Skip to main content

Crossing Dance

Our guest today is Momar Ndiaye, assistant professor of dance at Ohio State University (OSU) and a celebrated choreographer. Momar’s work in African dance and contemporary dance is internationally recognized, and he’s toured across the U.S. and abroad. In our conversation, we view migration through the lens of dance and recognize it as an embodied experience. 

To interview Momar, Eleanor is joined by Amy Shuman, professor emerita at OSU. Her formative work in narrative studies includes books, articles, and collaborations on human rights and political asylum. Momar, Amy, and Eleanor talk broadly about human rights and migration in postcolonial contexts, ideas of how human rights operate and fail, and what that has to do with the crossing of borders.

Guests

Links

Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum edited by Bridget M. Haas and Amy Shuman

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

West and Central Africa - Precarious Migration Routes to Europe - West African Atlantic Route

"Frontex Planning Operations in Senegal and Mauritania, Claims NGO"

Transcript

Momar Ndiaye  00:00

We remember with our bodies. By essence, what African cultures have been is – remembering is not just cerebral, it’s embodied. But the thing is for me, right now, if I'm making a dance about, you know, forced immigrants – like immigration that basically African people are going through – and the question then is, who's my target? Who am I talking to? Who do I want this big piece to speak to? It’s probably  not just these Africans who are, you know, embracing the Atlantic Ocean or actually crossing the Sahara in order to make their way to Melilla, or, you know, those Spanish territories, risking their lives. Because they've gotten to a point in which they identify themselves as martyrs. For them, dying, going there, is a way of saying “I've tried.” It's that serious. You know, like somebody who’s getting ready to go, you go to them and you ask them, “Don't go.” They’re like, “Are you mad?”

Eleanor Paynter  01:16

Welcome to Migrations: A World on the Move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's Migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, ACLS fellow and Migrations fellow and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. In this season on Crossing, we're thinking about the many kinds of borders that shaped migration experiences. We've talked about how migration involves moving between languages and memories. In this episode, we're focusing on dance. What can dancers’ movements tell us about the movement of people across geopolitical borders? How do choreographers address questions of mobility and human rights in their work?

Our guest today is Momar Ndiaye, assistant professor of dance at Ohio State University and a celebrated choreographer. Momar's work in African dance and contemporary dance is internationally recognized. And he's toured across the U.S. and abroad. To interview Momar, I'm joined by Dr. Amy Shuman, professor emerita at Ohio State University. Her formative work in narrative studies includes books, articles and collaborations on human rights and political asylum. I was lucky enough to study with Amy during my own doctoral work, and it's really wonderful to have her on the podcast. Momar and Amy are co-editors, along with Wendy Hesford, of a forthcoming volume from the Ohio State University Press called Human Rights on the Move, which will feature a version of this conversation.

In this episode Momar, Amy and I talk broadly about human rights and migration in postcolonial contexts. We talk about how ideas of human rights operate and fail, and what that has to do with the crossing of borders. And through the lens of dance, we recognize migration as an embodied experience. You'll hear Momar refer to a work he choreographed called Toxu, which responds to the precarious and too often deadly crossings of people who depart on repurposed boats from the Senegalese coast in an attempt to reach the Canary Islands. This nearly 1000-mile trek is incredibly risky. But for those who survive the crossing, it means a chance to obtain asylum in Europe and to build a better life. Here's our conversation that centers movement and creative expression as key parts of negotiating and renegotiating questions of human rights.

Amy Shuman  03:44

So, I'm Amy Schumann, and I'm a professor emerita at Ohio State University. My work in human rights focuses on two areas. On political asylum, where I've worked as a coauthor with Carol Bomer, who's a lawyer and sociologist, to actually help people to get political asylum. My area of specialization is narrative and the stories people need to tell in order to get political asylum. And the other area is disability and human rights.

Momar Ndiaye  04:15

And I am Momar Ndiaye. I am assistant professor in the department of dance. I am originally from Senegal, West Africa, and I made my way to the U.S. 10 years ago and, you know, didn't leave. And, again, I'm a choreographer, dancer, and a performer; a dancer and a videographer. So my research is actually – it has a lot of temps de cuisse, which I'm not sure for the French – like different connections because I identify [with] the multidisciplinary. There's no way to do what I do without tapping on other fields of study. Because of where I'm from, and the notions of colonialities, the notion of cultural imperialism and how it affects the bodies – in the way they operate and behave in the world – and then all that funneling through dance, as a practice of embodiment: embodiment of trauma, embodiment of identity, politics and all that. That's why, when I look at human rights, it’s more toward those concepts of mobility and also the notion of being human.

Amy Shuman  05:39

So, I wanted to ask you to speak more about the concept of the human and the ways that particular cultural understandings of the human have become important to you.

Momar Ndiaye  05:51

It is a very important thing to look at language first, like how people talk about certain things. And I'm a Wolof, and circling around, going to Congo, different places, there is a term in the language that they use just to say, “human.” And then in Wolof, we say nit. And it doesn't stop there. It says, nit, which is the biological being, and nité, which is the consciousness inside of that person that connects to the behavior, connects to the interpersonal, the way we deal [with] and treat other people. When we say nité, it’s that aspect of embracing and embodying and living fully that concept of humanness, which is how you interact with people, what kind of citizen you want to be in the community, how sociable you are – the list is long. And I've come to realize that, pretty much in all African societies that I have been in, they have the same kind of concept, which is a state of progressing in time and space, which means we don't think about “human” as something static. But we think about “human” as something that progresses, that becomes, that changes, that shifts with an ideal of perfection. It's pretty loaded sometimes, because when we say perfection, we start not imagining all those concepts of codes and standardization of minds and stuff like that. What is normal? What is not normal? And how do we deal and negotiate with the others with regard to those normalcies?

So, there in one hand, it's that stage of that process of becoming and evolving in time and space, along with the process of acknowledging the other as the same way. Because you give and then you take. So, it's always a continual – me proving how human I am in the way I behave, and then expecting in return to get that – which again, like I said, it can be problematic, depending on which language we're using to look at it.

Eleanor Paynter  08:27

How does what you're talking about in terms of this process of becoming – moving towards what you talked about as perfection – how does that relate to a notion of human rights?

Momar Ndiaye  08:39

Well, I ran into the text, the Declaration of Human Rights, in my twenties. And the way it happened was, I was competing. There was a national dance competition in Senegal that I was part of, and the theme of that year was human rights, the Declaration of Human Rights, just as a text to use, to work on. And we’re talking about Senegal in 1998. And our job was to not critique it, but more to learn it, and offer accurate translation of it in local languages – that in itself as a way of competing, so whoever had the clearest translation of it in Wolof and portraying it clearly from French to Wolof – you have the point. So I happen to be the one who represented the group doing that, which offered me a lot of time after practice rehearsal. So I would just stay. When my when my friends are drinking tea, talking, I'm sitting there learning the Declaration, like all the articles, knowing them by heart. And then after that, going to my godfather, who was a movie translator, and sitting with him and he would guide me through the process of actually translating it in proper Wolof. Which brings us again to another thing: colonialities, and then how our native tongues are being affected tremendously by French, and now English.

So long story short, that was my first entry point to the text. But then I started realizing not so many people know about that. The last time I worked with students – high school students, 14, 15, 16, 17 years old – it was a remake of this piece I'm talking about. And then I asked them to bring it to their own reality within the context of the United States. At that time, it was the wall. And yeah, they all picked an article and then went to work with it. They offered a critique of the article and then…

Eleanor Paynter  11:03

Of the border wall, you mean?

Momar Ndiaye  11:06

Yes. Yep. That's what I refer to by “the wall.” So, they all offered a critique and then geared that critique towards that wall, that they all agreed was insane and inhuman. So, we [are] always going back to that concept of humanness, humankind, what it is, what we mean when we say “I'm a human,” and how that is in conversation with all these texts.

Amy Shuman  11:32

So where have these explorations taken you toward thinking about how people treat others as ‘other,’ as less than human? And where does this sense of humanness, which can be very firmly located in one's cultural sense of self, then disappear when one thinks about others? Or the other side of that –  which the students might have been talking about – experiencing being treated as ‘other,’ as less than human?

Momar Ndiaye  12:10

Yeah, I think that's the major problem, the concept of otherness. For example, I remember the President of the United States, the 45th President of the United States, saying, “These people are bringing their disease, they’re ____, they’re ____, they’re ____.” And it was so close to bringing diplomatic problems between the US and all African countries. So, it's how do we look at others as intruders first? Because no matter what, whenever we look at the civil wars that happen, the concept of otherness is there. It's the people being looked at as intruders. And when we say “intruders,” it's the foreign person coming to invade my space. Especially when we look at mobility, people always say, “Why can’t they stay at home? Why are they trying to come here and take what I have?” This is when things start getting a little bit complicated. There is this notion of, “it's the other.” We don't look at the human, we’re just looking at the other, and the other is coming from a poor country, and the other is coming to bring such and such disease and malaria and, and, and, and – and then, borders start.

When I say borders, we have the mental borders of the space, which is interhuman, and then the physical border in between countries. So then, [it’s] the concept of, “it’s never my fault, it’s their fault. They can stay at home and try to develop their countries. They don’t have to come here. If they try to cross the ocean and die, it’s their fault.” It’s never [us]. We don’t have that sense of introspection, the question of what is my responsibility in this? It's because we are always looking at the others. It's their fault, you know – I’m here, I'm occupying this space, it's my space. I don't want anybody to come compromise it and trouble it. So, the concept of otherness is really, really there. And I think that's the bedrock of all these issues we're talking about.

Amy Shuman  14:56

And the other side of it is responsibility for others. And I know that plays a role in your work, that sense of responsibility for others, of what it means to have a responsibility beyond the self, first of all for the community, then people who aren't even in the community, for others. I wondered if you'd speak more about that?

Momar Ndiaye  15:24

I look at it just from the concept – it’s a very easy and simple concept – of ubuntu. It’s U-B-U-N-T-U. It's from South Africa, and it's “How do I care about the community so then the community cares about me?” You know, Nelson Mandela had a very nice interpretation of it. He's said it's not a way of removing yourself, it cannot be a way of removing yourself – because when we say, “I am, because we are,” you're not removing yourself, you are you placing actually yourself into in the center of this conversation. Because without you being well, the community cannot be well, and there's always that notion of circularity, of the community giving to you and you giving back. If we successfully get to that point, the concept of otherness would disappear, maybe locally, first, and then globally. How do we prioritize the human first, and then think about community, think about “togetherness” in terms of personal development?  Again, if you look at the indicators of human development, it's one of the tools we use to measure economic growth of countries. When you look at that, you see even the US is not the number one, the top country in terms of economical development, because we have to see how we're looking at prioritizing the well-being of humans.

Amy Shuman  17:22

Yes, well-being as a concept that's coming up in several of the essays that we're publishing in this volume. And it's interestingly coming up, always, from the perspective of people in the Global South. And it seems to be a concept that's missing in the actual human rights declaration. One of the critiques as you know, of the declaration is that it was drafted very much by the Global North, by the West, and really didn't take into account these other concepts. So it has failed in many ways. So one question would be: could it be recovered, if we were to pay attention to something like this concept of ubuntu or other ways of understanding the self in relation to community? And maybe even – this is really a separate question – but maybe that would help to resolve the questions of national sovereignty that have been in the way of international human rights? Big question.

Momar Ndiaye  18:27

I have a problem imagining the process of decolonization being effective, you know, 400 years later. These things have been so much embedded in the mind of people, and reimagining the concept of normalcy, within that context of hybridity – which means we all hybrid now; there is European-ness in me, there is African-ness in me, and so on and so forth. How can we decolonize that? I don't think it's impossible; however, we could reimagine again, what I imagined as being an ethical intercultural system, both from the legislation, which is imagined by the state, the big heads and the small heads,  and then trickling down all the way to people. Because people in some local settings are still applying the concept of ubuntu – I've seen it, but it's very local. These are places that are less affected by Western modernity. They are there. They have no choice but to support one another and lift one another [up]. “My kid is everybody's kid.” It's that concept. We take the whole village to raise a kid, this is true there. But now, how can we allow that space to grow and grow and grow? And I think we could use the Declaration as a starting point. But there's a lot of things that needs to be opened way more. It starts from reimagining, “Who's it for?”

Eleanor Paynter  20:10

What I hear you saying is that decolonized reality is not likely, is perhaps not possible. But do you still think that the world you're describing might be shaped by decolonial processes? I'm wondering if the approach of decoloniality is worth embracing still, or if you're talking about imagining something completely outside of some of the frameworks that scholars and practitioners are thinking with today?

Momar Ndiaye  20:42

You see, I'm looking at myself first, you know. And this is when [the topic of] my work is coming back. It's from me, who was born and raised in Dakar, you know, the latest capital of the West African French colonies, Afrique Occidental Française. And what it is that is impacting me, how I understand the world, and so on and so forth, is conditioned by all that. And the reason why I say “I start from me” is because, you know, it's good to have all these theories and stuff, but then we are starting to go back to where the Declaration of Human Rights was – actually these theories are an observation of phenomenon. But we have to consider the fact that it's not static. It's evolving all the time, at a pace [that] is really hard for observers to keep track. When we now go to Senegal, for example, go to Dakar and look at people, and we ask them about colonialities, many [of them] will look at you and ask, “What are you talking about?” It's because it has gotten to a point of being normal to speak French in order to prove that you are sophisticated, in order to prove that you are an intellectual. And now we have English sliding into the language. If somebody doesn't speak a broken Wolof, you know, mixed with some words of English and some words in French, it's not sophisticated enough. Again, what I'm saying is really problematic on so many levels. Colonialities have been embedded so much, so much into the daily living of those Africans who remain in Africa, and have no choice, because one learns how to process in a foreign language. You speak Wolof in the house with your mother and your father, and then you go to school. The moment you step into the classroom, it’s French. So the concept of rationality and stuff like that – it’s literally French.

I remember somebody saying one of the major missions of colonialism was to whiten the mind of the African. Which is now why I say, in an ideal world, yeah, we could go back to hundreds of years ago, and then start over and come back, make our way to where we are. But then what do we do with these concepts of fluidity and so on? Because culture is fluid, it's not rigid. Sometimes we imagine – what we think about us – [is] this is here and this is here, there is no interconnection between the two. That's, that's not true. I don't believe in that. So just to say, I don't necessarily believe in decolonialism in the way we imagine it, but I do believe in an ethical, intercultural system in which, you know, my values as an African can be considered. I can be valued as a person. I don't have to wear European clothes in order to matter. If I bite on it, it’s is fine, and nobody will be there to judge me, which is embracing the hybrid-self, who we are right now.

Amy Shuman  24:49

I'm very interested in these hybridities and what are sometimes described as creolization, especially in Latin America and Argentina, where a colleague of mine, Ana Cara, works on this idea of creolization as a reflexive verb, e.g., to creolize oneself. It's a dynamic – as you're saying – process, not static. And this idea of constantly doing in everyday life, re-creolizing everything, whether it's food or dance – in that case, the tango – or dress or economies. You know, what does a Creole economy look ? The values of creolizing as a process – right? – and hybridizing. Which is very different, I think you're saying – I agree with you – than decolonizing, which is an act of removing, trying to extract out the colonizing forces. But instead to say, “No, we've built something new.” The Wolof/French/English world is something that you embrace, and you don't have to police its boundaries. (Now we're back to boundaries and mobility.) And say, “No, we can't have this many English words or French words,” but rather, to recognize the ways that that is dynamic, I think is what you're saying. And then I think it might turn us to thinking about dance. I know that for the people who look at creolization, dance is a really fundamental place where this happens.

Eleanor Paynter  26:32

And you already talked about, I mean, I was thinking about this when you were talking about your first encounter with the Declaration of Human Rights as an act of translation, I think dance also might be a kind of translation as well, or Amy as you’re saying, perhaps a practice of creolization.

Momar Ndiaye  26:50

Yeah, I mean, when you were talking Amy, I remembered one thing that I encountered when I think I was in grad school. And it's like, one of those times I was very explicitly “yes, let’s decolonized this, this and that.” And in the room, there was somebody whose father is Senegalese, but his mother is French. And he was born and raised in France. So you know, when we're talking about…

I was giving the example of my nephew, who has never left Senegal, but he's going to. He won a grant and started studying at the French school, like, basically, with French kids and stuff like that. So, he started somewhat rejecting his Wolof; if you would prompt him in Wolof, he would respond in French. And I was offering that as a critique. And he said, “but where do I fit in the picture?” That's what he asked me. And it was a moment of like, “oh, okay, actually, I'm doing what I wouldn’t [want] – what actually I'm fighting against is what I'm actually doing to him.”

…Because, yes, he was born and raised in France, but he's totally embracing his Senegalese side, which is coming from his father. But if I come and say, “yeah, if you don't speak Wolof, then you colonize,” then, you know, I'm missing the whole point. Because he is the actual example of a hybrid body, who's longing and wanting to still grab his origins as Senegalese, but also wanting to stay true to his origin as French.

This is another thing colonialism has done – those hybrid bodies. People we call mestiço in Portugal, they call it métis(se) in French, and where do they fit in the picture? Can we oppress them? No. Should we embrace them the way they are? Yes. But again, it's a process. And then I want to be mindful about what it is people are experiencing in their everyday life, that kind of opened that door for vacuolization to happen, which is embracing and rejecting at the same time. And dance. Big time. Dance, big time, because, you know, the concept of newer traditional dance is literally one way to look at it.

We're looking at things we call traditional dances, taken from a specific set space, they fulfill specific functions, but then they’re put on the stage. Just that process of taking, staging, and here it’s done by Africans themselves. Maybe we could say it started with you know, the emergence of the national ballets, the national dance companies. So the notion of proscenium being applied to something that's meant to operate in the circle is always a phenomenon that started, somewhat, the creolization in dance. And then another way to look at it, even when we look at the context of Africa – and here, I'm not talking about European coming in, but just in Africa, in between the ethnic groups – the creolization was already happening. It’s the reality of the things because, like I mentioned before, we imagine culture as rigid, and they're fluid. So the Wolof, the Serer, the Pulaar, and those ethnic groups, they are so close to one another. If you look at the dances, if you look at the drums, and the music and all that, they are influencing one another. And it's a continual process, it doesn't stop. I mean, colonialism is another thing to look at, and then we start to talk about it, but fluidity and creolization, I will argue, didn't necessarily come from Europe. It was already happening in Africa. Yeah.

Eleanor Paynter  31:21

You're talking in several different ways about dance as an embodiment, a representation of and a response to these aspects of hybridity and creolization and fluidity that we've been talking about. And also, cultural traditions and being able to carry out a practice over time, as these ideas and as people change, as communities change. I want to ask about how those ideas inform your work in the context of migration. I think you've done some choreography and some performance also around the idea of crossing borders, since we're talking also about coloniality, maybe we can also take up the question of postcolonial migrations, and thinking about some of the work that you've done around movement. And I'm curious about how – from my own rudimentary understanding of dance – how the movement of a person or of a group in a choreographed piece might also relate to the actual movement towards or across a border.

Momar Ndiaye  32:34

I'm thinking movement from a traditional perspective, and then movement in the present context. This is my research actually. When I look at the traditional forms, what are the earliest version available of a particular traditional dance that I can find? It's literally a digging, a digging, a digging, a digging, in order to get closer to the oldest version still alive. And, again, you know, we're talking about the time in which documentation has changed. Again, this is from something Faustin was talking about, and we share, which is the trace, the embodied trace; basically, we remember with our bodies. By essence, what African cultures have been is – remembering is not just cerebral, it's embodied. So the Ga people who migrated, from what people say, from Eastern Africa all the way to Ghana, and then we have the Wolof, who, historically we say, migrated also from the Egyptian area: coming, coming, coming. So, there’s already this phenomenon of migration that are somewhat represented somewhere in the dance. But we have to look, dig deep in order to identify and find them.

But the thing is for me, right now, if I'm making a dance about, you know, forced immigrants – like immigration that basically African people are going through – and the question then is, who's my target? Who am I talking to? Who do I want this big piece to speak to? It’s probably not just these Africans who are, you know, embracing the Atlantic Ocean or actually crossing the Sahara in order to make their way to Melilla, or, you know, those Spanish territories, risking their lives. Because they've gotten to a point in which they identify themselves as martyrs. For them, dying, going there, is a way of saying “I've tried.” It's that serious. You know, like somebody who’s getting ready to go, you go to them and you ask them, “Don't go.” They’re like, “Are you mad? I'd rather go die than staying here, looking at my mom in the morning, looking at my wife in the morning, and my kids, and not being able to provide food.”

Eleanor Paynter  35:33

There’s a phrase people use for this, right?

Momar Ndiaye  35:35

Yep, in this context I'm describing, it was “Barsa Wala Barsakh,” “Barcelona or death.” Barsakh is the other realm of when we die, where we go. So that was the slogan, “Barsa Wala Barsakh.” So, do I want to talk to those people still? Yes. But who do I want to sensitize more? Who do I want to invite more towards a reaction? It’s mostly those countries, all the people who are looking at those folks as others. So then, would it be relevant for me to craft a dance that's purely traditional? I don't think so. But it would be relevant for me to craft something that would bridge and embrace that concept of hybridity in some ways, you know, and be accessible to both people. This is when the crafting is really important in my work. The movement vocabulary is not preconceived or preset; it is researched and discovered through the process of finding what is relevant. What do these people understand, what they don't understand? And how do I play with us both elements, and then the symbolics around the object we use. Also the testimonies. Because what I've seen so much in art is [that] a piece of art, especially in dance, that's meant to fulfill an act of activism in some ways, is kind of blurred by the virtuosity of the dance. Now, the question is, how can we stay in the space of dance, but dance as the mode of communication? First and foremost, before the beauty of it, it has to say something. Yeah.

And then, for that particular work, there was actual testimonies of people who tried, people saying/ narrating their experiences during the crossing, getting so close. And I have a very close friend of mine – we grew up together – who did it. It's always tears coming out when he narrates, when he tells a story, like the process of crossing, and then even seeing death, literally, right here with all the sharks.  Because there is a space when they cross the ocean, sharks are always there waiting because that's where the sails would break. And, you know, this is something that needed to be close to people who are actually ordering the others by saying, “Stay at home.” Is there a little fiber of humanness inside of you that could actually look at this and say, “I'm sorry, I should do better”? So I have to be very strategic about the movement vocabulary I use, the symbolics around the object I use, but also all the mediums – sound, lighting, and all that come to contribute. So then at the end, I can say something with my dance.

Eleanor Paynter  38:53

Since you're talking about movement, and we're in this audio format – and we'll move into the written word later – is there just one even small example that you could try and illustrate for us in words, just to give us a picture of how some of what you're talking about, might appear to someone who's watching?

Momar Ndiaye  39:15

Yeah, for that piece, we used cardboard boxes. Different formats, small, very big, medium, medium medium. In the beginning of the process, for me, it was: huh, what is this thing? Why am I attached to this cardboard? Because it started just being something that I was really attached to, because of the way it can be multifunctional. And it’s the first go to when we talk about moving. Basically, once we start packing, we start, we go we get a cardboard. But it also symbolizes poverty in some ways, because if we see people who are homeless, for example, it is a great value to them. They make shelter use of it. And so carrying that box, carrying all my stuff, walking to one place, to another, has a weight into my body. It does something to the body, a specific posture; just holding it like this, depending on its weight, my shoulder would tighten up or would release, my leg would be bent. There is that heaviness of the thing, depending on its size, and then how [much] stuff [is] packed into it. So basically, we played with those shapes in order to come up with a movement vocabulary that expands and expands and expands, coming from an angularness to a circularness. But there's always the you know, this impact to the chest happening constantly and all the time, which is a reminder of who we are, where we are coming from, and where we go all the time. Because even this curvilinearity, that starts coming from the angularity, which refer to capitalistic ways of doing, and circularity of things when we look at African content.

Eleanor Paynter  41:27

It strikes me then, as you were talking, about this as both material and symbolic. I mean, in the symbolic realm, thinking especially about people who are departing Senegal to try reach the Canary Islands, of course, they can't take boxes with them. So, you’re prompting me to think about the weight of everything that is carried, even with someone who perhaps only puts something in a Ziploc bag and tucks it into their pocket.

Momar Ndiaye  41:51

They go there with nothing. They don't bring anything. It's just the body going. The cardboard box would find them in Europe, if they successfully cross, because there is the dramaturgy of the third barriers. The first one is the water. The second one is when you land. The third one is the returning. Because the process of actually going is easier than the process of figuring out who you are in Europe, with no support, nobody, with all the laws and regulation. You cannot work. It's a game of chase, police behind you, you're running. And this is only when you make it there, and you’re already in the territory. For my friends, they were jailed. They were in jail for months, he doesn't even know how long he was in jail – until they cannot keep them anymore. They asked them if they have friends or they know people in Europe. Nobody wanted to say because they don't trust. And they got released. So imagine somebody in Europe, somewhere in Spain, they know nobody, just been released like that with no food, no money, no nothing. They become homeless right away. Cardboard coming back.

Eleanor Paynter  43:12

This resonates also with [my work]. A lot of my work is on this central Mediterranean route, so thinking about people who are crossing from Libya and Tunisia towards mostly Italy, sometimes Malta. And some of what you're describing, of course resonates with those experiences, too. And sometimes, they're also imprisoned on the way, and then have to deal with it again, in a different context once they reach Europe. And I'm also thinking about how these contexts have shifted over time as the rate of death has increased, for example. Now I think the western Mediterranean has perhaps the highest rate of death as a border zone, the highest rate of death in the world.

Momar Ndiaye  43:52

That's what we document. That's what is documented. In reality, sails are always still leaving from the coastal area in Dakar, even though it's illegal. Now you have the local police who would monitor those. And it's a law: if you get caught trying to leave to Europe, you go to jail. So you see what we have is like  a boomerang somehow happening. Now the policing is starting right in the coastal area of Dakar. Because we have Ghanaians coming all the way down, because that's the hub where people – recently  there was a boat that was being chased. In my village where I was born, that's where they abandoned it and then ran into the village. So, we’re still facing that. And there is another route that's less talked about, which is the Sahara. You know, people try to go to Canary Islands, but they also try to go to Melilla and what's the other island what is the other territory – Ceuta! They tried the two Spanish territories in Morocco. People are trying to go there, and here we have businesses and businesses involved inside of that; it is less talked about. A lot of people are dying there. And it's the market for people from Algeria, people from – people who pass people, who are selling them, actually. It's horrible. These are the stuff people don't really talk about, but it's real. Yeah.

Eleanor Paynter  45:32

And there also, we could come back to what you said earlier about the law at the US Mexico border.  There also there's the question of the wall and the attempts to cross it, and the horrific, violent policing of people who attempt to cross the wall.

Momar Ndiaye  45:46

It's sad, you know, in Melilla, the wall, the barrier they put in there is illegal even for animals. Yeah, there are YouTube videos of those stuff. It's really sad to see, but then I'm fascinated by the obstinacy of, you know, “ I'm gonna go, whatever happens to me will happen. If I pass, good. If I fail, I'll try again. I'd rather die than going back home,” which is the third barrier I was talking about – the preference of dying, rather than going back home as a failure. So there's all these bottlenecks that keep accumulating and piling up and piling up and piling up, until it become impossible. And inside of all that, can we make sure that, maybe, we make the acquisition of visa a little bit easier for people to go there with some kind of regularity?

Yeah, it's that easy. It’s more, you want to go, go get a visa. But the case of friends, having all the required paperwork, doesn't grant you a visa. I have witnessed that myself. The difference between applying a visa to France from the United States is way, way different compared to the process of applying for a visa in Dakar. And I'm the same person. With a green card, I applied in Chicago; I was applying for one month, they gave me six months multiple entry. In Dakar, this is impossible. So, it's how they are tightening up things in order to trigger something else happening elsewhere, and say it's their fault after.

Amy Shuman  47:56

We've really come to the crux of  such a simple problem of people who want to move, need to move. And we have the bureaucracy to make it possible. And yet, we restrict their movement and cause this kind of horrible, horrible violence. It's so unnecessary, and yet human rights doesn't protect them.

Momar Ndiaye  48:25

And yet, in the text, yes, they're supposed to be protected. But to wrap up, I think the question is – how can we make sure this thing that is so maybe beautifully written, get and be applied and closer and closer and closer to people? So then, the moment I, as an individual can start seeing myself in the others, and vice versa, a lot of problems would be solved. And again, it's manyness within our differences, but then there's one thing we share, which is, if we think about it deeply, the concept of humanness. And if we redirect and recenter things in there, I think a lot of problems will be solved.

Eleanor Paynter  49:40

Thanks for listening to Migrations: A World on the Move, a podcast by Global Cornell's Migrations Global Grand Challenge, a multidisciplinary, multispecies initiative that studies how the movements of people, animals, microbes, resources, ideas, and more shape our world. You can learn more about the initiative at migrations.cornell.edu, where you can also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us on Twitter @CornellMig.

This podcast is hosted by Eleanor Paynter, Migrations Postdoctoral Associate with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and produced by Megan DeMint. Much of the podcast was produced at Cornell University on the traditional homelands of the Cayuga Nation, and we recognize Cayuga Nation sovereignty and the Indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is “Basically Really” by Steve Fawcett.