Pranaya SJB Rana

Migration has become the defining characteristic of our age. The time of globalisation is the time of migration where people, in numbers more vast than ever before, are crossing prescribed borders and boundaries regularly and wilfully. On a global scale, this mass movement is visible in the increasing numbers of those crossing from developing and underdeveloped countries to the developed world; more locally, people are moving from rural areas to urban cities. The causes are myriad and range from socio-economic constraints that compel movement in search of jobs (as in the case of Nepali migrant workers flying to the Middle East and East Asia) to voluntary searches for better education and employment (as in the case of relatively well-to-do Nepalis flying to the US, Europe and Australia).

Postcolonial baggage

Of course, migration has always been part of the human experience. In prehistoric times, humankind moved from place-to-place in search of pastures, arable land, sources of water and escape from inclement weather. Even in the early 20th century, as Deepak Thapa pointed out in these very pages, mass movement, in the form of Nepalis being shipped off to fight in the trenches of the First World War, virtually denuded the country of young men. These days, Nepalis are leaving in even enormous numbers—hundreds leave for work in the Middle East and East Asia every day; conservative estimates claim that 400,000 leave annually. One in every four households in the country has at least one member absent or living out of the country, according to the 2011 census. The absentee population in the census is close to two million with the highest proportion (44.81 percent) from the 15-24 years age group.

This kind of migration, seen in purely spatial terms, offers little that is new. But migration, if understood as the paradigmatic metaphor of our times, offers a whole breadth of new ideas and modes of analysis. One way of looking at the migrant of now is in ideological terms. The migrants of today are postcolonial migrants, who take with them the burden of a colonial history, whether literal or figurative. Thus, Nepali migrants in Qatar are not the same as Nepali soldiers fighting in Flanders Field in World War I. For all consideration, those soldiers were colonial subjects, citizens of a ‘sovereign’ nation fighting under a foreign flag for a foreign monarch. When describing our Gurkha soldiers, adjectives of courage and valour are tossed around like so many grenades. Not so much for the postcolonial migrant, whose bravery lies in the simple act of boarding a plane, headed for destination that is, for all instances, alien and hostile. 

The migrant worker is one example but there are many others. There are the examples of the largely urban students who go off to premier universities in the English-speaking world; those studying medicine in close neighbours like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China; and those who have fled to foreign lands, especially in the West, under duress, sometimes real but often fabricated. All these migrants, whether permanent or temporary, have inscribed onto their bodies and minds the existence, whether real or imagined, of a postcolonial world order.

Power relations

This is not a conscious carrying; it is inherent in being, especially as a citizen of a third world country travelling to the first world. What is carried across becomes glaringly obvious when confronted initially with the unequal power relations that exist between the migrant and the airport authority checking the migrant’s passport. The scrutiny with which the officer matches the passport photo with the migrant’s features becomes an interrogation. The place of birth, the place of issuance, even the name—unpronounceable and foreign to the officer’s tongue—are all identifiers of otherness. The migrant is beseeching entrance and the officer holds the key.

Power relations, however, are not as simple as that between the migrant and the officer. There are vast differences between a white-collar migrant seeking entrance for an office job and a blue-collar migrant seeking entrance to work in construction. These two might come from the same country but there exists a power

relation between them that is often just as vast as the one between them and the first world airport officer. When the migrant worker to Qatar asks the middle-class student to the US for help filling out the departure form, the latter experiences a power relation that is a mixture of shame and pity. Pity for the poor soul who cannot help but leave for a foreign land where he/she will toil hard for meagre pay and shame because the experience of this migrant worker is something the student will never understand.

Though the experiences of these two migrants might be drastically different, there are modes of sublimating their experiences into metaphors of ‘carrying across’. As Salman Rushdie puts it: “The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images. Migrants—borne-across humans—are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples.” This shared experience of carrying across is vital to the experience of migration and this is where power relations between the student and the migrant worker collapse into a shared encounter. For it might be impossible to identify completely with the plight of another but there are grounds for empathy. Whether the movement is from rural to urban, from third world to first or even from one state of mind to another, migration understood as metaphor allows for the existence of a kind of collective consciousness that is built on difference.

The things they carried

To be confronted with the horrors faced by migrant workers in the Middle East is to be lulled into a state of pity and despair. Initial outrage is easily forgotten and action rarely goes beyond complaining on social media and signing a few virtual petitions. What is required is an active empathy, a solidarity in spirit and in theory, as postcolonial migrants. To understand and accept that we are all migrants is a step towards that end. Though the experiences might be irreconcilable, the ideology is shared. Identifying with the migrant must go beyond rhetoric and translate into a ‘carrying across of ideas’. This requires that migrants of all hues, but especially those of the privileged variety, own up to the political baggage they carry. Whether migrating to sign a multi-million dollar contract, migrating on a scholarship to study engineering in Germany or migrating to work in a restaurant in Malaysia, there is a shared history here that begs to be recognised.

Power relations will always exist but even the acknowledgement of those relations can go some way towards alleviating them. The migrant, thus, is not him or her but us. So it ceases to matter if we are in the Gulf or in Kathmandu. The frontiers we cross are not always literal; they often exist as states of mind and paradigms of thought.

Published on: 26 February 2014 | The Kathmandu Post