SS Winnipeg in 1939. Wikicommons/ Agrupación Winnipeg. Some rights reserved.
Stateless and dispossessed persons in the world today amount to a towering 65 million. If we are to trust the ‘’census’’ of such an unstable and stateless population, it is the highest number of refugees in recorded history (at least, in history recorded after the infamous case of Babel.) On the shores of Europe, the shipwrecked either hide from the immigrations police, or are processed by techno-bureaucracies. A resident status is ‘’pending,’’ assets confiscated in storage facilities, petitioners confined in the forced passivity of detention centres. Many years go squandered, lost in waiting. Waiting, during a gruelling process for the approval or denial of refuge, by way of forms to be filled in and email telegrams to be telegrammed. Waiting, to hear from relatives who fled, who did not flee; who may have died or who may have received a permit.
Poets around the world have attempted to make poetic gestures of solidarity with the oppressed immigrants in what has become, ironically, the anti-nomadic world of globalized technocracy. Most of these poets’ activist statements fall like blunt arrows thrust against the currents of the dominant news media, its language, its software programmes of noise-creation. Powerful interested parties try to generate panic about “refugee crises.” And many first-world, cultured liberals and card-carrying progressives who have supported mass-deportation policies in the past, today accuse right-wing extremists of being the original xenophobes (intellectuals who have decried such easy equations include philosopher Alain Badiou.
