When my son was few months old, I learned that he would fall sleep in minutes if I would carry him and start walking. Actually, I did not learn that then, since such knowledge is known to pretty much everybody. But the reality of such simple thought is almost overwhelming. A new born kid is, at least in my limited experience of one son, A Thing That Cries. So, in few hours, whatever makes him not cry is pretty much a miracle, a revelation. Being on the move, then, is one of those miracles.
Probably many other thinkers have tackled the issue, but I read it by first time in Chatwin’s Songlines. Our ancestry, for millions and millions of years, has been people on the move. We come from the savanna, from beings that walked, and walked and walked. It is no surprise then that a baby will recognize the rythm, and fall sleep. What it is surprising, at least to me, is the immense hatred that our societies of today have for those that are, still, on the move.
Few days back I have the privilege of atending to the defense of the doctoral thesis of Annick Pijnenburg. Annick, a lawyer, graduated Cum Laude on the issue of refugees and the international laws that commands their destiny, and their suffering. For my uneducated hear, she did a very interesting job eliciting order in the complex matter of sponsor and partner states, and the not only complex, but crucial question of how to allocate responsibility when the system fails.
Of course, I would love to go into the contents of the work of Annick, and mention more issues that make her work not only worth a doctoral title, but also innovative and relevant for the society at large. But without doing that now, just think in the matter that Annieck has worked upon. The law that regulates how people in distress that moves, people forced to be in the move, then, is managed. So today, in 2021, we have created a complex legal system to administrate and regulate and control… what precisely? People that can not live anymore where they did, and have to move away.
Just let that sink.
So we, humans. Animals that have always been in the move. Beings that owe their greatest works of arts and science to migrants, to people that got to move. Beings that manage to put our babies to sleep when we get moving, we who have Gandhi’s and Mandela’s … we from all beings, we regulate the ones of us that suffer and have to abandon house and family and friends. We tell them to stop, we tell them “don’t get here” we say “let me think”, “let me create partner states, and refugees camps with millions living in tents for years without end, and places to ashame ourselves for the rest of history, like Moria in Lesbos and the Jungle in Calais”.
How can we? Just… how did we get here?
How can we do this to ourselves?