/business_of_building_walls_-­_full_report.pdf. Amnesty International. (2019). La solidarité prise pour cible. Criminalisation et harcèlement des personnes qui défendent les droits des migrant-e-s et des réfugié-e-s dans le nord de la France. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ EUR2103562019FRENCH.PDF Babels. (2017). La mort aux frontières de l’Europe. Le passager clandestin. Babels. (2019). La police des migrants: Filtrer, disperser, haerceler. Le Passager clandestin. Barnao, C. (2004). Sopravvivere in strada. Elementi di sociologia della persona senza dimora. FrancoAngeli. Bauder, H. (2016). Sanctuary cities: Policies and practices in international perspective. International Migration, 55(2), 174–187. Bauder, H., & Darling, J. (2019). Sanctuary cities and urban struggles: Rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights. Manchester University Press. Birey, T., Cantat, C., Maczynska, E., & Sevinin, E. (Eds.). (2019). Challenging the political across borders. Migrants’ and solidarity struggles. Central European University. Bourdieu, P. (2003). Counterfire: Against the tyranny of the market. Verso Books. Broeders, D., & Dijstelbloem, H. (2016). The datafication of mobility and migration management: The mediating state and its consequences. In I.  Van der Ploeg & J. Pridmore (Eds.), Digitizing identities: Doing identity in a networked world (pp. 242–260). Routledge. De Vries, L. A., & Guild, E. (2018). Seeking refuge in Europe: Spaces of transit and the violence of migration management. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(12), 2156–2166. Défenseur des droits (2017). Visite des services du Défenseur des droits le lundi 12 juin à Calais. https://www.defenseurdesdroits.fr/fr/node/23871. Didi-Huberman, G. (2012). Images in spite of all. Chicago University Press. Djigo, S. (2019). Aux frontières de la démocratie. De Calais a Londres sur les traces des migrants. Le Bord de l’eau. European Observatory on Homelessness, EOH (2016). Asylum seekers, refugees and homelessness. The Humanitarian Crisis and the Homelessness Sector in Europe. https://www.feantsaresearch.org/download/feantsa-­studies_06_ web1893761109777125727.pdf. Fanon, F. (2005). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press. Fassin, D. (2012). Humanitarian reason. A moral history of the present. University of California Press.

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Giliberti, L. (2020). Abitare la frontiera. Lotte neorurali e solidarietà ai migranti sul confine franco-italiano. Ombre Corte. Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Prentice Hall. Hicks, D., & Mallet, S. (2019). Lande: The Calais “Jungle” and beyond. Bristol University Press. Human Right Watch, HRW (2017). Like living in Hell. Police Abuse against Child and Adult Migrants in Calais. https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/07/26/ living-­hell/police-­abuses-­against-­child-­and-­adult-­migrants-­calais. IGPN, IGA, IGGN (2017). Evaluation de l’action des forces de l’ordre à Calais et dans le Dunkerquois. https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Publications/Rapports-­ de-­l-­IGA/Rapports-­recents/Evaluation-­de-­l-­action-­des-­forces-­de-­l-­ordre-­a­Calais-­et-­dans-­le-­Dunkerquois Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (2018). An Inspection of Border Force Operations at South Coast Seaports. https://assets.publishing. service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/755272/ICIBI_An_inspection_of_South_Coast_Ports.pdf. Lyng, S. (2005). Edgework: The sociology of risk taking. Routledge. Maggs, J. (2019). The ‘Channel Crossings’ and the borders of Britain. Race & Class, 61(3), 78–86. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. Mellino, M. (2018). Governare la crisi dei rifugiati. L’emergere in Europa di una nuova “economia politica morale” di gestione delle migrazioni. Mondi Migranti, 2(2018), 293–220. Menghi, M. (2018). Intorno alla frontiera: politiche di contenimento e pratiche di mobilità sul confine di Ventimiglia. Mondi Migranti, 2(2018), 39–60. Mezzadra, S. (2020). Abolitionist vistas of the human. Border struggles, migration, and freedom of movement. Citizenship Studies, 24(4), 424–440. Papadopoulos, D., & Tsianos, V. (2007). The autonomy of migration: The animals of undocumented mobility. In A.  Hickey-Moody & P.  Malins (Eds.), Deleuzian encounters. Studies in contemporary social issues (pp.  222–235). Palgrave Macmillan. RRE. (2018). Twelve months on. Filling informations gap relating to refugees and displaced people in Northern France a Year from the Demolition of the Calais Camp. https://refugee-­rights.eu/wp-­content/uploads/2018/08/RRE_ TwelveMonthsOn.pdf RRE. (2019). Refugees and displaced people in Northern France. A brief timeline of the human rights situation in the Calais area. https://refugee-­rights.eu/wp-­ content/uploads/2020/04/RRE_ Northern-­France-­Timeline-­2020.pdf. Salvatici, S. (2015). Nel nome degli altri. Storia dell’umanitarismo internazionale. il Mulino.

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Sandri, E. (2018). Volunteer humanitarianism’: Volunteers and humanitarian aid in the Jungle refugee camp of Calais. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1), 65–80. Sauvadet, T. (2007). Le capital guerrier. Concurrence et solidarité entre jeunes de cité. Arman Colin. Schapendonk, J. (2017). Afrostars and eurospaces. West African movers re-­viewing ‘destination Europe’ from the inside. Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa, 3, 393–414. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. Hidden transcripts. Yale University Press. Tazzioli, M. (2018). Containment through mobility. Migrants’ spatial disobediences and the reshaping of control through the hotspot system. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(16), 2764–2779. Ticktin, M. I. (2011). Casualties of care. Immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in France. University of California Press. Vignon, J., & Aribaud, J. (2016). Après le démantèlement du bidonville de Calais, quelle suites possible? https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Archives/Archives-­des-­ actualites/2017-­A ctualites/Evaluation-­e t-­p ropositions-­s ur-­l es-­s uites­possibles-­au-­demantelement-­du-­camp-­de-­Calais. Walters, W. (2010). Foucault and frontiers: Notes on the birth of the humanitarian border. In U. Bröckling, S. Krasmann, & T. Lemke (Eds.), Governmentality: Current issues and future challenges (pp. 138–164). Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Ceuta, Melilla. Spain/Morocco

November 2018

Ibra and the Guards in a Borderland Ceuta and Melilla are two Spanish enclaves on the Moroccan territory, a European outpost in Africa where a multiplicity of frictions linked to mobility and security, diplomacy, and international cooperation has been unfolding. Ceuta and Melilla, as well as the neighboring Moroccan territories, can be imagined as testing grounds where different policies, spectacles, and economies are assembled, configuring a borderland that is peculiar for its governance and the turbulence of contemporary migrations. Borders here are not assumed in terms of the open / closed binary. On the contrary, borders act differently on different categories of subjects and become contested and reaffirmed (Konrad, 2015) through multiple “arts of resistance” by migrants (Scott, 1990) and policy responses by the rulers. We do not attempt to provide a detailed analysis of the governance of the mobility regime in this unique zone of ground-contact between the European Union and Africa, but it seeks to reflect on some dynamics that may reveal the spectacle of the border and the material acts of bordering, re-bordering, and de-bordering.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_8

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Since February 2017, when Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding on migration with the Libyan government of National Unity,1 the Central Mediterranean route has been progressively closed. As a consequence, Ceuta and Melilla, the Gibraltar Strait, and the Alboran Sea have become the focal points of new mobilities. According to UNHCR, in 2017, there was a global flow of 28,349 persons (by land or sea), while in 2018 it rose, soaring to 65,783, thus representing over half of all irregular entries into Europe via the different Mediterranean routes.2 Moreover, Morocco has seen a significant increase in its geographical income, a capital to be economically asserted in the fight to make migration illegal. This chapter originates from a visual ethnography carried out in November 2018 in these two contexts.3 The narrative is based on several field encounters with, on the one hand, a high number of activists and volunteers opposed to closure and discrimination policies, who support the reception and transit of migrants, asylum seekers, and unaccompanied minors, and, on the other, with different subjects (public officials, migrants in transit, and workers employed informally) that are involved in the social and material construction of migratory spaces, practices, and opportunities. Like Ibra, for example, who is an unauthorized parking attendant and the first person I met as soon as I crossed the fences of the port of Ceuta, about 45 minutes and 16 nautical miles after boarding a fast ferry from Algeciras. His job consists of protecting parked cars from troublemakers, mostly Moroccan children or teenagers, who seek shelter in the shade of palm trees in a small garden. This is an excerpt of what he said: I am a caballa, from here, from Ceuta, I’ve been here for a lifetime even if I come from there, from Morocco. Thank goodness I got rid of the Moroccan monarchy. I’m on the other side and I don’t want to hear anything anymore. When I am there, I keep the garden beautiful by keeping migrants, these children, away. I keep it clear. There, in Morocco, poor people have neither rights nor resources, you have to pay to see a doctor, you can’t even talk and protest, it’s normal that they come here to go to Spain, to Europe, if they manage.

I crossed the Strait of Gibraltar on a cold sunny day in early November 2018. This is Ceuta, but there is something familiar that I have already seen in the numerous border zones, in Calais like in Ventimiglia of this ethnographic journey, where the daily battle for the right to move is

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fought. Dozens of street children, whose features are not unlike those of the unauthorized parking attendant, roam the streets in a time filled with wait, but also trial, effort, risk, and sudden accelerations. Waiting to get through, to jump over the fence, to get on a truck heading to the peninsula (a term commonly used in Ceuta and Melilla, as well as in Baleares and Canary Islands, to refer to Spain mainland), to get on a ferry by any means. There are a lot of police officers of all kinds around, as well as grids, barbed wires, anti-climbing plates, cameras, motion and CO2 sensors, and control rooms to protect the port area, the gateway through which people can (re)gain their freedom of movement. Ceuta and Melilla are part of Europe and yet they are not. Here, in fact, Schengen agreements do not apply, and free movement toward the peninsula and the “real” Europe is valid only for some categories of subjects. What had been in operation for a long time in Ceuta and Melilla, in the rest of the continent has only appeared in 2015, with the hardening of the internal borders of the European Union (Giliberti, 2017; Hess & Kasparek, 2017; Babels, 2017) as one of the institutional approaches to managing the so-called migration crisis of 2015. Are the two enclaves confinement islands, as was the case in Lampedusa, in the Central Mediterranean, during 2011?4 And how present is the dimension of spectacle, the theater, and mise en scène of the border? According to Ibra, the parking attendant, harraga5 are a problem, although obviously his work―like that of many other inhabitants of the Spanish enclaves―depends precisely on making these people and these lives problematic. Yet, there is a tenderness in his words, the tenderness of those who see in these migrant subjects a piece of their own history, a closeness despite the distance, a common origin that creates a relationship, and an ambivalent symbolic collocation. In the quick jokes I exchanged with Ibra in the time it took to give him a few coins as a tip for his work, not only a description of the place which the harraga are fleeing emerges, but also the naturalness of the right to escape (Mezzadra, 2001) an authoritarian space and the right to search for a better life. The caballas6 are the inhabitants of Ceuta who were born there and are long-term residents, but they are also the descendants of a more hybrid “elsewhere” where the colonial history of the Spanish settlers got mixed with that of the colonized.7 Ibra, proudly introducing himself as a caballa, is a marginal subject within a broader economy based on the illegalization of transit. His relationship with those whose mobility is contested is mediated by his feeling that he is part of a story that transcends hispanidad, a

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cultural legacy that people in these territories are constantly reminded of by the numerous Spanish flags and the thousands of military uniforms that crowd everyday spaces. His native language is darija or tamazigh, the same that is spoken on the other side of the Tarajal border crossing; his religion is Islam, the same belief of the young harraga that he confronts himself with; his skin is olive-colored, not unlike that of the boys he chases away, as if they were flies, from the parking lot he manages. A few days later and over 400 km away in Melilla, I brought food and drinks to a sort of tribe of kids camped on the cliffs as they waited to cross the fences that protect the docks, and I stopped to talk to two young police officers at the port―both white, “real” Spaniards, as they had come from the peninsula to work on this side of the Strait.8 If Ibra, a caballa, protects cars from the danger posed by unaccompanied minors (referred to as MENAs in the jargon of the Spanish institutions), security officers protect the gates to the port and the ferries from the same danger. We could say that their jobs are similar, as they are working in the same economic sector. However, their perspectives are different: We are the true victims. If you spend one night with me, you won’t be feeling compassion for these children anymore. They throw stones and bottles at you and you can't touch them because you run the risk of being fired. My children are not free to go around at night, the MENAs rob people on the street. We’re the victims, we are! Ask the citizens, ask them, they’ll all tell you the same thing. You don’t have to feed them. At the Center for Minors they have everything, a roof over their head and food, they should stay there … and be grateful. Instead … they get away and we have to deal with them. If you feed them―like NGOs who spend every night here do―you help to keep them on the streets, keep them around the port fighting with us. I guess you’re Italian? You’re tired of having migrants there, rightly. It seems to me that now you want to change policies … or am I wrong?

Here there is no tenderness or pity toward the harraga (some very little, under ten years of age, and marked by the harshness of life on the streets), even if, given their age, they could be the port guards’ own children. These officers’ job consists of blocking the repeated attempts to breach border crossings by these small, annoying “flies”. In this game of snakes and ladders, all players often return to square one―the harraga jump across and sneak into every possible vector of hope, the guards chase them away and repel them. The behavior and the words of the port guards give away their annoyance and anger, but also a pinch of envy and

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admiration when they mention the racism that in Italy has become an institutionalized part of daily politics. From this side of the waterfront, the site of the formal labor market, the state speaks and acts in the name of white citizenship, white families, and white children. On the other side, Ibra speaks as a caballa from an ambivalent position, caught between Ceuta’s mestizo, colonial history, and his marginal job in the migration and security industry. Ibra and the port guards are pawns in a greater game, crowded with a multiplicity of figures that keep daily life going in Ceuta and Melilla―the guards and the thieves, those who jump across borders and those who reject them, those who wait and those who force them to wait, but also those who cross the border every day to work or trade. The reading we propose here develops along some nodes and images referring to varying degrees of spectacle, exposure, or removal from public representation. First of all, the “great wall”―a modern-day Hadrian's Wall that should protect the two cities from the danger of the Sub-Saharan invasion―is the sign of fortress Europe in Africa that has had the highest level of visibility and media attention; in Morocco, behind the valla (etymologically from the Latin vallum), informal camps reveal the shadow zones where policies against transit are enacted, without paying too much attention to human rights, as a result of outsourcing and of the governance of migration. This seemingly impenetrable perimeter is counterbalanced by a molecular economy centered on the porosity of the border and on permanent movements of goods and people. Finally, the “scandalous and obscene” (De Genova, 2013) presence of unaccompanied minors on the streets of Ceuta and Melilla, with their determination to cross the sea that separates them from mainland Spain, once again tells the story of non-­docile subjects. How do these nodes come together? How do they break down or collapse? Can there be a fortress which works both as a limbo and as a filter, a double membrane, an island, that is both a prison and a place of confinement, a regional border and a continental border, a porous and selective area for different types and times of crossing, a European labor market of the enclave that is reproduced thanks to a secondary labor market located only a few kilometers away, but which is subject to another sovereign power? To go back to a recurring metaphor in Underground Europe, through which one can read the struggle between the prohibition of migration and the autonomy of migration, we wonder where the leash of the state (or, rather, of the states) is and where the rift of migrant practices can be found.

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Behind the Fences: Morocco, Europe At first the fence―la valla―was a simple barbed wire, which in the mid-­ nineties evolved into different layers of nets up to six meters high and equipped with sensors, night vision cameras, blades, gas emitters, and every other possible technological prosthetic. The fence speaks of Europe and Morocco, of the inside and the outside, of the functions of the two enclaves in the migration industry and in border policing (Campesi, 2015). From this standpoint, once migrants are freed from the Moroccan leash, they are immediately tied up with a European leash. To do that, for people like Ousman, the only possibility is jumping over the fence, an act which concretely, if temporarily, rips open the previous sociopolitical order. I was a boy when I left Cameroon. I wanted to travel, to see the world, like you Europeans do. Everything went well … until I set foot in Morocco. I spent three and a half years there, but I have friends who have been stranded there for 10 years. I always lived in the forest. They don’t let you get on the buses even if you have money, you just have to walk. Libya, Algeria, Morocco are countries that should be abolished from the world map. I jumped, I waited, I did 6 months in Ceuta and then they transferred me to the peninsula at an associative project. Now I’m learning Spanish. I don’t want to talk about it, it hurts to remember what I went through.

I would like to collect more stories from Ousman, to ask about life in the camps, about conflicts and solidarity, and about how migrants prepare, physically and emotionally, to break the fences of Europe in Ceuta and Melilla, but my interlocutor has closed the communication and stares intently at the darkness. Ousman, a gaudy and elegant African dandy whom I met in Sevilla before crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, suddenly falls silent in front of the memories I tried to evoke. I imagine him, however, intent on jumping over the valla with ladders and grappling hooks, covered in blood, wounded by the blades that adorn the networks of democracy, leaving on it his biological traces. During all stages of the route to the north, it is common to hear memories about the fear and tragedies of the fences. Kamto, for instance, has a political history behind him, escaping, like Ousman, from the oppressive regime of President Biya in Cameroon. He arrived in Nador (a Moroccan port city, a few kilometers south of Melilla) in 2016 from Algeria.

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I went to the Gourougou camp for a week, trying to figure out how to jump. There were monkeys. In the forest we lived like cave men. I tried to figure out how to do it, but I couldn’t. I didn’t feel like staying and I came back to find another route. There were people covered in cuts, they scavenged food from the garbage, the police treated us like beasts. Finally, I left and went to Libya―another hell.

Kamto came back, while Ousman managed to get ahead by jumping. Many are still stranded in Morocco looking for a way of crossing, by any means. One’s ability to physically overcome la valla depends on body capital, gender, race, and age. Jumping is for blacks, young people, and men. In fula, a language widespread throughout West Africa, the word used to celebrate the act is Boza! (Victory!). Redouan Jalid, an activist operating in Ceuta for Alarmphone (an independent hotline used by those who try to cross the Strait by sea), highlights the importance of chance: “Victory, Boza, is not for the strongest, victory is for the lucky ones”. Individual successes fuel collective hopes. Knowing that some have overcome the border, it generates energy and endurance among all those who are still trying and taking deadly risks. Here, like in Calais and in many other border struggles, migrants on the move pray before jumping, pray in the informal camps to find strength and comfort. Ousman, in the few words that he gave us, highlights three crucial moments of the journey: overcoming Morocco’s hostile lands, waiting in the limbo of the enclaves, and the transfer, via institutional channels, to the Spanish peninsula. For sub-Saharan blacks, Morocco is to Spain what Libya is to Italy. The difference here lies in the existence of an authoritarian state that has a tight monopoly on violence, but, in both contexts, the treatment of migrants in transit, albeit with different intensity and effectiveness, is tied to the externalization policies of the European border. The informal camps near Melilla and Ceuta have more than twenty years of history behind them. In fact, they started at the same time as the fences―where there is a wall, there is a camp. However, scholarship on the functioning and the dynamics of these informal camps in Morocco is meager. Smain Laacher (2007) has reconstructed their development by emphasizing not only the drama of living conditions (hunger and disease, segregation, institutional violence), but also the extraordinary political inventiveness of their inhabitants, who are able to produce leaders and written laws, parliaments, courts, police, and “blue helmets” to manage

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conflicts and frictions between ethnolinguistic communities, to manufacture equipment (hooks, studded shoes, ladders, and so on), and to self-­ manage, without the help of any smugglers, the logistical aspects of jumping over the fences, an action which may involve several hundreds of people. If the stories collected by Laacher date back to 2005, a similar political and organizational process has been recently documented by the ethnographic work of Khalid Mouna on the Fés camp (Mouna & Kchikach, 2020) and by an extraordinary film from 2016, Les Sauteurs,9 in which the directors entrust the camera to Abou, a young migrant in the ”ghetto” (a term used by its inhabitants) of Gourougou who starts to ethnographically document its everyday life. Security forces have been dismantling Gourougou and all the other informal camps in Morocco with particular forcefulness from 2015 onward. In the summer of 2018, a new campaign of repression against migrants in transit was launched by the authorities. But where there is repression there is also solidarity. Redouan sees humanitarian work as a tool to learn, act, and stake a claim: Along the way, from the south to the north of Morocco, migrants are in transit and there are camps everywhere. As activists, we bring metal or plastic materials to build shelters, blankets for those who live in the cold, food and rice for the hungry. We share information about Alarmphone, the number to help those crossing the Strait. We go to the camps and we visit the casa-pateras, absconded houses in the Rif and in Tangier where migrants wait for the moment to embark. Sometimes 20/40 people live in 20 square meters. Many use these houses only to sleep and leave early in the morning, for fear of being caught by the police who often show up at dawn. They sleep for two or three hours, take turns on watch, for fear of being arrested and deported. Policemen threaten local residents, they don’t want them to let houses to migrants. We provide basic assistance, but this allows us to make visible and denounce such unacceptable situations. … When the raids arrive, the police break everything and steal money and personal belongings, like phones, documents. … People have learned to travel just with a backpack.

Living in transit means having a set of personal belongings reduced to little more than one’s own body, thus being reduced to bare life. Objects and clothes which are necessary for subsistence are grabbed along the route, sometimes through encounters with humanitarian volunteers and activists. The life of individual objects is fragile and ephemeral. Both the route and the camps are strewn with abandoned and destroyed objects as a result of the repressive action of different institutions.

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Esteban Velasquez is a Jesuit priest who has been the director of the church of Nador since 2012 and was expelled from Morocco in 2016. His support to migrants was deemed inappropriate by the authorities. This is what he said about his experience: We climbed Mount Gourougou with the Quran and the Bible and celebrated for the Cameroonians who were Christians and for the Malians who were Muslims. The religious dimension is very important on the journey. When they managed to jump over the fences, the first thing they did was raise their hands to the sky. … When they failed, the police brought them back to the Hassani hospital in Nador. I saw men arrive there torn to pieces, masks of blood, with utterly depressed looks on their faces … I saw their eyes popping out of their heads, their skulls split open, their jawbones shattered. … We were with them, witnessing our closeness. At night we used to go up to the mountain to pick up the women who had to give birth. Sometimes it happened at the camp, sometimes in the cars on the way to the hospital. We did health education and distributed material; a blanket and a plastic sheet were like a treasure. And then we gave them hygiene kits, as there were many cases of scabies. Finally, we decided to open a residence with several apartments for those who could no longer return to Mount Gourougou after leaving the hospital. We called it the House of Joy and Solidarity and it still exists inside the church of Nador. It is a resting place for those who cannot resume their journey; they came to us perhaps with one foot in gangrene and felt they had found heaven. Having a brief moment of happiness, of human acceptance, a miracle, was a blessing … hundreds of people have passed through here, through our Casa de la Alegria.

On the way to the north of Morocco, the Casa de la Alegria is a kind of refuge, a safe space, a station in a contemporary Underground Railway, a step in an escape route (Papadopoulos et al., 2008) that helps people on the run or those simply looking for more freedom and opportunities to keep moving. The informal camps that dot the route reflect a contingent balance between state repression, smuggling networks, and the ability to self-organize of migrants, but they also spread thanks to multiple solidarity initiatives, promoted by Moroccan human rights associations, Catholic religious groups, and Spanish activists. Unlike in other transit countries (Minca and Umek, 2018), in Morocco there is no network of institutional camps where the left-hand of the state (Bourdieu, 2003), (i.e., humanitarian governance) operates. If informal solidarity networks support the movement toward the Northern Morocco up to the Strait, at the state

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level the right-hand is all that remains, a “leash” without a humanitarian dimension that constantly arrests and deports migrants to the south of Morocco. This device is similar to the “decompression policies” at the French-Italian border in Ventimiglia and the permanent internal deportation of migrants toward the south of Italy, but in Morocco it is characterized by far more institutional violence, as was denounced in a recent report by GADEM (2018). Decompression devices, as Tazzioli and Garelli have demonstrated (Tazzioli & Garelli, 2018), affirm containment beyond confinement, reacting to the excess mobility of migrants with a surplus of imposed mobility. Many solidarity activists live in fear due to the threats of the authorities. This is how Judith, a European volunteer of a religious organization, talks about it: It’s a humanitarian emergency. To buy a train or bus ticket and try to go north, you must have a residence card. The camps are stop-overs, moments of rest. Therefore, migrants are forced to move only on foot. We do humanitarian support in a transit camp at the railway station, but we cannot talk or denounce much. We are afraid that the authorities will expel us from Morocco. We must protect ourselves from police control … they monitor us, our emails are checked, our volunteers are followed. They pursue us while the networks of traffickers act undisturbed.

We experienced a similar feeling of insecurity in Nador, at a sparse office of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights where Omar received us; he had recently taken over from the previous president, who had fled to Spain to seek asylum. From what he said, several members of the group were in and out of prison, and many were beaten in the streets or threatened by the police as dissidents. When the interview ended, Omar warned us to pay attention to plainclothes agents and suggested hiding what we had recorded in our intimate parts and preparing an SD card with touristy photos to bypass police checks. The Association’s Facebook10 page is a treasure trove of detailed information on border police and traffickers, on deportations and raids, on shipwrecks and families desperately looking for their disappeared relatives, on agreements and security cooperation between Morocco, Spain, and the EU.  Omar explains the increase in checks and the deterioration of the situation since the country became the epicenter of the flows after the Libyan route was closed.

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This is the only city in Morocco where migrants cannot walk around freely on the streets. They live in the forest in very difficult conditions, summer and winter under plastic shelters. They are often attacked by the police, beaten, their belongings destroyed. In 2017, we counted 3,000 migrants arrested in Nador and expelled to the south of the country; in 2018 there were 9000 arrests in the first ten months and 5000 just since 7 August, when a new hostile campaign began. Migrants in transit are locked up in two illegal internment centers. There is no judge to arrest them, the police act independently of the judiciary power and hold them for one more week, until the deportation buses are formed.

It is worth quoting his dramatic account at length to understand the close complicity between Moroccan and European authorities. Now with all the technological investments financed by Europe, it has become very difficult to overcome the valla; migration is thus pushed towards the sea route, which is riskier and more expensive, while jumping over the fence is free. People arrive in Morocco by plane, without visas, and Moroccan airlines earn a lot11 … and then trafficking networks can take you on board. Everything happens before the eyes of the Moroccan authorities. This is the actual result of their policies, of your policies. It’s a simple statement. Morocco carefully represses in order to get money from Europe; for Europe, Morocco can do whatever it wants, kill migrants, violate human rights. … I never heard a representative of the European authorities criticize Morocco on this topic. Every day in Melilla an airplane goes to take photos of camps … to check whether they have grown, shrunk, moved. Then the information and pictures go to the Moroccan police who do the dirty work on the ground. There is full coordination. Morocco destroyed Gourougou, which was right next to the fences, but today there are 14 new smaller camps outside Nador. … For Morocco this ongoing situation is really good business. This game of snakes and ladders―arresting people, deporting them to the south and them returning to the north―serves to justify constantly demanding money from Europe. More migrants, more repression, more money.

The main effect of the valla, of its constant strengthening, has been to divert routes toward the direct crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar, diminishing the flow to Ceuta and Melilla, and thus promoting a system managed by smugglers’ networks.12 Moreover, the hunt for migrants turns a flow into a kind of wandering, forcing tens of thousands of people to remain stranded in a dangerous and hopeless, suspended condition.

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“Higher walls call for higher ladders”―a vallas mas altas, escaleras mas altas. This is what our informants often repeat to underline the unstoppable desire for freedom and mobility, as well as the sheer ineffectiveness of any imaginable barrier. Yet, the exponential growth of risk and mortality13 clearly remains as a non-secondary consequence of such transnational policies aimed at illegalizing migration, which reveals the necro-political functioning (Mbembe, 2003) of these borderlands.

Beyond the Fences: The Enclaves as a Spectacular Filter On both sides of the border, activists often insist that the production of panic leads to an increase in bargaining power. According to them, every successful jump in the face of such an insurmountable technological device can only be explained by assuming that the Moroccan authorities let it go, to then show immediately after their seriousness about and commitment to their repressive work to stop irregular migration. To increase the geographic income of Morocco in relation to Europe, it is necessary to constantly feed the narrative of an impending invasion, opening and closing the tap of illegal migration. The geographic income of Ceuta and Melilla is also linked to a similar dynamic, as the two enclaves are first and foremost industrial districts where people make a living contrasting migration and working in the public sector.14 Attracting funds and subsidies and guaranteeing the reproducibility of an economic model whose primary source is essentially migration require permanent political-symbolic work; Andersson (2014a, 2014b, 2016) identifies the importance of setting a landscape of emergency, risk, and spectacle in order to frame the necessary answers in terms of security and control. Through this correlation, the border industry and the illegality industry grow abnormally in a vicious circle that creates profits, thanks to the system’s failures―the more the irregular migration, the more business for multiple actors in the public and the private sectors. Avalancha―avalanche―is a recurring word in urban conversations in the two enclaves. Avalanchas on the fences, avalanchas on the car and pedestrian border. Avalancha conveys well the image of a hostile scenario where uncontrolled migration falls ruinously on peaceful citizens and where preemptive defense is a better option. And yet, in the two Spanish enclaves as well as on the Moroccan side, one hardly ever sees refugees and

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migrants on the move in public space. If on the Moroccan side they live in the forests and in segregated camps, in Melilla and Ceuta they gravitate around the institutional facilities that host them, which are located very far from the city center but very close to the fences. Sub-Saharan black people, the paradigmatic illegal migrants, only appear when they hang from fences. Their images go around the world, as the symbolic proof of a barbaric invasion. They are useful because they justify the panic against migration. They are useful because they conceal the social inequality at the very origin of migration. Jumping over the fences is a real battle. If the migrants’ immediate expulsion is the state’s trophy, for the migrants, victory is entering the CETI (Centro de Estancia Temporanea de Inmigrantes). As it is a battle, the show is assured. Breaching the border as a violent act is hyper-visible, while the violence of the state(s) is often hidden or naturalized, as legitimate defense in the face of an undue aggression. This is what José Palazón, a famous photo-activist whose shots have traveled around the world, told us: In the beginning the Moroccans fired as soon as black people climbed the fences. On the Spanish side we were nicer, we just fired rubber bullets. In 2004, 2005, and 2006 many migrants who were attempting to jump over the fences died after being hit by bullets. At that point, the use of firearms began to be restricted on both sides of the border. Then there was the violence of immediate and collective expulsions, something terrible … the Spanish police forces grabbed the migrants, dragged them like animals, shoved them through those little green doors on the Moroccan side, like beasts, without knowing their names, without knowing if they want to seek asylum, without knowing their age.

Ceuta and Melilla are the great symbolic fault line, one of the main sets for media discourse on which Europe played the role of the victim in need of protection. However, all the coast between Tangier, Ceuta, and Melilla, over 450 kilometers, is dotted with coves and beaches from which the pateras (makeshift boats) depart and shelters where people wait for their departure (the so-called casas-pateras): this is the Rif, which is more Berber than Arabic. We crossed it in one day. Before our eyes, there were towns emptied by emigration, large buildings with no one inside, many open building sites, little traffic of people or goods on the streets, veiled women and children in public spaces, and cafes crowded with men waiting.

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In the port of Melilla we met Rachid, a young refugee from the Rif, the northern part of Morocco. He was actively involved in the Amazigh uprising movement (Hirak) which, in 2016, made significant claims to the Moroccan monarchy for schools, hospitals, universities, job opportunities, and democracy. After attempting a democratic revolution with the February 20 movement during the Moroccan-Arab Spring (Hlaoua & Idhia, 2018), crowded demonstrations throughout the Rif were once again violently repressed with weapons and in the courts, sentencing leaders and followers to tens of years of imprisonment. This political closure has led many activists to seek shelter in the enclaves, so migration toward Spain and Europe resumed, saturating the Strait with thousands of improvised boats.15 Rachid’s story brings complexity to my exploration of how these borderlands work: I ran away because the regime was arresting us all. We were a group of friends and we were in charge of the main Facebook page of the Rif movement. We were sentenced to 1, 2, 5, and 15 years in prison. So my parents made contact with a policeman at the border. We paid 1,000 euros for the right to go to the asylum office on the Spanish side. … I would have paid any amount to leave. I spent a week at the migrants’ center, sleeping on camp beds. There you learn nothing; it’s just time wasted and spent waiting … I’ve been here for three years, waiting to go to the peninsula. In the Rif you have no chance to study, there are no universities. Many young people leave … but even here in Melilla there are no work opportunities. I’m still waiting for the outcome of my asylum application.

Rachid’s account allows us to focus on two fundamental stages for those who escape and are on the move: the Oficina de Asilo (the asylum office) opened by the Spanish authorities on March 18, 2015, at the border crossing of Melilla, which recorded over 6000 applications in just the first year of activity; and the institutional camp (the CETI), a place devoted to reception. The first receives migrants filtered by the Moroccan border guard, a decision based on their skin color and their ability to financially bribe the police. The second is the lung through which the flows to the peninsula are managed. The fact that skin color is a capital well exemplifies the importance of racialization at the borders (Fassin, 2010; Lendaro et al., 2018; Giliberti, 2018), which gives more media visibility to some mobility flows as opposed to others that remain in the shadows. As José tells us, only black migrants jump over the fence because they have no

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alternative. Applying for asylum at the border is the prerogative of white migrants, and, despite its quantitative relevance, it remains largely invisible in media discourse and public perception. The point is very simple. Black migrants in Melilla cannot apply for asylum. To apply for asylum at the Beni Ensar gate, there is a Spanish office. How many black migrants are doing it? Zero. How many white migrants? Thousands. Almost 7,000 just in 2015. Whites pay 2,000 or 3,000 euros to enter and the Moroccans let you get in. Black migrants don’t get in, not even by paying. They suffer this discrimination and are forced to jump over the fence, putting their lives in danger. So black migrants jump over the fence, causing agitation in the city, a very useful agitation … useful to play the role of the victim and ask Spain and Europe for more money. White migrants don’t jump over the fence, you never see images of white people jumping. Since 2014, all the Syrians have entered like this, just bribing the Moroccan police. Migrants are money.

The situation hasn’t changed after the great Syrian exodus in 2014/2015. For instance, in 2018, the last year for which data is available (see Table 8.1), in Ceuta and Melilla, 1190 people succeeded in jumping, while 6115 are rejected (APDHA, 2019), thanks to the close collaboration between the Spanish Guardia Civil and the Moroccan Gendarmerie. For black migrants, it is still impossible to access the asylum office at the Beni Ensar gate. In his fortnightly report on irregular migration, the Spanish Minister of the Interior informs us that the total entries in the two enclaves amounted to 8288, just over 10% of all entries through the southern border. Finally, according to the National Asylum Board (OAR, 2018), asylum applications at the border office of Melilla were only 3823, mainly by Syrians. Although the data may not always be coherent and reliable, we can assume that in quantitative terms, despite being foregrounded in the media discourse, the phenomenon of jumping over the fence is in fact less relevant than other ways of crossing the border, as out of almost 8300 irregular entries, 1190 were migrants jumping over the fence and 3823 were asylum requests. There is just one crucial difference between these two categories: those who jump over the fence are always deportable, while the asylum seekers are protected by international agreements. Source: own elaboration based on Informe Quincenal de Inmigración irregular, Ministerio de Interior, covering several years for arrivals and jumps; Oficina de Asilo y Refugio, Ministro de Interior, several years, for

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Table 8.1  The situation of migrations: the two enclaves and the south border 2015 Ceuta Arrivals - Successful jumps - Asylum applications Entries in CETIs Exit from CETIs Melilla Arrivals - Successful jumps - Asylum applications Entries in CETIs Exit from CETIs Overall entries /Spain south border - Through Ceuta e Melilla Attempted jumps Achieved jumps Dead and missing Overall asylum applications / Spain - In Ceuta and Melilla

2016

2017

2018

2455 343 314 2255 -

2539 777 221 2443 1711

2257 754 206 2252 -

2549 752 348 -

9169 159 6336 8912 9767 16936 11624 6454 502 195 14887 6650

3888 332 2456 3993 3883 14078 6427 7515 1109 295 15755 2677

4541 110 2887 3298 27834 6798 864 249 29969 3093

5739 438 3475 64298 8288 6115 1190 1064 54244 3823

asylum applications; Informes CEAR (several years) and Informes APDHA (several years) for dead/missing and entries to/exits from CETIs. However, for all those who cross the border, the doors of the CETI in Ceuta and Melilla are open. These facilities operate as a limbo and filter area, undetermined waiting time and spaces, and logistic devices devoted to controlling the crossing of the Strait from an administrative point of view and often in a non-transparent way. Even if migrants addressing Europe manage to access this “African Spain”, they have no automatic right to move freely toward mainland Spain; another regional border is at work. The provisional documents of asylum seekers and residents of the CETIs (the red card) clearly show the words: “No authorization to cross borders” or “only valid in Ceuta y Melilla”.16 This filtering device is undoubtedly sensitive to historical and political contingencies. In an ethnography realized during 2010/2011 with CETI residents of Melilla, Bondanini (2012) encountered a situation in which the transfer time ranged from a few days to several years. Life in the enclave becomes a limbo with uncertain times and unpredictable rules, a definitely temporary area where excess humanity is confined and where the sword of

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Damocles of deportability is constantly hanging (Rahola, 2010). Waiting turns into a permanent condition, while Spain and Europe become a mirage. The institutional camp―located a few tens of meters from the fences, as a constant reminder of the transient nature of border crossing― is a centripetal vortex that holds migrants inside, preventing them from living and being perceived as free subjects in the urban space. Among the migrants interviewed by Bondanini, some had been confined in the Melilla camp for almost five years, even if the average residence time is around two years. A minority had opted for voluntary expulsion, requesting the transfer to a Deportation Center (CIE) on the Spanish mainland, from which they planned to escape as soon as possible. Finally, no one applied for asylum for fear of further slowing down their liberation. The accounts collected by Bondanini evoke the attempt to “ganarse la libertad” (earn our freedom), a sign that their condition was experienced as a kind of open-air detention, while crossing to the other side of the Strait was a “lottery”, the sentence of a Kafkaesque Court whose rationale is impossible to grasp for the laymen. Sahraoui more recently (Sahraoui, 2020) stressed the analogy of CETI with a total institution, in Goffmanian terms, emphasizing the multiple dispossessions suffered by its “inmates”. As observers and researchers’ reports have pointed out, the impossibility of applying for asylum in the two enclaves without being forced to remain there until the undetermined completion of the procedure is reached, represents a powerful tool for dissuasion that prevents the proliferation of a new status among the irregular migrants, who would go from being deportable to being un-deportable. Precisely because they cannot be expelled, asylum seekers are not free to go to the peninsula, and only those who are deportable are transferred through a humanitarian reception program, albeit with an expulsion order in their pockets which often makes any subsequent regularization difficult. Leaving migrants stranded in transit in these little enclaves, the unpredictability of the transfer, and the lack of a convenient procedure to request protection are part of a wider attempt to contrast irregular migration. The message is that this piece of Europe must become a cul de sac, a dead end, a trap. Here the “leash” is very short. The illusion of a humanitarian hand holding the leash is guaranteed by the existence of institutional camps that simply address the basic needs of their residents. Paraphrasing Sayad (2004), the “mirror effect” of the enclaves must show migrants crossing Morocco that Ceuta and Melilla are not a good stop on their turbulent journey. At the same time, the “mirror effect” of the enclaves must show

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the European and Spanish institutions a permanent state of emergency due to uncontrollable border crossings. In 2015, the UNHCR representatives in Ceuta publicly declared that they did not understand the transfer criteria adopted by the Spanish authorities (GADEM, APDHA, MIGREUROP, La CIMADE, APDHA, 2015), thus revealing that the only clear operational rule is the administrative arbitrariness embedded in the relationship between the director of the CETIs, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Labor, and the Spanish Central Government delegation in the two enclaves. Since 2005, transfers have been taking place within the framework of the Humanitarian Program for Migrants and are restricted to so-called vulnerable subjects. In 2017, the program counted on an extremely limited base: 2080 reception places in the peninsula for 3 months, which were extendable, under exceptional circumstances, to up to 18 months (CEAR, 2017). In Melilla, the mass arrival of Syrians in 2014/2015 and their determination to apply for international protection have undermined the equilibrium of the enclave as a filtering system, creating a logistic bottleneck and forcing a radical acceleration of transfer times―in 2015 and 2016, the CETIs had become saturated, and almost 14000 people were granted the right to be transferred (see Table 8.1). In Ceuta, where the Syrian flow did not arrive and not even one application is recorded at the Tarajal Pass office, mainly Algerians applied for asylum once they had arrived at the institutional camp, and, as they immediately became non-deportable subjects, they remained stranded waiting for the outcome of the procedure. The transfers from Ceuta thus continue to involve only deportable migrants, those who did not request protection and Sub-Saharans―categories which often overlap. For many national groups in the two enclaves, the average waiting time dropped radically, and, in 2016/2017, it fluctuated between twenty days and three months (Denaro, 2017; Amnesty Internacional España, 2016). The CETIs have recorded the variable composition of incoming flows: Syrians, Algerians, Moroccans, Sub-Saharans, and other nationalities, depending on the crises of the moment and the transformations in the migratory routes. Both undocumented migrants and asylum seekers converge on these facilities, whose functions are to select, filter, and channel― much like the work of hotspots in Italy. However, the results are paradoxically opposed and have only been mitigated in Melilla by the arrival of the Syrians from 2014 onward: while asylum seekers are stopped, “economic” migrants framed as vulnerable continue their journey. It is as

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if Ceuta and Melilla were being decompressed as the flows are redirected toward two opposite destinations. On the one hand, Morocco is paid to reject all those approaching the European border from the south, regardless of their nationality, while exceptional regulations, security technology, and bilateral agreements that hardly respect human rights and international laws allow for immediate expulsions and collective deportations.17 On the other hand, with unpredictable timing, Spain decompresses toward the north, the peninsula, by transferring a share of deportable migrants whose presence is useful to feed the informal economy. This is how José describes the consequences of the CETI institution on the moral economy of migrants captured by this device: Once you enter the camp, you never know when you’ll get out. The lack of information is central. You may stay a few days, a year, a month, six months, or six years. But you’ll never know in advance that you’ll be leaving on a certain date. Every day you’re waiting. You can receive the order suddenly, get on a ferry and go to the other side, or get on a van and be sent back to Morocco or your country. You never know what will happen. It destroys people psychologically. Furthermore, if you’re with your family, they automatically separate you. Women and children on one side, husbands on the other. Sometimes for years. There isn’t an official internal set of rules for residents. You don’t know what the penalties are. Everything is very arbitrary.

There are no stable rules and routines, but rather fluctuating administrative practices to manage contingency and exceptionality on the base of the golden rule of non-application in the two enclaves of Schengen agreements on free movement within the EU. This golden rule has generated different logics: following a purely operational one, when the camps fill up due to accumulation of entries or mass jumps over the fence, some emergency operation will lead to a cycle of departures toward the peninsula. The second logic is deportability. Opportunities, waiting times at the different stages of mobility, and the migrants’ ability to have their right to international protection recognized, vary significantly depending on their nationality. This produces internal conflicts and public claims between sub-Saharans and the “privileged” Syrians on one side, and all the other penalized national groups on the other. A third logic revolves around territorial peculiarities, as the criteria are affected by the migrants’ provenance and the specific challenges the administrative device must face in each field.18

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Porous Borders and Contested Settlements Yet, behind the figures of irregular migration and the spectacle of the fences, the two enclaves live off constant economic and labor exchanges with the neighboring Moroccan territories. The technological wall, although hyper-visible and subject to significant and multiple investments, is aimed at a specific category of racialized subjects.19 In the words of our informants: solo son los negritos a saltar las vallas (it's only young black men who jump over the fences). The daily movements that occur in this border zone are of a completely different nature and volume: for instance, the fact that those living in the provinces of Nador and Tetouan have the right to enter without a visa by day but must return to Morocco in the evening.20 Much of the workforce in these Spanish cities is thus relocated flexibly, on an hourly basis, to a non-EU country. Maribel, a retired headteacher, is the spokesperson for Digmun (Dignidad de mujeres, niños y niñas), an association that has been working in Ceuta since 2005 with migrant women and minors through social, educational, and language-focused support projects. As she says, the activities take place in a climate of growing hostility: “they accuse us of taking advantage of public subsidies and not taking care of Spanish citizens”. For a part of the local population, the solidarity initiatives aimed at Moroccan women and their children contribute to generating a pernicious “call effect”, when in actual fact it is precisely the reproduction needs of Spanish families that constantly attract Moroccan women to this side of the border―women whose presence is much needed but not welcome (Zolberg 1987). This is how Maribel describes cross-border women working in domestic service and in the hotel sector in Ceuta: they sleep in the city irregularly, where they are working or at the homes of friends and neighbors. I call these women invisible because they take care of all domestic work and they’re trapped. They cook, clean, wash, look after children and the elderly. Thanks to them, the women of Ceuta can work outside their homes. They are the ones who do everything, they do everything! They are the most vulnerable, they don’t know the language, they don’t know their rights, then they’re women and they’re poor. In short, they have all the characteristics to be fully exploited by people here. If I want, I won’t pay you, I won’t give you any holidays. The offer is very broad. Are you not OK with these conditions? Well, I have all the provinces of Tetouan and Nador at my disposal.

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For these women, the border opens during the day and closes at night. They do not need a visa; they just need to show their residence card. Then, from 7 pm the visa becomes necessary again and cross-border workers can enter a state of irregularity by seeking refuge at a friend’s house where they wait for the end of the curfew. Something similar happens to another category of subjects that feed the economy of Ceuta and Melilla. The two autonomous cities are free ports that enjoy special tax breaks; every day, thousands of women carry on their shoulders up to 80 kg of Spanish and European goods, which will then be resold on the Moroccan side. It is largely work on commission in which traders on both sides of the border are male, while the most dangerous work is taken on by poor Moroccan women from rural areas and with a low cultural capital, who guarantee the only income in their households. The porteadoras (women carriers) are present only in the marginal areas of Ceuta and Melilla, the industrial estates close to the border crossings where many large retailers like Mercadona, Lidl, Decathlon, and Carrefour have strategically settled and where the goods are packaged and prepared to be carried. Fuentes Lara (2017) underlines the analogy between cross-­ border trade in the two enclaves and industrial maquilas on the Mexican-US border, as both are characterized by the exploitation of a racialized female workforce and by juridical devices which put the merchandise under a duty-free regime. The political and economic actors in Ceuta and Melilla defend the prerogatives of this so-called atypical trade as, on the one hand, they hinder the proposals to improve labor standards and the civil and social rights of the porteadoras, and, on the other, they support the need to make the border more fluid and safer for the passage of goods. Housekeepers, service workers, and porteadoras invisibly meet reproductive needs of the primary labor market (mostly white, public-sector employment) and support the development of profitable commercial exchanges. The secondary labor markets, which are localized and delocalized on a flexible and temporary basis, represent the “virtuous and useful circulation”, whose fluidity is sought and publicly supported, as opposed to the “vicious and dangerous circulation” of the young sub-Saharan males trying to jump over the fences, which nonetheless generates important economic flows. According to APDHA (2018), out of 85,000 residents in the city of Ceuta, there are a daily average of 20,000–25,000 cross-border workers coming from Morocco; similar figures are reported from the same source about Melilla. If, on the one hand, the spectacle of the great fence

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symbolizes the dream of a fortress, the need for protection, and the alert about an invasion at the gates on which the possibility of a subsidized labor market for white people is based, on the other hand, the economic life of the two enclaves depends on the permeability of the border and on a limited freedom of movement for the Moroccan residents of Nador and Tetouan. As far as our informants can remember, the border has always been porous, at times indistinguishable, as the cultural and commercial exchanges have been permanent. The construction of the fences in the mid-1990s has generated the figure of the cross-border worker, turning into migrants all those people who, until Spain’s entry into the EU in 1986 and also by virtue of the colonial history of the Spanish protectorate up to 1956, had moved more or less freely between the two sides of the border. Sayda, a young educator in a Center for MENAs in Melilla, sums up the mental transformation induced by the material appearance of the border: My father tells me that when he was young there was only a kind of low barbed wire that he simply crossed with a little jump. It was easy, and nothing happened, nothing happened. The misery continued to exist on the other side, but the Moroccans could come and go and so could we, we came and went … without checks, without problems. If it were up to me, I’d knock the valla [fence] down immediately, totally.

Redouan reports the normality of exchanges related to small businesses, schools, and family visits: I clearly remember. The valla was built from 1994 onward. I remember how the traders came from Ben Yunes to bring sour milk or other produce from the country here to Benzù, to Ceuta. And Moroccan children came to school here because the village where their national school was located was very far away, in Castillejos. People came to Ceuta to do the shopping, to go to school. Yes, there was a small guard post, but no one paid any attention to it.

Memory keeps shedding light onto the complex and interrelated nature of social phenomena. Spain’s entry into Europe and the construction of the valla since the mid-1990s have changed the urban space and the logic of mobility, generating segregations based on ethnicity and residence

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status in Ceuta and Melilla, and giving rise to a new migrant condition. This is what José tells us: When I arrived in Melilla, the valla did not exist. And there weren’t any mobility problems. We always went to Morocco, we crossed and just said: “Hello”. Then we came back to sleep on this side. And the Moroccans did the same. They came, went, looked for work, tried to sell something, and finally returned to their homes in the evening. There were no problems. When the valla was built, many Moroccan border workers changed their minds … “but if I get out of Melilla tomorrow, they won’t let me in again to work” and so many people started to stay over on this side, in situations of hardship, in the disadvantaged neighborhoods where they were forced to concentrate.

In 1986, a strong mobilization of non-Spanish residents developed in the two cities to claim their right to citizenship. Back then, Muslims were 32% of the population in Melilla and 18% in Ceuta. Most of them had been born and raised in the enclaves, without any right to nationality (Arteaga, 2014). Their struggles were successful and led to the amendment of the ley de extranjeria (migration act) and the granting of over 10,000 naturalizations (Planet Contreras, 2004). Since then, thanks to the settlement of Moroccan migrants, access to citizenship, and the birth of second generations,21 the local newspapers are beginning to publish alarmist reports on data that shows the growing Moroccanization of a society that previously was and imagined itself only white and Catholic. The Real Instituto Elcano (Arteaga, 2014), a think tank close to the Partito Popular (the main right-wing party in Spanish political system), has claimed, with palpable concern, that half the population in the city of Melilla is now of Arab and Berber origins and of Muslim religion; in Ceuta, the process is only slower. The analysts of the Real Instituto conclude in an alarming tone that “The most important problem is the demographic one, because it alters the political and social balance of the population” (Ivi: 154). Thus, Ceuta and Melilla have become not only postcolonial outposts populated by soldiers, public sector workers and their families, and economic and political testing grounds where the industry that seeks to illegalize migration, despite its failures (Andersson, 2016), attracts significant flows of money and investments,22 but also complex societies which are internally stratified along class, national and racial lines, despite an

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institutional rhetoric which is capable of celebrating multiculturalism and reactionary Hispanidad at the same time, as manifestly highlighted by the monument to the harmonious coexistence between four cultures (Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, and Hindu) in one of the main squares of Melilla, not far from the tribute to Franco, Commander of the Legion. The two cities therefore boast different records in terms of unemployment and the spread of poverty.23 As a sign of the construction of a continental European border, the fence is what forces migrants to jump and channels migrants who come and go every day toward the border crossing, but it is also what makes some immigrants try to settle, becoming citizens or residents, despite the numerous administrative hurdles. Redouan, like Sayda and Ibra, all Spanish citizens of Arab or Berber origin, have stories like these, and their relationship with the spectacle and materiality of migration is partly filtered through biographies in which social class and ethnic origins overlap. I’ve always lived here, we’re from the outskirts of Ceuta. My father did some work in fishing, some on construction sites, he was unemployed for a while. … He couldn’t study in Morocco, my grandparents were from the countryside, they forced him to go to work as a child, then they sent him over here. There are many different opinions on a lot of topics, even among us Muslims … but on this we agree. Why can’t a boy who was born here go to school? Why hasn’t he got any right to register at the municipal registry office? Why can’t he have a regular job? Why can the children of immigrants born on the other side of the strait go to school and ours can’t?

Yet, according to Redouan, “the rights (of the population of migrant origin) have been suspended on the other side of the strait”, by which he means to highlight how here the process of rooting migrants in the two enclaves, their transformation into regular immigrants and then into Spanish citizens, is particularly long and difficult. This process is persistently hindered by administrative procedures aimed at dissuading that are enforced only in these two autonomous cities to prevent a new, mass naturalization like the one that took place in the second half of the 1980s, which has radically changed the social composition of the local population. Ramona and Blanca are two social workers in a low-income neighborhood of Melilla. I met them during an educational workshop. At the time, they were in charge of a baby who was just a few months old, and they were desperately struggling against the municipal officers to register him

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at the registry office, even though he was born at the city hospital. This is how they described the paradoxical situation they were facing: Many public-sector workers and social workers are actively and consciously promoting exclusion. To avoid having to register the newborn, they ask for sets of documents that are impossible to put together. There are children who were born here but can’t go to the hospital, get vaccines, go to the registry office … that in so many words don’t exist―a grotesque, but tragic situation. It’s impossible to become a resident, it’s difficult to enroll in school, and it may even happen that some parents and teachers’ unions oppose the schooling of undocumented children, saying that they lower the quality of education for their children.

The fear of a growing Moroccan population and of their influence on the local politics, a discourse that has repeatedly featured in the local press, explains how white people of Spanish origins use the levers of the local administration to slow down the ongoing demographic transformation. In this scenario, as José tells us, every desk, every public sector worker becomes a border, a device of exclusion and production of widespread illegalization and marginalization. There must be 7,000-10,000 people living here in Melilla, they were born here or have been here for a long time and. If they were living in the peninsula, they would already be Spanish citizens, not by birth, but because their parents would already have Spanish citizenship! I’m not from here, but I'm white and I’m not considered a foreigner. They call them foreigners, even if they were born here. It’s curious and crazy. Every three or four years the scandal of children appears again, children born here who are not admitted into schools because they have no documents. Children who have to demonstrate for their right to attend to school.

In recent years, solidarity movements have often been engaged in political disputes to force local administrations and the state to recognize immigrant children and admit them into schools. After protests and legal complaints, children born in the enclaves but without regular documents were able to enroll and attend school in several waves. This is José’s account of the most recent fight of 2018 of which he was one of the organizers:

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One year, the children went in front of the school, in front of the Court of Justice, in front of the Government Delegation (the Prefecture) to protest. Even when it rained and when it was cold, they were always there, even in rainy or cold weather, shouting: “We want to go to school”. It the end, the new socialist government in Madrid caved in and 160 children were able to enroll. I don’t know, it seems almost absurd … children who have to protest to go to school. Perhaps something similar happened in South Africa during the apartheid. … It seems absurd that today in Ceuta, in Melilla, a government run by white people on African land doesn’t want to educate children of Moroccan origin.

According to De Genova (2013), the counterpoint to the border spectacle is precisely that of an obscene inclusion, a subaltern inclusion along color lines, and that is also evident in the public authorities’ incessant struggle against attempts by cross-border workers and second generations to settle in these urban areas. In this sense, the public debate that condemns and tries to prevent cross-border women from accessing hospitals in the enclaves to give birth to their children in Spain, thus threatening the “whiteness” of the border, is an example of this phenomenon.24 The porosity of the border is always precariously balanced between de-­ bordering tactics and re-bordering strategies in which administrative law and politics play a central role. Local political actors are constantly bargaining to have the central government pass and guarantee exceptional legislation on access to nationality, the registry office, schools, healthcare, on the deportability of minors, and so on. Their aims are to resist, channel, and slow down “excessive” mobility and settlements. Those who escape the status of cross-border worker, conquering that of legal immigrant in Ceuta and Melilla, in fact become entitled to free movement toward the peninsula, thus breaking the blocking and filtering mechanisms of these two borderlands. Those who become citizens therefore threaten the reproduction of local political power held by white and Catholic politicians in the two cities.25

Minor Subversion If the great international wall between the enclaves and Morocco is aimed at young black men from Sub-Saharan Africa, port infrastructures in Ceuta and Melilla defend Spain and Europe from young harraga whose presence is hyper-visible on the streets and in media representations. They live in

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groups, in camps near the port. I joined Eulalia and other Melilla volunteers in the distribution of food and medicines that takes place every night at 7 pm under the fortress. Approximately one hundred children of different ages gather there. This is how Eulalia describes their stories and living conditions: They come from the Rif, or from the slums of the big cities, Fez, Rabat, Casablanca … they’re dirty, little, hungry, and cold, with unsuitable clothes for winter and some without shoes. They live scattered on the cliffs, many sniff glue to deal with the hardship of life on the streets. They’re covered in skin and genital infections; they often carry the signs of wounds from jumping over the fences or from being beaten by the port police. Even Mosques reject them when they ask to take a shower, even though they’re Muslim. We know that Mosques have received pressure from the Municipal Council. And even we, white volunteers, are not welcome.

Eulalia keeps talking while treating a cut wound. She comes from the Basque country and is part of a solidarity group that for over ten years has been caring for the young harraga. This activity is often opposed by the City Government, that has accused the group of keeping children on the streets by providing services; in a curious inversion of causes, it is the free distribution of food on the streets that is to blame for the street children’s situation, a rhetorical mechanism similar to that which identifies the origin of pateras crossing the Mediterranean in the existence of independent search and rescue operations. Eulalia’s group seeks to reduce the damage, support the transit, and accompany the choices of these young people. The volunteers, almost all women, have a close relationship with the boys—they know them by name and support them emotionally, not only materially, keeping themselves informed about who has managed to cross, and they refuse to cooperate with the municipal officials who want them to convince the boys to return, against their will, to the centers from which they escaped. These evening meetings with Eulalia in Melilla and with Redouan on the cliffs beside the commercial port of Ceuta constitute small safe spaces, moments of care, protected time along a turbulent route, in that their function is similar to that of the Catholic parish in Nador for the men from Sub-Saharan countries. Sayda adds that, working in such facilities as she did for a long while, the motivations behind the harraga’s preferred options are evident:

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They don’t have access to public services in the city. They can’t go to the cinema, even if they have the money for the ticket, because they don't let them in. They can’t play soccer in a pitch, because the other kids call the police to send them away. The same goes for pools, showers, schools, hospitals, and libraries. Occasionally politics does a limpieza (clean-up) and brings them to the centers. Those who are considered adults, after a brief “age test”, are thrown back to the other side of the border.

In Sayda’s words, the chicos-calle (street children) are counterbalanced by the chicos-centro (children living in centers for unaccompanied minors). As Vacchiano reports (Vacchiano, 2018), young Moroccans use the term khayriyya to refer to these institutions in Europe, linking them to the state-run centers in their country where a variety of dangerous and vulnerable subjects are detained. Many young people I met during my ethnography spoke about their migration as a way to access a global modernity, represented by consumption and fashionable goods. Nonetheless, as Zygmunt Bauman has taught us, the ability to move has become one of the main factors for social stratification in the global world. Their stories and their ways of life also evoke their attempt to escape the humiliation of empty waiting time in marginal neighborhoods without opportunities as well as their determination to save their families by supporting them financially. Being stranded in Ceuta and Melilla, a few miles from an “elsewhere” that is almost within reach, also makes the poor social and educational programs that these centers can offer very unattractive. However, Ramona and Bianca accurately describe the aims of the local policy framework within which they have been operating as social workers: The Municipal Council asks educators and social workers to do limpieza. This means bringing these children to the centers, getting them out of people’s sight, expelling them, preventing them from registering at the padrón (registry office). But we reject this racist role.

Although they are barred from having any possible relationship with their peers, these kids remain hyper-visible in the urban space, embodying the scandal of subjects who anywhere else would be in school, but here are trying to cross the Strait, risking their lives; “a subversive action organized by minors”, as opposed to that organized by those who are of age, which develops along the external perimeter of Ceuta and Melilla. What local governments want is for chicos-calle to turn into chicos-centro, to adapt to

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and accept life in overcrowded centers that often have no educational resources, are located on the edge of town, and whose main purpose is essentially to contain their presence. Maribel, who has been cooperating with the Center for Minors in Ceuta for a long time, explains that: Of course, we give them a roof, a bit of food, a bed, a doctor, some language training. At least when they run away they have some more resources available. But their dream is to leave, to cross the border, I mean, cross the port and go to the other side. They’d rather stay on the cliff in the cold and keep trying.

The Centers for Minors are meant to block and filter mobility, detain the kids until they are of age, when their residence cards expire, and they are no longer eligible for protection. The destiny of many of them is to become future deportable irregular immigrants. Sayda, who has experienced work in one of these centers from within, clearly explained this process: When you turn 18 you get out and you often find yourself with an expired residence permit that’s no longer valid. At that point, you’re asked to register at the padrón [registry office], but you can no longer provide this document, you need a work permit to get a residence permit … and in the end you find yourself on the streets. Inside the center, kids try to get the right documents, so they can get out with everything in order when they turn 18. However, often they don’t manage to do it, so many of them would rather get out before on their own, leave the center and pursue the dream of reaching the peninsula. Some tell us that on the streets they feel safer, less exposed to the abuse and violence that occur in overcrowded spaces with poor infrastructures. Then some centers function as punishment centers for the unruliest youths.

For this reason, many boys run away and would rather live on the streets, constantly trying to cross. Carlos, a social worker in a Center for Minors in Ceuta, sums up the thoughts of the many young people he has met: “Why do I have to learn Spanish or do any kind of training, if when I turn 18, they throw me out and make me go back to Morocco?” The lives of these runaway boys are similar to those of the migrants in transit in Calais, Ventimiglia, Patras, with constant and frenetic attempts to hide on trains, in trucks, in cars, and on ferries. Crossing the Strait is often just a stage in a journey toward family members or family networks that have been settled in France, Belgium, Germany, or Italy for a long time. Every

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borderland along these routes―be they external or internal borders―once again becomes a similar battlefield on which transients, both minors and adults, are exposed to a series of risks due to their willingness to keep moving on. One day, while we were distributing food with Eulalia just a few meters from dozens of Spanish and European flags waving on the fortress, the boys repeated jokingly: O llego a la peninsula, o me muero! (“I’ll either make it to the peninsula or I’ll die”). The scandalous activities of the young harraga evoke a practice of “edgework”, a voluntary risk-taking (Lyng, 2005) that cannot simply be reduced to a condition of victimhood. In their conversations, they use the invented term rizki to define themselves and the extreme “sport” they practice around the port. Sayda told me that: They always do rizki, all day, and they’re always talking about rizki. There have been many deaths and many children have gone missing. We don’t know how many bodies have been recovered on the other side. It’s the boys who tell us that many of them have left and no one has heard from them again. I know guys who have lost the use of their legs due to falls and are now disabled. As the term suggests, doing rizki puts them in a very risky situation. They know it, they accept it. They don't want to set foot in hospital, because they know that doctors will call the police to take them back to the centers or expel them. At the same time, doing rizki is also a way of playing. This is my theory. They’re driven by the adrenaline of this deadly game. Every time they see the police they run away, they get on trucks, on ferries … and it’s some kind of video game … with a clear goal … making it to the peninsula where they have friends or family. And to do rizki you need drugs. When you take them, you’re not cold, you’re not scared, you’re not hungry. … Are they doped? Yes, they are … but it’s their way of dealing with life on the streets and keeping doing rizki.

Doing this requires tenacity, courage, strength, intelligence, cunning, commitment―all qualities that remind us of the importance of body and warrior capital (Sauvadet, 2007) and almost evoke a rite of initiation into adult masculinity. To do rizki you need to travel light, with just a small backpack. However, more generally for all migrants on the move, living in transit means that personal belongings are reduced to little more than the own body, which means being reduced to “bare life”. Any objects and clothing needed for subsistence are abandoned when they are worn out and then found again along the way, often through encounters with

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humanitarian workers and volunteers. The life of things is fragile and ephemeral. The transgressive attitude of these unaccompanied minors has gradually become the focus of the media panic. They embody the perfect monster, the scapegoat, the source of all perceived insecurity, the ungrateful and vengeful guest. The biggest demonstration that was ever held on the streets of Ceuta took place in December 2016 to denounce the growth of crime committed by harraga and other young migrants. Maribel, from her past experience working in the school field, told me how parents often use the expression “es una zona de MENAs”, “cuidado, que se vienen los MENAs”,26 to talk about a dangerous place or a dangerous situation. Minors in transit resist institutionalization and, at the same time, represent an easy target. The panic surrounding their presence is highly productive. As José highlighted, they generate billetes, hard cash: Local authorities are constantly trying to spread panic among the population with stories about these children, which have become the most ­criminalized group in the city. The problem must always be visible and present, so they can negotiate, negotiate future subsidies with the central government to eradicate the problem. In Melilla we make money from borders and migrations. It’s one of the few clean sources of money―compared to drugs, smuggling, and money laundering. The port is half-dead, commercially and in terms of tourism, but it stays alive thanks to the needs of security, agents, cameras and barbed wire. So, it’s really good that the MENAs are a problem! The more there are, the better! More panic means more money that the city can ask the state for. Before the MENAs there were black migrants assaulting the fences, who allowed us to cry ‘invasion’ because there were a few thousand people. Today black migrants have more problems jumping over the fences, so the minors have replaced them.

In November 2018, during the fieldwork, there was an animated discussion between local politicians and the central government on the distribution of 38 million euros destined to the 12,437 unaccompanied minors present on Spanish territory. The issue was the funds assigned to Melilla (1.3 million for 1118 minors), which were deemed insufficient and unfair compared to what was received by other Autonomous Regions.27 Around the same time, the president of the autonomous city in Ceuta denounced the minors crisis and their hugely increased presence, inviting the central

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government to implement without delay the readmission agreement signed in 1992 with Morocco, even to this specific target. Meanwhile, social services councilors in the two cities denounced the impossibility of managing the unaccompanied minors crisis in front of a delegation of MEPs, saying that it had caused “social and economic pressure that is now unbearable for public life”.28 The young harraga have been entering the enclaves through tactics that have made the border porous, such as coming with relatives, using false documents from Nador and Tetouan, corrupting guards at the border crossings, swimming or entering through the sewers, and hiding in the cars of smugglers. They remain until they manage to cross over to Spain, adding without knowing it to the nightmare of the local white population: the “Moroccanization” of the city. Time is a crucial device of power and resistance. The stagnation of movement imposed by the authorities generates temporal counter-practices, of which the flight of minors from the centers, to experience the playful and transgressive thrill of doing rizki, is a prime example.

Under Hostile Cities In these borderlands, behind and beyond the fences of the EU frontier, a pivotal component of the hegemonic discourse is the concept of “attraction-­effect” and “migratory pressure”. Classic migration theory places these dimensions within a hydraulic and mechanical framework, which does not take into account subjectivities and desires, or social and family networks as a support factor for departures and arrivals. Migrations would be simply determined by expulsive pushes in the countries of origin and attractive pushes from the countries of arrival, as well as by the socioeconomic differentials between the areas concerned. Through the very idea of contrasting the “attractiveness” of arrival areas, policy makers implement strategies that affect multiple fields: from issues with school attendance for the children of irregular immigrants to the implementation of and investment in futuristic technology on fences and in port infrastructure, from restrictions on the registration of irregular migrants to the protection of port infrastructure, from the blocking of asylum seekers' routes to the criminalization of informal solidarity practices, from limitation of reunification permits to attempts to discourage women working across the border from giving birth in the enclaves. This is how Sayda describes this fear:

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The fear of the call effect is clear. The border is right here. Behind the border, we have Beni Ansar, Nador, and the Rif, an impoverished area where young people have no future, they feel that they have no future in Morocco. It’s obvious that if there’s a way out right outside their front door, they won’t hesitate to take it. And if they know that those who have managed to get through before them have also improved their lives, they will continue to leave through that door, they won't stop. This is obvious and it’s right. We’d all do the same. Go to the other side where we know our lives could be better. This is the fear of the call effect. It applies to Moroccans, but also to people from Sub-Saharan countries, Syrians, everyone … for every migrant who arrives in the city, the locals fear that these people will achieve their goal and that for this reason others will follow.

Things like public showers, food distribution, and healthcare provision for undocumented migrants can be framed as part of an inappropriate attractiveness to be contrasted. To curb this supposed effect, Ceuta and Melilla have made their spaces progressively more inhospitable for migrants. Unlike sanctuary cities in the US, these borderlands aim to be hostile cities. It is a similar process, which we have seen materialize in Ventimiglia with the ordinances banning food distribution and water fountains, in Val Roya with the militarization of the area (Giliberti, 2020),29 in Calais where the police destroy tents and blankets, hunting people with dogs, drones, and pepper spray, or in Paris with “the stones of infamy” that prevent camping under the bridge. In many places where the daily battle for freedom of movement is fought, urban planning, architecture, technology, and the administration of exclusion develop strategies to keep migrants out. Migrants’ encampment, their turbulent mobility, and the proliferation of selective border checks show a different picture of the borderland, such as the one proposed by Balibar (2009) to depict a racialized and striated space that involves Europe as a whole. Another crucial device in hostile cities does not concern space but time―the imposition of indecipherable and exhausting temporalities for those who have overcome the walls and entered the two enclaves. Indeed, the wait―a constant horizon in the stories of migrants on the move―is a kind of weapon in the fight to illegalize mobilities, as Andersson (2014a) reminds us. Time is a capital that the authorities have at their disposal to slow down flows, generate wandering, and build effective bottlenecks to redirect migratory routes. Making Ceuta and Melilla unpredictable waiting locations means decreasing their value as stopovers in the journey

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toward Europe. The stagnation in mobility imposed by the authorities generates temporal counter-practices: minors running away from the reception centers reserved for them in order to try out the playful and transgressive thrill of the rizki is the most significant example, along with mass jumping over the nets that, by involving hundreds of people, inflicts a blow to the infinite temporalities planned by the authorities. To return to the metaphor of the leash and the rip, those who get through the first walls of these borderlands are immediately tied up with an institutional leash (be it a reception card from a CETI or an asylum application), whose range is only as long as the radius of each enclave. Ripping the leash means finding the quickest way to overthrow that imposed temporality, reach the dream of the peninsula, and continue the journey. Furthermore, the mobilization of fear is at the heart of the production and reproduction of such an economic model and labor market. Ringing alarm bells about the invasion does not help to stop migration or increase the impermeability of the border as a fortress, but it reiterates a permanent dramatic spectacle, thanks to which Ceuta and Melilla can protect their geographic income and continue to make a living from fences and security workers, from subsidies and public jobs of all kinds, and from exporting goods through tolerated smuggling. The selective porosity of the border also produces a secondary labor market, which at night is relocated to Morocco and is useful to meet the reproductive needs of the Spanish families of the enclave. From this angle and in a way that is only apparently contradictory, the two enclaves fight against and support their attractiveness, simply because without the economy generated by illegalizing migration, the two cities would lose a key element of their sustainability. Sayda, Judith, Redouan, Maribel, Omar, José, Rachid, Eulalia, Ibra, Esteban, Ousman, Kamto, and many other subjects/actors I met during the journey have allowed me to reveal a counternarration, casting a slanting gaze on the border, a gaze that can capture all that the spectacle of the jumps over the fences conceal: the complicity between states and institutions, the convergences between smuggling networks and sovereign powers, the resistance tactics of people in transit, but also the molecular work of no-borders solidarity networks. On his way to the general assembly of Alarmphone on the border with Algeria, Redouan suddenly told us that he had received a phone call from a migrant who had disembarked on the coast of Cadiz, cold and scared: “and what was I supposed to do?… I called the comrades of our network in the peninsula, asking them to bring him clothes and food, give him shelter for a while and then accompany

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him to the nearest railway station. That’s our normal course of action”. When we say goodbye to Sayda, after a long conversation at the house of a well-to-do Muslim family, she is the one who shakes our hand to remind us that somos cadena (we are chain), an effective way to represent the dynamics of a contemporary Underground Railway that supports transit, step by step, ripping the leash of an EU governance devoted to illegalizing free mobility as a human right.

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(Eds.), Winou el shabab.Images of transformations between the two shores of the Mediterranean. Gup. Konrad, V. (2015). Towards a theory of borders in motion. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 30(1), 1–17. Laacher, S. (2007). Le peuple des clandestins. Calmann-lévy. Lendaro, A., Rodier, C., & Vertongen, Y. L. (2018). La crise de l’accueil. Frontières, droits, résistances. La Découverte. Lyng, S. (2005). Edgework: The sociology of risk taking. Routledge. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 1(15), 11–40. Mezzadra, S. (2001). Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione. Ombre Corte. Minca, S., & Umek. (2018). Walking the Balcan route. The archipelago of refugee camps in Serbia. In I.  Katz, D.  Marti, & C.  Minca (Eds.), Camps revisited: Multifaceted spatialities of a modern political technology (geopolitical bodies, material worlds) (pp. 35–59). Rowman & Littlefield International. Mouna, K., & Kchikach, Z. (2020). Préparer la Boza. L’ethnographie d’un campement des migrants subsahariens à Fès. In H. Faouzi, M. Khachani & W. Anir (Sous la direction de), Migrations, représentations sociales et stéréotypes. Paris: L’Harmattan. OAR (2018). Datos provisionales acumulados a 31 de dicembre de 2018. https:// www.interior.gob.es/opencms/es/ser vicios-­a l-­c iudadano/tramites-­y -­ gestiones/oficina-­de-­asilo-­y-­refugio/datos-­e-­informacion-­estadistica/ Pandolfo, S. (2007). “The burning”: finitude and the politico-theological imagination of illegal immigration. Anthropological Theory, 7(3), 329–363. Papadopoulos, D., Stephenson, N., & Tsianos, V. (2008). Escape Routes. In Control and subversion in the 21st century. Pluto Press. Planet Contreras, A. I. (2004). Melilla y Ceuta como regiones de destino migratorio. In B.  López (Ed.), Atlas de la inmigración maroquí en España (pp. 386–389). Taller de Estudios Internacionales Mediterraneos. Rahola, F. (2010). The space of camps: Towards a genealogy of places of internment in the present. In A. Dal Lago & S. Palidda (Eds.), Conflict, security and the reshaping of society (pp. 185–199). Routledge. Sahraoui, N. (2020). Integration into liminality: women’s lives in an open centre for migrants at Europe’s Southern Antechamber. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(9), 1809–1827. Sauvadet, T. (2007). Le capital guerrier. Concurrence et solidarité entre jeunes de cité. Arman Colin. Sayad, A. (2004). The suffering of the Immigrant. Polity Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the art of resistance. Hidden trasncripts. Yale University Press. Sebag, J., Durand, J.-P., Louveau, C., Stagi, L., & Queirolo Palmas, L. (Eds.). (2018). Sociologie visuelle et filmique. Le point de vue dans la vie quotidienne, Immagin-azioni Sociali. Genova University Press.

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Tazzioli, M., & Garelli, G. (2018). Containment beyond detention. The hotspot system and disrupted migration movements across Europe. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1–19. UIR, (2016). Les migrants sub-sahariens au Maroc. Enjeux d’une migration de résidence. Ed. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, https://www.kas.de/c/document_ librar y/get_file?uuid=5757725d-­3 90b-­3 cbf-­1 151-­9 99a9653f572&gr oupId=252038 United Nation Support Mission in Libya (2018). Desperate and dangerous: Report on the human rights situations of migrants and refugees in Libya. https://www. ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/LY/LibyaMigrationReport.pdf Vacchiano, F. (2018). Du karian au hreg et retour. Spatialité subalterne et désir d’emigration au Maroc. In T. Fouquet & O. Georg (Eds.), Citadinités subalternes en Afrique (pp. 157–176). Editions Khartala. Veglio, M. (Ed.). (2018). L’attualità del male. La Libia dei lager è verità processuale. Edizioni SEB27.

CHAPTER 9

In and Around Athens March 2019–April 2019

Premise: Why the Shadow? I arrive in Athens in early March 2019 with the intention of staying for over a month. I have different itineraries and possible destinations in mind for the Underground Europe project and only one certain base as a point of reference, a rather well known and visible one. It is a former four-star hotel, the City Plaza, located right in the center, not far from the Archaeological Museum and from Patisìon, the city’s main road. The hotel was shut down after going bankrupt in 2014, and later, in April 2016, it was occupied and collectively managed by a group of activists, families, and individual refugees, some of whom are still living there. I spend the days during my first weeks getting closer to the reality of the Plaza, where I had already stayed briefly a little over two years earlier. I go to the occupied hotel almost every day and regularly participate in the weekday meetings, attend a series of internal events, spend a lot of time with the occupiers, do a series of shifts at the main desk at the entrance, and participate in the organization of two demonstrations directly promoted by the collective. From the time spent at the Plaza and the words exchanged with friends and comrades from the collective or Diktyo (an antiracist network close to Exarchia) as well as with several migrants and resident volunteers, I observe clear symptoms of tiredness tied to the broader political situation (which, even more so at these latitudes, can be summed up in the signifier “crisis”, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_9

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to point to a whole constellation of collapses―economic, political, European, “migratory”, and of borders) and in particular to the situation in Greece and in Athens, which seems to represent the maximum point of condensation and precipitation―the recurring image adopted to describe its combined effects is “inclined plane”. These signals are reflected in the intentionally decreasing number of residents at the Plaza (from the original 400, with peaks above 500, to the current 150/200) and in the oft manifested willingness to negotiate a progressive abandonment of the occupation that can protect families, individual migrants, and asylum seekers, by offering alternative options, hopefully through agreed exits from the place and from the country. Meanwhile, however, life inside the hotel goes on and it is somewhat yanked or, in any case, strained by a series of external political events (the “inclined plane”), to which the composite social reality of the Plaza reacts and responds, and by just as many everyday situations from which it constantly acquires meaning: relations with other parallel and institutional entities in the city, in the country, in Europe; relations between families or individual refugees and others who are in Athens or staying in the various institutional reception facilities or in squats; the activities organized inside or outside the occupied hotel for families, minors, and children; the always precarious financial situations, both the general one and those of single families; the threatening “visits” by the owner of the building, with her raving accusations of supporting smuggling and terrorist networks; the integration of the international volunteers who continue to arrive; the very rare admissions of new residents; the sporadic but significant “exits” of some toward other European countries chosen as further transit zones or possible destinations and the more frequent seasonal “exits”, ties to employment opportunities especially on the islands. It is a whole constellation of more or less relevant micro-events and a sequence of relatively well-organized everyday interactions which are reflected in a specific topographic order, reiterating the allocation of spaces within this facility between public places, which are mostly mixed and intended for meeting people (entrance, reception, bar, kitchens, canteen, common room, and staircases), and private ones (the rooms for rooms, individual refugees, volunteers, and activists). This confers a pace, a specific articulation or a “calendar” to a time which is actually “hooked”, marked by an implicit “unspoken” message―generic open expectations which essentially point to the uncertainty of the outside world.

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Zooming in on the localized situation of the Plaza allows me to come into contact with a plane of experience that is, so to speak, “point blank”, routine, and in and of itself atypical, and yet a dimension which I believe can be expanded and generalized―an “active life”, despite the fact that it unfolds under the more general and constant lien of a mostly intangible border whose effects are reflected in and break down the terms of perception of time and space (protracted and often frustrated waiting and diminished movements) into a myriad of everyday opportunities set against the backdrop of the more general scenario of crisis that characterizes Athens and Greece. Starting from the City Plaza, I deliberately choose to follow this specific level, which George Perec would have perhaps called “infraordinary” (Perec, 1989), in the attempt to understand the weave of situations and relations that have mostly been built around such an indirect and overdetermining action, which is generic and generalized as much as it is perceived and contested. It is a “border situation” which becomes refracted, bent, and dissolved into everyday life and relationships, retranslated into an overall experience of “confinement” which is more or less metabolized and is, in any case, negotiated and reactive, elastic, so to speak. This experience goes on to define the material existence conditions of many residents of the Plaza or, more generally, of Athens and Greece, all of whom are seemingly “trapped” in a landscape that is physically marked by the austerity policies imposed by Europe and implemented by the Greek government, whose material signs are clear and just about everywhere. Therefore, in this case too it is a matter of following the trajectories, practices, stories, and movements of subjects who have been captured by the indirect action of a “leash” that looms over their lives, imposing a dynamic spatial and temporal dimension which, however, has a narrow gage―a regime of (im)mobility forced by the equally suffered and deferred waiting times. It is also a matter of seeing how, when, and where its hold can be loosened or tightened to the point that it eventually breaks and the present, conditioned by the wait and the controlled radius of movement, can be overturned into open rupture situations. In the meantime, alongside my experience at the Plaza, I keep collecting testimonies on the “external” situation, particularly on the emergency on the islands, a sort of “background story” whose continuous echo filters into Athens. Among these, there is the story of Nawal, an activist and volunteer who spent two consecutive years in the Moria camp in Lesvos. I meet her and two young Syrians who have arrived with her just before her return to

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Italy to renew her residence card, and they confirm many things that I already thought I knew: the incredible overcrowding and congestion in the camp, also due to continuous arrivals from Turkey that are bound to increase in the spring1; the superfetation of parallel camps which are possibly even more “informal”, somehow embedded in that facility (and that, in turn, absorb it); the hierarchization of places and the juxtaposition of its various functions as emergency center, reception center, detention center, and hotspot; the key role of Frontex, backed up by the IOM, in the management of the camp and the progressively hegemonic role of an American religious NGO in the allocation of spaces and in the distribution of resources; the increasingly marginal position of UNHCR and the openly opposed and boycotted position of Médecins Sans Frontières (MsF), that distances itself from the camp and more generally from the hotspots to denounce the situation; the frequent eruptions of a violence that is hastily read as “ethnic” (often due to the priority given to certain nationalities), which reflect within the camp more general political conflicts that are causing bloodshed in the residents’ countries of origin; the selective and very sporadic interventions of the Greek police in the attempt to quell these episodes.2 The picture is filled with personal incidents (one of the two young Syrians has an ulcer, a rather frequent effect of staying at Moria, and he is in Athens on “leave” to access treatment that is not available at the camp or on the island; the other one, who is younger and has arrived in Lesvos more recently―six months earlier―shows signs of bruises, which he says were the result of an “encounter” with the Greek police) and further details which are probably less known but equally significant: the exponential 1  This is also due to the Turkish government’s constant threat to push back refugees toward Syria, particularly in the occupied zones of Ankara. This operation ended in the fall of 2019 with the Turkish occupation of Rojava and was justified by the necessity to build a buffer zone for Syrian refugees in Turkey. 2  In this respect, it is worth mentioning the attack suffered in May of 2018 by the Kurdish population in the Moria camp, seemingly for religious reasons, by other residents who were generically described as “Islamic State sympathizers” (see: https://refugeeobservatory. aegean.gr/en/observatory-news-bulletin-violent-clashes-moria-ric-cause-displacement-­ hundreds-kurdish-families). Following the attack, nearly one thousand people moved elsewhere and in particular to the self-managed camp in Pikpa which, after welcoming over 350 people, risked collapsing (https://www.lesvossolidarity.org/en/blog/press-release/region-­ must-­reconsider-decision-to-close-pikpa ). In answer to this, the Greek authorities relocated some Kurdish refugees to other camps on the island, such as Rafatn, banning them from exiting for safety reasons, under the threat of relocation to Moria, and lavishing benefits on those who were prepared to work at the camp as volunteers. The exploitation of refugees as volunteers is a recurring practice by various humanitarian organizations active on the islands.

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number of journalists, reporters, photographers, and video-­activists which triggered the resentful reaction of some of the residents; the spread of psychiatric drugs and sedatives administered to the “interned” and the parallel and pervasive spread, especially over the last few months, of heroin and opiates, which Nawal links with the drug-dealing networks in Omonia Square in Athens and which, using a fitting hyperbole, she defines as a sort of “Zyklon B” to definitively solve the refugee emergency on the islands. Nonetheless, to this stifling scenario from which it seems impossible to exit Nawal associates stories that give the impression of a certain fluidity, of complicated but possible crossings, from Moria, Samos, Chios, and the north of Greece, along the Turkish border on the Evros river, toward Athens and, from here or from other towns, toward just as many possible towns elsewhere―particularly through Omonia Square, a crossroads and a big bazar under the open sky where one can get hold of all kinds of papers: exit tickets to leave via the main gateway (Venizelos airport) or via other secondary gateways (the Balkan Route) of the Greek trap. The two young Syrians confirm this, and one of them says he is waiting for a sign. Their words match those of others, volunteers, activists, researchers, and people on the move, which reinforces the impression of a similar, more general porosity in a tactical game of lights and shadows, as if to modulate and overturn the “spectacle of the border” (De Genova et al. 2015) staged on the islands, suggesting, far from the foreground, just as many escape routes and exit itineraries. These are essentially precarious and mostly risky practices which, in the shadows and from the shadows, oppose the attempt to subvert the peculiar hold that, also through movements, each border device tends to produce and convey, its own peculiar and dynamic entrapment effect. For this and other reasons―first and foremost the substantial amount of existing literature, reports, and research work produced by academic researchers, militants, and others denouncing the situation in Moria and on the islands―I progressively decide to put aside the idea of staying in Lesvos along with a whole series of other hypothetical initial destinations. It is a choice dictated by necessity, but it is also about method. The focus of my attention progressively shifts from places to situations and, wherever it is possible, from devices to practices―in a more general and constant marginal dimension, from the lights cast on the borders to the relative shadows that characterize routes, even in urban “centers”. Besides, the very project of Underground Europe, the willingness to explore and preserve itineraries and routes which have been imagined and built in a

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subterranean dimension by micro-networks of subjects on the move within and against the European borderland, seems to point toward this option: an informed choice to stay in the shadows, to account for a series of backstage and offstage situations and practices that can be opposed to the regime of forced (im)mobility and (in)visibility that defines and accompanies the “spectacle of the border”. Thus, in the following days, I mostly limit myself to getting to know, meeting, and accompanying people who are “trapped” in Athens and in Greece at different levels, collecting their stories, following and supporting their everyday itineraries and their exit attempts and plans. I end up limiting my movements to few “out-of-town” field trips to neighboring places, to Lavrio and Patras, where I also retrieve a weave of karstic situations and movements which at times leads back to Athens, to Omonia Square, or to the area surrounding the City Plaza.

The True Dream of Diavata Athens, March 29, 2019. In front of a secondary branch of the NGO Za’atar in Kypseli, a mixed and originally middle-class neighborhood north of the City Plaza and of the archaeological museum, I meet Filippa, an English activist who, like me, has been in the city for about a month, and Niwan, a Pakistani volunteer living in Norway who collaborates with the NGO. We move to a bar in the main square and discuss the possibility of driving the following day to the refugee camp of Katsikas, near Ioannina, just behind the Albanian border, to closely follow the evolution of an announced concentration of migrants and asylum seekers at the border. We try to take stock, but the situation is uncertain, and nobody manages to retrieve clear information on the exact place and time of the mobilization. For this reason, we decide to postpone and check back with each other the following day. Three days later, I receive the following message from Filippa: –– Hi there, at the end we will go to Thessaloniki on Thursday, I think, but someone from our team now wants to come and I’m not sure there will be space –– Ok, no problem, just please let me know … but Thessaloniki??? –– The fact is that I’m just trying to figure out where and when … sorry for the confusion.

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The confusion, both mine and hers, is nothing but the reflection of the more general confusion surrounding the whole alleged mobilization, and it is not accidental. For several weeks, at least since early March, there have been unverified rumors on social media about the opening of the border and a collective action: a march, initially said to have been promoted by a phantom Basque NGO in the wake of the convoy that crossed Mexico from Honduras and went on to stall in the detention centers just behind the border with the United States. Compared with that example, in any case, the strategy seems to be more cautious and based on red herrings. Indeed, the destination is opaque, willingly kept under covers: at first it seems to be Ioanina, a town on the Albanian border that is gateway to the (new) Balkan route toward Kaçavir; then, almost suddenly, between April 2 and 3, a self-­ organized convoy sets off heading north toward Thessaloniki and the fenced border with Macedonia, once again toward Idomeni, a place crossed out in the European topology of the last few years. And yet, just as early and remarkably prepared to prevent this, various institutional subjects (IOM, UNHCR) as well as a series of NGOs had circulated dissuasive appeals (Fig. 9.1), using convincing arguments bordering on intimidation, to emphasize the groundlessness and unattainability of the objectives and the danger of this march. This preventive action is aimed at refugees and asylum seekers (reminding them of the risk of losing their recognized status and therefore their protection and any material benefits tied to it or the possibility to obtain them) as well as at NGO volunteers and activists, with the intention of removing all support (highlighting how any participation in “illegal activities” could jeopardize their stay in Greece). Despite this, within two days, almost 2000 migrants and asylum seekers (Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Pakistanis, and Iraqi-Kurds or Iranians) from every corner of Greece, but especially form Athens, Patras, Ioanina, and partly from Thessaloniki itself, gather about ten kilometers from Greece’s second city, in the vicinity of the large camp of Diavata, and set up a makeshift camp for the night with the intention of marching united the following day toward the border to cross it and reach what from here is generically called “Europe”. This is the reconstruction of the “battle of Diavata” produced after a meeting at the Plaza. In the makeshift camp, between tents, pushchairs, sleeping bags, blankets, and cardboard, fires are lit for the night. Someone brings a guitar, meetings are organized, very well attended (especially by women), and are

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Fig. 9.1  IOM, UNHCR warning

constantly happening to discuss how to proceed the following day, how to organize and react to possible countermeasures of the Greek police. Dross builds up and frustrations add up alongside a more general sense of exasperation and stagnation that makes the perception of entrapment more and more acute and unbearable: the national ESTIA reception plan

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has been retroactively dismantled (only in Athens, over the last two months, two hundred recipient families have been evicted from the accommodation subsidized with special EU funds that have been suspended for 2019); arrivals on the islands and especially in the North, via the Evros river on the border with Turkey, are constant and every day newcomers on the run add up to the already exponential number of asylum seekers and migrants concentrated on the Greek mainland. No one seems to be able to exit what turns out to be, as the days go by, more and more like an enormous chokehold. But it’s an impression, however realistic. To reinforce it, with a seemingly unprecedented action, the night of the 4th Larissas Station is shut down, stopping people who had gathered from every reception camp and protected accommodation in the Athens metropolitan area from catching a train to join the convoy and reach Thessaloniki. The same destiny awaits those who try to get around the ban by heading toward the secondary station of Lamia. There’s nothing left to do but occupy the rail tracks in protest. This is an overt violation of basic rights, of the possibility recognized to any ticket holder to move freely within the national territory. But no one, especially on an institutional or media level, seems to perceive this. Regular circulation does not resume until the following day, when it’s too late to join the convoy and the tickets purchased the day before are no longer valid. Meanwhile, around the makeshift camp of Diavata, between Friday 6th and Sunday 8th April, a real battle occurs, with the police lined up in riot gear chasing back migrant families with tear gas and repeated charges (the final report will include several contusions, an injured reporter, and three arrests among protesters). After various attempts to force their way through the block, fires, protests, and repression started, the collective exodus project succumbs, and everything seems to subside: the makeshift camp is dismantled, the various groups are dispersed, and individual people are co-opted under (unverified) promises that they won’t suffer any penal retaliations and especially that they won’t lose access to institutional reception plans (accommodation, cash cards), which are actually already being dismantled. The convoy is led back home, sorted into the various camps of origin with the support of a series of coaches made available by the IOM, and all that’s left on the ground is a seemingly aseptic and depoliticized representation of the three days of Diavata. On Ekathimerini, the main national newspaper, the whole incident is synthesized as the result of the general swindle of which various groups of migrants were victims, deceived by false rumors on the alleged opening of

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the European borders. This is the concise dispatch which, after the evacuation of the last sixty die-hards, puts an end to the whole incident: The last sixty out of around 1,000 migrants who were involved in clashes with the Greek police for three days have left the makeshift camp in northern Greece. The migrants clashed with the police as they believed the fake news that had appeared on social media, which said that restrictions on travel to central and northern Europe had been lifted. The police arrested some of the sixty people who did not have valid documents. The remaining ones left, heading toward either migrant camps or other accommodation all over Greece. None of the residents of the nearby camp were among them. When the camp suddenly started to empty out late on Saturday, a group of people were heard cheering. When asked why, they answered that Angela Merkel had opened Germany’s borders. Like earlier rumors, this was also fake. The majority of the migrants were refugees coming from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

As it often happens in front of a mobilization of subalterns, the protest of Diavata is represented in caricatured and paternalistic terms as a collective blunder, almost a millennialist eruption, with Angela Merkel in the improbable role of vestal or prophet. The rumors that filter through in Athens and at the Plaza during and immediately after the march actually suggest a rather different interpretation of the protest, which was born out of the necessity to force the situation in order to produce an opening similar to that adopted by Merkel herself in July of 2015 in response to the pressure that was then being exerted on European borders. Their attempt may appear desperate also in this respect, suggesting more than just an analogy with the recent Mexican convoy of hope, but this doesn’t make it irrational, let alone manipulated. The posthumous truth, a sort of gravestone on the three days of Diavata, is ascertained by decree the following day by the Minister for Migrations, Dimitris Vitsas, who directly evoked organized crime and the international smuggling racket. The night of April 8, the usual weekly meeting at the City Plaza, during which we assess the situation and plan future activities, is very well-­ attended and lasts longer than usual. There is a certain embarrassment surrounding the question of Diavata, which is only raised at the end. A young Iraqi-Kurdish occupier asks for an explanation regarding the absence of Plaza people in Diavata and the silence of the collective on the whole incident. His disappointment is palpable: “I speak as an asylum seeker, but also as an activist, member of the Plaza collective: there were

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hundreds of people like us at the demonstration. There were also some of the Plaza occupiers: what can we say to them? What can we say about what happened and what’s happening?” These questions trigger a somewhat resentful reaction by some in the group. Some members of the collective accuse him of having an attitude that is over the top and histrionic, and they remind him that it is also him and his absence which are being discussed. In fact, the words of many are overridden by exhaustion, by the awareness of a more general weakness (the same weakness that stops them from putting up, however symbolically, some families that have been evicted from the ESTIA plan because they cannot bear the thought of having to reject the wave of requests that would probably follow), and also by the fear of a risky exposure that may jeopardize the survival of the place. In any case, the absence and silence on Diavata are heavy like a space of expression and action that is dangerously shutting down. Moreover, in the reconstruction of the incident, from the contacts and the stories of those who were actually there (the Facebook live streams on Pishti and Diavata camp), one can sense rather clearly that the march was the expression of something different from what was officially reported, something akin to a “movement”: chaotic, contradictory, sudden (more than improvised), but essentially autonomous, substantially informed, and above all internally made up of a plurality of voices and presences which are also very different. Those who were later able to talk to some other people who were present speak of a more general isolation of the group of migrants who were protesting in the camp: those who arrived later were prevented from reaching, participating in or giving support to protesters, “a real old-­ regime sanitary cordon to isolate the infected area and stop it from being reached from the outside”. It is also in light of this scorched earth effect that we decide to collectively reconstruct an account of the three days of Diavata (roughly what is cited earlier), which can act as a counternarrative to oppose the one imposed by the media and the government, the image of a “soft”, humanitarian repression and of many “uninformed” subjects, dazzled by false promises and manipulated or conned by smugglers―subverting the flattened and depersonalized image of the clueless victim and bringing to the surface the material blackmailing (impunity in exchange for docility) that overwhelmed the willingness to escape expressed by that mobilization. However, in the weeks leading up to the Diavata March, not everybody had headed toward Idomeni. The day before the mobilization, on April 5,

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“Pablo”, a 25-year-old Afghan young man who had mostly lived in Tehran and now lives in the Malakasa camp, 40 kilometers from Athens, decides to decline our proposal to accompany him to Ioanina to attempt the journey “to Europe” via the Balkan route, taking advantage of the confusion created around Idomeni: “we stay”, he writes without many regrets to Antonio, the colleague and friend on sabbatical in Athens who introduced me to him. And yet, the day before, in a bar in Viktoria Square, he had responded to our proposal to go to Thessaloniki together “to see what’s going on”, restating more than once his intention to head toward Ioanina and to prepare to cross the Albanian border by finding a tent, a sleeping bag, some clothes, and the “French” passport. In any case, the following day, Pablo backpedals with a message in French sent to Antonio, who forwards it to me along with the whole thread: Before setting off …, I have to take some steps to make some friends with my friends, because I have to inform some of my friends to avoid being alone on that route, and I have to pack my bags.

Alone, without planning, protection, and some basic support, the Balkan route is very risky, unthinkable for the time being. But it is only being postponed. Meanwhile, Ajar, a Kurdish medical student from Mus, in Turkish Kurdistan, who is staying at the City Plaza, tells me that the day before he had left Athens, trying to reach Germany (he also says “to Europe”) via Crete that night. His attempt failed and also in his case it will be “next time”, but the dynamics, the timing, and the sudden acceleration are at the very least surprising.

In Lavrio Two days earlier, on April 4, I went with him to the Lavrio camp where he stayed before moving to the Plaza, along with Antonio and Jacques, a Parisian film director member of the CGT who had already made a series of documentaries and reportages on Lavrio and the City Plaza. Located about sixty kilometers from Athens in a former school building in the center of an increasingly prominent port town on the way to Cape Sounio, today the camp is a sort of sanctuary of the PKK and a real Kurdish safe haven in Europe which, however, was started in the mid-fifties in a different political context.

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The large central block has three floors, with a wide internal square enclosed by another two lower buildings, and it has witnessed the transit of various generations of people on the move. In the early 1960s, it was turned into a reception center for those who were fleeing the Soviet Bloc countries. Over the last three decades, it has hosted, above all, Kurdish and Turkish political exiles, including quite a few leaders or intellectuals tied to the PKK or to Turkish Marxist parties (MLKP e MKP). Starting from 2014, the original core of political refugees was progressively joined by an increasing number of Kurdish refugees fleeing the war in Syria. Today the camp hosts around 400 people, almost exclusively Kurdish, mostly coming from Syria (but also from Turkey, Iraq, and Iran), and the overcrowding has led to the opening, three years ago, of a second camp with containers located in the immediate vicinity. Both facilities were partially supported by the Greek government and the Red Cross, at least until the summer of 2017, when their existence was threatened by the blackmail employed by Recep Erdogan in the context of the bilateral repatriation agreements signed between Turkey and the European Union in March of 2016 in the form of explicit pressure on the Greek government to suspend any kind of support to this facility (which was actually rather scant), painted as a dangerous “terrorist hotbed”. The withdrawal of any direct aid was later justified based on the “nonconformity” of the camp with regard to state and European reception regulations, in particular those regarding checks on presences, accesses, and exits. Indeed, unlike institutional reception centers, Lavrio does not have filters or internal registration procedures, and this fluid and transit dimension constitutes its most scandalous anomaly, and overt denial of the Greek trap, by refusing to impose a leash on the residents. Today, the camp is essentially supported by local and international solidarity as well as by the remarkable organizational capacity guaranteed by Kurdish parties, whose presence through signs, flags, and banners is, for that matter, immediately perceptible. After stopping at a discount supermarket on the way where we buy some essential goods for the camp, we arrive in Lavrio around noon, in the middle of the celebrations for the 70th birthday of Abdullah Ocalan (detained since 2002 in the ad hominem prison of Imrali, an island in the Sea of Marmara, where he is serving a death penalty commuted to life imprisonment), and we are immediately involved in a demonstration for his liberation that moves from the camp down to the road leading to the port, in front of the infamous island of Macronisos, home of the harshest

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prison of the colonels’ dictatorship. Here, in an unpaved square, seventy oleanders and maritime pines will be planted to honor “Apo’s” seventy years. At the end of a brief ceremony, we return to the camp, stopping at the bar on the second floor of the central building, where we are introduced to a series of residents, among whom is a Turkish film director forced into exile in Greece due to his “support for the Kurdish cause”. The bar is decidedly crowded: groups of people (almost all men) chatting at the counter or sitting at tables, some playing backgammon, and there is some background music coming from the square (the rehearsal for the official celebration). Despite the crowdedness, however, the noise threshold is well below the habitual standards at other latitudes, even at the Plaza. The people inside do not seem particularly interested in our presence, a symptom of a certain tradition of “international” visits, but someone offers us some tea, asking where we come from. Upon hearing our answers, two relatively young neighbors tell us they come from Afrin and that they arrived in Lavrio six months earlier, and they introduce us to an older man in his sixties who briefly illustrates the situation in the camp: the presence of various political leaders of Kurdish opposition parties in Turkey (HDP e BDP), the reason behind generalized fleeing due to systematic persecution by the Turkish government (various people who are staying there are wanted and on some of them loom arrest mandates equivalent to out-and-­ out bounties) as well as to the downfall of events in Syria and in Rojava. Through Ajar’s translation, we learn something about the largely peaceful relationship with the local population, the internal organization, the various activities directly managed by some parties, communal life, the difficult sustenance thanks to loans, the precarious economic situations of the families, the sporadic jobs that some residents have been able to find outside, and especially the struggle to obtain official recognition as a refugee camp. We get around to visiting various shared rooms, among which are some offices of various movements and parties, where we are received in the midst of a phantasmagoria of acronyms and an impressive sequence of images of “martyrs”―among whom there are many young women―some fallen in combat, others “disappeared”, victims of Turkish repression. The rather large rooms are accessed via long and narrow internal corridors surrounded by flaky walls with cracks and infiltrations, they often overlook the courtyard, and some of them even have a balcony. On one of these, in the sun, we are offered some tea, which we drink mostly in an embarrassed

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silence, saying just a few words in the attempt to comment on the impressive series of faces pictured on the walls. All of this happens before we go to the second camp, a few hundred meters away from the main one, where, among the orderly lines of containers located in a semi-wooded area near what probably used to be a wood dumpster, we meet other families, other children on bicycles, and a group of men who receive us in a common container-room. We are offered more tea and the break is prolonged as we are entertained by two young men from Rojava and an older man in his sixties who, after his initial diffidence, tells us about his experience in Libya as building site manager before he returned to Syria and then fled Afrin. He shows us the oven he has built at the camp, a “way to do something”, he says shrugging, as though it were an antidote to an empty time of which he has lost control. Of all the voices we heard in Lavrio, his is the first one that alludes to the weight of the more general “trap”, the times and spaces taken away that loom over those who stop over in Greece. We promise that, in case we return, we will make pizza together, but we have to hurry, because we hear music echoing from the square in the main camp, a sign of the start of the official celebrations. We get there just in time to witness a series of dances at dusk, followed by fires and an enormous cake with the image of Ocalan covered in candles. In Lavrio, despite our different interests, we collaborate with Jacques to carry out interviews with some young people including a twenty-three-­ year-old girl, Ajwan, who also comes from Turkey and is a YPG militant. The dialogue is protracted for longer than usual (also due to the fact that in the room where we are we receive a tray with pieces of cake and the umpteenth tea, of which I have lost count), and Ajwan tells us about her life as a student, her choice to become a political militant and to approach the PKK, the harsh repression, the threats, the intimidations by the Turkish police, and the necessity to flee Turkey once she returned from Rojava, until she crossed the northern border via the Evros river into Greece before arriving in Lavrio, “a home”, three months ago. Her tone is decisive, militant, and it makes a certain impression in relation to her age. We try to loosen it up by asking something about her role and the space of female presence within the camp, and more concretely about her relationship with the other women in Lavrio. She tells us that there is a general solidarity, beyond the communal spaces and activities, and she talks about the celebrations for March 8, “a day for women”. We hint at the feminist movement and the image we have in Europe of the central role of women

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in Kurdish resistance: Ajwan nods, laughing, but she declares herself distant from feminism. When asked about the future she wants, she reiterates the impossibility of returning, “so far”, to Kurdistan, and she alludes to the possibility, which seems more of a desire, to go to Switzerland to join her mother and a brother (“although my family now is here”). After 9  pm we leave Lavrio because Ajar points out a certain urgent matter, as within less than an hour he should be collecting a passport near Omonia Square (his Turkish documents, which are sufficient to enter and exit Greece, were confiscated after a period of detention), and traffic going into Athens makes the duration of the journey imponderable. While we are on our way, he exchanges various messages and phone calls, as he tells me that, that same night, he is expecting the arrival of a European friend he met in Turkey years before. The following day I write to him, proposing an evening meeting at the City Plaza, and this is the series of messages we exchange in the following 24 h: –– Hi Ajar, are you at Plaza? Shall we meet for a coffee/tea there or somewhere else near the Kurdish center? – 7 April h.13.48 –– Hi Compagno [Italian for comrade] federiko, sorry but today I’m very busy, maybe we can meet this evening or tomorrow, if you have time – h. 13.52 –– OK, no problem, maybe later on or even tomorrow, best! – h. 13,54 –– Ok, I understand, I will write you this evening if I will be free, or tomorrow – h.14.01 During the course of the day, I do not receive any more messages from Ajar, until the following morning: Hi heval [Kurdish for comrade] federiko. Yesterday I tried to go to Europe. But I couldn’t, so if you want, we can meet today after 17.00, because I’m in Creete right now – 8 April h. 9.25.

Without hiding my surprise, I reply, expressing my solidarity and sorrow for the outcome of his escape and confirming that, if he wants, I will be at the Plaza anyway around 6  pm to hear about his failed attempt. Indeed, around 6 pm, Ajar shows up at the bar of the Plaza where, sipping some hot tea, he explains the reasons behind that “busy” used to justify his unavailability the day before as well as his doubts on whether he would literally be “free”. Indeed he tells me about his nighttime journey to

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Crete, with the passport he had just collected and a ticket to Frankfurt, and he says he was immediately stopped at the airport of the island, where he had to spend the night along with his European friend in separate rooms at the airport police station before both of them were sent back― Ajar to Athens, with his passport confiscated, and his friend “to Europe”. He does not appear particularly shaken or dejected (he will have to wait as long as it is necessary for a new passport and to let the situation decant), he only seems a bit worn out due to the conditions at the police station (“less harsh, but possibly dirtier than the ones in Turkey”) where he spent the night together with a group of Turkish “Gullenist” refugees (who “aren’t really persecuted: they’re also accomplices, fascists”), and above all he is very worried because he has not received any news from his friend. As he recaps some details of his attempted journey “to Europe” and I tell him as many details of the convoy in Diavata, of which he seems to relatively unaware, he tells me in passing that in the meantime Ajwan, the young woman I met in Lavrio three days earlier, is already in Switzerland after leaving from Venizelos airport without problems. In Athens, in Greece, this is how it is: some remain (more or less temporarily) trapped, others fly away.

Outpost Patras I arrive in Patras from Corinth in the early afternoon of a mid-March summery day. With some difficulties, I reach the headquarters of NoNameKitchen (NNK; a Spanish NGO that prepares and distributes food in transit zones, essentially along the Balkan route, monitoring violations of rights and the violence suffered by subjects on the move), which is located in a neighborhood on the hills quite far from the center. Here, inside an open house with a small courtyard in the back, I am introduced to a rather heterogenous group of volunteers. They tell me that the local headquarters of NNK have been active for a little over a month, adding up to those that opened in 2016 and 2017, respectively, in Šid, in Serbia, and in Velika Kladuša, in Bosnia, both on the Croatian border, and they tell me that there are three Afghan and one Pakistani young men temporarily living in the house with them. Patras is the official gateway to and from Italy, Bari and Ancona, which has recently been duplicated and perhaps surpassed by Igoumenitsa. It is also a sort of Mediterranean Calais―the place where, like on an inclined plane, people who intend to reach the other side, Italy, converge along

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routes that mostly originate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, finding tens of borders along the way until they stall in Greece. Here, however, the “jungle” is not concentrated in one single exorbitant city-camp located on the margins of the urban area, but rather it is disseminated in a series of scattered dots. The largest one is represented by a group of factories that have been abandoned since the second half of the 1980s, located in front of a double ring of walls that isolates the commercial port. In the skeletons of a series of rundown industrial warehouses, people sleep, over 150 of them, mostly of Afghan origin, many of them minors, some of them very young, between 15 and 16 years old, and all of them male. Among them, absolutely indistinguishable―if not to more accustomed eyes―there are some smugglers, essentially in the same state as the others, whose activity is mostly limited to indicating the timing and modality of crossing on a truck that is about to board when they are not engaging in parasitism, blackmail, and extortion. Every day, the NNK collective provides a meal cooked at their headquarters for everyone, without distinctions; they accompany those in need to the hospital; and they monitor the situation at the border, reporting abuses and violence by the local police, prolonged detention, and systematic deportations to Athens. We have been in Patras since February 2019, where we have been offering daily meals to people-on-the-move who are staying in squats around the city. The people who we are assisting come to Patras to play a “Game” in the hopes of reaching Italy. These people―the vast majority consisting of young boys―hide for hours inside of trucks which will be crossing the sea in ferries. Everybody knows that people come to Patras to try and cross to Italy, so the police―day after day―chase refugees living here, detain some of them and against their will, and put them inside buses which take them to Athens. The situation is complicated and many of those living in the factories are unaccompanied minors.

Every day we see them jump the fences of the port to try to get between the tires of a truck. When they do, they hide there for hours. The trucks are getting ready to enter a ferry and cross the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea to reach an Italian port. The Patras game is dangerous and exhausting. We’re here to make each one of those people in transit feel more human.3 3

 See: https://www.nonamekitchen.org.

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From NNK’s report we can infer that as time goes by, the “game” has become increasingly risky. In fact, over the last few years, the port has moved further and further away from the city, as though it had been stolen, with two parallel lines of walls and fences rising around it (Fig. 9.2). The first one, older and made of cement, is over 1.5 m high and is located near the actual port area. The second one, more recent and detached, is located directly on the seaside road and has an undulated shape, like big snake made of cement and iron; it is over two meters high and several kilometers long, forcing those who want to get around it into long detours. Jumping to the other side is not impossible per se, but it is at the very least risky: among the young men living in the factories, there are frequent cases of fractures, sprained ankles, cuts―even deep ones―as well as wounds caused by the bites of the dogs the police unleashes among the trucks. Ahmad, a 16-year-old boy of Afghan origin, is starting to move his right arm again with difficulty after fracturing it as he was precipitously coming down from the first wall in the attempt to escape the police. This is not stopping him from training for the next jump, as he explained to me while he plays with the ball in the courtyard of the NNK headquarters. In time, Patras has gone from being an actual main gateway to being a marginal transit point, a geographically remote border. Over the last few years, the number of people sleeping in the factories and in the jungle has

Fig. 9.2  The port as a fortress. Source: photo taken by the authors

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gradually decreased (from over 600 people in 2016, to 150/200 people at the time of writing according to NNK’s reports). However, this does not mean it is a definitive trend: routes are organized on a variable geography, and some passages and stations temporarily fall into disuse, to then unexpectedly re-emerge later on. Moreover, being in the shadows can also be an advantage. Besides, Patras is still a viable passage, however difficult, and the number of people who “jump” across the wall and the sea, despite being low, is constant, almost daily. In addition, the locals seem to coexist quite peacefully with the invisible presence of those who live in the factories, trying to “jump” across the wall on a daily basis, although in the last two years the perception of abandonment and isolation has worsened. There are increasingly sporadic but tenacious manifestations of solidarity―the food distributed by NoNameKitchen is integrated with donations by local producers and the City Council―but the situation seems distant from the “limelight” which characterizes other transit situations. Now that it no longer has any spotlights pointed on it and has returned to a sort of oblivion, Patras hides more stories, various trajectories on the move, which often develop in contradictory and sometimes opposed directions. The night of my arrival, we are invited to dinner along with some NNK staff members by a group of Sudanese men from Darfur, four of them in total, who live in a barrack with two rooms in the middle of the “jungle”, not far from the factories, and receive weekly a food supply from NNK. With the flour delivered, they prepare a kissra, a sort of fermented polenta similar to an Ethiopian injera, which accompanies the main dish, mullah, a meat and vegetable stew. While we eat, the eldest of the four, Ibrahim, tells us that in his case dinner is also a temporary goodbye as, in the following days, he will move to Manolada, in the south of Peloponnese, a farming area renowned for the production of strawberries. Thus, a story of seasonal commuting emerges which involves having a stable base in Patras and alternating regular moves and transhumances toward the south of the Peloponnese in the spring for fruit picking, and to Kalamata in the autumn for the olive harvest. The working conditions, about which Ibrahim does not seem to complain, appear to be not so distant from those in other ghettos of migrant agricultural labor in various Italian farming “districts”: € 20 per day for eight hours of work. Sitting next to him, Sahr, the youngest one, openly disagrees and says that the money is even less (€12 for twelve hours) and that he refuses that “slave” job, preferring “the traffic lights of Patras”. The other two guests seem to agree with him, but one of them, Abdul, will leave with the eldest, taken on by the local

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illegal recruiters or perhaps by Ibrahim himself. We try to understand their story and that of the place where they live, and Ibrahim points to a series of maps and dates drawn on the kitchen walls―marks of a confused geography, dots and arrows that essentially indicate circular directions without any clear references to cardinal points. However, it is the dates that strike us the most, like the etchings on the walls of a cell, the oldest one of which dates back to October 2008, the day of the first arrival in the house, and it was Ibrahim who made it. The following day I contribute to the preparation of meals to be delivered to the inhabitants of the factories and of the “jungle”: two enormous pots in which vegetables, potatoes, legumes, and rice are cooked and subsequently poured into two hundred aluminum containers, each accompanied by fruit and a pita bread. I am peeling and cutting potatoes together with Umar, a Pakistani thirty-something from Kashmir, the eldest among the guests of the NNK headquarters, who arrived in Patras less than a month ago and tells me about his journey through Iran and Turkey: with his finger, he draws on the table the regular and intermittent rides provided by passeurs to elude checks by the Turkish police, walking for hours to find each other again about ten kilometers down the road, all night long, sleeping by day, all the way to the Greek border. On the table, he composes the invisible drawing of an itinerary with surges, like an electrocardiogram or a grid on a graph paper. Then, in September, comes the final “tear” of his crossing, partly swimming across the Evros river, and yet another ride, the last one, to Orestiada, before reaching Diavata, Thessaloniki. I ask him why Patras, and he answers that he has a cousin who has a pizzeria in Italy, in Ventimiglia, and he wants to join him. I tell him that the situation in Ventimiglia is not very different from that in Patras, making up a deferred frontier that becomes gradual, as though it were the next ring in a series of concentric circles, perhaps hierarchical and stepped. He answers that for him it is very different, a way to move toward “Europe”. Food delivery happens rather quickly. The NNK van visits the various delivery locations, where the groups of people on the move who are trapped in this strange outpost regularly converge to wait. Some of them are already queueing along with a bunch of stray dogs who are also clearly hungry. The first two locations are not very crowded, with small groups made up of men of different ages, mostly young, with some older ones and a young woman, the only female presence. The last stop is at the abandoned factories, and here the distribution is more irregular and prolonged,

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with a decidedly more crowded queue. From the chipped walls of the rundown buildings emerge small groups made up of young men, mostly very young, who form a regular, almost uninterrupted, queue, with some queueing up twice for a second round. The attentive eyes of the volunteers notice that a young man to whom they were meant to return clean clothes is missing. After a quick exchange of glances, a complex dialogue, and some shaky translations, some say he has “jumped”. The clothes go to someone else.

Epilogue: to Europe The approximate and collective reconstruction of the three days of Diavata, a sort of “description of a battle” that is, however, delayed and based on information gathered from indirect sources, images on the web, reportages on social networks, online newspapers, and dialogues with the residents of the City Plaza, falls outside of direct, first-person narrative, and it is significant for two sets of reasons. Firstly, for the event in itself, the way it was collectively and autonomously planned and organized (the red herring regarding its destination and its sudden acceleration), which triggered the militarized response of the institutions that, by repressing and isolating the march through a sort of “sanitary cordon”, rejects its legitimacy (criminalizing its matrix) and political rationality (offering an interpretation controlled by others and based on victimization). Secondly, it is significant insofar as refracted, like a fire seen from afar, within an environment that is “close” to it and sensitive as the City Plaza. Thus, the meeting and the collective text that takes shape within it become ethnographically thick, when the various actors involved re-elaborate and interpret a series of facts which, however distant and not experienced directly, are still “close to the experience” (Geertz, 1973), providing a series of accounts that directly involve them as activists and as migrants trapped in various ways in Athens and in Greece. The short circuit between such “experiential” proximity and the material distance from Diavata, which is still somehow perceived and suffered, seems to return a more general and intrinsically violent sense of the specific “trap” that looms both over the migrants staying at the Plaza and over those who participated in the march. Moreover, the fact that even within the Plaza there was no clear sense of destination, timing, or general intentions of the mobilization, is a symptom of the specific masking and red herring strategies used by those who organized and participated in the “caravan” and, more generally, by the irregular and

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accelerated time frame which characterizes mobility practices and exit strategies, movements, and escapes within the Greek “trap”. It is precisely this last aspect which calls for closer analysis. The two escape stories told by Ajar and Ajwan, with their opposite outcomes, still bring to light the substantial event-centered nature of the moment of rupture when, in a seemingly abrupt manner, there is a decision to interrupt the protracted normality of a confinement situation: the gesture through which, more or less suddenly, there is an attempt to sever the hold of the leash that looms over and governs from a distance the everyday lives, in Athens and in Greece, of migrants and asylum seekers. However, they are always occasions and moments which, however sudden, are planned, decided over time and, above all, in the shadows, and whose organization necessarily involves a series of actors and situations providing support. In both cases, then, a crucial factor is staying at facilities that are not “institutional” (the City Plaza and the Lavrio camp, respectively), relatively or totally lacking registers, time restrictions, and checks on entry and exit times aimed at reducing and inhibiting any form of autonomy― that is without the direct imposition of a leash. More generally, these support structures, stations or networks of a hypothetical Underground Railroad, can find their first and immediate localization in Omonia Square, despite the fact that it is a place where services have a cost based upon fluctuating bargaining on the basis of a rather selective pricing that tends toward rising (the overall cost of Ajar’s passport and ticket amounted to €2000 and seems to be in line with others reported to me), to which a series of guarantees―almost an insurance system―have gradually been added (a deposit paid in advance and blocked until the country of destination has been reached, followed by the payment of the remaining instalment: 1+2 in Ajar’s case). Similar things can also be found along other infra and transcontinental “migratory routes”, like the ones described by Dawood and his housemates in Calais. Therefore, to access the Omonia Square bazaar, people need to have a whole series of capitals available to them―first of all, material capital and thus family, relational, and more generically social ones. Yet, Omonia alone is not enough. Despite being often necessary (especially in terms of “exit tickets”, travel tickets, and documents), the support network that can be found in the square is not sufficient to grant an exit, be it through the main door (Athens airport) or, especially, through the secondary ones (basically the northern borders toward the Balkan route), for which it can turn out to be uninfluential and often not even consulted.

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From this point of view, Ajar’s case is particularly significant: as he confided to me during our last encounter at the Plaza, the arrival of his European friend accelerated a plan and a decision that had been made for some time, hopefully offering more guarantees of going unnoticed or looking credible as “tourists” or volunteers. Unfortunately, that did not happen, but it ended up actually jeopardizing their chances to get across― the mixed couple ended up increasing the visibility of a crossing and an exit that required a peculiar kind of shadow. However, this does not mean that in other situations being accompanied grants more chances of success, to prove the weight of the “color line” in the control and surveillance strategies in official transit zones, and, more generally, to prove the fact that the network, the hypothetical Underground Railroad built through these kinds of crossings, must be able to count on the support of just as many “abolitionists”, most likely “white”. Ajwan’s case, which was reported indirectly in the third person, only leaves room for a series of conjectures tied to her gender, to her age, and especially to the credibility of her document (an ostensibly authentic Turkish passport) as well as to a certain tolerance on the part of the Greek police (also due to the tense political relations with Turkey, which makes them not hostile toward refugees of Kurdish origin). In addition to this, there is a more general disposition to “let people cross” (similar to that shown by the Italian border police in Ventimiglia) to then up the price of checks on external borders required on a European level. In both cases, however, any attempt to escape still remains a gamble, a hazard whose consequences may have a significant weight, both in penal terms (protracted detention, annulment of asylum applications, withdrawal of protection and of the cash card, and so on) and in material terms (loss of the paid deposit and extra costs to reissue a document). All of this, in any case, is “taken into account”, and many of these negative conditions do not always (actually, seldom) occur: pushbacks following a check after a more or less prolonged detention may result in a straightforward release without any consequences, especially for those who do not benefit from subsidies, provisional recognitions, or pending applications (like in Ajar’s case); the confiscated passport may be included in the deposit, and the money that has already been paid still remains bound to a final successful escape. In all of these cases, the price to pay seems to be configured above all as a return to the starting point, which is often played down with the words “next time”.

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What is the main risk then? In the two cases being examined, ostensibly, next to the frustration for potential failure and the weight of having to start all over again, it is above all the idea of having to confront again the “trap”, the empty harshness of a time definitively hooked to an invisible leash, without being able to have control over one’s life as well as risking a leap into the void, like that between the walls of the port in Patras. The situation in the case of other exit routes is different and riskier. “Pablo” decides to put off his plan to escape along the Balkan route, via Kacavir, Albania, waiting for amis, both in the sense of travel companions and a support network, at least initially. In his case, “next time” does not simply indicate the repetition of an aborted attempt, but rather the moment and the appropriate environmental and psychophysical conditions to embark on an extenuating journey, on which uncertain crossings and time frames do not allow for big error margins. In the face of very high risks, constituted by an unsafe territory without any support or “stations” like Albania, Kosovo, or Montenegro, by the length of the journey and the number of national borders to be crossed, a potential failure means very low chances to recover, and, in the best case scenario, it is configured as a prolonged stationing in detention facilities along the route or as a pushback and as a variable radius deportation―to Bosnia, on the Croatian border, and, from there, all the way back to Greece, potentially down to Turkey, if not even to the country of origin.4 Thus, the price to pay is decidedly higher in terms of economic and especially physical consequences, in terms of security and personal safety. Nonetheless, the Balkan route and its continuous corrections, established by a variable geometry based on the stiffening and on the blocks through which the European capture apparatus as well as the Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian national ones respond to the movements of the “nomad machine” of migrant mobility, remain a viable exit route, especially for those (the majority) who do not have access to the necessary capital to exit via the main gateways― the airports―of the Greek trap. More generally, these stories show the effects and the weight, experienced firsthand, of a way of governing mobility which essentially acts “through mobility” (Tazzioli, 2020), which holds people back and contains them rather than blocking or stopping them, hijacking movements, 4  Recently, Frontex, the European border police, overtly transgressed its mandate, which is limited to the territories of EU countries, by starting to operate directly in Serbia and Bosnia, organizing expulsions and pushbacks of migrants and asylum seekers to Greece and Turkey.

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multiplying their duration by stemming their flow, and forcing into a sort of perpetual Brownian motion, almost orbital, those “trapped” subjects― like in the case of Ajar’s return to Athens or of the systematic deportations to the capital of the “obscure number” (which is still somehow tracked by NNK) of young Afghans captured between the trucks on the docks of Patras after having climbed over the double ring of walls that surrounds the port. The extension and the variable geography of this sadistic game of the goose/ snakes and ladders correspond to the “radius” of the leash that governs the “internal” and curbed mobility of migrants and asylum seekers. In tension points, the flexible range of the hold and the forced mobility to which it compels reach a limit, often a national border (but also a local, urban one, like in the case of Larissas Station before the march of Diavata), and the usually invisible rope re-emerges and is pulled, yanking and leading back into the Greek trap and beyond. Therefore, all these stories go on to constitute a sort of background of the more general “spectacle of the border”, staged every day on the islands, in Lesvos, Samos, and Chios. They actually enact a sort of other side, complementary and delayed, of that spectacle, and contribute to strengthening a regime of (im)mobility and (in)visibility, both of which are forced (De Genova et al., 2015). In this suspended, dynamic, and restrained dimension, in the dilated time frame of a protracted wait, and in the restricted spaces of an urban landscape scarred by the reflections of the “crisis” (economic, of borders, and of Europe) and of their way of governing in line with the diktats of ordoliberal orthodoxy (almost an in vivo “laboratory” which is reflected by a widespread impoverishment, finding its own correlative in the line of closed down shops, vacant apartments, abandoned houses, ruins, and the seeming redemption, in a further trap, of historical neighborhoods in the process of becoming gentrified), prevails the perception of a place of transition, hopefully of transit, where one can essentially stop over for an imposed amount of time. Obviously, not everyone shares this perception, and the migrants or asylum seekers―like in the case of the four Sudanese met in Patras, but also of many more migrants and refugees who were less precarious and exploited―who have decided to turn Athens and Greece into a destination or a “home” are not a minority. It is a choice they acted on, a motivated choice (besides, before and beyond turning into a transit zone, Greece, much like Italy, was and still is a country to which people immigrate, which the last decade has turned into a country from which people emigrate), but it is also a specific “indication of a method” to be projected onto a more general geography that speaks of borders arranged in concentric circles based on an ostensibly hierarchical and stepped order

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(the scenario which Umar, the Pakistani man I met in Patras, is bound to encounter once he hopefully reaches Ventimiglia and which may be repeated in Calais), made of routes improvised along the way within a territory that could be defined, so to speak, as constantly “deferred”. Besides, no matter how well prepared and organized, every escape always requires a decisive dose of improvisation. More precisely, I am referring to the ability to seize the moment when the grip is loosened and leave based on routes, journeys, and destinations that are defined along the way, as people go along: practices which elsewhere I have linked with Foucault’s concept of “counterconducts”, that is to the idea of people “conducting themselves together in a different way” (Foucault, 2009; Rahola, 2015), against the direction, the time frame, the constrained itineraries, and the suffocated mobility regime imposed by the specific “pastoral power”, sovereign and governmental, of a leash. This is because it actually seems to be about this, and this is also what any attempt to escape within the European borderland tells us. For the majority of people on the move who have arrived over the last two/three years and who have been forced to reside there, however, Greece really feels like an enormous island, a confinement area with variable intensity, gradual but generalized, as well as a country divided between islands and the continent, where the Greek capital acting as a mirage almost takes on the features of a separate place, a hub from which routes can be reinvented. “To Europe”, the apparent contradiction in the way of designing an “elsewhere” and a destination hoped for by many of the subjects we encountered, also tells this basic truth. Moreover, such insularity and liminality are reflected in the slippery nature of mobility practices that keep moving in and out of the field of vision of European governance and of its prose: “secondary movements” within Greek territory that move back into the shadows of “primary movements” when they insinuate themselves into the external folds of the Balkan routes to resurface in and around Trieste, yet again “secondary” and (in)visible. In all cases, what is being searched for is essentially a breach, a passage, an itinerary, and a subterranean network leading toward an “elsewhere” that is always “further down the road”. This search and this escape, their planning and their actualization, are essentially configured as a rupture with respect to the racialized spaces and the constrained time frames imposed by capture apparatuses that work like a leash, finding their institutional translation in a phantasmagoria of euphemisms―Dublin 1, 2, 3, “secondary movements”, “hotspots”―and in material and immaterial border

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devices―camps, walls, ports, filings, fingerprints, permits, visas, protections, and so on. In any case, at these latitudes (much like in Ventimiglia, in Ceuta and Melilla, but also in Calais) to many trapped migrants Europe really looks like an “elsewhere” that is delayed over and over again, almost a fantasy. Perhaps, it is precisely this open and indefinite―yet subterranean and deferred―dimension that represents the only reason why it is worth continuing to name it.

References De Genova, N., Mezzadra, S., Pickles, J., et al. (2015). New keywords: Migration and borders. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 55–87. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population. Lectures at the Collège de France (1977-1978). Macmillan. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. Basic Books. Perec, G. (1989). L’infra-ordinaire. Seuil. Rahola, F. (2015). As we go along. Spazi, tempi e soggetti delle contro-condotte. Materiali Foucaultiani, 7(8), 275–294. Tazzioli, M. (2020). Governing migrant mobility through mobility: Containment and dispersal at the internal frontiers of Europe. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(1), 3–19.

CHAPTER 10

Pozzallo, Sicily June 2019

Memories/Resonances/Presences We are in Pozzallo. This town in southeastern Sicily is the port through which thousands, tens of thousands of people have passed over the last 15  years; perhaps, this is the port par excellence for landings in the Mediterranean, a Lampedusa on the Sicilian mainland, which does not stop people, but rather sorts and channels them toward the reception system, repatriation circuits, and clandestine work. As the first landing point in Europe, starting point of routes, trajectories, escapes, and transfers, Pozzallo is an extraordinary site, a crucial location from which one observe the effects of not only the leash but also the Underground Railway in the Underground Europe that we are exploring. Pozzallo―not unlike Calais, Ventimiglia, Lampedusa, and Ceuta and Melilla―is a name that constantly recurs in the stories we have collected over these years of ethnographic observation in border zones (Fig. 10.1). We accompany Kamto, a Cameroonian asylum seeker, to retrace the steps of his first entry into Italy during 2016: his arrival at the hotspot, his admission into an official protection facility (an Extraordinary Reception Center, CAS in the jargon of the state), and finally his transfer to a city in the North after having led a guests’ revolt aimed at obtaining an improvement in the living conditions. By physically going back to look at a recent past through today’s gaze, the aim is to search for a way to regenerate memory and observe how © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_10

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Fig. 10.1  At the literary café, Pozzallo (“Sorry if I haven’t drowned”). Source: photo taken by the authors

places and a given space can re-invoke and inspire reflection. This ethnographic work is also an attempt to bring into collective memory, to put it in Maurice Halbwachs’s (1949) words, the subaltern voices of survivors and traveling migrants which would otherwise be left out of the picture. As Jedlowski (2000: 32) says: “Collective memory is always intrinsically plural: it is the result, never definitely acquired, of conflicts and compromises between a different wills and different memories”. This situated collective memory, which I have searched for through my dialogue with Kamto (one of the 181,436 migrants who have landed in Italy in 2016) and his/our encounters with social workers and migrants on the field, is a reconstruction of the past for the present, and it carries within it the signs of the tensions, frictions, and conflicts that fuel the discourse on migrations in Italy today. While we were wandering around Pozzallo, in the southeast of Sicily, in June of 2019, during a sort of peripatetic ethnography, a far-right

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government had been in power for over a year, acting and passing decrees that Achille Mbembe (2003) would define as necropolitical. In Italy, this consisted of not saving shipwrecked people and closing the ports to those who have been rescued by NGO ships, violating maritime law inscribed in countless international conventions and pieces of legislation, letting them die, making them invisible, hindering the search and rescue system, continuing to negotiate with Libyan armed militias, self-declared political authorities, and traffickers to make sure that blocking migratory flows becomes their main business. There have been tangible results: arrivals have decreased drastically, while deaths have increased.1 The few independent ships that can get close to the Italian coast have found closed ports, have had their vessels seized and have been tried for aiding and abetting irregular migration, have been fined for millions of euros, and have endured infinite waiting times before they were able to let their load of suffering people disembark. At the same time, due to new laws which have been grotesquely named referring to the concept of security, obtaining a protection document is becoming increasingly difficult,2 and asylum seekers are being denied the right to be added to the civil registry and have a mailing address, which are the basic legal requirements for any interaction with bureaucracy in the host societies.

Dying, Telling There is a whitish light, the sea is still, the sun is burning and makes you see things like in a mirage. In the distance you can just about see the contour of Malta. From the Piazzale dei Marinai (Sailors’ Square) in Pozzallo, we observe together the pier where the ship that rescued Kamto in 2016 docked and the walls of the hotspot, the building where landings where dealt with. We are not allowed to access this area, which is under the control of the Italian and European authorities. These days the building is 1  On migrants’ conditions in Libya, see UNSMIL (2018). Libya never signed the 1951 Geneva Convention for the protection of refugees. In the second half of 2018, according to UNHCR (2019), 85% of people intercepted in the central Mediterranean are now made to disembark in Libya; in 2018 there were 23,400 arrivals via sea in Italy, 80% less than the previous year. The death rate increased dramatically, from one death in 38 arrivals in 2017 to one in 14 in 2018. 2  According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, in the first 11 months of 2019, there was a rejection rate of 80%. During 2018, it was 67%. See: http://www.libertaciviliimmigrazione.dlci.interno.gov.it/it/documentazione/statistica/i-numeri-dellasilo.

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disused as the externalization of Europe’s migration policies has put the sea rescue system under the control of the so-called Libyan coastguard. This first point of entry into Italy was a space/time of the control authorities rather than an expression of the will to rescue or a civil society “welcome”. It is a complex device that produces a power/knowledge regarding the classification and sorting in a kind of humanitarian triage (Pallester-­ Wilkins, 2016): on one side, those who can be deported thanks to readmission agreements with the countries of origin (D’Angelo, 2019), on the other, the potential refugees and guests of a temporary reception system (Sciurba, 2017). As Anderlini (2020) has pointed out, the term hotspot, which has become famous as a symbol of European border management (European Commission, 2015), evokes the rhetoric of war, crime, emergency, and epidemiology―all areas restricted to specific experts, which is why our curiosity as ethnographers must be kept at a distance. Behind us are the Via dei Pozzallesi Emigranti (Migrant Pozzallesi Street) and Pizzeria Scordapene (Forget-sorrows). The very topographic and commercial signs tell a piece of the history of this big town of 20,000 inhabitants, where generations of men have been making a living as seamen. When we ask the locals what Pozzallo has been living on, the answer is univocal: Pozzallo lives on the “embarked”, such as the many Pozzallesi who became merchant navy sailors. This noun sounds like the reflection of a working-class aristocracy in a context of unemployment and poverty. Emigration and immigration are therefore inscribed in the flesh, in the history and in the present of Pozzallo. Those who are embarked and those who disembark belong in contiguous worlds, as they fall onto the same land, but at the same time they are distant, as they do not communicate―even spatially. In the town’s high street, a small but imposing building carries an ancient sign that reads Società di Mutuo Soccorso dei Marinai (Sailors’ Mutual Support Society) and is the hangout of older “embarked” who play cards. Far from the town center and out of sight, the hotspot detains and keeps the “disembarked” sealed off in a vacuum of opportunities and self-determination, “a spatial and temporal chokepoint” (Tazzioli, 2016). Even death, a possible point of contact between the “disembarked” and the “embarked”, is reflected in a unilateral commemoration. At the end of the Piazzale dei Marinai, there is a monument to the Caduti del Mare (fallen at sea) with three rusty masts held together with a scaffolding post, not even a creased flag flapping on it. An anchor lying on the ground evokes war and work―fallen at war, fallen at work. And yet, part of the

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fallen at sea remains excluded from this decadent celebration. Kamto stops and, gazing at the pier and the hotspot from afar, tells me about the stories that are not worthy of being included and acknowledged by this monument, the victims of the European border, the 36,570 deaths confirmed between 1993 and May 2018―just a small and visible fraction of a tragic, unknown total―since when UNITED (2019) started to archive fragments and information published by the international press in an attempt to give the fallen a name.3 Here, too, the hotspot, the beaches, and the sea have given back hundreds of bodies which have been filling cemeteries all over Sicily. Kamto tells me: “I’ve seen the friends I shared parts of the journey with die at sea. I wonder where their bodies are now”. We suddenly find ourselves in the cemetery of a town further inland, among nameless graves where paper sheets stuck with rusty pushpins mysteriously resist in the bad weather: IMMIGRANT N. 14, SAMPIERI LANDING, 18/11/2005. Kamto thinks aloud about what his destiny could have been when he was shipwrecked, and he keeps repeating to himself (and to us) the same question that tormented Primo Levi: “Why was it me who survived? Why was I rescued after 12 h at sea between Libya and Sicily and not my friends? Why am I one of the saved ones and not a submerged? How can I heal this wound?” Kamto―like Primo Levi―finds solace in giving us his individual story, which is nothing but a collective story fighting to become collective memory, to be acknowledged. And it is through narration that this process unfolds and can become a homage to the victims of border policies. If we had to follow the traces of a public monument for the nameless fallen―unburied dead of the sea/border, deaths which are not natural but profoundly political (Salvador & Denunzio, 2019; Heller & Pezzani, 2014; Rygiel, 2016; Babels, 2017)―we might be able to glimpse beyond the metal grills of the port, where there are many wooden vessels and old repurposed fishing boats, run aground, balanced on a sea of concrete. From outside (we are not allowed to access this area either) you can make out the names in Arabic on the sides where the paint has already come off, rusty metal canopies, shattered holds and decks. This could be material for another public monument, but actually these objects under judicial requisition have turned into ruins, residues. They seem lifeless, inanimate things, 3  According to UNCHCR, from 2014 to 2019, dead and missing in the Mediterranean are 19,098 (see: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean#_ga=2.58946797. 1373647299.1571650007-261321748.1571650007).

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even though they have been loaded with voices, smells, fears, hopes, death, and life. At first, those who survive have to deal with and overcome a trauma that manifests itself externally as a kind of mutism. “We all get here in this state”, says Kamto, “lost in ourselves and in what we’ve seen. Often being silent and closed off are the reactions of most of us”. After dealing with his grief for a long time, Kamto has decided to tell his story, perhaps in search of a therapeutic outcome. His reflection, however, is full of doubts and ambivalence, torn between wanting to stop and the desire to keep telling his story, undecided whether to back out of an oppressive identity or politicize his memory so that it can be useful to the present. Telling my story is a way of forgetting, to overcome. But I also feel stuck in my story. I’m a different person now and I don’t want to always be brought back to that Kamto that no longer exists. I’ve decided that this is my last testimony. Many of us don’t want to talk to avoid bringing back terrible memories. I also start seeing images, they become stronger and each image brings back another one, like a chain. Often after telling my story I can’t sleep. Every week I always tell the same things. I’m tired. Everyone wants to know. Everyone is curious. I want to tell it not only for you, so that you know, but also for us, for the guys who, like me, went on the journey. To set an example, so that others tell their stories, too, and I can stop telling mine. I’ve seen things that I’ll never be able to forget, even if I was only a student escaping a dictatorial regime when I left.

In Kamto’s account there are three temporal dimensions―past, present, and future. Together we are trying to work on residues of memory emerging here and now in Pozzallo, searching for what Benjamin called dialectical images, images that resonate with the present. As Taussig (2004) also reminds us, this rescue operation of the past, this “rememoring”, can take on the strength of a reawakening of awareness, in which it is today’s gaze, the gaze of someone who spent three years waiting within the official protection system, which breeds a new awareness, combining shock with critical distance. And in fact, when we come back to this corner of Sicily, not only the individual present but also the sociopolitical present is so different from the past Kamto lived through here in 2016. People are no longer being rescued at sea, and those who do it are being persecuted, landings are few and far between, the hotspot is almost deserted, the institutional reception system is in the process of being dismantled, and many of its workers are now unemployed.

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Policing Landings We can think of this as ethnographic serendipity, because we are in Pozzallo just when one of the few authorized landings takes place. A tug boat called Asso (ace) has rescued 62 people off the coast of Libya. We go under the walls of the hotspot, which awakes from its forced slumber; we see the workers coming and going as they get ready for the operation, and they start filling the building. Police forces are guarding its perimeter, European officials wearing colorful vests and speaking English fluently get through the entrances. The boat is still at the horizon, like a mirage. Beside us there are only a curious tourist and an old man fishing. No rejection or welcome committee. The townspeople are elsewhere. Despite being so close, Kamto does not recognize the space that hosted him: “I was inside, then from there they loaded us onto coaches to an unknown destination”. Kamto has only one image―or at least that is the only one he wants to convey to me―of the hotspot: that of a container and an interrogation, the first image of his coming into existence in Italy. As soon as I disembark, they separate me from the other rescued. They show me a picture of my boat from above. I can see myself in the picture! Those who interrogate me ask me to identify the smugglers―those who were piloting the boat. They’re offering me citizenship, you know? But I didn’t want to press charges against those who had just saved me, and the police held me in the container alone for a few days. They’re immigrants like us. These guys may have traveled for free, but they were hit and subjected to violence as much as we were.

The planned landing is mainly a police operation involving identification and sorting. The migrants’ boat is intercepted and destroyed at sea, and rescued people are taken to a specialized center. People are like goods, objects that must be checked, sanitized, hygienized, and classified, with minimum room for individual wishes. The feeling of being a “thing”, although rescued from death, is widespread in the story Kamto and many other refugees have told when asked to retrace their first steps after arriving in Italy. The aim of this planning is to contain autonomous landings in which migrants find their way around the country and continue their journey. Planning implies a logistical operation involving different sequences and stakeholders, a cooperation between national authorities and supranational agencies, different types of knowledge and power that build up and

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unfold (Martin & Tazzioli, 2016; Tazzioli, 2018). Among these, that of the police stands out, as we are reminded by Zoe, a nurse we find through a network of supportive parishes in the area and who has a long-standing work experience in the center: Sometimes I was the only one on duty when 600 people were landing. As health workers we have always supported the point of view of the patients, sometimes by opposing ourselves to the transfers decided by the police, which maybe split families. But, of course, there are a lot of police officers and they’re in charge.

Zoe has found work in public health thanks to the landings, but more generally the management of arrivals and reception have given the local economy a major boost. Carmela, our host and the director of a cooperative that is no longer active, tells us that: During peak periods, before 2015 we employed up to 90 people. The City Council would call and say … she’s unemployed, he needs cancer treatment, he lost his parents. … Here landings have always been welcomed, they’ve brought money. Hotels worked with police officers and carabinieri, preparing meals for hundreds of people. Then many started to do it just for the money.

Carmela’s words describe a moment of “market” growth. But what happens when the protection system is radically restricted as a result of new policies against the “cost of migration”? Renata and Lucia, two workers over 40 who are now unemployed, note that: “There were 35 of us in the cooperative and now there are only 5 workers left … here there are thousands of us who have lost our jobs in the reception system. We don’t know how to do anything else, landings are what we know how to do”. Despite the professional skills acquired after ten years of experience, they fear for their future.4 Checking people is one of the core activities of humanitarian work and ethic: “for each landing there’s a code. There are a lot of guys and they’re not here for long. We can’t help but use numbers to call them”. Kamto laughs; he does not remember his number at 4  According to an Oxfam Italia (2019) report, there are about 36,000 workers in this sector, a workforce that is made up of young Italians. The CGIL trade union has estimated that there have been 15,000 redundancies in this sector as a result of the new security/reception policies to the paradoxical cry of “Italians first”.

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Pozzallo, but he remembers that at each camp he has always had a number to replace his name. Our encounter with the two unemployed workers casts a light on the ambivalent relationship between migration and local life. Landings are good for the local economy so long as they remain distant from the residents’ daily lives. Pozzallo remains indifferent as long as this safety distance is maintained. In fact, the hotspot where they worked is spatially and socially far from the town center: “people are neither hostile nor supportive … journalists gave it bad publicity, as if there were black people around town and who knows how the tourists are going to react, but the landings have not had an impact on local life. It’s all there on the pier, sealed off”. Checks and safety distance re-evoke the Foucauldian genealogy (1977) of the prison―segregation and discipline, leprosy as an exclusion scheme, the plague as a disciplining scheme. The hotspot approach, which involves sealing off the site of the planned landing and de facto redefining it as a condition of semi-detention, cancels off the spaces where informal solidarity can develop, thus making any free, casual, and impure interactions between the disembarked and the locals impossible. Enzo is the host of the literary cafe of Pozzallo, a precious source of alternative cultural life―from LGBT rights to street art. This is how he remembers the times before the hotspot: Before young migrants used to roam around the city, they were free, they came here, we organized initiatives like Italian language and art courses, “diffused hospitality”, they could sleep here if they wanted to. We organized cultural events in front of the center, juggling shows, and we used to bring them here with us. Some of the locals complained. With the hotspot authorities locked the guys away, it was impossible to build relationships.

This is how two workers from a center for unaccompanied minors comment on the security turn: “Before it was the civil protection that used to welcome landings and people. Then, from one moment to the next, the main color became the blue of police uniforms”. Some informants speak of the arrival of the European Border Control Agencies in Pozzallo as a way of putting everything under external supervision, a procedure change which reverses what used to be the prevailing attitude among Italian authorities―let them pass through, so that migrants would continue their journey toward their European destinations (Pinelli, 2017; Ambrosini, 2019). From 2015 onward, the new European approach to migrations has

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been trying to block, according to the Dublin regulations, detaining migrants in transit, often against their will (Fontanari, 2016; Vianelli, 2017), within the protection system of the first country of arrival. It is in this political context that Kamto’s personal story is rooted, as he was fingerprinted in Pozzallo. The feeling we get from his words is that he was considered a “thing”, unaware of his own destiny, without any tools to manage his future. From the very first moments, “when I landed, nobody told me anything about my rights, nobody asked me anything about what had happened to me in Libya, I didn’t meet any lawyers, counsellors, mediators. All they wanted me to do was press charges against the smugglers”. And if Kamto was a “thing”, he could be moved and transferred by the authorities as they pleased, so he was loaded onto a bus headed for the reception center in Rosolini, leaving Pozzallo, of which he will not have any memories other than that of a container and a long police interrogation.

The Scafista: A Smuggler Savior In the most widespread narrative, not only in the media but also in institutional rhetoric, there is only one villain of the sea: the scafista, the smuggler who drives migrant boats across the Mediterranean. It is something that is taken for granted, an element of the border spectacle (De Genova, 2013). The term, which had previously been associated with smuggling cigarettes by sea and has now been entirely redefined in relation to irregular migration, is usually associated with mafia, profiteering, and trafficking. It is, however, a “veil-image” (Didi-Huberman, 2012) which works to remove the gaze from the structural dimension of the context, as for all those who cross the Mediterranean with makeshift means there are no possible ways of migrating that are legal, there are no ships or scheduled flights for which they can buy a ticket. One of the scapegoats on which to offload the costs of the European Union’s necropolitics is indeed the smuggler. Investigative efforts are concentrated on their identification, as each landing needs a culprit. According to Renata and Lucia, the two unemployed workers, “the police in Ragusa have been working here forever, they spot them right away”. They sound as though they are talking about intuition, magic, a knowledge based on the ability to decipher small signs unknown to the layman―clothes, burns, mobile phones, objects possessed, nationality. Zoe―the supportive nurse―tells us what happens after: “The arrested scafista are moved to the

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prison in Ragusa, then a few days later they’re released, and they end up under a bridge. We deal with them through Caritas [a catholic charity], we put them up at the parish”. Much like Paola, a lawyer and an activist, who defends them in court: “If there were three landings, they’d stop six people, an alleged smuggler and a helper for each boat. They didn’t have basic defense conditions granted. The public defenders would encourage them to acknowledge the crime. The police encourage the other migrants to testify, promising all sorts of documents”. Kamto listens to them speak and finds correspondences with his personal experience. To him the scafista is just someone who is at the helm, a somewhat improvised, somewhat forced captain, a migrant like all the others who has gone through all the same violence and who deserves respect: “Those who are accused by the authorities are the best ones, because they’ve saved us by managing to bring us all the way here. We should give them a prize. The smuggler is a savior!” In general, the status of the agents of irregular migration is ambiguous by nature―saints and/or demons, depending on the final result. In Latin America, “coyotes”5 are often worshipped, with masses and prayers dedicated to them, and their families have considerable status in the moral economy of the village (Lagomarsino & Ramirez, 2009; Hagan, 2008; Sanchez, 2017). Net of the symbolic capital and the reputation, in each clandestine journey smugglers represent a risk factor, but they also provide a service and protection―something Kamto knows well as he has participated in that kind of exchange: To move north from Cameroon I had to work along the way. There is no route, stops and journey time are unpredictable. To fund my journey, for months I helped a person who worked with migration at the border. I used to bring him customers, my fellow townspeople. Then the Nigerian used to take them on to the next step toward Niger. Two months later, I managed to get a free ride to the north as a reward for my work. He wasn’t a trafficker; he just had a truck.

However, in Libya things are different, as those who are actually at the helm are nearly always victims, prisoners who try to pay the price of their liberation, not a small entrepreneur of the journey or a smuggler. Listening 5  Tsianos and Papadopoulos (2007) have pointed out how, even in other geographical contexts, the demonization of irregular migration workers is often associated to a process of animalization.

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to the description of a boarding to cross the Channel of Sicily by the direct witnesses makes us reflect on the analogies with the science of stowage and loading―goods, things, that must be arranged then stay still. And the traffickers stay ashore. Kamto tells me the order in which these operations are carried out. Once at sea, one remains still in the few square centimeters available. Taussig (2004) has wondered about the descriptions that are missing from ethnographic accounts, such as physical sensations like heat. And in fact the images of overcrowded boats that circulate in the media do not convey the screams, the vomit, the prayers, the stench, the urine, the gas, the stuffiness, the fear, the cramps, the dizziness, the dead bodies among the living, the sound of the waves, and, least of all, the horror of the bodies and the cadavers recovered. We meet Kenny, a Gambian scafista, thanks to the supportive parishes and the anarchist collectives in the Ragusa area. Within a few days of his landing he has been arrested, imprisoned, and thrown out in the street. Zoe and Paola take us to him, but it is Kamto who convinces him to leave a testimony. When he starts telling his story, he stares into the void as he speaks, as if he could see the images of what he is telling us. Then every so often he goes back to staring at us and insistently shows us the traces that have built up on his body―proof and signs of torture. A line on his foot indicates that he was tied upside down. Some lumps on his head show that he was beaten. A strange curve on his neck, almost as if some mass were missing from the outline of his face, suggests that a chunk of flesh may have been removed. Kamto and Kenny meet in a park on the outskirts of a Sicilian city―almost an encounter between someone who was saved and a savior. This is what Kenny tells Kamto about his experience: I can’t swim, I know nothing about the sea. They hanged me by my feet and beat me up in Sabrata. They chose me to drive because I didn’t have enough money. They beat me up, and said I had to call someone about the money. They forced me to drive the boat. I’m a human being, I don’t want to die. I accepted. My life in Libya was nothing but prison, I escaped and then prison. I didn’t know anyone, only the traffickers, only the guards. They transferred me from one prison to another prison. They bought me and sold me, they beat me up. I ran out of money in Agadez. They forced me, they forced me. If I’d known about this hell, I wouldn’t have come, but I couldn’t even go back. Many people are still stuck. They force you to do, to see unimaginable things. Libya was my mistake. We’re poor, really. Africa is corruption, poverty, no hope. What should we do? I want my life, that’s why I

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went through Libya. But there you can’t walk down the streets, they enslave you or they kill you. I can’t forget, I can’t forgive, no, no … I want to tell, you must know. I was in Libya for at least 9 months in prison. They beat me up, all the time. Then they put me at the helm. While I was driving the people on the boat were praying and screaming, calling for God’s help. That night many boats had set off and we saw one sink. The Arab pushed me with his rifle, telling me to go. We went and we arrived. In Pozzallo four of us from our boat were caught, they didn’t explain anything to us, I asked the men in blue if they spoke English … nothing. They didn’t tell me that I was being detained because I had driven the boat. They only made me sign documents I didn’t understand. Then they took me to prison. What I wanted in my life was to be happy, free. My mistake was believing that Europe was happiness, that it was freedom, that it was going to school. And I said: “I want to go to that place in Europe, I have to go to Europe”.

His story is not linear, it is repetitive. His hypnotic voice moves without mediations from Libyan prisons to the Italian prison. We realize this later, at the end of the meeting. It is like an overlapping story which leaves even Kenny in disbelief. He cannot understand how the European dream greeted him with another prison and another camp: I felt sick after we got off the boat, there wasn’t even a doctor in the cell, only some pills and then they threw me out in the street. … I was under a bridge for three months, it was very dark, I was scared, I didn’t know what to do, I had no money, I had no documents, there were others who had been accused of driving the boat like me, we tried to clean up the place and set up a camp. Fortunately, Caritas came to give us a hand.

Few words/phrases make up his account: “beaten”, “boat”, “prison”, “Europe”, “Libya”, “they forced me”, “I didn’t understand”, “camp”. The same words punctuate and structure Kamto’s stories, as he has also been through Libyan prisons. The difference between Kamto’s experience and Kenny’s is not qualitative, it is only quantitative. They lived through and saw the same things, but on a different time scale, one month versus nine. This is also due to their different ability to draw on financial resources to continue the journey. Once they had landed, two different types of camp awaited the one who had been saved and the savior. Around the same time when Kenny was living under a flyover in Ragusa with other scafista, Kamto was transferred from Pozzallo to a nearby official reception camp in Rosolini,

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waiting for a Commission to decide whether he is a fake or a good refugee. One went the “good” institutional way, the other had to face life on the streets, the courts, and the condition of illegality. In the end, either could have ended up living through the other’s situation.

Stuck in the Camp According to Pinelli (2017), surveillance and control are a key aspect of the refugee experience in Europe. For Kamto, even more radically, the camp in Rosolini represents evil. Right from our first meetings in the autumn of 2016, it is described as the paradigm of a spatial segregation that becomes social, linguistic, and totalizing. Rosolini embodies Agier and Lecadet’s (Agier & Lacadet, 2014) definition of a camp: something external, extraterritorial, reflecting exclusion and exception. In the 6 months he spends there, he only learns a handful of words in Italian. His days begin and end inside the center, as the guests are discouraged from moving freely around the area: “they told us that going to town alone was dangerous, that we risked being beaten up by the locals and the racists”. Kamto repeats firmly, pronouncing each word clearly: It’s not that I felt in prison, I was in prison, like in Libya but different, a different kind of violence. We were stuck, far from everything, locked in, I was there, in Rosolini, but I didn’t know where I was, I couldn’t place myself either on a map or on a route. You’ve helped me to come back here, but it’s as if I’d never been in these places.

In his autoethnography, Khosravi (2010) introduces the concept of “refugeeization”, noting how it is the camp that produces the refugee through a pathologizing bureaucracy that infantilizes the beneficiaries, replacing them in decision-making. As Alessio d’Angelo (2019) has written in his discussion of the theory and practice of reception in Sicily, the line between reception and detention becomes blurred. The theory of reception is founded on protection, but in the real world it ends up producing illegality. In fact, neither at the hotspot in Pozzallo nor at the camp in Rosolini was Kamto informed about his rights. Actually, several months went by, and he was not able to submit his asylum application, which meant he was living in a judicial limbo. He was simply “received”, “held”, “contained”; he had a roof over his head and food. After all the guests are

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nothing but numbers, slightly annoying but profitable things, since the system is funded with public money, but largely managed privately. Then, says Kamto, there are secondary business opportunities: Even workers of the camp made money from us, selling us cigarettes and other goods at higher prices since we couldn’t go down to the town. It also happened that they would ask us to do some volunteer work, days as agricultural laborers or in construction. The longer our stay became, the more they earned from us. I remember the Italian boss of the camp who used to come in his luxury car and asked us if we wanted to go and pick tomatoes.

Every Centro di Accoglienza Staordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Center) is potentially, but also materially, a source of workforce that can be underpaid to work in agriculture and construction. As Paola, the lawyer, points out, “if people have a roof over their head and food … they are more exploitable”. In addition, reception centers are often located in isolated and rural areas; when asylum seekers are expelled from the system because their protection applications have been rejected, many of them end up living in large informal camps tied to the harvest seasons (MSF, 2018). According to official estimates that include illegal work, in 2015 (Corrado, 2018; Corrado et al., 2017), migrants represented 48% of the whole industry. Dines and Rigo (2015) describe the growing overlap between exploitation in the south and reception through the term “refugeeization of the workforce”. Not only does the official protection system constitute an important stimulus for public spending but, especially in agricultural and rural areas, it also allows for the extraction of free labor― “volunteering”―or cheap labor from its guests by inviting them to show that they are good and deserving refugees (Casati, 2018). As Di Cecco (2019) argues, volunteer work promoted by reception centers becomes a way of thanking required in exchange for the hospitality. What images does our traveling companion have of this camp? He remembers long nights on the sofa in front of the TV, filled with boredom, then suddenly someone would get up and run off in the dark, crying desperately in search of freedom. There were some who, to kill time and keep busy, accepted work in agriculture for low pay or as volunteers. Kamto also remembers that he never had official documents, just a piece of paper with “Rosolini camp” written on it. Those who got on a bus to escape, were stopped and taken back by the police as they had no valid identification documents―“go back to your camp”, they were told. This

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is how he describes his prevailing state of mind at the time: a mix of heldin rage, silence and self-isolation, topped by a compulsive addiction to tobacco. “All I thought about was escaping, but I never did. It’s good that I didn’t, I would have ended up as a clandestine without documents in the Sicilian countryside”.6 In fact, Kamto got out of the camp through a collective struggle, forcing the authorities to empty the camp and transfer rebellious guests elsewhere to contain the uprising after a canteen boycott to stop the camp boss from getting reimbursements. In these acts of revolt disrupt, however temporarily, the two logics which structure reception: control over lives and the infantilization of subjects. And yet, despite being ephemeral, these struggles are also an extraordinary injection of self-­ esteem and generate oral memories that are passed on. From then on, Kamto breaks his silence and goes back to cultivating a strong desire to meet with the world outside and experiments with narration and testimony as a cure. When we get to the entrance of the camp in Rosolini, Kamto again has no images, and he does not remember how to get to where he lived. He keeps repeating that he has never been there, because there he was in prison and could not go out; “I just stayed where they had put me”. In the end, outside the town, in a countryside lined with beautiful dry walls, the reception center appears. Kamto is restless, he wonders whether he really wants to go back to see that space, get close again to what could have been, face another possible destiny for his life―as much as his destiny was not like Kenny’s (the scafista), it could have been. It is as though, to go back to Benjamin, Kamto himself were the dialectical image in relation to the other possible outcomes of the journey, of the encounter with the border and its policies. The mirror in which Kamto sees what could have happened to him is the story of Maxuell, a thirty-­ year-­old of Nigerian origin who has been stuck as a guest in Rosolini and has been fighting for at least two years against the camp-institution on health matters. We meet him via some local associations, the same ones that have brought us to Kenny. To have a quiet chat with us, he chooses a small public garden near the town’s outdoor market where veiled women, children, and older locals gather around a few rusty playground toys, a lot of garbage scattered around, and a big tree. He agrees to being filmed 6  According to the SPRAR Annual Report (2018, 63), expulsions and escapes from the centers accounted for 25.9% of all exits from the reception system in 2017.

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with Kamto interviewing him and talking to him as a former guest. Like Kamto then, today Maxuell still does not speak a word of Italian two years after his arrival as a consequence of the social segregation. Off the record, the guest of the reception center says that there is rage at the camp, that time is empty; nobody knows what they are waiting for, and the workers keep encouraging them not to worry and to wait. There are about 80 people left, many of them have run off to France, Germany: “they withhold our documents … because they don’t want us to escape. They only give them back to us the month before they expire … that way they know we’re forced to remain to renew them”. He denounces the fact that his illness has not been treated adequately, he shows us pictures of the catheter with which he lives and tells us about how his kidneys are not working, as he keeps repeating the word “operation”, “operation”. He is on paracetamol to bear the pain. If Kenny, the scafista from Gambia, used to say “Europe, Europe”, Maxuell’s dream is “Germany, Germany”, where apparently the only doctors who could perform his surgery are. In the interview we filmed, he often thanks Italy and maintains a diplomatic style, only making claims regarding the issue of health. “Operation, operation”, he repeats every time we ask him about his future. As Khosravi (2010) has observed, between hosts and guests, there is a violence at work which makes the beneficiary, from whom gratitude is expected, feel inferior. Conversely, gratitude―however superficial―is also a weapon, a resistance tactic of the dominated (Scott, 1990), as is clear from the different registers Maxuell uses in informal conversation and in the filmed interview. Meanwhile, many black people who are also guests of some kind of center walk past, looking with curiosity at our camera and the interviewer, a black people like them. Kamto is surprised by all this activity in town, as if the doors of the leper colony where their lives had been indefinitely quarantined had suddenly been opened. He says to us: “it’s obvious that now they can go out, our struggles must have worked”. As we wander around the town, all of a sudden Kamto recognizes Nadia, one of his former camp workers. He runs after her, stops her, and tells her with pride who he is now, all the things that he could not be in Rosolini: “I’m studying, I speak Italian, I live in an apartment, I’m collaborating with the university, I’ve applied for asylum”. A list of grievances, as if to say to her: “I’ve managed to achieve those things you should have helped me with”. Thanks to this fortuitous encounter, we informally enter the camp. On a shiny white wall is a red heart with two hands

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shaking in the middle; the writing Centro Accoglienza ‘Alessandro Frasca S.a.S’ (Reception Center ‘Alessandro Frasca, Ltd’) reminds us that charity and enterprise, reception and profit, politics and economics are also entangled. We thus find ourselves―almost magically after our formal access request had been rejected by the Prefecture of Syracuse―inside the Rosolini camp. Kamto quietly observes the site of his soft detention―it has improved, and it is large and spacious, with many shared spaces. Inside, TVs switched on and people lying on couches. Outside, minibuses unload guests holding bags with small purchases. Kamto concludes that “the aesthetic has changed, but the looks on the guys’ faces are the same”, suggesting that this experience has nothing to do with “integration”, whatever this word may mean. After the new 2018 laws on migration and asylum, many have been and are going to be expelled from the protection system and will be joining those who live in informal settlements, working under exploitative financial conditions in agriculture, or those who try to reach other EU countries.7

The Mirrors Shahram Khosravi (2010) introduces the autoethnographic account of his journey from Iran to Sweden with the following question: “What do we see if we look at the border from the other side?” How is this positioning, the act of looking “from the other side”, qualified? How can this gaze emerge, since I am not a migrant in transit? This chapter seeks to capture traces of a refugee gaze through the shared experience of traveling back to one of the major landing sites in Sicily. For me as a researcher, it is not a question of being Kamto’ shadow, following him at a distance according to the procedures commonly adopted in the observation of action in the making (Trouille & Tavory, 2019; Quinlan, 2008). Rather it is an empathic dimension and a project that binds me to Kamto in an attempt to rethink ethnographic practice as a site where the researcher does things together with the “researched”, as Jock Young (2011) argues with regard to transformative research. 7  According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, foreign nationals in the reception system have gone from 173,603 (2018) to 92,891 (2019) (see: http://www.libertaciviliimmigrazione.dlci.interno.gov.it/sites/default/files/allegati/cruscotto_statistico_ giornaliero_15-­12-­2019.pdf).

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Reading drafts of this chapter after we returned from Pozzallo, Kamto tells me: “I could have been Maxuell and Kenny”. He lets me know that he has found a mirror in these potential doppelgangers of his destiny. On the one hand, there is Kenny, who was expelled from the outset from the category of “deserving refugee” and, after he was briefly sent to prison as a sort of theatrical admonishment, forced to find other ways to survive. On the other hand, there is Maxuell, who was taken into a center but left to vegetate without any hope or a future. In the end, Kamto represents the positive outcome, as the official system includes Rosolini and many other reception speculators as well as associations which are not profit-oriented and are involved in anti-racist movements (Fabini et al., 2019; Avallone, 2018); his case shows how important it is to not segregate on any level― spatial, social, and symbolic. We should try to read the experience of being inside the institutional reception system following the hypotheses on secondary adaptation of the inmates formulated by Goffman in Asylums: conversion/adhesion practices (becoming assimilated in a disciplined manner, following the rules); colonization practices (“working the system”, benefiting from the rules by adapting in an opportunistic way); practices of rejection and challenge of authority (“the intransigent line”); practices of withdrawal from the situation (searching for isolation, passivity). It is also for this reason that the nodes of the reception system―albeit progressively in ruins―are also possible steps along the Underground Railway: rest stops, comfort zones, from which people can immerse themselves or become immersed again in the informality of the journey. When Kamto talks about his friends with whom he had arrived, he says that many of them are now in France or Germany after growing weary of waiting in some kind of camp. If we ask him about the guests of whom he was in charge when he worked for the Italian Red Cross, once again he tells us that they have all escaped to “Europe” and the answer is the same if we ask him about his roommates who had received a negative answer from the Refugee Commission or the court of appeal. Since humanitarian protection status was put into question by recent government policies, thousands of asylum seekers have been expelled from the system, and the consequent production of new illegal immigrants, together with mass unemployment in the reception industry, has resulted in an exodus and journeys toward new borders. To refer to the two terms proposed by Didier Fassin (2005), the paradigm of the new discourse on migrations consists of less compassion and more repression. The destiny of the illegal

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immigrant seems to have caught up with Kamto, too, when a few months after our return from this trip he also receives a rejection letter from the Refugee Commission. He has now become a false refugee who will be stuck in a temporal limbo for some time still, thanks to an appeal to the courts. In Scicli, a few kilometers from Pozzallo, we meet Ivana and Giovanna of Mediterranean Hope, an autonomous project funded with the income tax donation scheme known as “8 per mille”, received in this case by Protestant churches; their mission was to free the Hotspot of unaccompanied minors. We aimed to be a relief station, a break before the boys moved on to the reception system. We took all the minors who had disembarked in Pozzallo before they were moved to the permanent reception facilities. The Prefectures didn’t want them to be transferred out of Sicily. They told us that before: “We had to fill all the local facilities”.8 Many minors ran away from the reception centres to which they were assigned and came back to us. We opened up ours in the heart of Scicli, on its main drag, but in other places these facilities are really far from social relationships, the kids live segregated in the countryside. We didn’t want to put them in the middle of nowhere. Even before we started out, local business owners had gathered 2000 signatures against us … they told us that black people would have discouraged tourism-related business. Here we have become a tourist destination because it’s where the TV series Inspector Montalbano is shot. Even the neo-fascist party Forza Nuova has come to demonstrate against us, demanding that the reception center―if it really had to be there―be put out of town, away from everything. We insisted. And the change happened thanks to the school … we enrolled dozens of them in school … and that’s where relationships among the boys as well as between the boys and the families were built. We celebrated Christmas in here with many people, everyone together, even those who had signed against us. So the boys brought the town's people into our home.

Hence, waiting and escaping are two structural conditions in the European borderland, and, both when waiting and when escaping, people have encounters and find opportunities, they elaborate tactics and connections, they pass on knowledge and memories, they build alliances within, 8  In 2017, out of 18,303 unaccompanied foreign minors present in Italy, almost 44% were in Sicily (Save the Children 2018); in 2018, thousands of them (4677) were reported as missing after having fled the reception centers and continued their journey (IDOS 2019).

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outside, and on the margins of the reception system. Perhaps we should try to imagine the Underground Railway as a carrier that allows not only a bridging of geographical distance, but also a slippage in the social space: Kenny does not move away from the local area, but his condition changes radically precisely because he connects with some solidarity workers. The same social subjects who in Ventimiglia physically take people to the other side of the border, here in Sicily can be seen engaging in rooting practices rather than in crossing practices. We thought that space would trigger memories capable of producing on this journey back to the landing and early reception sites. But it soon became obvious that Kamto hardly has any visual memories of the places we traveled back to together, of the outdoor spaces through which his life passed. What counts, however, is the time that swallowed him for months; in fact, for many migrants and asylum seekers, the wait, living within the undecipherable bureaucratic time (Andersson, 2014), is a structural condition in the European borderland, which is often offset by escape and nomadism as moments of freedom and self-determination (Schapendonk, 2017). During this and other trips to different borderlands that I shared with Kamto, I became aware that the distance between me as an ethnographer and him as an informant has become blurred, despite the distance between our social positionings. Little by little, we have come to share a common point of view arising from a constant dialogue that developed as we lived together during the trip and have remained close since. However, Kamto is not my informant; rather, we are trying to give rise to a third gaze in which both of us are narrators (Taussig, 2004), putting Jean Rouch’s insight for a shared anthropology (and, I would add, sociology) into practice, moving beyond a search for that same refugee gaze at the origin of this ethnographic experience. The dialogue and the issues that have emerged―about death, testimony, the smuggler as savior, landing as a police operation, and the camp as a segregation device―generate a further mirror effect (Sayad, 1992) in which, by looking at migrations, their political treatment embodied in stories and lived experiences, we understand how arrival societies work. The symbolic and material impact of this return to Sicily makes Kamto move further back in time: Pozzallo and Rosolini bring about anecdotes of his past. Almost looking for a reason for his arrival, he spreads open stories that have been hidden until now: the neighborhood where he grew up, youth gangs, summary justice against thieves, homosexuals sent to the

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stake, the police torture he suffered, escaping and hiding away in his own country, deserting the army, and his long journey (a 6-year odyssey) toward the Mediterranean coasts. The growing politicization of his relationship with the world seems to be a thread for us to follow, a subjectivation opportunity offered by the Underground Railroad. With regard to this, he has been surprising us since the early days of our friendship in 2017, when we found him on the streets, the only black man at a demonstration of white people: “I’ve always been an antifascist, since I was a student”, he said without emphasis, commenting on the episode, which connected his story to ours.

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CHAPTER 11

Omonia, Athens May 2019

At the Crossroads I am back in Athens after a four-week-long absence. Before moving for about ten days to Kipseli, a former residential area north of Patisìon which the crisis has turned into a lively mixed neighborhood, perhaps on its way to becoming gentrified, I stay at the City Plaza for three weeks on the sixth floor, room 603. As it often happens, when they are experienced from within, the life and the dynamics of a “place” appear more evident and, at the same time, more complex, perhaps even opaque compared with the concise clarity of a glance from afar. In particular, proximity becomes an opportunity to shatter the harmonious impression of a “community of equals”, leaving space to a kaleidoscope of material and positional differences that intersect, oppose one another, negotiate, and reproduce manifold, involving the roughly 150 refugees, between families with children and individual people, as much as the varying number of activists and volunteers, Greek and international, who gravitate around the occupied hotel. In the closing talk at the Historical Materialism conference held at Pantheon University in Athens at the beginning of May, Olga summarized her three-year experience at the Plaza without hiding its imbalances, asymmetries, and contradictions, and suggested reading this regime of structural differences as the only possible way to articulate something akin to “a viable and always unstable political ‘us’”. In any case, it is an “us” that is reinforced around © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_11

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an increasingly stronger feeling of being under siege, fueled by a series of more or less immediate political events. The polls on the imminent municipal and European elections prefigure a victory of the right-wing coalition headed by Nea Demokratia, with a consequent radical redefinition of the city’s political scenario and of the very conditions of survival for a place like the Plaza. Despite having never relied on any kind of support from the current government majority, in three years of occupation the hotel has not had to face any serious threats of eviction, but a likely success of the right would find in the eviction of a symbolic place like the Plaza the exemplary confirmation of a trend inversion. To immediately boost this perception, denying any hypotheses of support to the occupations, between mid-April and early-May, various squats self-managed by anarchist and migrant collectives were evicted with a military hand by the police―two in Exarchia and another one, Clandestina, which was politically “close” to the Plaza and hosted about fifty refugees, mostly Iranians, many of whom, after a protest sit-in that lasted over a week in Sintagma Square, were transferred to the institutional camp in Eleonas. As she updates me on what happened, Olga adds that for the many refugees coming from the squats in the city center, the move to the “model” camp in Eleonas brings some improvements in terms of stability, guarantees, and material possibilities (registration and cash card). However, this is not true for everyone. Two days later, around 10 pm, as Antonio and I are strolling near Viktoria Square, we meet a family of Iranians, former residents of Clandestina, a young couple with their daughter in a pushchair who tell us that they have not yet been registered at Eleonas, despite having lived there for over two weeks, and that they are looking for smugglers in Omonia in the attempt to unblock their situation and speed up their exit from Greece. In fact, during my two weeks at the Plaza, from my conversations with the residents and my outings in the vicinity of the hotel, I mostly gather information on the signifier “Omonia”. Omonia literally indicates Plateia Omonoia (Concord Square), a square in central Athens with a history that is anything but peculiar, and it is above all a cardinal point for the vast majority of people on the move who, to varying degrees, are in transit or have fallen into the Greek and Athenian trap. It may happen that a family leaving Kabul or Karachi have a name, number, or address, all generically filed under “Omonia”, among the few things they bring with them and the inadequate reference point they have. Elman, a young Iranian engineer, tells me about his irregular journey from Tehran to Belgrade (Iranians entering to Serbia do not require a visa), and

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from there to Athens, walking back along the Balkan route, with a phone number and an address abstractly referring to Omonia―but actually located on an equally central street of Athens―as his only compass. The same is true for Baraw, a Kurdish student for whom Omonia actually signifies a series of documents materially obtainable in the vicinity of Exarchia, or for Edris, an Iranian twenty-year-old in search of a safe document and ticket (“the last chance”) in another square in the city center which is once again cumulatively referred to as Omonia. The list of similar cases could go on, which suggests a story of flows, echoes, and refractions: “Omonia”, like a sound, reverberates thousands of kilometers from the physical place it indicates, mostly without coinciding with it, and works like a sort of ciphered word or a passe-partout whose reflections can be picked up in advance as much as afterward, in the travel stories, in the routes, and in the itineraries of people met in Calais, Trieste, Ventimiglia, and anywhere within and around the European borderland.

Outlines for the Ethnography of a Square I reflect on how to organize a possible ethnography of Omonia and, as I try to proceed by getting progressively closer to the camp, I realize how traditional methods involving accompanied access, observation, being physically present in the square, and therefore being on lookout at different times of the day and in different strategic points do not allow me to collect much of anything significant on the networks and the encounters referred to that place. Whoever talks to me about Omonia―that is almost all the people on the move I meet inside and outside the Plaza―is not actually going to or materially alluding to the square. It is as though the square were the scenario onto which events, appointments, encounters, and negotiations are projected, all bound to occur in the shadows and especially in some kind of “elsewhere”―as though everything were pushing toward a possible backstage. Indulging this deviated direction, I also decide to “use” Omonia as a refracted scene, a sort of drift or cover. Without knowing exactly on which bases to proceed, I have the impression that a whole series of conventional theoretical tools will turn out to be inadequate, perhaps with the exception of the opposition between an official representation of space, a square, and a space of representation that exceeds it and rewrites it by retrieving it only through its name. There is still a prevailing feeling of having to do with a dimension which is more topological than topographical, a

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constellation of dynamic and relational aspects tied to practices and “indexes” that cannot be related to the materiality of a place, but rather indicate its continuous deformation. Omonia is essentially a stratagem to indicate a multiplicity of accesses, transits, and escape routes, and, in the tales of those who are searching for it, it almost functions like a hologram. It is the name of a bazaar which is mostly not in Omonia and whose locations I do not intend to reveal. My only aim is to explore its functioning and its multiple branches. And yet, as much as it is counterintuitive, it is precisely the history of the square that seems to suggest a trace. Thus, I decide to start over from a historical/city planning level. On Giorgios’s advice, I go to the Politekniou Library, where a very attentive librarian gives me access to a series of historical texts and images related to the square. My attention is drawn to a recent volume, Athens 2021. Exchanging of European Experiences, featuring a series of regeneration projects promoted within the Urban 2021 framework (Serraos & Greves, 2017). The text is made up of selected talks which were delivered in the context of an international conference held in 2015 and centered on the presentation of some redevelopment actions in the Athens metropolitan area, whose urgency was intensified by the weight of the “unprecedented social, economic, and urban crisis, which the country and, namely, the Athens city center are undergoing during the last few years”. It is not hard to guess that, beside the detailed presentations and virtual renderings of regeneration interventions, more speculative and policy-­ oriented contributions have been collected. One in particular features a series of thematic maps and data regarding a series of “lacks and needs” and areas of “social disadvantage”. Paging through the article, I focus on map number 7, which shows the concentration of various forms of petty and serious criminality in central Athens and is titled Criminality and misdemeanors in the Municipality of Athens. On the map, there are six indicators in total: location of homeless people, location of drug addicts, illegal brothels, warehouses storing counterfeit products, streets with a high number of immigrants and illegal peddlers, and streets with the highest number of verified illegal behaviors. The automatic association the map implies between locations where activities that are deemed illegal take place and people’s profiles is questionable to say the least, and the link between certain areas and streets in the city with just as many violations is rather vague, while the equalization between illegal goods and subjects is absolutely untenable. This is to say that in the eyes of a sociologist of

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deviance―and not even a very critical one―it would be rather easy to discredit such a mapping as nearly exemplary case of spatial/racial profiling. However, beyond the arbitrariness of such categories, what is most striking is their location. I try to understand where Omonia is on the map, but its name is not there. I approximately locate it to the east/northeast of areas and neighborhoods I manage to identify, such as Kerameikos and Metaxurgeio. I check with the librarian who, with the help of a magnifying glass, roughly indicates what I had already guessed, that is the point of highest concentration of almost all of the above-listed indicators, particularly the presence of homeless people, drug addicts, brothels, and especially the most improbable and cumulative category, that which associates illegal immigrants with peddlers. What seems astonishing is that, even if we overlooked the absolute prejudicial way the data is constructed and despite being the focal point of all that is constructed as synonymous with “deviance”, Omonia is still never named in the whole publication. A conference on the urban vulnerability of central Athens in the midst of the crisis which, with its assessments, projects, redevelopment interventions, evaluations on risk areas, and so on, essentially gravitates around a square and its “influence” ends up never naming it explicitly. How can such an omission be interpreted? It must be said that Omonia as a place still is to this day an enormous open-air building site, occupied and concealed by protracted and murky excavations for the making of the hypothetical fourth subway train line heading toward Exarchia and probably Kipseli. However, even in light of this logistical centrality within the urban transit system and of such invisibilization, the fact that the square is not mentioned in the projects on Urban 2021 seems surprising to say the least. Searching for a definition that can combine this centrality and this absence, the most immediate association that comes to mind is a hole, a gap, a black hole. A central place which is in some way axial but invisible, on Google Maps Omonia is located exactly under the word “Athens”, hidden between the “e” and the “n”, completely covered by the name. Thus, the square is as central as it is materially erased from the “city”. In the images and in the renderings of projects meant to redesign Athens, Omonia remains a “black hole”, an umbilical space which is literally removed and only resurfaces as an unspoken place, the unnamed point of maximum concentration for a whole series of phantom quantitative indicators.

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Another text is recommended to me to try to get to the bottom of this removal, the collective project of a social atlas of Athens that can be found online.1 As I consult it, I may have found a key to understand the transformations that have redesigned the square over time and to find a further definition to support the idea of a “black hole” in the attempt to complicate it. In the atlas, the entry “Omonia Square” is written by Themis Andriopulos, an urban sociologist and architecture historian who, in his contribution, highlights the peculiar dimension as a mixed contact zone for tourists, migrants, peddlers, and passersby typical of the square; the peculiar mix reflecting the social turmoil which characterizes it; and, above all, the historical weight of the transformations that have occurred, as it is a central node of the city’s transit, a point of convergence of the main urban arterial roads, the material translation of a Megali Idea, the great modernist urban plan which, in different eras, continued to attract Greece’s most well-known city planners. In fact, as the author underlines, a similarly grandiose idea will be destined to a series of failures, marking, in parallel, the various phases of nineteenth-century and twentieth-­century Greek history and of the political life of the city. A cosmopolitan center until the end of World War II and location of renowned hotels, Omonia emerges at the dawn of the nineteenth century and supports a specific design, an axiality that sees it aligned with the big boulevards leading to the city center which, from the square, continue on Odos Athinas all the way to Monastiraki along the main route leading to the Acropolis. Initially conceived as the possible location of the royal palace, it seems to present itself as a natural alternative to Syntagma Square, which is more decentered with respect to the city’s decuman. The fact is that, since its inception, its role has been that of a gateway, a perspectival main gate, a role which has subordinated it to a geography of various kinds of flows and traffics. Anna Lascari, a friend who lives in Athens, tells me about how Omonia has always been the main access point for goods in the city, the location of improvised markets from the surrounding rural areas. Andriopulos, on his part, reads the decadence of Omonia in relation to a progressive marginalization due to the absolute lack of charm of Odos Tritis Septemvriou, which leads directly into the square, and to its subalternity vis-à-vis the grandeur of the parallel street, Patisìon, which is a real Haussmanian boulevard that restores the vectorial hierarchy leading to Syntagma Square. 1

 See: http://www.athenssocialatlas.gr/en/.

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Starting from this subalternity, he seizes a crucial fracture line within the square, as though this place was the origin of a fault line destined to split Athens in two, between high and low more than between inside and outside. It is, according to Andriopulos, a real watershed, a border between two worlds, between a bright daytime Athens and the dark side of the city, which is reflected in the perception of the urban landscape and in the conscience of its inhabitants. Even acknowledging this fault line, the current meaning of Omonia Square does not seem to be exhausted in the border that cuts through it and that the square itself has set forth. Perhaps―but this is just a hypothesis―a decisive trace of this series of transformations lies in the very architecture of the square, in the succession of drawings and of the shapes it takes on. If we compare the photographs provided in the atlas, we can notice that the morphology of the square has undergone at least three major metamorphoses.2 It is as though, over time, at more or less regular intervals, this place had been affected by a gradual erosive process produced by flows, which has contributed to turning an originally rectangular square into an area that was therefore circular, round, with a fountain and waterworks in the middle, surrounded by traffic arteries, and then into the elliptical and increasingly skeletal and essential version of a roundabout. Through time, all monuments and ornamental elements have gradually disappeared: from the palm trees and the statues of the muses of the early nineteenth century, to the fountain from the post-World War II era, up to the ephemeral Runner, the large futurist-like glass statue put in place in 1988 and removed in 1995, and to the steps and the increasingly scant park, rest and shelter areas for many migrants and refugees in 2015, both of which have been taken over by the subway train line building site. Thus, the atlas and its images allow us to add something to the acknowledgment of a “void” in the center of the city, suggesting the idea of an area of traffic circulation and transit, which could not be further removed from the image of a square. This is to point out that Omonia is obviously a place, but it is not a square (anymore). Rather, it is a crossroads, a roundabout, an intersection of roads. Besides, this is a transformation noticed by Andriopulos himself, who suggests a peculiar split between an upper Omonia, as a symbolic place of emergence and visibility, and a lower one, its subterranean correlative. This vertical division could be carried on, suggesting for instance how the 2

 See: https://www.athenssocialatlas.gr/en/article/omonia-square/.

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value of “upper” Omonia comes above all from its ability to guide and represent a compass, the concise and nominal act summed up in the formula when it is uttered by subjects in transit, while “lower” Omonia seems to allude to a multiplicity of weaves, places, and practices that are dispersed and articulated on the ground, transgressing and exceeding the square. However, it is especially some definitions used in the text that indicate something more on the final transformation and the current meaning of the square: a “continuation of the surrounding streets”, a “platform for the road network”, a sort of “hub of the capital”, and above all a place that expands beyond the borders of the square and becomes a “meeting point”, a “hideout”, an “intersection”, an area of traffic and crossing. This constellation of meanings seems to suggest more than one analogy with the everyday use of Omonia by subjects in transit through and trapped in Athens, while the history and the transformations of the place seem to reflect and contain indications to decipher its current use. This is, so to speak, a deferred and misleading use: if you say Omonia, you move further, like in a roundabout; if you say “Europe”, you move further, like in a corridor.

Runaway: Ways Out More than and in addition to being a physical place, Omonia is a crossroads, a sort of marker: it points to a mobile archipelago of subterranean locations whose dissemination, summed up in one name, turns it into a real station, a sort of hub. Insofar as it is a crossroads, a market, an area of traffic circulation, the irradiation points of the square, its activities, and its services lead toward many places, both material and immaterial ones: they may lead to shops scattered on a series of streets and central squares that are more or less visible and well known―which I obviously shall not name―and that also function as “travel agencies” to obtain documents and exit tickets based on negotiations and on a system of guarantees. In addition to these, there are a series of “sub-agencies” specializing only on documents which are mostly sold online. At the bar of the Plaza, Ajar, the Kurdish friend with whom I had been too Lavrio and who had already tried exiting “to Europe”, shows me a website with an endless series of possibilities and prices (from Bulgarian or Korean ID cards for less than €100 to authentic French passports worth more than €1000). Together, we try to find the one that is more credible for his age, looks, and country of origin, and which can be collected at a specific address. However, the

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network of Omonia does not limit itself to this retail activity and often it also provides “consultancy” services, suggestions, material and tactical support regarding the time frame, itineraries, any ways of traveling (more accessible routes and destinations, recommended times, accessible gates, and disguise strategies to adopt). Those who provide these services―so-­ called passeurs or, worse, smugglers, mostly people in transit who have decided to take a temporary break in Athens―may also be acquaintances, often sharing the same nationality, and their paid support activities expose them to even higher risks than their “clients”. All of this obviously has a cost and the bill is often high―as much as lately prices have been lowered, perhaps pushed down by competition. However, next to this series of services bought and sold, those who are trying to exit the “trap” can also count on the “free” support of other actors, activists, or friends. From the advice regarding the choice and selection of a document, based on its reliability, effectiveness, and validity, to sharing basic language skills to support the staging of the chosen nationality, to actually accompanying people, mostly to the airport, at times even toward and across borders. One afternoon in mid-May in Kipseli I meet Marie, a French thirty-­ year-­old of Greek origin who volunteers for an NGO and tells me about her three journeys “to Europe”, in which she accompanied as many refugees. The first crossing was for love, and it brought her to share part of the route with her Iranian partner whom she had met in Athens. They headed to Paris and there, after living together in the shadows for a month, he left for the UK, where he has been living for about six months after “registering” with the authorities and applying for asylum. Marie talks about the thought-out choice of his document (a French ID card with an Arab name), his language training, the subway train journey to the airport, the glances and the tacit recognition of other “companions” who were traveling, up to the arrival at Venizelos at an appropriate time. Here, the main problems are the potential language test―passed thanks to the ignorance of Greek police officers―and the last check at the gate. In particular, Marie dwells on the mistake of printing the boarding pass, as this can lead to some suspicious shaking when handing it over to have it checked: “better to have the ticket on the phone, like everyone does”. The second journey, still heading to France but via an indirect route, was with another Iranian friend, and therefore it was part of a specific emotional network. The third one was with a refugee she had just met and marks a shift, a process of politicization, however dampened: “I did it because I think it’s

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right, but I don’t want to do any more: too much anxiety”. It is understandable that she remains faithful to this intention. In any case, as an agent of Underground Europe, Marie is certainly not the only one who is carrying out this kind of journey. However, in most cases, support is less direct, and it especially consists of sharing the project of a journey on various levels. Among those who go to Omonia to get hold of an exit ticket there is an initial tacit solidarity: the willingness to exit the trap is something people openly share. As soon as the topic is mentioned, everything is mostly rather explicit, direct, uncensored, although the interlocutor must demonstrate that they are earning the kind of trust which clearly cannot be taken for granted. Even between the walls of the Plaza, at least as far as the initial stages are concerned, there does not seem to be much secrecy, and forms of collaboration and cooperation emerge spontaneously. Even I have helped two residents, an Iranian boy and an Afghan young man, to choose reliable documents: in one case by preventing him from buying an improbable Korean passport; in the other case, by verifying the document’s expiry date. Thus, there is a rather extensive solidarity network among migrants, refugees, and activists, which supports the initial stages of the exit project, “in Omonia”, and often accompanies it, but only up to a given limit, which is at the same time spatial and temporal. Although the way out and the exit ticket obtained in the shadow of Omonia frequently lead to Venizelos airport, this is not the only practiced trajectory, and the journey may head toward other routes: air routes, through airport that are thought to be less controlled, mostly on the islands, or land routes, along the Balkan route and mostly the Albanian border. In this case, however, it is an infinitely more strenuous, extreme, and risky itinerary, which requires support from further networks, almost exclusively upon payment. Moreover, over the last months, Frontex seems to have delocalized its area of intervention―which had already “trespassed” into the two former Yugoslavian states―to Albania, significantly restricting crossing opportunities to what had become the main way out of the Greek “trap”. Nonetheless, arrivals in Trieste keep coming in succession every day, rarefied, in loose ranks (Minca et al., 2019; Minca & Umek, 2019). This means that the route is still partially accessible and accessed, not so much from Athens, but rather from areas adjacent to the border (Joannina, Larissa, and, partly, Thessaloniki) and especially, outside the metropolitan area of the capital and outside institutional reception, it is limited to those (the majority) who are lacking the material and relation

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capitals which are necessary to exit via the main door. In the latter case, the support network may even cross the border, as much as most of the times it only goes as far as the threshold of the last gate and is potentially reactivated in the destination country, once people have gotten through the entry checks on their own. However, if support actions are faced with a series of territorial limitations, of borders beyond which people are left alone in their “leap into the dark”, the temporality of these exits calls for closer examination. Indeed, the majority of departures involves rather long waiting times and gives rise to a sudden acceleration, as though it were a matter of seizing an opportunity on the fly. This element of acceleration is reflected in the degree of socialization of the project: if, up to a certain point (the search for the document and, often, also that for the ticket) everything is very explicit and shared, the moment of departure is actually managed mostly within an extremely restricted circle, quite often also in a lonely, almost secretive way. In the early afternoon of a late-May day, I swing by the Kurdish cultural center to say “Hi” to Ajar, whom I had seen two days earlier at the evening party for the three years of the Plaza and who usually alternates between nights at the hotel and days at the center. However, I find a friend of his who informs me that the day before Ajar left and went “to Europe”. I celebrate the “good news”, thinking back to his words about the “next time”. As I return to the Plaza, I pass on the good news, and someone adds that also a young Afghan man who had been staying at the Plaza for a long time has left early that morning: nobody knew anything about it the night before. I reread this threshold of secrecy, this management of risk and secrets within a shared environment characterized by solidarity like the Plaza, in light of Olga’s words about the meaning of a collective political subject crisscrossed by differences: the “viable and always unstable political us” which the Plaza represents. Despite recognizing the weight of these differences (departures mostly involve adult males with a certain degree of “capital” and without a family), I extend this concept more generally to the whole “solidarity” network around and within communities on the move, around and within the European borderland: it is also through this tacit support, through the intermittence of a word that is said or left unsaid, that an Underground Railroad is woven and built. In the last two months, departures from the city Plaza have slowly increased, which is the sign of a certain flexibility on the borders (also in sight of new arrivals on the islands in the summer, which are bound to

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clog the system of institutional reception even further) as well as of a exhaustion of spaces within the occupied hotel. For those who are not registered in Greece and do not have any accessible material alternatives outside the hotel, there seem to be two options: either continuing to occupy, participating in the potential negotiation of solutions and resisting the possibility of eviction, or trying to leave. It is a difficult fork in the path, to stay or to go: everything seems to be reflected in this dilemma, leading back to the general, ambivalent dimension of trap and crossroads attributed to a square and, by extension, to a city and to a whole country. Even the Plaza, in its own way, is inside the trap, much like, obviously, Omonia, Athens, Greece, and “Europe”: places where people stall, keep arriving, and which, just as often, they attempt to leave, but where the hold of the leash governing the forced mobility of refugees and migrants can be loosened, giving back some degree of habitability. The night before the party for the three years of the Plaza, on May 18, I am walking through Omonia around midnight when, in the silence broken by the noise of traffic, I hear a stentorian voice, a low baritone, singing something like an anthem. I turn around and I ask into the void: “who is singing?” I get an embarrassed answer from an African man who was walking behind me without me noticing him. He answers in French, saying he did not understand. I explain that I appreciated his voice and the song a lot. He laughs and tells me it was a psaume religieux. We introduce ourselves: Federico, Italian; Felicien, Congolese from Kinshasa, six months in Athens. He is also heading back home, near the Plaza, after the general rehearsal of the Kimbanguista church choir in Omonia. I only vaguely remember the story of Simon Kimbangu, who seems to have been a sort of charismatic leader. Felicien corrects me, adding that Papa Simon, of whom he is a follower, was above all a reformer, creator of a Universalist Church officially recognized among the African ones. He talks to me about Congo, Kabila, Mobutu, and Patrice Lumumba. He mentions something about the Ebola epidemic, the likely reason of his escape. We take a break near a group of homeless people, probably drug addicts, and he comments “pas mal des problèmes, même ici à Athènes”. I ask for information about the church. In answer to that, he invites me to the Sunday morning mass, à dix heures, before food distribution in Omonia. The square takes on a different look, inhabited (by an African church and by public canteen), and he tells me that he even lived there in the temporary accommodation managed by IOM, before moving near Patisìon. We are in the vicinity of the intersection with Odos Tritis Septembriou, under

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the “Mirage” Hotel, which has just reopened: I think about how the trap can also be a home, and Omonia is, after all, faithful to the name of the hotel―an optical illusion.

Epilogue: Inhabiting a Crossroads I return after three months spent in and around Athens with an ambivalent sensation, a space-time made of waits, confinements, passages, and crossings, which I project onto the overall situation, the Greek “trap”, as much as onto the condition of those who are “stuck on the move”, who live there and are somehow trying to exit to get “to Europe”. Taking the City Plaza as the main reference point was a methodological choice as much as it was convenient, and, in exchange for a fine-grain view, a “degree zero” zoom, it has partially compromised the possibility of having a more general point of view. There is an enormous gap in this account, which I will try to fill by suggesting a brief reading, in several steps, of the “trap” and of the crossroads, through a series of data about Greece and the Balkans more generally. Let us start from the camps, the archipelago of institutional reception which crosses over into that of detention. In January 2019, the data provided by UNHCR and by the Greek authorities estimated that there were over 72,000 refugees officially present in Greece, of which 58,000 on the mainland and over 20,000 registered at the 28 reception camps spread across the “continent”, only three of which (Schisto, Eleonas, and Diavata) fall within the formal standards of “reception”.3 For some of these facilities, it was a matter of repurposing former public buildings that had been abandoned (Athens’ former airport, some barracks, and a series of offices and schools). For all the camps that were set up urgently and from scratch―that is, most of them―containers are the dominant modular form, although even that is insufficient. Indeed, in many cases, as if 3  The reports produced by AIDA and ECRE provide information updated on September 7th 2018 on capacity as well as numbers, origin, gender, and age of the asylum seekers “accommodated” in 25 reception centers (respectively Alexandreia, Andravidas, Diavata, Doliana, Drama, Elefsina, Eleonas, Filippiade, Kato-Milia, Katsikas, Koutsocero/Larissa, Lagadikia, Lavrio, Malakasa, Nea Kavala, Oinofyta, Pergiali/Kvala, Ritsona, Schisto/Perama, Serres, Skaramaga, Thermopiles, Thiva/Sakiroglou, Veria, and Volos) which on the whole host 16,110 people. However, the list appears to be incomplete, as it does not account for open camps after September, AIDA, Country Report: Greece, 2019, see: https://asylumineurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/report-download_aida_gr_2019update.pdf.

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through a sort of “meiosis”, these have been doubled by provisional encampments made of tents and makeshift materials, bound to be absorbed or incorporated into official structures, and surrounded by people, mostly families, waiting in front of the gates. However, besides these shadows and in the name of informality, overcrowding, and mostly desperate conditions,4 there are the darker manifestations of detention centers―officially “reception and identification” (RIC)―and of the “hotspots”. It is hard to establish dividing lines within this specific “form”. The camps which are defined as “pre-removal detention centers”, where many asylum seekers waiting to be transferred to other destinations5 are “provisionally detained” along with “third-country nationals” waiting for repatriation, cover a good part of the national territory: two are located in Attica (Amygdaleza and Tavros), one in the Peloponnese (Corinth), three in the north, in Thrace (Paranesti/Drama, Xanthi, and Fylakio, in Orestiada on the border marked by the Evros river), one in the Dodecanese (in Kos), and two in the Eastern Aegean islands (Lesvos and Samos), to which another one was added, still in Samos, and has been operating since March 2019. Then there are five official “hotspots” along the external borders (in Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros, and Kos), which were established between the end of 2015 and the early months of 2016 and where overcrowding, as of December 31, 2018, was estimated by official sources to be almost twice (11,683) the nominal reception capacity (6438), with the most dramatic cases in Lesvos, that is in Moria (5010/3100), and especially in Samos (3723/648), which brought to the introduction of the aforementioned new hybrid facility (between detention and identification) from March 2019. The border, even the formal one between pre-removal detention centers, detention centers, and “hotspots”, in any case, seems opaque and seems to merge with what, elsewhere, I have defined as “camp form”, giving back an analogous

4  The RSA reports denounce the often extreme conditions inside the official centers, collecting a series of direct testimonies from refugees staying at different camps, both in the Attica region and in the central and northern regions of the country. See: https://rsaegean. org/en/. 5  Detention areas … refers to pre-removal detention centres established in accordance with the provisions of the Returns Directive. Therefore asylum seekers are also detained in pre-­ removal detention centres together with third-country nationals under removal procedures (AIDA 2019).

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dimension of forced confinement and administrative detention, which is protracted indefinitely.6 In immediate opposition to this archipelago of institutional reception and detention―an exorbitant (semi)formalized universe which is often characterized by the wait to enter waiting zones and whose population is without a doubt underestimated―there are occupied spaces, essentially in the Athens metropolitan area, which are the symptom of practices of reappropriation from below, of a way of resignifying the material effects, the voids, and the ruins that the government of crisis keeps producing. The attacks against these temporarily autonomous spaces take on multiple meanings, summed up in the adaptable semantic field of “security” policies, and they essentially strike every living arrangement and every opportunity to stay in Greece that subtract themselves from the management of precarity through precarity, from the governing of mobility through (forced) mobility, from containment through a more or less invisible leash which defines the contours of the Greek trap. Thus, based on these premises the “trap” may appear to be configuring an enormous field, circumscribed and sealed on the way in, toward its inside (by the hotspot network on the islands and by the bilateral agreement with Turkey), as well as on the way out, toward an “elsewhere” called “Europe” (through an arsenal of border devices and the application of the Dublin III Regulations). Moreover, like in all traps, in addition to blocking and capturing, the Greek one tightens its hold inside, in the attempt to dissuade people from staying and make it impracticable. The end of the ESTIA reception plan funded by the European Union and by the UNHCR literally evicts the beneficiaries without any notice, as they are deemed “capable of integrating and competing on the Greek labor market” (conceding a three-month “credit extension” through cash cards to find an autonomous alternative to accommodation in the camps and in the apartments of institutional reception). It also forces newcomers who have arrived from the islands and especially from the land borders

6  AIDA/ECRE, Reception and identification procedure, https://www.asylumineurope. org/reports/country/greece. The report shows further proof of the juxtaposition between reception and detention, RIC (hotspots): “As of 31 December 2018, a total 14,615 newly arrived remained on the Eastern Aegean islands, of which 154 detained. The nominal capacity of reception facilities, including RIC and other facilities, was at 8,245 places. The nominal capacity of the RIC facilities (hotspots) was of 6,438 while 11,683 were residing there, under a geographical restriction”.

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across the Evros river to a never-ending wait to register their asylum application and accommodation in very precarious conditions. The overall effect, however, is rather contradictory. Indeed, what emerges from this is, first of all, a generalized machine that produces precarity and (in)visibilization, a real homelessness factory, whose correlative is an urban landscape where, at regular intervals, after systematic “clean-­ ups”, the city’s underpasses, arcades, colonnades, and sidewalks are reconverted into homes for an exponential number of people―refugees, migrants, and impoverished citizens alike. However, the impression is also that of a machine that expels (Sassen, 2014), in the literal terms of a violent and more or less explicit injunction to exit the country, both for those who can afford to do so and for those who have nothing to lose, hence making room for the new arrivals. This is roughly the threshold, the landscape at the fork in the path packed with various kinds of camps, ruins, and cyclically expelled inhabitants which I left behind on the day of my departure on the eve of the municipal and European elections, with exits―some of which induced― and continuous arrivals. This is because in the “trap”―despite the fact that the agreement with Turkey of March 2016 formally closed its borders― people who are fleeing continue to enter, even if they do so at different paces, along diversified routes and at costs (material and especially human) which are always very high. On the one hand, arrivals via land, essentially on the northern border across the Evros river, reflect what today is the most accessible route, although it is not the less risky one, with its tragic victim count for frostbite in the winter and drowning in the summer. On the other hand, arrivals via sea, especially north of the main islands, are the expression of a situation not far from that of the current “inivisibilized” scenario in the Central Mediterranean, coming up to the Libyan SAR zone. In the attempt to escape the Greek and Turkish Coast Guards, shipwrecks and disappearances are sadly frequent,7 and the presence of NGOs engaging in rescue and monitoring operations is criminalized and hindered in various ways (custody and pretrial seizures) through legal and propaganda strategies similar to those carried out in the Central Mediterranean. However, it is known that blocks and walls never stop crossings, but rather they redirect and channel them, imposing new routes or making 7  To get a partial idea of these tragic figures, it is possible to consult the register produced by the IOM (see: https://missingmigrants.iom.int).

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existing ones increasingly risky. Thus, the dynamic relationship between the nomadic machine and the capture apparatus appears to work retroactively on the first, taking on the contours of a game in which the stakes keep getting higher, in the form of a real manhunt involving increasingly higher risks, of new border architectures (walls, fences, barbed-wire, closed ports, and checkpoints) which lead people to dig just as many passages, corridors, and subterranean landing places. As we have seen, this is true of the northern border along the Evros river, across which people enter on a daily basis, mostly at night and in small groups. However, it is also true of the islands, where the forthcoming summer leads us to prefigure new mass landings. In its contradicting the image of a block, the trap thus appears to be decisively permeable.8 Such porosity is noticeable on the way in as well as on the way out, starting from Omonia and, from there, toward Venizelos airport or the port of Piraeus, all the way to the island airports or, again, from the ports of Patras and Igoumenitsa, and then from every possible crossing place in the links of the Balkan route, which were officially shut down two years ago, producing further traps: “At the time of writing, alarming accounts describe an increasingly tragic situation, with over 10,000 people waiting to enter Croatia”.9 Therefore, it is a strange trap, porous by design, marked by crossings that are difficult but possible and essentially continuous, turning it into something very similar to an intersection, a crossroads. On more specific premises, Greece, insofar as it is trap and a crossroads, can be defined as a sort of buffer state, however atypical, as though it were an island, an outpost of the EU surrounded by external borders, by extra­EU territories and waters (similar, in this respect, to Ceuta and Melilla or, 8  Despite the agreements with Turkey, the overall number of arrivals far exceeds that of readmissions: “Since the launch of the EU-Turkey statement on 20 March 2016 and until 31 December 2018, 1,484 individuals had been returned to Turkey on the basis of the EU-Turkey Statement, of which 801 in 2016, 683 in 2017 and 322 in 2018”. https://www. asylumineurope.org/reports/country/greece/asylum-procedure/access-procedure-and-­ registration/reception. 9  In Society & Space, a series of reports produced by Minca and Umek (2019) on the Balkan route paint a picture of the situation of stalemate which characterizes Bosnia and Serbia, concentrating on the archipelago of formal and informal camps, on reception/detention centers and encampments (in Sid, Velika Kladusa, and Bihac), and on the trapped presence of people who mainly come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, most of whom have traveled through Greece, but also through Bulgaria, or have arrived directly in Serbia (as is the case with many Iranians).

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if anything, to Lampedusa). However, even this definition seems partial, and, rather, it would be necessary to complicate it by adding “shades” of buffer zones with different intensities, an archipelago of border zones which are at times juxtaposed and which ends up gradually taking over a whole region: first the Aegean islands, then the Greek mainland, the external territories, and the surrounding states, turning the whole Balkan area into a sort of patchwork, the sum of just as many buffer zones with variable geometries and multiple sovereignties, cut through by walls, camps, routes, and crossings. Spending three months in Greece intercepting the stories of trapped people has allowed me to understand the gradual, probably hierarchical and stepped nature of the border regime in place in “Europe”―as though it were a deferred border, a sequence of rings produced by the propagation of a series of concentric circles, of many traps which represent just as many crossroads. In these gradual and ambivalent terms, the “strange trap” that is Greece becomes a mirror of the whole European territory, going on to form a continuous progression (from Orestiada, to Omonia, to Patras, and, from there, to Ventimiglia, Briançon, the Brenner, and Calais) within a territory that looks like a never-ending corridor. Rereading the interpretation of the general run for the “walls” in the present as a symptom of the fragility of state sovereignty already provided with in Walled States Waning Sovereignty (Brown, 2007), Wendy Brown reminds us of the specific regulatory function of channeling and hijacking, rather than of blocking proper of borders barriers, and she highlights how such refractions produce routes which transform entire national territories in just as many borders or corridors: new border barriers, such as those erected by Hungary at its Serbian and Croatian borders do not repel but divert migration flows coming from the east and the south, and they also now link to a system channeling migrants through the Balkans and into the heart of Europe. This in turn converts whole nations into European borders, corridors rather than destinations. (Brown 2007: 4)

At present, Greece seems to tell the story of this type of transition, but it is certainly not an isolated case or an exception. Concentrating on the specific heterogeneity (almost heterotopic) proper of a “corridor”, Bernd Kasparek goes further, suggesting a paradoxical form of “belonging”, obviously not to the letter but, in any case, aware and deliberate, for many

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people on the move. That of corridors is indeed a dimension which is inherently trans- or extraterritorial and those very corridors, intended as crossings or crossroads, are always configured in the eccentric terms of an “in between” or “outside” space: The corridor, stretching across and seemingly connecting many countries, has a constitution of its own. One might characterize it as “extraterritorial’ to better capture the different laws and rules that apply within (as opposed to those without). … The EU border and migration regime did not have the capacity to stop the extraordinary movement of people across its borders, but morphing the route into a confined corridor served to re-establish some kind of control over the movements. (Kasparek, 2016)

To this reading, which can be absolutely shared, I would be tempted to submit a whole series of further questions, asking, for instance, if when we speak of corridors we are really just and exclusively referring to transit zones. In other words, is it possible to inhabit a corridor without using it just to move through it, whether free or constrained, from one room to the other? Moreover, can we still take for granted that there is an “outside”―the implicit “without” in Kasparek’s words―with respect to these new (extra)territorialities? Which one and where would Europe be with respect to the corridor states and the border states that surround it and make it up? If a city (Athens), a state (Greece), and a whole region (the Balkans) can really be enormous buffer zones, “traps”, camps, and just as many crossroads and corridors at the same time, what is the meaning of this abstract place to which the desires of all people on the move toward a continuously deferred “Europe” converge? This in a way is a provocation, but only up to a point, which leads us to wonder whether it is legitimate (and possible) to think (and transform) Europe in terms of an infinite corridor as well as of a string of traps. After all, the very idea of an Underground Europe comes from here. However, it is above all a gamble on the possibility of overturning this infinite corridor by inhabiting it or by creating new subterranean transit spaces and stopovers. However, these “notes from Omonia” are not the place to answer such questions. All I can do here is take stock and provide methodological indications: the fact that it is precisely in this spurious dimension, with uncertain sovereignty or statute, between a trap, a crossroads, and a corridor―which some might read as an exception (Ong, 2006; Mbembe,

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2003) and to which I continue to prefer the idea of excess, of multiple and imbricated jurisdictions (Guareschi & Rahola, 2011) where the juxtaposition and the assemblage of borders and decisional spheres produce new territorialities (or old forms of violence and exploitation)―that the premises and the conditions are created which enable specific “operation of capital”(Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019), more precisely for situations or opportunities from which value can be “extracted (from “smuggling” practices to the far more significant and lucrative creation of farming districts or special economic zones) and in which people in transit end up being temporarily put to value, exploited and “trapped”. Perhaps, for this reason, counting refugees really makes no sense, unless it is done to avoid facing the enormous “obscure figure” into which flow those who are temporarily registered as well as those who have not been officially counted once they have been recruited in the industrial and farming districts together with (or in competition with) “economic migrants” from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, and so on. This is to say that the question is certainly how to get out of the trap, but also how to live in these corridors, inhabiting them and resignifying them. So we come back to the City Plaza, to Exarchia, to Omonia and its shadows, to Athens/“Europe”, and also to the struggles that some new “wobblies” are conducting in the attempt to organize exploited migrant and asylum seeker labor in the farming districts of the Peloponnese. Perhaps then what we are trying to track down, an Underground Railroad within and against the European borderland, is not only a history of routes, exits, and crossings toward “Europe”, but it is also and above all a history of intensity. It is certainly made of transits and crossroads, but also of lived-in squares, African churches, and occupied hotels: ways of inhabiting which seek to leave a sign by loosening the hold of a leash and by modifying the political landscape around it. On July 10th 2019, the City Plaza collective has decided to abandon the hotel after 39 glorious months, “returning the keys” to the former workers of that facility. Between the end of May and the end of June, the families and the individual people who had lived through and continued the occupation of the Plaza, along with militants and activists, have found a new “home”―some of them outside Greece, others in different cities, most of them in Athens. On July 6th, four days before the end of the occupation, in Montreal I receive a message from Antonio, who is still in Athens: “Here we have really reached the

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final hour, with a strange atmosphere, a mix of relief and nostalgia, and even more intense commitment for those who, in the meantime, have made it their own and found themselves in the PLAZA project. Yesterday I had the impression that many were starting to speak of the Plaza like a mirage. … Did the Plaza really existed?”

References Brown, W. (2007). Border barriers as sovereign swords: rethinking Walled States in light of the EU migrant and fiscal crises. Political Geography, 59, 2–4. Kasparek, B. (2016). Routes, corridors, and spaces of Exception: Governing migration and Europe near futures online, Europe at a crossroads.. Retrieved from http://nearfuturesonline.org/routes-­c orridors-­a nd-­s paces-­o f-­e xception­governing-­migration-­and-­europe/. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2019). The politics of operations. Excavating contempoarary capitalism. Duke University Press. Minca, C., Šantić, D., & Umek, D. (2019). Managing the refugee crisis along the Balkan Route: Field notes from Serbia. In C.  Menjívar, M.  Ruiz, & I.  Ness (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of migration crisis (pp.  445–464). Oxford University Press. Minca, C., & Umek, D. (2019). The new front of the Refugee crisis in the Balkans. Society & Space. Retrieved from https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/ the-­new-­front-­of-­the-­refugee-­crisis-­in-­the-­balkans Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception. Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Duke University Press. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions. Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Harvard University Press. Serraos, K., & Greves, T. (2017). Metropolitan interventions Athens 2021. Exchanging of European experiences. Propobos.

CHAPTER 12

Passages (Diaries of a Male Conductor and a Female Conductor)

Diary of a Male Conductor We meet in X City after the umpteenth push-back by the police. Today it must have been more than sixty people between men, women, and children. The request is the same as ever: they need help to get through the border and be able to join friends and relatives who live in the capital. There are three of them. The eldest is 22 years old and they tried to elude checks multiple times, but the National Police had an easy time spotting them and getting them off the train. The second time, they used a crowbar and pepper spray to get them out of the toilet where they were hiding. We bump into another man at the station. He is waiting for a passeur that was recommended to him by his uncle who lives in Brussels and that assured him he can drive him to the other side for 300 Euros. His contact has been putting off their appointment for two days, leaving him on the streets in an exhausting waiting game. He said he left home three years ago, his family stayed in Greece and he, still a minor, continued on foot on his own all the way to Italy. They are tired and the violence suffered during the journey has left wounds on their bodies and in their spirits. They are stuck at yet another border, facing a surveillance device which forces them to risk more every day to be able to keep going. We decide to put them up at our house and take them to a less traveled trail leading to Y town the following day, avoiding checkpoints.

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The preparation to cross the border follows the usual routine: we get to know each other, we look at maps together, we get our backpacks ready, and we discuss how to deal with potential inconveniences. The walk is going to be short, a maximum of five hours to reach the town where friends and a safe home await us. We walk through the woods as the day is coming to an end, we keep a good pace and shortly after we are in French territory. There are no checkpoints or signs telling us to stop or go back. The silver foliage of the olive trees that we see in the distance has been replaced by green fir and beech trees. The conversations loosen up as we stack up the miles, and the struggles and glitches the young men encountered during their journey begin to emerge. On that trail that feels out of time and space, they share their deepest desires and motivations. A sign welcomes us to the town of Goresa. A smile appears on their faces. Together we have placed another piece of a jigsaw that still does not clearly reveal its image. Near the Dannanimo Pass, once we have gone around the last bend before the fork in the path, we see a group of soldiers guarding the brow of the hill. There must be at least half a dozen of them, with assault rifles and wearing camouflage. A couple of them spot us and tell the other ones. We stare at them as our muscles suddenly tense up. We must be less than twenty meters away from them, it is too late to turn back, and it is too risky to attempt to escape into the woods each in a different direction. Taken by surprise and scared by the armed men, we whisper to each other to keep walking to avoid incidents and follow our plan. We smile as we get closer, pass them, and greet them. We take the path that descends toward the bottom of the valley where the river flows toward the sea. In disbelief, we keep walking and exchanging perturbed glances, trying to comprehend what has just happened. There are another two soldiers blocking the path after two hundred meters, and this time one of them orders us to stop and show him our documents. Three of our travel companions declare themselves Libyan and one of them Syrian. The one we will identify as the commander-in-­ chief blows in his whistle and the other ones rush toward us. They make us sit down on the ground and take off our backpacks as they position themselves in a circle around us to prevent us from escaping. From the badges on their uniforms, we understand that they are part of the foreign legion, military corps created to recruit foreigners to support an eighteenth-­ century colonial war. At the moment, some units are taking part in an anti-terrorism operation involving border checks to stop undesired

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migrants entering the country. The situation is paradoxical―foreigners who are recruited to patrol the mountains hunting other foreigners who, like them, are searching for a new life abroad. They tell us we have to follow them and that we will be handed over to the police to clarify the situation. They tell us to stand in line two meters away from each other and they order us to start walking down the path. A squad of legionnaires guides us, and one follows behind us; others follow us from a distance on the sides. We march in silence, exchanging furtive glances and whispered words whenever we think we will not be seen. I keep staring at the large rifles hanging from the legionnaires’ arms, but my mind goes back to the bodies marked by violence during the arrests at the border and the stories of beatings, humiliations, and theft which I have often found myself hearing from migrants pushed back into Italy. I feel like I am a prisoner, I cannot go back, I cannot stop walking or let our companions run away. As we walk, our thoughts flow hectically, we take some breaks, we stop for refreshments and we exchange a few words with our guardians. They speak the language with foreign accents, some of them speak Spanish, others have Asian features, others presumably come from Eastern Europe. As a pastime, they ask us to guess their nationalities without ever telling us the right answers. At some point, one of them gets close to me and whispers in my ear without letting the other ones hear him: ‘I’m Albanian, tell me how much do they pay to you? Don’t worry, I know how this thing works, how much do they pay?’. Another one, addressing one of our travel companions invites them to join them in foreign legion to get a residence permit and a job. The guys exchange subtle smiles and answer that they are not interested. Once we reach the valley, we are ordered to sit on the ground while we are constantly surveilled by two soldiers taking turns, the other ones roll up some cigarettes and joke around in a loud voice. When it has gotten dark, the police arrive and, after searching us, load us into their vehicles to take us to the police station. The following day, the migrants will be pushed back into Italy after spending the umpteenth night in the border police containers. The following night, they will try again, managing to cross the border, recklessly walking along the edge of the highway for several miles before taking a train to Y.

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Diary of a Female Conductor We meet one morning in the city of Z, in the park by the square. My friend, who has been in the town for about two months, has decided to try one of the roads already traveled by many to avoid getting trapped in the “Dublin”, the constant threat for those who were forced to stop on this doorstep of Europe. He has managed to get a hold of one of the many fake passports on offer on the streets of Z, a passport which, along with a certain ease and a good dose of luck, should give him the all-clear to cross the border. My role, as an Italian girl, should be that of breaking the aura of suspicion which by now leads police officers in airports to observe and then carry out spot checks before the opening of gates on all young men on their own who may not be citizens of the country or northern Europeans. We spend the day in the surroundings of that square, between travel agencies and internet points where we can buy tickets to Europe and, after various encounters and conversations, we end our evening at the port, waiting for our ship to the island from which checks are said to be less strict than at Z airport. We decide that, in order to support the new identity of my friend as much as possible, I will be the one carrying all documents with his real name in my backpack in case he gets frisked. We try to take care of our looks a little, to make sure the photo in the new passport matches our holiday look as closely as possible and, with a new backpack on our shoulders and supplies for our journey, we join the other passengers waiting to board. During the checks we keep talking in English without interruption, trying to identify with the tourists who start storming the country in the spring and concentrating more on filling silences than on the content of our conversation. We smile as we nonchalantly show our passports and tickets, and, with a certain satisfaction for having jumped through this first hurdle, we walk up the escalators to enter the ship, which increasingly resemble a floating campground with sleeping bags scattered everywhere. We reach the island before dawn and we start walking from the port toward the town that is still asleep, with that unreal aura that islands have at dawn. We spend the day wandering around the town like good tourists, although the constant reminder of our mission keeps us on the same streets that surround the bus stop to the small airport, which we end up reaching far too early. We try to avoid discussing the mission, unless it is to ask each other about our feelings about the near future, almost in the hope that the other will have the reassuring gift of clairvoyancy. We try to pass time and calm our nerves by forcing a few

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morsels of the leftover supplies from the previous night into our clenched stomachs, remembering a piece of advice that is always valid: eating can contribute to giving off an innocuous vibe in moments of tension. We keep using the technique that seemed to have worked the previous evening, fueling what could be defined as two single monologues rather than a conversation in English, but that may allow us to steer clear of the police checks usually carried out before boarding, which are clearly based on the looks of the passenger and on the mood of the police officer. We also join a very short line of passengers in front of the gate, and we immediately end up among the last ones. I show my ticket and ID card, and I walk slowly toward the plane, hoping that my friend will follow shortly, but he is held up for longer and then ordered to wait on the side to let other passengers board. I join him and together we start the scene of incredulity mixed with annoyance, as two more men join us on the side, by now definitively apart from the other passengers in line, and try, perhaps more timidly due to their very poor command of English, to receive some explanations regarding what has happened. All of our attempts to improvise any strategy to persuade them of our identity is rather quickly torn to pieces by the police officers who lead all four of us to the airport police station, where I am taken to another room so they can start to interrogate us separately. I decide to follow the plan we had agreed on and therefore I continue to shamelessly support the new identity of my friend, whose main details I had memorized, in order to make our stories slightly credible. However, shortly after my friend yells to me in his language to get his real documents out of my backpack and I try to get the chance to ask him what he had told them so far, confiding that in these desperate times our language would remain unintelligible, but our brief conversation is immediately cut off by the police officers who rush to shut us up. As soon as we hand them the documents, the search begins. A university notebook is comically scanned page by page in search of some important contact or clue, and the interrogation becomes more heated, as they repeatedly ask me, regardless of my answers and later with the help of an Italian translator, how much money I had received from my friend and the other two men who were stopped as they were attempting to board the same plane. The interrogation is interrupted by a phone call announcing to the female police officer, visibly annoyed by this series of unexpected events disrupting her shift and her dinner (which she decides to have delivered to the office), the arrival of a family that has been stopped at another gate and is sent to the room together with my friend and the other two men who have been stopped at

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our gate. As the arrival of the translator had exposed even my attempt to answer at the very least elusively due to my scant knowledge of English and in order not to risk dumping further responsibilities on my friend, I decide to claim that I supported his illegal exit from the country due to the large presence of figures belonging to the secret services in his country who would have put his life at risk. Once the interrogation is over, I am sent to the room next door where I join the others. We remain in silence until when, thanks to the reprimand of the parents toward one of the children who is running around the office too freely, we discover that we all speak the same language and we shake off the new nationalities and the fake native languages that had made us remain in silence up to that point. We receive advice on how to reconcile the different versions me and my friend came up with on the spot at the trial, so that we can protect one another from heavier charges, and we joke about the impeccable Spanish of one of the two men that was not enough to dispel the suspicion of the police. After a while, the family is released and the four of us are loaded onto the van that will take us to the police headquarters where we would have had to spend the days before the trial. We hand them our backpacks, watches, telephones, and shoelaces, and I am taken to the women’s room where, among piles of trash, cigarette butts, and remains of food that must have seen more than a few new faces go by, I am welcomed by a mother and her daughter who, curious but with the diffidence of someone who has learned not to trust others too much in life, want to know the reason for my arrival while being very vague about theirs. I understand that they are happily announcing their departure for the prison the following morning, where they would be able to take a shower, probably be in a warmer room and sleep in cleaner blankets, which would give some relief to their constant itchiness. I decide to give my linguistic abilities the benefit of the doubt when they explain to me that, in their experience, problems with documents generally guarantee you will end up in prison. The mother makes me a pillow with some blankets in an attempt that I have decided to read as a welcome and, after sharing a pastry from the vending machine outside the cell, we wish each other goodnight. The following morning, they get ready to leave and, after combing their hair and giving themselves a quick wash with a bottle filled with water from the squat toilet, we say goodbye to each other, with some sadness on my part at the thought of being left there on my own for an indefinite amount of time. As I begin to observe the writings on the walls to pass time, reading “Fuck the Island” takes me back to the prison-island, a stopover sadly shared by many

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migrants who have managed to reach Z, the “big city”, almost a country of its own compared to the islands, which, for those with financial resources as well as a lot of luck and patience, can really give access to Europe. My wait is actually short, because soon after that they let me out to join my friend and tell me the trial would be held. Going up the stairs leading to the courtroom, we are stopped by another police officer who tells us we have to wait. We are sent away shortly after, all four of us, with the simple explanation that “it’s your lucky day” and almost immediately we find ourselves in the streets, once again asking for directions to the city center. Together, we go back to Z, where I say goodbye to my friend before flying to Italy. I will see him again a little over a month later in Italy when, thanks to a new passport, he manages to pass the checks at the gate, almost in disbelief when nobody asks him to move to the side to let other passengers go through. After about two weeks in Italy trying to assess possible routes to Europe, he was clearly tired of waiting and one night he told me he would try to cross the border by train. We decide to go together and, without telling anyone our destination (a decision that was made more out of superstition than as a safety guarantee), at dawn we get on the train heading across the border. Along the way, we think about strategies to arouse as little suspicion as possible and we try again to have food handy, notebooks to read repeatedly without really memorizing anything, and headphones to listen to music, which justifies our silence. This time we do not talk a lot, immersed in our thoughts, almost as if we wanted to achieve with our minds what had previously failed. My friend’s chest visibly moving up and down betrays his declared calmness. At the border, following the example of other friends who, a few days earlier, had managed to get across, we get off to smoke a cigarette and we try to interact with other passengers, subsequently realizing from their evasive answers and their clear restlessness that they probably share our same objective without knowing it. We leave again and we try to hide a grin that perhaps wanted to be more of a scream of joy, only to realize shortly after that the real checks seem to be happening at the station immediately after, already on European territory. The train stops and the police get on. We forget our resolution to identify with hungry students, and we simply pretend we are sleeping, listening to music, heads leaning on one another. We wait for an amount of time that I would not be able to quantify, and the train leaves again, with us not daring to change position, as though by breaking the image the spell of invisibility disappeared. We only open our eyes to observe something that is new to both of us: the sea from the train

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window. We reach the first big city across the border and for once the spring sunshine of seaside cities is not mocking our feelings, but we timidly savor the pleasure of anonymity, still afraid that the spell might break any minute. We get out of the station as quickly as possible, mindful of the stories told by friends who were stopped just because they could not recognize the exit signs in the language of the country or of the many raids in train stations or at bus stops. In town, we receive the address of a fast food restaurant where we can wait for a comrade who would put up my friend while he waited to continue on the last leg of his journey toward Europe.

CHAPTER 13

Epilogue: Harriet and that Last Train to Europe

It is difficult to imagine a conclusion, to wrap up, gathering the thousand branches that got intertwined, often confused and at times lost in this journey through the present reread and almost retraced onto the filigree of a past history and route. Abandoning many of these rivulets, we limit ourselves to getting back to an overall discussion, inevitably concise and articulated on some points, four or five words on which we can update and build a possible “abolitionist” lexicon: escape, comparison, coalition, and democracy. Let us start from the first one.

Escape Escaping on foot, running, at breakneck speed, from the chains of a plantation located in a state just below the boundary between oppression and freedom they call Mason-Dixon. Escaping the whip, the physical abuse and the psychological blackmail of the masters, the dogs of your jailors, erasing every trace; leaving behind sisters and brothers, still in chains or hanging from a noose. Taking a leap into the void, looking at a river, crossing a swamp, walking all night long following the northern star, hiding in the under-stair closet of a church, then in a barn; furtively sneaking into the hay on the wagon conducted by a poor old white man who, the following day, points to a direction with a gesture of complicity. Walking on tiptoes into a small town where, still in the dark, you can find shelter in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16151-3_13

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a house of white people, not hostile ones this time. Just enough time to eat something, sleep in a bed never before dreamed of and bathing, and then, at last, crossing that line, doing it with a childlike leap, emotional, euphoric, smiling inside. Entering a free city, being welcomed by other black people who were born without chains. Telling them your story and seeing their reactions, sometimes understanding, sometimes incredulous. And then almost not managing to adapt to the new life as a free black woman, to paid work, and to clothes chosen and bought. And already having on your mind the obsession with going back down there to rescue others, organize their escape, build and live together in a place perceived as free, in Pennsylvania, in Canada, in New York City, without knowing yet that it will be the work of a whole lifetime, the deferred route you will follow, your northern star. From Dorchester County, to Maryland, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: are you tired, Minty? Not yet, not with all there is to do. First of all, change name, Harriet, like your mother, and surname, Tubman, that of the husband with whom you will never get to live. But for everyone you are Moses, the conductor who goes up and down that line and guides those who escape, with crossings lasting several nights and days. The same route over twenty times and more than seventy runaways, your people, conducted to safety in less than two years―perhaps that is your home. The others in the Philadelphia vigilance committee (William Still, Thomas Garret, and Robert Purvis) support you anyhow, but they look at you like a Martian. Almost all of them are black like you, but not all of them have known chains, violence, and the mark of ownership, chattel, that mark you bear tattooed on your body, a marauded and sexualized body. You will say that shortly after, almost screaming, at the meetings of a semi-clandestine organization, a network that was known as the Underground Railroad, as though it were a train of which you were the conductor. And you will repeat it again in Canada after 1850 and in New York City, in the years leading up to the Civil War, announcing to Douglass, Still, Garrison, and Child that you would continue to “conduct” brothers and sisters, “not one (woman) less”, along the routes of the UGRR. Because it is not about waiting for the outcome of a conflict or an emergency (a pandemic), but rather it is about organizing their escape by inhabiting and building a different society. Escaping is a radical gesture as much as it is indeterminate and open. It traces a sort of half line: an uncertain origin, a point in space from which originates another future, hopefully a better one, but undefined and

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infinite. Its radicality essentially consists in subtracting yourself from spatial-temporal determinations, freeing yourself from a mark, breaking chains and leashes, and violating borders. But it does not absolve you from the risk of finding all of this on you next time around. For this reason, it is enshrouded in an inevitable “radical indeterminacy”, what Aimé Césaire (1956) associated with the verb marronner, a continuous change of state, place, perception of the self. In other words, it becomes a transformative act which pushes you to redefine and reinvent yourself as it defines and reinvents the space around it. It would be worth asking whether it is possible to inhabit the escape. It is what many runaway slaves had to do once they crossed the boundary of a plantation, of a state, of an unsteady line and then of a national border, on their way out and on their way back, in an infinite, circular, and deferred itinerary. Circular and deferred as the movements of migrants, refugees, and undocumented migrants within the European border regime often are, opposing a tenacious direction to Europe against Borderland Europe. We tried to compare these two different and distant ways of building and inhabiting a moving space along a route. But what did it mean?

Comparison In sociology and, in a different way, in anthropology, comparison has long been a hegemonic temptation. Perhaps this is because of the influence if Weber, whose model was as dizzying as it was difficult to reproduce. This is because it not only requires incredible erudition, but also exegesis, an ability to isolate and define phenomena and situations, to describe in detail specific fields before associating and comparing them. It is a paradoxical exercise which is mostly successful insofar as it starts from the premise of failure―the fictitious presumption of a background analogy to discover significant differences. Because it is precisely these differences which allow us to lend meaning to the finished gesture as much as to discrete situations, the terms of comparison taken into consideration. We probably did not go all the way in this sense, but we limited ourselves to retracing an analogous intensity, a same strength, and a similar direction in two spatially and temporally distant experiences. However, differences can be equally important and symptomatic. Projecting the glorious historical experience of the Underground Railroad and the (anachronistic?) figure of the runaway slave onto the routes and “drifting” practices of migrants and undocumented migrants

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in the European borderland is essentially a fantasy exercise. It is evocative and seemingly immediate as much as it is insidious. They are in fact two distant and substantially antithetical situations, starting from the original motive, the “remote” reasons for the presence of slaves back then in the new world, and of migrants today in the old one. In the latter case, these reasons were suffered (through forced deportation, trafficking). In the former case, even when they were tied to colonial legacies, these reasons are essentially driven by agency (despite the existence of networks and of a rhetoric that end up compressing and discrediting this choice behind the language of trafficking), driven, that is, by a desire for transformation, for a better life (or just for a life). Incidentally, it is worth highlighting the constant “extractive” matrix, however obviously different and in a state of continuous transformation, which was at work in the scramble for Africa and in the organization of historical deportation, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as much as in the effects of spoliation and dispossession imposed on whole areas of the world, particularly in Africa, by dynamics of looting and grabbing, incentivized by the current logic of accumulation of capital spread through “structural adjustment plans” as well as catastrophes and wars that are almost invariably produced or declared elsewhere. Then, less incidentally, we could highlight how the Underground Railroad triggered by runaway slaves as much as the underground Europe “karstically” rewritten on maps and in the corridors of the European borderland by the routes of migrants and asylum seekers occur especially “inside”, within a confined landing space. They certainly did not happen in sixteenth-century Africa, and they happened not only in the pro-slavery states of the South, but especially in the “free” ones in the North, tied to the leash of the Fugitive Laws. They do not occur in present-­day Africa (where the most general upheavals seem to constantly cause and almost order movements and escapes along the killer routes), but they especially occur within Europe’s Schengen Zone and on the Dublin leash. Thus, both of them are experiences of “internal” movements, within and around borders which, in the prose of European governance of counter-migrations, would be defined as “secondary”. And if, once again, we try to place these two temporally and spatially distant experiences near each other and associate them, we can discover, as if through a contrast agent, that it is precisely what diverges that becomes significant in so far as it ends up pointing to a “constant in evolution”: the trajectories and the transformations of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “color lines”, or the race line, and which some of his heirs, as Cedric Robinson,

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have updated in the filigree of a “racial capitalism” and of a “race management”, suggesting how each race is also synonymous with migration and must be thought of as a continuous effect of borders and border policies. This is where we stop, in front of another possible rivulet (actually, a sea) which we cannot follow further. Also, we limit ourselves to recalling some indications learned from Maurice Stierl’s attempt to compare: the idea that the slaves of the past and the migrants of the present find a convergence in their acts of resistance, looking for a place of perceived freedom. That is to say, to reconnect with Harriet, in the moment when they organized the escape―by inhabiting and building deferred routes toward that perception of freedom, by giving life to different Maroon camps and communities as well as to a specific counter-space along those routes. This intensity, the legacy of a direction that from the Underground Railroad reaches Underground Europe, is essentially the premise on which we have built our comparison, its most important immediate effect. But not only that. What really mattered for Harriet―to organize the escape and dwelling, and building a different society―is also a possible account of what goes through and messes up today’s European geography: hundreds of thousands of people on the move, in search of a better life, “the place of a perceived freedom”, circumventing by any means the institutional attempt to curb that desire and, therefore, those movements within the borders of the Union. They are not fleeing slavery, but rather the conditions that the free societies of arrival―“of reception”―reserve for them, alternating repression and compassion, dosing the right-hand (which is prevalent today) and the left-hand of the state, offering integration in “dirty, dangerous, and poorly paid” jobs. Overcoming a border then, as Khosravi (2007) reminds us, also reflects the attempt to cross a social barrier, a confinement, a place, and a role that are assigned in a violent way. And it also “produces new subjectivities”.

Coalition We too have tried to discuss the “new subjectivities” generated by the violation of just as many borders―something that takes place in Harriet’s incredible biography when, while crossing a border, she stumbles upon the abolitionists’ network, or when, in the process of re-elaborating and politicizing her story, she becomes a tireless conductor of the Underground Railroad, the best one and the most reliable.

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However, even in that case, it was about an individual and collective subjectivation, founded on the encounter and cooperation that resulted in unprecedented “coalitions”. It is essentially this process that we have tried to retrace and recount along the routes of Underground Europe, where new runaways often meet, in the different stations they go through and inhabit, forming coalitions to get across or to feel better, with parishioners, mosque worshippers, Erasmus students, scouts, No Border collectives, anarchist groups, doctors, nurses, researchers, organic and neo-rural farmers, volunteers in all manners of international civil service, secondand third-generation migrants (postcolonial European citizens), countless “inhabitants” found along the way and along the routes, driven by the most varied reasons (love, adventure, exoticism, sense of justice, or humanity), as well as other people in transit who are in the same conditions but have more experience, which they can sell or make available. It is in this not-very-cohesive and at times conflicting coalition of subjects and practices that one can find the heterogenous crew of present-day abolitionists, which corresponds to that (black and white) world, perhaps more organized but not less divided, which materially supported runaway slaves, the rebels of the plantations. Moreover, it is about a heterogeneity of biographies, national origins, trajectories, affiliations, practices, and beliefs that are progressively reassembled―mirroring each other―into a coalition also because they are subjected to similar sanctions. In the face of the spread in the criminal codes of many member states of the criminalization of solidarity, in the recurring conflation of people acting in solidarity with migrants, smugglers, and traffickers, humanitarian work becomes politicized, while more traditional political demands are combined with minute practices, support gestures, and concrete disobedience. Inside this coalition, we catch a glimpse of the making of another Europe which is at last uncoupled from the hold of the nation-states that constitute it and, for this reason, demands a right to asylum, a residence permit, and a fully European citizenship. Dreaming, perhaps, of a near future when, like in Mohsin Hamid’s novel, the categories of natives, refugees, and migrants will evaporate, and movements and new parliaments will rise from the ashes of states. Thus, the plot of Exit West evokes the theme of democracy and makes us reflect on how this coalition in the making―in which a female presence is often hegemonic, as shown by research carried out at the many “stations” of Underground Europe―is also searching for a weight, a “representation”,

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a voice that is loud and clear in the face of the “sovereignist”, (femo) nationalist, patriarchal, and racist shrieks which saturate the media discourse, projecting a distorted, univocal, male, and white representation of the state of the country or of the Union. This, too, is the crux discussed by many of our narrators and many of the conductors we have met: the importance not only of “getting people through”, but also of narrating and disclosing the sense and the work of disobedience that supports transit and reinvents forms of hospitality, also in an attempt to counter the semidetention devices of institutional reception, precisely with the intention of opening and changing the terms of the political debate and of our demands. This dimension of direct action, which is at the same time public and linked to specific demands, has been referred to as “convoys”, pacific and collective assaults to the border by people on the move―something similar to what happened in 2015 along the Balkan route, in the cacerolazos against the border in Ventimiglia, under the nets in Ceuta and Melilla, or in the makeshift camp in Diavata, near Thessaloniki, but also on the thousands of boats and inflatables of all types launched “to Europe” and steered by “smugglers” who often are fugitives like everyone else. To return to the previous point (comparison), of course there are still many gaps and shadow zones to be covered, especially those represented by a role and a place, the decisive role of free black people in the abolitionist states of the North (like Still and Ruggles), which appears to be harder to retrace in the mostly blackmailed, tamed, and silenced place of many “economic” migrants, temporary or not, in today’s Europe―the infinitesimal yet abysmal space which sets seasonal migrants (Indians, Bengalis, Maghrebis, Sub-Saharans, and Romanians) employed in the agricultural districts of southern Europe apart from asylum seekers conscripted to work for free in citrus groves or strawberry fields at the same latitudes. There is still a lot of work to be done, new coalitions to form, and new “wobblies” to invent. In the meantime, however, we can record an expansion in scale or of routes. Like with the mixed-race crews of pirate ships, the rebels of the Atlantic, a similar heterogenous developing crew can be found onboard the solidarity fleets that cut through the Mediterranean saving lives, contributing to breaching the maritime equivalents of walls and barbed wire that have taken over the continent and turned the sea into an enormous cemetery, and freeing those who sail through and across it from the complicit leash of trafficking and of “Fortress Europe”. Going back to Gilroy,

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someone has talked about a possible Black Mediterranean (Proglio, 2018). This perspective and this debate have been growing significantly, becoming increasingly filled with voices and perspectives, and we wanted to position ourselves within them in the hope that we have been able to make our own contribution from the “land”. Besides, this very Black Mediterranean could be dated even further back, rediscovering the appearance of the “Jacobin Arabs” in the insurrections that attempted to overthrow the dictatorial regimes delegated to doing the dirty, externalized work of European borders (Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt). The prose of countermigrations poured out again onto their longing for freedom―Houria― and free movement in all its aseptic violence.

Abolition Democracy This heterogenous, pragmatic, and developing “coalition”, this community of practices (simultaneously political and humanitarian, driven by solidarity and demands), which is built around the routes of the “Euro-Afro-Asian stars”1 crossing and challenging the European borderland, immediately asks for a right to movement for all. However, it does not stop there, because through everyday and collective praxis it also produces underground spaces of crossing and temporary liberation from other leashes and other border devices―aspiring, that is, to something more, despite doing so in confused terms. 1  Some will remember some evocative ethnographic work carried out about twenty years ago, an exploration of common Europe built from the grassroots by the low-cost generation of precariously employed youths in the knowledge economy, who saw and used this space essentially as an opportunity. The author, Adrian Favell, defined them―not really in a provocative way―as Eurostars (Favell, 2008). In his recent work, Joris Schapendonk (2017) suggests the corresponding term Afrostars, in a twist reminiscent of Afro-Futurism’s daring aesthetic. Behind the ostensible provocation, Schapendonk actually introduces a sort of detournement and challenges two consolidates clichés―especially in the official discourse on migrations. On the one hand, he points to the analogies in the desires and practices between the transnational experience of highly educated precariously employed European youths and that of young Africans who are represented as “on the run”, contesting all dichotomous perspectives, the border that separates legitimate lives and movements from “irregular” ones, experiences to be promoted/incentivized and those to be confined/controlled/expelled. On the other, it turns a presence which is represented as a “problem” into a resource, ascribing to it the power to materially build from the grassroots a “communal” and transitive space within and against a context which, instead, seems to be increasingly torn apart, hierarchized, and racialized.

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The borders it opposes are not only the material and symbolic ones which obstruct movements, but also those which capture this coalition differentially, by projecting the migrant condition onto a segregated, hierarchical, and racialized space; or the class boundaries that Benjamin Drew had already understood on the other side of the Atlantic back in 1854 when he discussed slavery and that here in Europe have been intensified by ten years of economic crisis and massive doses of austerity; or, once again, the persistent boundaries that continue to frame gender and genders in the development of patriarchy and those that redefine belonging based on criteria that are more and more claustrophobically nationalistic and “white”. All of these aspirations outline the contours of a radically democratic, post-national, and postcolonial space which is shared or communal as well as of a “subaltern” perspective, Maroon and queer, from which we can define abolitionist theory and practice in far more open and extended terms. To cite Du Bois, we could speak once again of “abolition democracy”, of a tension toward an open scenario of “freedom, intelligence and creative power for all men”. Du Bois imagined these possibilities in the short summer of the “Black Reconstruction”, opposing it to any attempt of subaltern inclusion of African Americans, freed from the chains of slavery and destined to those of the assembly lines, of race and gender in the segregated spaces of the industrial metropolises. Moreover, he invited a reading of the Black Reconstruction as a possible horizon and a persistent way out for the heterogenous coalition that had emerged around the slave uprising, their escape and its organization and fulfillment through the Underground Railroad. Perhaps he already glimpsed the traces of all this along the routes, in Buxton or in Florence. We traced something similar in the thousand more rivulets, scattered within and against the European borderland, which surface in this book and were sacrificed in this epilogue: an idea, a future to be followed and cultivated in the present of Underground Europe.

References Césaire, A. (1956). Oeuvres completes. Gallimard. Favell, A. (2008). Eurostars and Eurocities: free movement and mobility in an integrating Europe. Blackwell.

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Khosravi, S. (2007). The ‘illegal’ traveller: an auto-ethnography of borders. Social Anthropology, 3, 321–334. Proglio, G. (2018). Is the Mediterranean a White Italian-European Sea? The Multiplication of Borders in the Production of Historical Subjectivity. Intervention, 20(3), 406–427. Schapendonk, J. (2017). Afostars and Eurospaces. West Africans movers re-­ viewing “Destoantion Europe” form the inside. Etnografia e ricerca Qualitativa, 3, 393–414.