The Wherewithal of Life. Michael Jackson
it is only a question of when). These sweeping statements indicate the existential perspective from which I view migration. Rather than treat the migrant as a singular figure—an interloper, anomaly, or alien in our midst—I view the migrant as exemplifying a universal aspect of human existence. Either we are moving or the world is moving—about, under, or above us. To cite the slogan so often seen on vehicles in West Africa, “No condition is permanent.”
Although movement, metamorphosis, and mutation are in the nature of things, change does not merely befall us like a bolt from the blue; it is often chosen and embraced, in the hope that we may be carried into a more fulfilling relationship with the world. Whether we construe “the wherewithal of life” as a matter of having wealth or health, fresh water or self-worth, love or lebensraum, food, family, or a future—it tends to be characterized by scarcity. As a limited good, it must be actively sought, struggled for, salvaged, and safeguarded.7 Critical to these processes of capturing or commanding life is a capacity to move to where life appears to be most abundant and accessible, or to orient oneself so as to see what other possibilities may exist where one is.8 This explains why many desert-dwelling Australian Aboriginals readily abandoned a hunter-gatherer economy when they first encountered white pastoralists, choosing to “sit down” on the fringes of cattle stations or mines and exchange their labor for tea, flour, and sugar. Just as nomadic people value both stasis and movement, so sedentary people sometimes grow restive when stuck in the same place or the same rut for too long. In the traditional sand drawings and contemporary acrylic paintings of Aboriginal artists, the recurring icons of circle and line suggest a perennial oscillation between camping and traveling, sitting down and “going walkabout.” Dreaming myths recount how totemic ancestors moved far and wide across the partially formed face of the earth, performing ceremony, shaping landforms, imprinting and impregnating the ground with their sweat and their designs. Exhausted by their travels and nostalgic for their natal country, they eventually returned whence they came, sinking back into the ground, to be ritually brought forth again by the dancing, chanting, and clacking boomerangs of the living. Aztec migration narratives echo this archetype. In the early sixteenth-century Mapa de Cuauhtinchan, Mesoamerican artists living in the “Place of the Eagle’s Nest” depicted, two decades after the Spanish conquest, a labyrinthine journey by their ancestors through sacred landscapes. By means of this map, subsequent generations would be able to vicariously revisit the critical events that led to the founding of the Aztec world.9 Like Aboriginal paintings from Central Australia, this Aztec “masterpiece of cultural history and religious memory”10 can also be read as a cryptic account of a cosmology in which the peregrinations of the ancestors mirror the movement of life energies between microcosm and macrocosm. For the Aztecs, women, captives, and children had to be periodically fed to the sun and their “vital energy transferred” to the cosmos as a kind of “debt payment to the hungry gods” for the expected regeneration of life on earth.11 This primordial logic of sacrifice, requiring that individual lives be given up for life itself to be renewed, prefigures the rationale for contemporary migration, in which one gives up one’s life in a natal altepetl or community to gain a more bountiful life across the border, in a foreign place. But the tension between what W. B. Yeats called “one dear perpetual place”12 and all the other places to which one develops ties or where one finds fulfillment is never completely resolved. How much does one have to sacrifice to have a life worth living? How much can one expect from the powers-that-be in one’s search for a just apportionment of the things that make life possible? And as much as one yearns for pastures new, one also yearns, in an alien land, to be at home again or, at least, to recover a balance between being an actor and being acted upon—a balance I refer to elsewhere as “being at home in the world.”13
Throughout this book, I explore these existential tensions and quandaries through a deep engagement with the three individuals who shared their life stories with me. In each case, the stories unfolded in conversation. I did not so much interview my subjects as collaborate with them, occasionally annotating the experiences they recounted, yet distancing myself from the jargon of migration studies so that their voices would be heard and their observations and recollections would determine the course of my own deliberations.14 Consider, for instance, Jean-François Bayart’s 2007 study of global governmentality, where migrants are spoken of collectively as “the drudges of globalization,” living a “floating” or “liminal” existence.15 These are arresting images. But even in Roberto Franco’s darkest days working in the fields of Southern California, and despite the long hours Ibrahim Ouédraogo toils for a minimal wage in an Amsterdam kitchen, these men do not ontologize themselves as drudges, floating, or liminal, although there are times when these words ring true.16 If we are to avoid the trap of becoming infatuated with our own intellectual-cum-magical capacity to render the world intelligible, then the vocabulary “we” all too glibly project onto “them” must be tested continually against the various and changing experiences of actual lives. Otherwise we risk becoming complicit in the social violence that reduces the other to a mere object—a drudge, a victim, a number, assimilated to a category, a class, or a global phenomenon. As John Chernoff notes in his splendid portrayals of West African urban life through the ebullient narratives of “a brilliant but uneducated African woman” who “examines moral ambiguities from a perspective of situational ethics,”17 most media reports, academic studies, and novels of the educated elite “all have ambitions to elevate generalizations about big social issues” and “it is difficult to get an idea of what life is like at ground level or to get a feeling for the experience of the people who lived there.”18 Ruth Behar’s narrative ethnography of a Mexican migrant, whose name translates as “hope,” brings home to us how close-grained empirical and ethnographic documentation can speak against the social and discursive violence that creates inequalities of presence, recovering the lived experience that is often lost in the administrative and intellectual discourse of the global North.19 As Behar puts it in her preface to Esperanza’s story, “I can only hope that her story will find un rinconcito, a little space somewhere on this side of the border where there are no aliens, only people.” I share this same hope for the stories in my book.
THE QUESTION OF LIFE ITSELF
In his author’s note to Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad observes that “it is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all kinds of spoil.” He then refers to this work and another unnamed story as being “all the spoil I brought out from the center of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.”20
Conrad could not have anticipated the irony of his comments, for as a direct consequence of the European colonization of places where people like Conrad had no right to be, countless people from those regions would wind up in the global North, where they would be stigmatized as interlopers and often told to go back to where they properly belonged.21 Yet the ramifications of Conrad’s observations go beyond colonialism. For whether we are speaking of mercenary ambitions for power and profit, ethnographic quests to understand the human condition, utopian longings for an elsewhere or a soul mate, or movements of people from the impoverished South to the global North in search of work and well-being, ethical questions arise that go beyond historical events, social identities, legal rights, and moral norms.
I therefore begin with the question of life itself, before considering the particular ways in which life is understood and the specific conditions under which it can be accessed, augmented, possessed, preserved, and shared.
For Spinoza, life and death were not absolute poles of being and nothingness, but matters of being more or less alive, since every life form “endeavors to persist in its own being,” seeking whatever augments and amplifies its existence, while avoiding all that imperils or diminishes it.22 Spinoza’s concept of the struggle for being is directly relevant to understanding the human impulse to move and migrate, as well as what it means to have a life or the hope of a better life, or to be so destitute of the wherewithal for life that one experiences oneself as socially dead. It also helps us understand the relation between being and belonging, since to be is also to yearn to be with others, to experience one’s being as integrated with and integral to a wider field of being, and to know that one’s own particular life merges with and