Home: An Emotion
Homes
are not just defined on the coordinates of time and space rather it is an
emotion. The grief of leaving our homes could make us sick (homesick). Then
imagine the trauma of those refugees whose emotion of home is colonized by the
bureaucrats and the systemic evils of the world. Houses
could be built but homes are not the niche of an architect, they evolve; not
just out of the blue but through sheer sacrifices, compromises, endurance, hope
and pain. Homes are the concrete expressions of human abstraction. When people are made to be homeless it is not just
rendering them space-less rather you take a toll on their humanness. Devoid of
homes means devoid of emotions and bereft of emotions humans are just a mass of
flesh. Theologians and faith leaders add impetus to this. Eulogizing the ordeals of exile through the intervention
of a Divine force makes suffering and endurance sacrilegious. Resilience turns
to be an inert cognizance in this entire process.
What
has gone wrong? Slavoj Zizek reckons; “What if the way we perceive a problem is
already part of the problem?” Extrapolating this statement George Zachariah
opines;
Our social location
informs our knowledge and determines our responses. The knowledge that we
construct informed by the dominant interests is nothing but an ideological
apparatus to legitimize and perpetuate the prevailing order. The solutions that
we develop to the contemporary problems are also coming from the same logic. That
means, our solutions are incapable of addressing the root causes of the problem
and bringing healing and restoration into our communities.
Today
we commemorate the World Refugee Day. Here we need to take cognizance of the
fact that a refugee and a migrant are not the same. Migration could be a matter
of choice but refugee is exclusively a matter of force. The 1951 Refugee Convention
defines a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their
country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons
of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or
political opinion.” 1951 Refugee convention is the key legal document ratified
by 145 State parties. It defines the term ‘refugee’ and outlines the rights of
the displaced, as well as the legal obligations of States to protect them. The
core principle is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be
returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or
freedom. This is now considered a rule of customary international law.
It is quite disheartening that a nation like India which takes pride
in its legacy of welcoming guests through one of its ancient maxims, athithi devo bhava (a guest
is akin to God), has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention. After all this is only a soothing maxim because had we
successfully translated this maxim into economic dividends, India should have
been among the top 10 countries in the world for tourism. However, even today,
we are ranked 40th globally by the Travel and Tourism index of
the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Amit
Singh, a human rights researcher states;
India has not signed
1951 Refugee Convention (which is legally binding principals for refugee
protection) and, there is no specific domestic legal framework to protect the
rights of refugees and asylum seekers in India. This has led to legal
insecurity of refugees’ status and difficulty to access in refugee rights. Due
to the absence of specific laws related to refugees and asylum seekers; they
are regulated under the Foreigners Act, 1946. However, problem with this act
is, it does not take special situation of refugees and refugees’ rights and
treats refugees and asylum seekers with tourist, illegal immigrants, economic
immigrants alike. Indian legal framework has no uniform law to deal with its
huge refugee population, it chooses to treat incoming refugees based on their
national origin and political considerations, questioning the uniformity of rights
and privileges granted to refugee communities as per the international human
rights conventions and UN treaties. This results in unequal treatment towards
refugee groups. This treatment is reflected in how refugees from China are well
received compare to refugees from Myanmar in India.
What
really disturbs me is that age is no longer an
impediment for one to turn a refugee. Trump’s new ‘zero tolerance’
immigration policy has pushed many kids to the abyss of despair and trauma.
More than 700 families have been separated from their children at the US
border. Concerning the mental status of the separated children, Elizabeth Frankel,
Associate Director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights
observes;
The trauma increases
the longer the children are detained. It’s traumatizing to have no information
about your parents and to be in this completely different environment it’s
heartbreaking. We see kids who can’t sleep, can’t eat, that are regressing
developmentally, that cry all the time. These children have already endured ‘layers
of trauma.’ The journey is traumatic, they're separated from family members,
they have post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, high levels of anxiety and
trauma is what caused them to flee in the first place.
We the Church too
cannot elope accountability as we claim to be the bride of Jesus, who was a
refugee himself. We welcomed him by slamming doors on his face when he
was in his mother’s womb by giving her no space to deliver her child. This
young boy Jesus, who had to face shut doors even before his birth, grows up and
says to the world that I am the door of the sheep. The statement “I am the
door” itself is so beautiful. What could be more beautiful in this world than
being doors to others? But the beauty of this saying intensifies when a person
like Jesus, who has faced utter rejection in all walks of life says so.
Could
the Church be doors to the refugees so as to maintain the credibility of the statement
of Christ? I would solicit your attention to the Gubbio Project; wherein which
an average of 225 homeless people seek safety and rest on the pews in the
sanctuary of St. Boniface church in San Francisco every day. The Gubbio Project
was co-founded in 2004 by community activists Shelly Roder and Father Louis
Vitale as a non-denominational project of St. Boniface Neighbourhood Center
located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighbourhood in response to the
increasing numbers of homeless men and women in need of refuge from the
streets.
Take
a look at this video
Today
as we observe the World Refugee day we are demanded to contemplate on the pathos of the
refugees as well as reverberate the same through our praxis. Fred Rogers
reckoned, “We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s
easy to say “It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.”
Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my
heroes.”
Humans cannot live as islands, keeping at bay from the
petrifying realities. Neither could we take solace in the fantasy of opinions. Bill Bullard writes; “Opinion is really
the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no
understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy for it requires us to
suspect our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose
larger than the self-kind of understanding.” There
is no substitute for empathetic engagement.
I
conclude with a poem entitled ‘Home’ by Warsan Shire – a British-Somali poet.
No
one leaves home unless
home
is the mouth of a shark.
You
only run for the border
when
you see the whole city running as well
your
neighbours running faster than you,
the
boy you went to school with
who
kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is
holding
a gun bigger than his body.
You
only leave home when home won't let you stay.
No
one would leave home unless home chased you,
fire
under feet, hot blood in your belly.
It’s
not something you ever thought about doing
and so when you did –
you
carried the anthem under your breath,
waiting
until the airport toilet
to
tear up the passport and swallow,
each
mouthful of paper making it clear that
you
would not be going back.
You
have to understand,
no
one puts their children in a boat
unless
the water is safer than the land.
Who
would choose to spend days
and
nights in the stomach of a truck
unless
the miles travelled meant something more than journey.
No
one would choose to crawl under fences,
be
beaten until your shadow leaves you,
raped,
then drowned, forced to the bottom of
the
boat because you are darker, be sold,
starved,
shot at the border like a sick animal,
be
pitied, lose your name, lose your family,
make
a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,
stripped
and searched, find prison everywhere
and
if you survive
and
you are greeted on the other side with
go
home blacks, refugees
dirty
immigrants, asylum seekers
sucking
our country dry of milk,
dark,
with their hands out
smell
strange, savage –
look
what they've done to their own countries,
what
will they do to ours?
The
dirty looks in the street
softer
than a limb torn off,
the
indignity of everyday life
more
tender than fourteen men who
look
like your father, between
your
legs, insults easier to swallow
than
rubble, than your child's body
in
pieces – for now, forget about pride
your
survival is more important.
I
want to go home but home is the mouth of a shark
Home
is the barrel of the gun
and
no one would leave home
unless
home chased you to the shore
unless
home tells you to
leave
what you could not behind,
even
if it was human.
no
one leaves home until home
is
a damp voice in your ear saying
leave,
run now, I don't know what I’ve become.
Dn. Basil Paul
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