Yousif Qasmiyeh 00:00

In my poetry, what I've tried to do, and consciously, is to stress the fact that these times are not just the individual times, but also the ones that, perhaps, are fragmentary and very tiny, and, at times, invisible, within this specific, and within the individual. So, for us, we own time, but also there are certain times that we can't own. When I arrived in this place, the legal time did not belong to me. The way I was made to wait, in fact – and this is a very, very passive and yet – my response was to recount time, to take it from the camp and bring it to the UK and see whether these different, varied times can start a conversation.

Eleanor Paynter  01:06

Welcome to Migrations: A World on the Move, a series brought to you by Cornell University’s Migrations initiative. I’m Eleanor Paynter, postdoctoral associate in Migrations and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. In this season on waiting, the camp is a recurrent figure and point of reference. The camp haunts conversations about limbo in border spaces because so many border crossers have spent or will spend time in a camp—perhaps one built and managed by a government, international organization or NGO, or an improvised camp set up by people in transit in an abandoned building in a major city, or maybe in the woods near a national border.

The camp is a familiar space in the public imagination, though it can indicate many different kinds of sites and a range of living conditions. When we hear the word “refugee,” we often picture a camp – maybe we have a kind of generic image in mind of people gathered outside a row of tents with “UNHCR” written across them, or makeshift structures like the ones at the camp known as “the jungle” in Calais, France. Recently, camps have appeared in news coverage of people fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, setting up in temporary shelters in neighboring Poland and as far away as camps at the US/Mexico border. Or maybe we have a very personal image in mind from our own memory or family history.

So when we think about camps, we have this visual archive. But as we’ll hear in our conversation today, life in the camp, and the ways the camp functions in a world shaped by displacement and mobility, are not just visual or spatial questions; they are also matters of time: the camp as a site of “waiting”, of urgent need and uncertain futures – the camp as a site shaped by multiple temporalities.
Or, as Yousif Qasmiyeh writes, “The camp is time, and time is the camp.”

In this episode, you’ll hear Yousif reads several poems from his award-winning collection “Writing the Camp”, which came out in 2021 with Broken Sleep Books. These poems really guide our conversation on displacement, border crossing, and time, and offer a critical perspective on refugee camps. Also joining is Shahram Khosravi, who has published extensively on the topic of WAITING and border temporalities and how holding people in precarity serves the needs of the state and the constant need for cheap and exploitable labor. And also joining us is Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, whose work brings decolonial perspectives to displacement and mobilities and prompts us to engage with histories of displacement as crucial to understanding the present.

You’ll see how their work raises urgent questions about the different temporalities at play in border crossing. This conversation challenges us to recognize the camp and refugees not as peripheral to normal life, but as key to understanding our world.

I continue to be so moved by Yousif’s poems and by the scholarly and creative work of our three guests.  And so it’s really wonderful to speak with these scholars, thinkers and writers together for an episode that is part-poetry reading, part-conversation about the camp in terms of waiting, memory, and return. If you’d like to read along, you can find the poems and a transcript on migrations.cornell.edu/podcast.  

So to start, I'll ask you each to introduce yourselves. And let's start with Yousif.

Yousif Qasmiyeh  04:55

How are you? My name is Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. I'm a translator and poet, currently based at Oxford, where I'm also completing my doctorate in the field of English language and literature. The topic of my thesis revolves around, in fact, what I call loosely “refugee writing”, where I explore and examine critically, the thematics of time, containment, and the archive in English and Arabic, and I’m also the editor of Creative Encounters in the journal of Migration and Society. And I'm also the Writer-in-Residence of Refugee Hosts, but I also co-lead to the Baddawi lab as part of the Imagining Futures project.

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh  06:10

I’m Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and I'm professor of Migration and Refugee Studies at University College London, where I am co-director of the Migration Research Unit, and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies “Refuge in a Moving World” Interdisciplinary Research Network. I'm leading a number of research projects examining experiences of and responses to displacement from the perspective of local communities, and across Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, who have been hosting refugees from Syria since 2011. In addition to another project, looking at so called Southern responses to displacement across, but also beyond the Middle East and North Africa. And with Yusef, I'm co-lead of the Baddawi Camp lab as part of the Imagining Futures research project, in addition to being co-editor of the Migration and Society journal.

Eleanor Paynter  07:04

Thank you, and Shahram.

Shahram Khosravi  07:06

My name is Shahram Khosravi, I'm an anthropologist. I'm Iranian, and work at Stockholm University. I have been working on precarity of people in Iran, but also have been working in border studies, on deportation, undocumentedness, and recently have been thinking about WAITING. And this thinking has resulted in some publications and movies. I made a movie with my friend Dagmawi Yimer, who is an Ethiopian-Italian filmmaker. So it's on YouTube, and also acted as, as a kind of curator for this publication on WAITING, which is a combination of – part-poetry and, and other kinds of writings about waiting, which most often is in relation to borders.

Eleanor Paynter  08:30

Thanks. And I should also say that also the film that you made leading with Dagmawi Yimer is, I think, quite an incredible film. And we will link to all of these in the show notes, so you can all see it after too if you haven't had the chance to view it yet.

Thanks. Yousif I would invite you to open our conversation with a couple of poems. And I wonder also if you want to situate the book for us a little bit for people who may not have seen it or read it yet. 

Yousif Qasmiyeh   09:06

Thank you. And the title of this poem, “The camp is time.”

Who writes the camp and what is it that ought to be written in a time where the plurality of lives has traversed the place itself to become its own time.

How will the camp stare at itself in the coming time, look itself in the eye; the eye of time, the coming that is continually pending, but with a face — human or otherwise — that is defaced? The camp is a time more than it is a place. Upon and above its curves, time remembers its lapses to the extent that it is its time — the one whose time is one — that preys on a body that is yet to be born.

In crucifying time neither it nor we can recognize the crucified.

God, incinerate the camp save the dialect. God, incinerate the camp, save the dialect.

The incinerator of time is the camp.

What is it that makes a sight worth a sighting when the seer can use his eyes alone for an enormity that no eyes can actually see? Is it the camp or is it its time that should be returned to its body to reclaim its body as a dead thing with multiple previous lives and none. 

I write for it knowing that this is the last time that I write for it, herein the time is last and the last, it may belong to a no-beginning-no-end, but what it definitely has is its camp. The camp is time and time is the camp.

The possessive is what possesses the guilt that transcends all guilt and yet co-exists with itself until it becomes an event in its own guilt. But is it, is it my camp? 

What am I saying right now, in this specific instant under the false impression that the camp is mine? I say that it is the autobiography of the camp that is autobiographising the camp, suspended in time it is, while we deliberate the impossibility of narration in that context. In order to think of narration, not necessarily its narration, we follow it discreetly in the shape of ash.

In time, the mask takes off its mask. 

The foot that treads is also time. 

In time we impregnate time with its time. 

Time gives birth to nothing. The nothing that is raging nearby is our only time. 

Time, tell us where your private parts are? 

In the camp, time is hung like threads of dried okra.

[end poem]

So, in fact, perhaps talking about the book itself, what in itself, is a journey. It is not in fact a journey away from the camp, but the journey into the camp. Even though I arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker evolved into a refugee, and then into a citizen, but returning to the camp, because, in it, I see in fact, the progression of my time in a different place. But also to it, there are different times, and these times are the familial, the historical, the political, but also very violent times where things are never in fact stuck. And things are always, as always happening. And that is why maybe, Shahram talked about waiting, something that is really fascinating is that waiting in the Arabic language, the language I speak as a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, is in fact attributed to seeing. So seeing and waiting coexist, but also return to the same root word, to the word that has to do with active seeing and active responding to what is happening around us. And I'm going to read another poem.

And this poem is, in fact, I would say fragmentary in nature, because of how a times arrival cannot be demarcated and contained. And the title of this poem: “In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds.”

We think, sometimes, 
That they came from countless directions, 
From dim-coloured borders, 
From the raging fire that devoured them in the beginning, 
From absence. 
Here they come again, so invite them over to our death.

The refugee is the revenant of the face.

O refugee, feast upon the other to eat yourself.

In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds.

In the camp, time died so it could return home.

[end poem]

This is about also, sadly, what we repatriate is the deaths, and this is something that – so we return to a place when, also not just the actual deaths, but the concept of death itself is dragging us towards what we call the original place.

So, I and Elena, of course, knows about this story once Elena and myself talking with my mother, and my mother's and of course, interviewing my mother or chatting with her about time, in the cast in Baddawi camp in North Lebanon. And her main concern was, in fact, how we, when we move away from the camp would be able to transfer our deaths, and how we take the cemeteries with us to other places. I think, perhaps, this is only an invitation to all of us here to ponder a bit about waiting actively.

Eleanor Paynter 16:44

Thanks so much. These are really powerful poems, and I want to sort of also just sit with them for a moment. And thank you also for following up with those sorts of invitations for further discussion about them too.

I'll just share a few of the lines and images that are really striking to me maybe in connection with this, connection that you've drawn our attention to between waiting and seeing.

That the first poem you read ends on this image of time hanging like, I have to turn to it to get the line right, but “it's hanging up like dried okra” makes me… so time is appearing and disappearing in these poems in many different ways. And sometimes it's associated with these very specific objects. And sometimes it's almost more like a character. And I'm also especially struck by the turns that you make in these poems, which give a kind of circularity sometimes. So in the phrase, you say the camp is time and time is the camp. And I wonder if we might even just want to take that up for a minute, this sort of really direct relationship you're, you're putting out there between time and the camp.

I'm also very interested in, and I know, Elena, you and Yusuf are both involved in this project called Imagining Futures. And if you want to comment on that.

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh  18:27

Thanks, Eleanor. Yeah, I think that what comes through very clearly in a careful and interdisciplinary approach to camps and displacement, is recognizing the simultaneities and the extent to which displacement, to quote or following Deleuze and Guattari, has no beginning or end, it is always in the middle. So I'll read Yousif’s line from his poem writing the camp, which I think captures both this element of being in the middle, but also the extent to people are not just waiting, and they're certainly not just waiting for external intervention. So I'll read these short lines, 

“Refugees ask other refugees, who are we to come to you and who are you to come to us? Nobody answers. Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Kurds share the camp, the same different camp, the camp of a camp, they have all come to re-originate the beginning with their own hands and feet.” 

So such is the same different camp, the camp other camp. It's a singular plural camp, created through overlapping displacements with no beginning or end; it's always in the middle. And if we think of displacement through the framework of the rhizome, as I've been experimenting in a couple of chapters, on camps and more than camps, and we see the rhizome as – I quote from Deleuze and Guattari again – “no beginning or end, it is always in the middle, between things, into being, intermezzo.” It is from this middle, from which displacement is growing and from which it is over-spilling as it were. And if we see the camp as composed, quote “not of units but of dimensions or rather directions in motion”, we see camps and their residents as always already being in the middle of displacement, never at the beginning or at the end, and in a multiplicity and simultaneity of spaces and times of intersecting temporalities, materialities and spatialities. 

And here the past, the present, and the future intersect under mutually constitutive. Rather than necessarily wanting to leave a space of transit, it's very difficult to demarcate that space as transit alone. It is a point or a space of origin, beginning, transit potentially, departure, simultaneously: some people will be arriving, other people will be leaving. It is the same geographical location, but it has different significances and different directionalities of movement. Some people may want to leave, some people may be desiring to return because camps are spaces of refuge, of destruction of violence, but they're also spaces of belonging and of longing as well, for many people. They are home camps, they are places that people return to for many different reasons, as Yousif has written about, again, in numerous chapters and as well as in his own poetry.

So for one reason for returning is indeed to visit family members, but also to visit the cemetery, to visit the remains of the camp, the afterlife of those who lived there, and to continue to endure and to keep the camp going and ensure that it's constantly in motion, it's constantly changing, it doesn't static, it is not solely a place of departure, it's a place where people remain even if the camp disappears from the map, it remains through their remains. So when we're imagining the future, we need to recognize this intersecting, all these intersecting temporalities in addition to the spatialities and the materialities.

Eleanor Paynter  22:14

I was going to ask, who controls time in the camp? Or what controls time in the camp? but you've just given such a fascinating read, and, as you say, these intersecting temporalities, that's maybe not the right question. And I think it's useful to sort of enunciate those different threads and temporalities that are actually coming together, there are many active forces. And so I don't want to pose this as a sort of, I don't mean to be simplistic, but I am thinking also about time as a tool, that is a political tool that's used to control people contain people, to contain them in a particular moment, but also perhaps, to hold their futures captive.

And then also, as you're talking about, also in the care for loved ones, and for the dead, time, waiting, time as an active practice, so also something that is about community and solidarity and collectively imagining futures. So it's, I think, perhaps one thing that the camp offers as a lesson for us on time is a way of thinking about how these different kinds of power and forms of resistance and community, what kinds of spaces they create when they come together.

And that's, I think, really, maybe important to highlight, I was thinking about sort of two directions for this kind of conversation as we focus, at least at first on the camp itself, so thinking about what we learn about the camp when we focus on it in terms of time. But then also, what experiences of the camp teach us about time and mobility? 

I want to turn to Shahram also, for a slightly different question about time. Shahram you've worked also on the idea of stolen time and capital. And I wondered if we could also take that up, and maybe then also try and connect that back to the camp, some thinking about your work on stolen time as a strategy of capitalism and a couple of different pieces where you talk about deportation as temporal and as related to the stealing of time as a way of also producing a workforce. And I wondered if you wanted to comment also on this relationship between time and mobility?

Shahram Khosravi   24:55

Yes, when we – in modern societies, when we talk about time, we use same vocabularies that we use for money or capital: investing of time, waste of time, you know, how, spending the time, all these means that time has a value. Yeah. And stolen time is in relation to deportation and expulsion… I became curious to know what happens to that time people have used before deportation to establish relationships, but I mean, also, you know, earning money, paying taxes, you know, all these things. But beyond that also other, you know, form of capitals, cultural capitals, social capitals, you know, that they have accumulated, and then they are deported suddenly, yeah. So, what happened to all those forms of capital after deportation? Who took them?

So, that kind of, you know, stealing is very much, I mean, became more explicit in the context of United States that people are deported after, you know, 20 years, yeah, that they have spent all the, you know, adult life, maybe, in that country, and then suddenly they are – or you know, Windrush in UK, yeah. It's even horrible.

But also in case of Palestinians. I mean, how did the time of Palestinians is stolen? I mean, every day at the Israeli checkpoints, what is happening is the stealing of time. Is it when Palestinians are delayed to go to work? Delayed to go to visit their parents? They are delayed to go to school, they are delayed to go, just, I don't know, doing something in everyday life, yeah. Every single day, they are delayed, yeah. So if we put all these times, delayed, together, it's a huge amount of time. So what happened to that time, who took that time, you know, and how we can calculate not only in terms of money, but also in terms of, you know, emotions, also in terms of life opportunities, when we go and think about all those stolen times. 

Eleanor Paynter  

This comes up for me as an idea also, because Yousif you also have a poem where you talk about time is not mine, or time running away. And I wondered if there might be some kind of resonance there, with the idea of stolen time, as it appears in these multiple contexts in and outside of the camp.

Yousif Qasmiyeh  28:45

When I talk about my time, or the time as not being mine, I also think about what Shahram said about the stolen times. In the English language as well, and in the Arabic language, I'm sure that in Persian as well, we have the equivalent of, to kill time, to kill time, to dispose of it, but at times to kill actively, to kill very specific spots within this overarching time, or within maybe these pockets of time. And that is why, in fact, in my poetry, what I've tried to do, consciously, is to stress the fact that these times are not just the individual times, but also the ones that, perhaps, are fragmentary and very tiny and at times invisible, within this specific and within the individual. So for us, we own time, but also there are certain times that we can't own.

When I arrived in this place, the legal time did not belong to me. The way I was made to wait, in fact, and this is a very, very passive, and yet, my response was to recount time to take it from the camp, and then bring it to the UK, and see whether these different very times can start a conversation. And in fact, for me, there is no difference. I'm talking about it chronologically here, between the refugee camp and the City of Oxford. Because here, I also see how people, different refugee groups are retreated and made to wait intentionally. But also at times, we wait, we wait, the prospect of also doing something in the future. And that is why this active pulse is always always prevalent in waiting.

And would I be able, please, to read something that perhaps, and this has to do with the encounter, also with the immigration officer, but how these things which took place in the past are still happening now, if I may. And the title of this poem is: “Past Tense.”

They asked him to strip off all of his clothes while discussing his asylum claim.

The uniform was loose on him—two sizes bigger to accommodate his solitude.

The being is being strangled somewhere nearby.

On their way to court they disposed of him and his documents. 

He never paid any attention to numbers. 

They called it his room so he could commit suicide in private. 

The last time they called his name he was not there. 

His shoes had new soles. 

He enjoyed photographing feet, including his own. 

His title was written in bold. 

His name looked faint. 

The interviewer failed to conjugate a verb in the past tense. 

He opted for the present tense instead. 

He saw term, terminate and terminal on the same page.

He landed unscathed.

His only injury was mental. 

In the end, he claimed asylum.

[end poem]

And I think that this, also these individual lines, but also what they convey of fragmentariness, is in fact also a response to the arbitrary in the asylum process, and what happens when it comes to waiting and how asylum is also sadly and painfully associated with madness.

Shahram Khosravi   33:47

Thank you so much. Yousif. I was thinking, listening to you, I was thinking about when you said time, as you know, in process of asylum, for example, we have, one side we have migration agencies who you know, for them, time is in terms of calendar time, chronological time, yeah, years, weeks, months, days. On the other side, we have the asylum seeker, and waiting is not know what that period of waiting means for her or for him. So this is, you know, the quantity of time and quality of time. How we can measure that, how we can approach that. That's very interesting.

Eleanor Paynter  34:59

Elena, I'm thinking in part also about your work on South-South mobilities. And you talk very explicitly about anti-colonial and decolonial approaches to this work. And I guess, moved by the how our conversation has also taken up the idea of camp is a space of belonging. But I wonder if, and I don't mean to sort of presume any kind of like political views, but I'm thinking about conversations around abolition, border abolition, the abolition of detention spaces, perhaps then the possibility of not needing camps anymore, the abolition of camps. I wonder how time might factor into or might give us some insight into the possibilities for these kinds of abolition.

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh  35:54

Thanks, Eleanor. I think I'll pick up time in relation to what history tells us about the erasure of camps. And what time then tells us also about the ambiguities and the constitutive nature of destruction and violence as well, and the extent to which abolition will only ever be partial unless, and I quote Yousif from earlier, unless it's an abolition of the conditions that require camps rather than the abolition of camps themselves. 

So if we think of, for example, the Sallum border between Libya and Egypt in 1995, 30,000, Palestinian refugees who were living in Libya at that time were expelled from Libya by Gaddafi, in protest of the PLO’s signing of the Oslo Accords. And that mass expulsion was accompanied by the construction of a great camp on the Sallum border between Libya and Egypt, which was named the Return Camp, which again return temporal spatial dynamics there. Now, those Palestinian refugees were unable to return to Gaza and Jericho, which had been the political intention of creating that camp. And that camp eventually was closed. But that closure was far from the end of the camp, because at the outbreak of the 2011 Libyan war, which affected again over 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinians who were still working in Libya, living in Libya at that time. Several thousands of Palestinians would once again left stranded on the Libyan-Egyptian border, including precisely at this Saloon crossing, where the Return Camp of the 1995 year had been created. So the closure of the Return Camp in 1990s may have temporarily suspended that particular camp, but a new camp physically returned. It re-erupted in the same place at a different time. 

We can add two other examples: obviously Yarmouk camp, which has been viscerally central to understandings of the Syrian conflict and a symbol of the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe. But there are many other camps which are not so actively remembered. So we can add Tel Zaatar camp and Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon, both of which have been physically destroyed, razed to the ground, and their residents displaced and yet remain both as spaces which are of great symbolic and political significance on individual and collective levels, but also have important afterlives. So this is both because of the insistence, for example of Yousif’s mother, of returning to visit the cemetery in Nahr al-Bared camp. And in fact, the protests that arose not for people to live in the camp following its destruction, but to be able to visit the dead, to be able to visit the remains of those loved ones who still remained in spite of the physical erasure of that camp. 

So even if we think of the campicide, the death of the camp, in fact, through physical erasure and forced depopulation, that's far from an absolute process. And so I think that it's problematic to declare the end of the camp given what history has told us about when camps have been closed, including for political grounds, including the political grounds, grounded effectively or officially on notions of solidarity with, in this case, in the case of Libya, in solidarity with Palestinians, that this would in fact, lead to the return, it would lead to a solution to the causes of displacement. External interventions of this form, I think, are problematic in many instances, and the abolition of the camp is insufficient, if the broader conditions require the camp remain unaddressed. That I know that there are multiple approaches to this and precisely being attentive to the power dimensions that exist and being attentive to who we are, again, in relation to such studies and attempts to understand and respond to displacement really have to come to the fore. And again, if we think about decisions having to be prioritized from the perspective of the people who are themselves living in and through those spaces. 

Eleanor Paynter  

Thanks so much. Shahram, did you want to respond to Elena or also take up the question of time and abolition? 

Shahram Khosravi   

No, I totally agree with what Elena said. Yes. I mean, on the one hand, true anticolonial action should target the reason of why people are in the refugee situation firsthand. For example, there is a recent report by Brown University, I think that the title is The Cost of War, saying and showing with numbers that the war on terror has resulted in displacement of millions of people up to 30 million, I guess, if I remember correctly.

I mean, and we are talking about region, I mean, the Middle East, yeah. And the Middle East in terms when I was listening to the future imaginaries, it’s you know, how can we isolate camps refuge in this displacement from other, you know, forces, or, you know, broader, larger international geopolitical relations, I mean, environmental disasters which is going on in that region and others you know, and all these together you know, historic sites, yeah, historic sites camps, historic sites borders. True anticolonial approach should pay attention to those aspects. And I totally agree with Elena, you know, just removing camps or removing borders maybe is not the true solution for people who are, you know, the victim or situation. 

I also want to say there is a recent publication by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, I don't know if you know them, Refugee Heritage. It’s about how camps and refugee nests should be part of, you know, human heritage or something like that. Yeah. 

Eleanor Paynter  

Thank you. Yousif, would you be willing to read another poem, and we might use this to round out our conversation, then.

Yousif Qasmiyeh  43:00

Thank you. I'm going to read extracts from With a third eye, I see the catastrophe. But also it touches on illness, on the pandemic, in a camp. And we talk about these illnesses and these very, very serious ailments within cities, and how we respond to pandemics in refugee camps. And this is, in fact, a re-writing, I would say, of some of my mother's statements, so I rely heavily on words uttered by my mother, so I have to acknowledge her as also the co-writer, in a sense. My mother is illiterate, she can't read and she can't write, but she is a poet nonetheless. And also I've written on co-seeing. So I co-see with her,

“With a third eye, I see the catastrophe”

[I write the secret].

On the doorstep, finding her way to the seeds that escaped her lap: Like the one who read the book, Son, read my swollen legs, another’s land.
The camp happens in the distance.

With their permission, they disappear. With their permission, they return in hiding. 

Ruins endure ruins.

Humming: the well is in the well

Mother: There is no longer time, and the concealed in its place is its road to the thing. These days, her days are strange. The evenings are stranger. From the uttered to its evidence, she loosens the cross’s crux to hang her headscarf. 

The disease is not yet here. Alongside our heavy hearts, we have what will be: flour, beads of yeast, whole and crushed lentils, potatoes, their red soil to nurture escaping blessings in dryness.

I do not follow he who thinks well of time.

I grew old and the camp before me is the purest of ageing. 

The father, late in his imagination, is also the infinite gratitude to death’s eloquence in prioritsing the prioritised. 

In the camp, we arrive not. Nor do we remain. In ailment we only remember ailment. 

With blessings without name, they resume wailing, each from the throat and all from the camp.

An ailment—as though it were a mouth inside a mouth. 

What does a disease have for us to die? 

Hastening death does in no means suffice to repel death from the face. Whoever will die in this instant, is already dead, but for death to survive interpretations it delays its own. 

I repeat: Cursed is the complete in the flesh.

Camp, awake! Not for the innate deafness in the voice. Awake to see with the eyes of dust the effect of killing in time. 

Certain we are in this death, that the sun will never be for us, to see the enormous death. 

In this time we remember those who are long gone, not those who will certainly die. In darkness, memory looks at its feet. 

Who will inherit the disease in ap lace that was in the beginning a place? 

When the camp falls ill, tomorrow falls ill for its sins. 

By tomorrow, by its disavowed promise, we promise the disease what we have of wishes: a camp big enough for death, a camp with fewer deaths. 

He who is hardly awake shaves no more. The mirror with severed edges, bartered in shards between the sons, those perched over the shoulders of the almost identical curses, has a new line. From my old grandmother’s mirror, the mirror of her beech closet, the one she bought in the city for the camp, my father in his spare time made us bespoke mirrors for our escaping faces.

As we wait for the disease, in echoless rooms, doors locked up, shutters dusted, thrust to the heart… The disease that will sign a pact with our diseases. In patience bereft of patience, we stand still behind our walls: without seeing, we shall see the disease that will be. 

To my parents: When this is over, leave the dusk incomplete in its time and return, with fewer limbs, to your non-existent pastures.

With a third eye, I see the catastrophe.

[end poem]

Thank you.

Eleanor Paynter  48:15

Thanks for listening to Migrations: A World on the Move, a podcast produced by Global Cornell's Migrations Global Grand Challenge, a cross-disciplinary, multi-species 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'll also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us on Twitter at @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 Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ', the Cayuga nation, and we recognize the nation's sovereignty and the indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is “Basically Really” by Steve Fawcett.