Icons of Becoming: Documenting Undocumented Migration from West Africa to Europe.

Christian Vium

Icons of BecomingDocumenting Undocumented Migration

from West Africa to Europe*

“While I stood staring into his misery, he looked atme and with both hands he opened his chest and said:‘see how I tear myself!’” (Aligheri 2003: 28-30).

Dramatic images of suffering, huddling masses of African migrants crossingthe ocean in overcrowded ramshackle boats, landing on the shores of Europeincreasingly inhabit our television screens and newspaper pages. Strippedof their history, these migrants become visible to us only at the height oftheir suffering: undifferentiated, shipwrecked souls with glearing white eyes,exhausted by dehydration and days spent at sea. These “apocalyptic repre-sentations” (de Haas 2008: 1305, 1317) effectively construct the migrantsas “lost souls” (Mallki 1996: 387-390), invading hordes from a poor andlost continent (Broomberg & Chanarin 2008: 6; Jackson 2006: 79; Lucht2012: ix; Vium 2007). That human suffering represents a “master subjectin our mediatized times” (Kleinman & Kleinman 1996: 1) is hardly a sur-prise given our longstanding historical obsession with death, pain and exis-tential trials and tribulations, which figure so prominently in Western mythsand collective narrative discourses (Jackson 2006; Sontag 2003: 38). Withthe spread of mass media, however, we have become particularly familiarwith images of atrocity, and the horror and political paradoxes these imagesactually portray become numbing when one person’s suffering is instantlycancelled out by the next (Broomberg & Chanarin 2008: 5; Das 2007; Sontag1971: 20-21).

In this article I set out to document and analyse some of the largelyobscured but significant events, which predate and lead up to the moment ofthe dramatic crossing. Using photography as a privileged tool for analysingundocumented migration I demonstrate that it enables a form of conceptual

* The author thankfully acknowledges valuable comments by Karen Waltorp,Cécile Canut and Alioune Sow, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers.

Cahiers d’Études africaines, LIV (1-2), 213-214, 2014, pp. 217-240.

403191 UN09 14-05-14 07:18:36 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 217

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ethnography, which allows the migrants to perform themselves into exis-tence through a form of collaborative storytelling. The images accompany-ing this article expose the structural invisibility of the migrants, and arguablyindex their progressive transition by fixing decisive moments in this process.The article is based on empirical material collected during six years of ongo-ing anthropological research tracing the multiple trajectories of undocumentedmigrants from West Africa to Europe via the Sahara desert and the AtlanticOcean as well as the Mediterranean Sea. The project explores migrationas a paradoxical question of becoming through unbecoming (Vium 2007),and investigates what happens when human beings who must continuallydeny their identities find themselves stuck in a prolonged liminal positionregulated by norms of exception and the absence of rights and dignity(Laacher 2007: 23). In the following, I present and discuss a selection ofcases featuring prospective migrants in a small village in northwestern Mali,excerpts from an overland journey undertaken with undocumented migrantsthrough the Sahara, as well as from a detention centre on the coast of Africa.In the research, which was commenced in 2006, photography and videohave figured as integral components in data generation, analysis and dissem-ination of findings, and for the purpose of this article photography is exploredas a form of conceptual ethnography, which affords specific types of collab-orative narratives to arise through the interaction between researcher andinformants in this particular context. Paradoxically, the camera functionsas a sociopolitical technology, which enables the perception of subjects whohave become both literally and figuratively imperceptible (Papadopoulos &Tsianos 2008). Thus, the collaborative process of image-making analyti-cally frames migration as a transformative project of social becoming throughwhich the migrant progressively “comes undone” as he ventures furtheraway from the familiar and into the unknown. Following Jackson whoconsiders storytelling a fundamental desire, which allows human beings tomake sense of even the most constraining, disorienting and unimaginableexperiences (Jackson 2006), I demonstrate how using a camera as part ofthe methodological approach to a topic such as undocumented migrationmay incite and make possible new forms of performative storytelling proc-esses and discourses. Epistemologically, then, this article elaborates onhow photography can be used as a medium not only to document, but alsoto analyse and convey undocumented migration from an anthropologicalpoint of departure (MacDougall 2006: 271; Pink 2001; Ruby 2000: 398;Stanczak 2007: 4).

Departing

Sidi1 was absorbed in the darkness of night in a small room of the mud-cleaned house, immersed in prayer (fig. 1). The following morning he was

1. All personal names and place names have been changed by the author.


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to embark on a long and perilous journey into the unknown. His destinationwas Paris, France. Before him awaited the vast expanses of the hostileSahara desert and the treacherous sea. Like many other prospective migrantshe was not ignorant of the journey’s dangers (Collyer 2010: 278; Fall 2007;Jónsson 2008; Lucht 2008: 162): “I know the dangers of the journey. Thereis death all along the road”, he told me, as he explained how he was consumedby thoughts about what awaited him. What concerned him the most wasnot knowing when, and indeed if, he would ever see his family again. Hisparents had invested a significant part of the revenues from their meagremillet harvest to finance his journey, and their future was now, to a largeextent, hinged upon the success of his impending “adventure”2. The objec-tive was clear: He was to reach France, where relatives would help himfind work (Timéra 2001: 45), and send back money to support the family.

The photograph of Sidi immersed in prayers was made3 in the villageof Djoun in the Kayes region in northwestern Mali on May 26, 2006. Inthe three months leading up to that day, an estimated 70 young men outof no more than 1,000 inhabitants had left in the attempt to reach Europe.People in Djoun were growing anxious as they had received limited informa-tion on the whereabouts of the young men, and news in the radio weresaturated with tragic stories of migrants left to die in the Sahara andconsumed by the sea. This collective concern, essentially a form of socialor intersubjective suffering (Kleinman 2006: 390), was engraved on thefaces of fathers assembling in the mosque to pray for their departed sons(fig. 2). The mayor was preparing a journey to Paris to look for thosewho had left, fearing that many had perished along the way, been detainedindefinitely or “forgotten” that their peers back home depended on theirremittances. If the men failed to send back money, the village wouldundoubtedly face a troubled future. The families had invested their futurein them, and where would the revenue come from if not from them?

Like many agricultural villages in the Kayes region, Djoun has a century-long history of regional “circular” and seasonal migration (Quiminal 1991;Timéra 1996) and, in the decades following the Second World War, Francebecame a favoured destination as the demand for manual workers was onthe rise in postwar Europe (Jónsson 2008). Colonial ties and the languagemade France a natural choice, and throughout the second part of the20th century migration from the Kayes region increased to a point where

2. In West Africa, migration is commonly known as an “adventure”, and those whoundertake it are called “adventuriers”, alluding to the fact that they venture intothe unknown, face numerous challenges, and grow as human beings as a resultof the acquired experience, knowledge and recognition the dangerous endeav-our entails.

3. I deliberately use the phrase “making” an image (as opposed to the more conven-tional “taking” an image) so as to underline the collaborative nature of the pro-duction of the images in this essay, and my general methodological and ethicalapproach to photography.


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revenues derived from migrant remittances, in particular from men workingin France, constituted a, if not the main source of income for families inmany villages (Barou 2002; Daum 1998; Kane & Lericollais 1975; Timéra2001; Quiminal & Timéra 2002)4. However, since the 1990s, strict immi-gration policies in France and Europe in general, and the significant rein-forcement of EU’s external borders, saw the advent of a clandestine economysurrounding migration to Europe (Boerwinkel 2011: 53; Joppke 1998; Mann2003; Sargent & Larchanché-Kim 2006; Soudain 2006; Weil 2005; Witholde Wenden 1998)5. This did not, however, prevent young men in the vil-lage of Djoun, to fantasize about and plan to “try their luck” and reachEurope. On the contrary, the more constrained their means of mobility,the more the imaginary (Appadurai 1996; Gaonkar 2002; Lado 2005; Strauss2006) became predominant, producing a frustrated context of “involuntaryimmobility” (Carling 2002; Lubkeman 2008).

Across the village, signs of a “culture of migration” (Åkesson 2004; Ali2007; Jónsson 2008; Kandel & Massey 2002) were evident. Young menin European football shirts (fig. 3) moving through narrow dirt streets, pasthouses of families with family members abroad, monuments to the potentialsof migration, where cars in particular testified to the flow of remittances.The words: “Live is Money” written on the facade of a house, spelled outthe discourse in the collective imagination (fig. 4). Manifestations of areality beyond the immediate confines of this impoverished farming villagewere immanent, both in artefacts, such as the aforementioned cars, and post-cards, letters, presents, photographs as well as communal wells, cliniquesand schools (Daum 1998; Gauvrit & Le Bahers 2004; Grillo 2007: 211;Quiminal 2002). The widely circulating rumours, narratives and discoursesabout and from those who had gone abroad contributed to the preponderantfantasies about Europe (Appadurai 1996: 31-35, 53-54; Vium 2007). Atnight, the youth would often assemble in front of the few television setsin the village (fig. 5), consuming American action movies and other deterri-torialized media products, which radically fuelled their “irresistible desire”to experience that which lay beyond the immediate horizon and escape adesolate and futureless present (Appadurai 1996: 54; Gaonkar 2002; Lado2005: 17, 19; Pandolfo 2007: 348; Salazar 2010; Timéra 2001: 37; Vium2007). In this context, migration must be understood as not merely move-ment but a form of socio-cultural construct involving significant imaginary

4. G. JÓNSSON (2008: 5) quotes F. KANE & A. LERICOLLAIS (1975: 17) for stating thatin 1975, approximately on third of the male population in the Soninke homelandhad emigrated to France. According to J. BAROU (2002: 8), a study conductedin the area known as “la vallée du fleuve Sénégal in 2005 migrant remittancescovered between 30% and 80% of the needs of the families. Based on a house-hold study, G. JÓNSSON (2008: 21) puts the figure at more than 50% on average.

5. As M. COLLYER (2010: 275) points out with reference to E. GOLDSCHMIDT (2004),significant transsaharan migration with Europe as a designation was only recog-nized in the late 1990s, a statement which my sources from Djoun confirm.



and discursive dimensions which inform processes of meaning-making (Frello2008; Salazar 2010). Indeed, the imaginaries of the youth in Djoun consti-tute both models “of” and models “for” reality (Geertz 1973: 87-125).

“Here, we only work for the stomach, it is impossible to save money...All is work, everyday. Just work and no money.” Sidi told me one after-noon when he explained how he grew up doing hard manual labour in thefields. Since he was a young boy, he had been dreaming about going toEurope, and in particular France, where he had relatives and friends6. “Tome, Europe is a promised land. [...] Some people say there are people whosuffer in Europe, but the majority say that Europe is wonderful. In anycase, we have to go there.” He relayed to me how, when he was a boy, heused to wonder why some of the other children were wearing trousers andt-shirts, when he did not. He later realised that they had family membersworking in Europe, sending back money and presents. His father, Boubacar,a 51-year old millet farmer who, as is often the case in West Africa, financedthe majority of his son’s immanent journey (Barou 2002: 8), phrased thesituation as follows: “When you are starving and have a lot of problems,you don’t have a choice. You have to go. Try cultivating this land, andyou will understand.” He nodded towards the primitive hoe leaning againstthe wall, and continued his pragmatic explanation about how he had decidedto send Sidi towards Europe to earn money: “I tell my son: this journey isfor your family—remember that when you are away—we are still here.”

In Djoun, migration has become an imperative, not only because of thepotential of economic gain (Bloch et al. 2011: 1289; Castles 2000: 7), butalso as an emancipatory project enabling social becoming for youth likeSidi, who are stuck between adolescence and adulthood, finding themselvesincapable of cultivating social capital (Bourdieu 1986), because they lackthe means to contribute to the family economy in a constraining context ofpoverty, environmental degradation and unemployment (Carling 2002: 18;Lado 2005: 17-18; Lo Sardo 2008: 5; Lucht 2008: 83; Timéra 2001: 37;Vigh 2009: 98-100; Vium 2007). Under such circumstances, many youngmen desire to be “socially present through the remittances and possibilitiesthat their physical absence make possible” (Vigh 2009: 98). According toPapadopolous and Tsianos, becoming articulates “a political practice inwhich social actors escape their normalized representations and reconstitutethemselves in the course of participating in, and changing, the conditionsof their material existence. Becoming is not only a force against something[...] it is also a force which enables desire” (Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008:223). In the same vein, Timéra (2001: 38), who worked among prospectivemigrants in West Africa, argues that the project of migrating inscribes itself

6. The destination is first and foremost dictated by the availability of family andfriendship networks, which may provide help in finding lodging, work and ingeneral council on all matters pertaining to life as an undocumented migrant(COLLYER 2006: 143)


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in a voluntary initiatory rupture with the aspiration of accumulating wealthand experience and the promise of a future glorious return, which fosterssocial recognition, thus enabling the migrant to procure social capital anda new elevated status. The fundamental existential problem for the youngmen in the village is their incapacity to honor the reciprocal logic of takingcare of their families at a point in their lives when it is expected. Bydeparting, literally absencing themselves from this confined situation, youngmen hope to one day become present, economically, in the lives of theirfamilies, who are paramount to this project of social becoming (ibid.: 44).In Djoun, migration, then, can be understood as a radical rite of passage(Turner 1992; Van Gennep 1960) in the sense that it is considered a vehicle,which may transport young men through a series of transitions which enactthem as respected individuals within a widely accepted logic of social mobil-ity. Being is belonging, but perhaps more importantly, becoming (Jackson2006: 13).

An Icon of Becoming

The image of Sidi immersed in prayer serves as an iconic encapsulation ofthe migratory endeavour at large. A young man caught in an existentialconflict, which compels him to undertake a long and dangerous journey intothe unknown in order to provide for his family and, by so doing, becoming aman. If there ever was a universal mythical narrative, this is the one.Taken in profile with long exposure due to the dim light in the room, his“soul” seems to be already departing, while he is gazing to the ground,contemplating the possibility that he might loose his life along the way,and never see his family again. Arguably, the image captures the momentwhen he realises that he must depart, and condenses the multiplicity ofthoughts surrounding this decision. The actual story however, is not therein the photograph, it must be “imagined into existence” (Strauss 2006: 9),and to become legible to others, this imagining must be socially and cultur-ally encoded, a process which David Levi Strauss calls astheticization (ibid.).To represent is to aesthetisize (ibid.), and in the case of photography thisis particularly pertinent, given the indexical quality inherent in the medium.Photographs, as it were, are always just instants, fragments, and what theymust do is to register the relation of photographer to subject (ibid.: 10).

In this particular case, I had approached Sidi in the afternoon, askinghim if I could spend a moment with him portraying his prayer. I felt itwas an intimate and significant moment, which I hoped would enable anuanced understanding of the migration endeavour. The ideal was to pro-duce an image, which could afford identification. I imagined that prayingwas something most people would be able to relate to as an existential act.



Sidi agreed, and that evening I accompanied him as he prayed, taking sev-eral photographs, most of them in profile as the one displayed here. Uponediting the images when I returned from fieldwork, several images fromthis situation were identified as potentially interesting, but only much later,when the overall story of the project began to take form, did I single outthis particular image due to its symbolic and evocative qualities. Subse-quently, I further stressed these qualities by retouching the image in photo-shop, making several versions, significantly enhancing the darkness, contrastsand grain to achieve a more dramatic image. In line with the understandingof aesthetics forwarded by Strauss above, Italian photographer Paolo Pellegrinconsiders photography, which is essentially aesthetic representation, “as abridge between the subject and the viewer—like the hand that comes out,or the beginnings of a conversation” (Pellegrin cited in Usborne 2008).Throughout my project, I consciously applied a consistently blurry and darkaesthetic so as to cultivate an “open”, “unfinished” quality, which also reflectsmy subjective reading of the uncertain, clandestine and disorienting aspectsof undocumented migration. Initially, I had imagined to render the photo-graphs in colour, but I soon chose black and white, as I felt it afforded thepictures a more symbolic meaning which transcends the situation depicted.I was particularly interested in enhancing a sense of disorientation or schizo-phrenia so as to highlight the radical implications of the journey. By dis-carding the colours I was left with a more sculptural and graphic vocabularyof light and shadows, which exposed an almost abstract element of mutabil-ity: A theme I wanted to analytically engage. Because the world appearsto us in colour, photographs in colour may seem more “realistic”, and Iwanted to avoid this. I wanted to move beyond representation and endowthe images with a significant metaphorical layer, which I felt the lack ofcolour permitted. Black absorbs colour and light and hence it “hides” orconceals. Throughout history, darkness has symbolised the unknown, thesecretive, mystery, fear and even death, and hence enhancing this elementin the images would, in a banal but effective way, highlight the overarchingleitmotif of “the journey into the unknown”.

Thus, through a series of deliberate choices, i.e. analytical moves appliedto further my overall argument, the portrait of Sidi, I argue, becomes aportrait of an existential moment in which an individual comes to termswith a fundamental condition which he must subsequently act upon. Inother words, the image comes to stand for something more than just whatit depicts (Barthes 2000; Goldstein 2007: 70-71; Sontag 1971; Usborne2008). In fact, I would go as far as arguing that it is a “universal” imageof becoming.

In the following part of the article, I demonstrate how this aspirationof becoming somebody often entails becoming nobody, in the sense thatthe migrants must continually renounce themselves if they are to maintainany hope of succeeding in their arduous endeavour.


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Lost in the Desert

Emry was sitting in the sand (fig. 6). His shirt half pulled of, and leaningagainst a porous wall in a “migrant ghetto” in the desolate town of Inhalid,some 15 kilometers South of the border between Mali and Algeria7.Exhausted, and with an empty look of defeat in his eyes, he exclaimed:“This is it. I am turning back”. A resigned adventurer who, in this verymoment, realised that his dream of reaching Europe would not materialiseanytime soon. Over the previous weeks, he had travelled up from his nativeGabon, traversed the Malian part of the Sahara desert on the back of abattered pick-up jeep along with 11 other West African migrants (fig. 7),and been robbed of the better part of the money with which he had plannedto pay the entire overland journey to the shores of the Mediterranean, wherehe intended to cross into Italy. On no less than three separate incidentscorrupt policemen and military personnel stopped the car which was trans-porting him through the desert (fig. 8), demanding money to let the migrantscontinue their journey (fig. 9) (Gatti 2008; Jobard & Saugues 2006: 65).In addition, one night, the Touareg chauffeurs refused to circumnavigateyet another police post unless they were paid more money than agreed uponbefore departure (fig. 10). As we arrived in Inhalid and located the ghetto,Emry found refuge in a secluded room while the other migrants immediatelybegan negotiating with the coxer, i.e. middleman (Ba 1995; Schmitz 2006:106), Abdallah, for the next stretch of driving, involving the clandestinecrossing into Algeria and several hundreds of kilometers through the desertbefore the city of Tamanghrasset. Emry was not going to continue thejourney. It was a definitive decision, and he complained about the shamefulprospects of having to return empty-handed to his family—but it was betterthan never returning, he argued. While Emry had been aware of the dangersof the journey, he had come quite unprepared for the extent and the natureof them (Lucht 2008: 162). He was literally at a point of no return: withtoo little money to complete the journey and a desert to cross he couldeither continue into the unknown on a journey which could last years and befragmented into indefinite stages of involuntary immobility (Carling 2002;Collyer 2006: 134), knowing that turning around would be complicated ashe would not have the money for the return fare either, or, he could stopat this point avoiding the potentially fatal desert crossing.

Until now, Emry had been reluctant to discuss his journey, let alonehave his photograph “taken”. I had asked him on several occasions, andtried to explain to him why his story was important, but he explained that

7. “Ghetto” is term used across West Africa to designate the houses along the waywhere migrants wait between the actual journeys. Most often these are seg-mented with respect to nationalities, but in the case of Inhalid, which was a verysmall town, the clientel was mixed. See also JOBARD & SAUGUES (2006: 58, 66)and LAACHER (2007: 76-77).



he felt it was too disgraceful—below his dignity8. He did not want hisfamily to see him like this. But, in this particular moment of destitution,as it dawned upon him that he would not accomplish what he had set outto achieve, he changed his mind and signalled me to “take” his portrait.He, so to speak, urged me to represent him (Strauss 2006: 8), demonstratingthat being vulnerable is not the same as being a victim without agency (Das2007: 63)9.

Collaborative Storytelling

“Now, go and tell them how it is. Tell them what we must endure. How they treatus. What it does to a human being. Tell them that and show them the photographs.”

So, on the above initiative of Emry, I documented his resignation thenand there, by fixing his despair in a photographic image. Paradoxically,as his journey ended, his image started an ongoing journey. His story wasmigrating, but he was stuck. In this situation, the camera served as a medi-ating technology, which not only associated Emry and I in an intimaterelation, but also enabled our collaborative production of a narrative, anargument as it were. As Jackson argues, storytelling can be, and indeedoften is, a particularly empowering human strategy in the face of disempow-ering circumstances (Jackson 2006: 14, 93), and it does not necessarilyinvolve elaborate explanations as much as silences, gestures and glances(Gardner 2002: 41-42). As was the case with many other migrants whoundertook or had undertaken the long and perilous journey, it seemed lan-guage could not entirely do justice to Emry’s experience (Jackson 2006:95). At a point in his life where Emry was in the process of becomingimperceptible (Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008), effectively reduced to a barelife (Agamben 1998: 105), and the perfect image of Baumans figure of the“outcast of modernity” (Bauman 2004), the camera paradoxically exposedand fixed his state. I brought Emry into being by creating a “mementomori”: participating in and testifying to his vulnerability (Sontag 1971:15)10. Furthermore, not only was Emry enacted through the photograph,he also actively participated in producing himself as a symbol, an icon,representative of others who, like him, aspire to transform themselves and

8. COLLYER (2006: 14) identifies the same reluctancy to speak about the crossingin the multiple interviews he conducted with migrants following their arrival atthe coast following the overland journey.

9. I am perfectly confident that he would not have made this gesture, had it notbeen for the fact that I, too, had been sitting on the back of the pick-up drivingto dust and incessant heat, eating dry bread, canned tuna and drinking watertasting like petrol—from the same bowls and containers as he had. Without thisparticipatory or embedded presence, I would never had won his trust.

10. Hence the argument that photographing is akin to a form of killing, hence theexpression “to shoot” somebody/something (SONTAG 1971, 2003).


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their lives through the territorial passage inherent in the migratory endeav-our (Van Gennep 1960: 192; Turner 1992).

How is it that the camera, with the primary function to document so as tomake something visible and identifiable, may work out to be a constructiveinstrument when working with people who, like undocumented migrants,aspire to remain exactly the opposite: Invisible? One might, of course,argue that it is the act of producing the image, the actual release of theshutter, which, so to speak, “makes the migrant”, irrespective of whetherthe image is actually conveyed to anybody. Perhaps the camera is justthat: A machine for testifying and thus becoming. While I believe stronglyin the empowering qualities inherent in the shared moment of vulnerabilityenacted in the collaborative production of an image such as that of Emry,I acknowledge the discursive potentiality, which lies in the subsequent dis-semination of the image, although it will never convey the pictured situationadequately. A photograph is never a rendition of reality, it is a testimony,an argument, and in this case, a shared one. Before returning to a furtherelaboration on the performative dimensions that form part of photographicrepresentations such as those accompanying this article, I turn to a contextu-alisation of the journey, followed by another illustrative case to underlinemy argument.

Becoming Imperceptible

As indicated above and elsewhere (Vium 2007, 2009), the overland journeythrough the Sahara, followed by the ocean crossing is, by all means, ripewith dangers. In addition to the natural obstacles constituted by the vastexpanses of hostile desert and rough seas (fig. 11, 12 & 13), the migrantsrisk robbery, violence, rape, unlawful detention and so forth by a bewilder-ing plethora of actors. Corrupt police, military, scrupulous traffickers,coxers (guides), drivers and middle-men as well as bandits, armed insur-gents, rebels, radicalist movements and immigration authorities (Gatti 2008;Hamood 2006: 47; Human Rights Watch 2006: 30, 38; Jobard & Saugues2006: 49) including the EU border agency Frontex (Collyer 2006: 18, 134,2007, 2010: 276; Gammeltoft-Hansen & Alberts 2010; ICMPD 2006; Lucht2008: 153; Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008: 230) form a complex of obstacles,which makes the clandestine passage a veritable matter of life and death11.

11. DE HAAS (2008: 1312) estimates that 368 people died while crossing to Spain in2005 and cites human rights organisations who estimate that 3.285 bodies werefound on the shores of the Straits of Gibraltar between 1997 and 2001. However,as he himself underlines, the death toll is undoubtedly much higher as manycorpses are never found. GAMMELTOFT-HANSEN and ALBERTS (2010) describe theincreased patrolling of FRONTEX boats in the maritime waters and also discussthe number of deceased as a result of the crossing attempts on the Mediterra-nean Sea.



Successful navigation of these multiple obstacles demands not only extremevigilance and determination, but also a set of cunning tactics, which theclandestine migrants make use of so as to become imperceptible (de Certeau1984; Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008).

While severely understudied from an academic point of view (Collyer2006), the actual clandestine crossing represents a particularly importantformative and transformatory period, in which the subject literally waversbetween worlds in an existentially liminal space (Bloch et al. 2011: 1290;Mai 2007; Rattansi & Phoenix 2005; Turner 1967, 1992). Turner statesthe following regarding the liminal state and process: “Those undergoingit—call them ‘liminaries’—are betwixt and between established politico-jural structure. They evade ordinary cognitive classification, too, for theyare not this or that, here or there, one thing or the other” (Turner 1992: 49,my emphasis). As such, the journey constitutes, I argue, an optimal vantagepoint from which to explore, engage with, and analyse the quintessentialquestion of becoming. As was explained in the previous part on life inthe village, migration can be understood as a rite of passage in the transitionto adulthood (Margolis 1994; Turner 1967, 1992; Van Gennep 1960; Vium2007). Not only are the trajectories of the clandestine migration multipleand fragmented, unstable and disorienting (Collyer 2006: 2; Grillo 2007;Vium 2007), indeed the aspired becoming is fundamentally predicated upona processual self-denouncement, a becoming undone, imperceptible and de-identifiable (Vium 2007), which intensifies with each successive departure,as the journey into the unknown unfolds, transforming the migrant into aradical political subject, or perhaps, rather a non-subject (Agamben 1998;Dal Lado 2009). Becoming is the inherent impetus of migration, in whichthe migrants “realize their desires by changing their bodies, voices, accents,patois, hair, color, height, age, biographies” (Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008:228). Quite literally, the migrants must become invisible, severing them-selves from any indications of where they come from, so as to avoid appre-hension and deportation once they cross into countries to which they haveno formal legal right to be.

These tactics of becoming imperceptible through denouncement, mani-fest in the appropriation of new and multiple fake identities (Jobard &Saugues 2006: 66; Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008: 228)—perhaps mostclearly examplified in the deliberate incineration, known as l-harg, “theburning” (from the Arabic verb haraqa, “to burn”)—of one’s identity papersbefore the maritime crossing so as to avoid expulsion upon arrival (Beneduce2008: 513; Pandolfo 2007: 333; Teriah 2002) come at a high price. Theprogressive reduction to what Agamben (1998) calls homo sacer, i.e. barelife, invariably implies a loss of dignity (Diken & Laustsen 2005: 52-53).According to my interlocutors, one of the most difficult aspects of becomingimperceptible was accommodating the permanent presence of fear thataccompanied them on their journey (Laacher 2007: 71-75). Having wit-nessed their truly vulnerable state first-hand, I can identify with the notion


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that “[...] a body without a name is a non-human human being; an animalwhich runs” (Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008: 227; see also Agamben 1998:105).

As Lucht (2008: 148) reminds us, the paradigmatic space of the modern“state of exception” evoked by Agamben is the “camp”, “[...] in whichthe normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atroci-ties are committed depends not on law but on the civilty and the ethicalsense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (Agamben 1998:174). The following case is based on a visit in June 2006 to a detentioncentre for migrants in the costal city of Nouadhibou in Mauritania, wherelarge numbers of prospective migrants were detained following their incep-tion at sea while trying to reach the Canary Islands in “floating coffins”(Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008: 229), i.e. ramshackle pirogues (fishermen’sboats). It provides an ethnographic first-hand glimpse into the truly liminalposition of what Collyer (2010: 275) has aptly termed “stranded migrants”.

The Collapse

The 25 or so young men in the room (a classroom temporarily used tohouse the surging number of migrants intercepted offshore), had figurativelyspeaking, returned from the dead only a few days earlier (fig. 14)12. Theyhad been intercepted and detained after 9 days of drifting at sea followingthe capsizing of the boat, which they were using in the attempt to cross tothe Canary Islands some 1,000 kilometres North of Noaudhibou. Half ofthe passengers had drowned. In addition to having lost the money paidfor the crossing, which meant somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 € (Collyer2006: 17, 143), they now faced deportation.

“I will continue! What else can I do? I can’t stay here, there is nothing for meto do. I have my children to think of. My father and mother. My sisters andbrothers. I have to do something to save my family. I can’t sit with my armscrossed like this! Either I save my family or I die. It is the only thing I can do.[...] I have nothing. Absolutely nothing!”

Seydou, a 27 year old Senegalese man was voicing his discontent as Iwas discussing with a group of detained migrants, one of whom determin-edly exclaimed: “Now, it is Europe or death.” His eyes were still red andhis skin dry from the saltwater. Seydou had barely survived the failedcrossing, upset by having faced death. It was his third unsuccessful attempt,but nevertheless he was determined to try again. Having confronted death

12. LUCHT (2008: 156) quotes a migrant who made the crossing via Libya into Italyfor saying the following concerning the overland journey through the Sahara:“[...] We said we had died, but that we came back to life.”



at sea on the Dantesque crossing, the ultimate descend into inferno (Aligheri2003), exposed to unimaginable ordeals, he had effectively been grounddown to a living dead, characterised alone by his pure desire to continue(Turner 1992: 50; Papadopoulos & Tsianos 2008: 227). Seydou epitomizeda bare life subjected to continue structural violence, little more than a disposa-ble object (Laacher 2007: 39). As an ultimate act of becoming “nobody”,Seydou had incinerated his identity papers, hoping this would deter theauthorities from deporting him once he reached Europe.

In the case of Seydou, our meeting evolved as a spontaneous choreo-graphy. When I approached him with my camera, he immediately sensedmy interest and began voicing his complains and making statements. Hewas gesticulating in a manner quite unlike what one would imagine in ameeting not involving cameras. We began talking, and he explained thedifficulties of his journey and his reason for risking his life. Only thendid I start photographing, and at this very moment, a spectacularly performa-tive form of storytelling began: Spontaneously he began striking a varietyof elaborate poses, consciously refining what I took to be his idea of a“look of suffering” (fig. 15). Going through the 22 photographs from thatparticular situation, it is evident how Seydou experiments with differentways of performing himself. On a few of the images he is smiling confi-dently looking straight at the camera with his eyes nearly closed, so asto signal fatigue. On the majority of the images, however, he is gazingdeterminedly yet troubled into the distance, his mouth half open as hepushes forward his upper body from the rudimentary bunk where he wasresting, producing a particularly contorted effect. His body partly coveredby a blanket, adding a graphic effect, which enhances the contrasts oncethe image is desatured into black and white. On a handful of the imageshe covers his eyes with the left hand, thus signalling severe exhaustion bythis simple but calculated gesture. In the final image (following compre-hensive retouching), almost half of the surface of the photograph is inhabitedby a darkness which seems to progressively encapsulate or consume Seydou.The image projects suffering, and indeed, he was in distress, he was vulnera-ble, and he was exhausted. No doubt about it. He was suffering, if suffer-ing is defined as “[...] involving those critical events in life in which peoplecome up against resistance to their actions and life plans and when resourcesare limited, often desperately so, when vicious cycles of depravation andoppression make misery the routine local condition” (Kleinman 1992: 174).After all he spent nine days drifting at sea, witnessing half his fellow passen-gers perish at sea, fighting for his own survival. And he was willing todo it again, even if it meant risking his life and never seeing his familyagain. What I want to reiterate here is the fact that despite his vulnerablecondition, he had a very clear understanding of what the camera coulddo, and how he could condense his state of being, his frustrations anddiscontent, into an argument, so to speak. And not just an argument, butSeydou’s personal political statement about the injustice of what he was


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going through. Just as Emry, whom I described previously, Seydou was,I argue, deliberately elevating himself into an icon by way of me and mycamera. Performing the suffering in a most convincing manner. In addi-tion to engaging in a dialogue with him, creating a stage or frame with thecamera for him to perform his argument, my work consisted in selectingone among the multiple frames, which I subsequently cropped, retouchedand re-contextualised by placing it into a new narrative order with otherimages from the journey, all of which were furnished with supplementarycaptions. Analytically speaking, Seydou thus appeared as a composite“Icon of Despair” as a consequence of our dialogue and my subsequentanalysis, i.e. editing. I had the power to select any of the other imagesfrom the same situation, but the one I chose, I chose because it mirroredand condensed not only my experience of that specific situation, but alsomy intention with the overall narrative I was developing in the project atlarge. Seydou thus offered his image as an argument in a much more com-plex assemblage involving not just the journey but also both the sendingand receiving context.

In relaying this story, I wanted to once again reiterate the collaborativenature of image-making and stress the inherently performative nature ofstorytelling. Contrary to the pervasive argument that the photographer can-not intervene if he is to record, i.e. that intervening hampers the possibilityof recording (Sontag 1971: 12), I agitate for an approach to photographingwhich acknowledges the interventional nature of documentary practice inthe first place. Inspired by Jean Rouch (2003: 38), I consider interventionas a particularly useful technique which allows the image-maker to “pene-trate into the reality, rather than leaving it to unroll itself in front of theobserver”, thus opening up to a more reciprocal and participatory form ofresearch and data generation which arises in the moment (ibid.: 44). J. Rouch,working from a point of departure in his ethnographic film-making appliedthe terms “cine-trance” and “ethno-dialogue” in his promotion of what hecalled “shared anthropology” (ibid.: 100-101), which he saw as a promisingfuture avenue for anthropology. I believe we have much to learn from hisapproach.

�

The ocean crossing (fig. 16) represents the final ordeal before arriving onthe continent of Europe, and more often than not, the territorial passagerepresents a monumental event in the lives of the undocumented migrants:It is a moment of truth (Chavez 1996: 4). As emphasized previously, thecrossing epitomizes Turner’s concept of the liminal, where the subject waversbetwixt and between worlds (Turner 1967: 231-232). In her eminent analy-sis of Moroccan youth aspiring to traverse the Mediterranean Sea clandes-tinely, Pandolfo (2007) likens the crossing to the chasm of Hell (sirat)



“which will widen like a highway to let across the saved, or instead shrinklike a blade to make the damned fall, pushed down into eternal fire (Al-Ghazali, 1953; Smith and Haddad, 2002)” (Pandolfo 2007: 354). The anal-ogy to Dante’s Inferno is evident: in “floating coffins”, the migrants mytho-logically—and symbolically—cross the threshold to the realm of the deadand cease to exist: They fundamentally rupture with their past being,renouncing and denouncing themselves both physically and psychologicallysuspended in a moment where the past has lost its grip and the future notyet taken definite shape (Beneduce 2008: 512; Chavez 1996: 64-65; DalLado 2009; Turner 1992: 49, 132).

Findings from the extended case work I have conducted with undocu-mented West African immigrants in Paris since 2006 (fig. 17 & 18)13, leadsme to argue that while significant, the crossing into Europe merely consti-tutes yet another departure and subsequent exposure to the brutal realitiesof life as a stigmatised and marginalised “other”, subsiding on the margins(Vium 2007, 2009). In other words, the threshold that is the territorialcrossing does not necessarily imply the succesfull transcendence of theliminal stage manifest in a positive realisation of becoming (Chavez 1996:83; Collyer 2010: 278-279). Rather, a great many undocumented migrantsin Europe spend large parts of their lives away from their families in asociety where they are considered as nobodies and stigmatised outsiders.The reason why they sustain such a life on the margins despite great challen-ges and existential suffering is exactly their desire for becoming, whichimplies providing for their families through the remittances they send back.Were they to return empty-handed, they would truly be nothing and nobody.In other words, they stay “nobodies” so as to avoid becoming nobodies intheir minds and in that of their significant other, the family back home inthe village. Such is the truly paradoxical nature of their liminal existence(fig. 19).

In this article, I have presented a number of ethnographic cases, discuss-ing them through the optic of my photographic and anthropological endeav-ours. I have shown how photography affords a promising tool for enactingand analysing, i.e. documenting the particularly paradoxical existential spacewhich undocumented migrants find themselves inhabiting. By engagingundocumented migrants with a camera, their structural invisibility is funda-mentally exposed, while they, at the same time are granted a means oftelling their story, thus performing themselves into existence. On a finalnote, I propose that photography is a particularly constructive tool to theanthropologist who wants to engage with, document, analyse and, not least,communicate findings which may potentially nuance our understanding of

13. Since 2006 I have conducted seven short-term fieldworks among immigrants withparticular focus on one specific foyer des travailleurs migrants (a housing com-plex for migrant workers) in northeastern Paris.


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complex and largely undocumented phenomena such as undocumented migra-tion from West Africa to Europe. However, for this to become successfullyadopted by anthropologists and other social scientists, we must accept thataesthetics play a crucial role, just as grammar does in writing.

Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.

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ABSTRACT

Dramatic and spectacular images of destitute African migrants suffering in theirattempts to reach European shores in ramshackle boats have become endemic inEuropean media. However, these images rarely do more than produce the migrantas a political subject, a bare life from a destitute continent portrayed at the heightof his suffering. Through ethnographic case material stemming from an ongoingresearch project documenting undocumented migration from West Africa to Europe,


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this article describes significant events in the migrants’ lives, which predate the depar-ture from the African continent, thus providing rare ethnographic data from the peril-ous crossing of the Sahara desert. The article describes and argues how photographycan be used as a productive research tool in ethnographic research and how it ena-bles a particular form of collaborative storytelling, which holds promises for a newform of conceptual ethnography. Through the article, it is demonstrated how undoc-umented migration is essentially a matter of social becoming, which paradoxicallyinvolves an inverted becoming, in that those who migrate must continually denouncethemselves, becoming nobody so as to avoid becoming nobody in the eyes of theirfamilies back home.

RÉSUMÉ

Symboles de devenir. Enquêter sur les migrations clandestines d’Afrique de l’Ouestvers l’Europe. — Les dramatiques et spectaculaires images de migrants africainsdémunis tentant dans la souffrance d’atteindre les côtes européennes dans des embar-cations de fortune sont devenues endémiques dans les médias européens. Ces imagesfont cependant rarement plus que produire le migrant comme un sujet politique, unepauvre vie provenant d’un continent miséreux dépeint à la hauteur de sa souffrance.À partir d’un cas ethnographique d’un projet de recherche en cours consistant àenquêter sur les migrations clandestines de l’Afrique de l’Ouest vers l’Europe, cetarticle décrit des événements significatifs de vies de migrants avant leur départ ducontinent africain, fournissant ainsi des données ethnographiques rares sur leurpérilleuse traversée du désert saharien. Cet article montre comment la photographiepeut être utilisée comme un outil utile pour la recherche ethnographique et commentelle permet une forme particulière de narration collaborative, offrant une nouvelleethnographie conceptuelle. L’article montre comment la migration illégale est essen-tiellement une question de devenir social, qui implique paradoxalement un devenirinversé, dans lequel les migrants doivent continuellement se dénoncer, ne devenantpersonne afin d’éviter de ne devenir personne aux yeux de leurs familles lors de leurretour chez eux.

Keywords/Mots-clés: West Africa, conceptual ethnography, inverted becoming, photo-graphy, suffering, undocumented migration/Afrique de l’Ouest, ethnographie expéri-mentale, devenir inversé, photographie, souffrance, migration clandestine.


Icons of Becoming: Documenting Undocumented Migration from West Africa to Europe.

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