A
s soon as Farzad sits down on the white leather sofa, he wants to know how my work is going on. Have I talked to others? What have I asked and what have I been told? I explain again what I do in the centre, that I have spoken to others who have the B permit, and provide a list of things and themes that have come up in my talks. When I mention hopes for the future, Farzad looks at me and asks “what hope do they have? What kind of hope can we have? How are we different from those whose ngerprints are in the system and who are deported in a short time?” He looks at me and I know I have to give an answer.“What hope can we have with a B? Tell me, how are we different from those others?” I speculate that temporality is one key aspect; that those with the B do not know for sure what will happen, if and when they are deported. I explain how the B is of cially speaking a positive decision, but because of all the restrictions, it is more often considered a nega-tive one. Farzad’s eyes penetrate mine and he asks “and how is this decision posinega-tive? How do you feel about this?” He is seeminly unhappy with my evasive wording. He exclaims giving his interpretation of the issue: “Hope! What hope can you have with this B? Tell me what kind of hopes these people, you have met, have?” I tell that their hopes are really di-rected towards the time after the B, but Farzad replies that for him this is impossible. “You never know what can happen after this. You cannot hope for or plan anything.”
Farzad came to Finland in June 2005. “I complained about my decision, appealed, but it has now been over ten months and I still have no answer. How long is it going to take?
Now my rst B will expire, and I still do not know about my future. How can you plan your future with the B? You can’t. I don’t know with whom to talk, what to say anymore.
We are told that we cannot study or work. We haven’t come here to live in a refugee centre, even though here we don’t have to be afraid of being killed, but we come here to nd a better life. We don’t come here to get the 300 euros per month to buy food. We expect to have a better life. Work, live, study; be free. That’s what we want, nothing much. The trip is very long; some of us have come 8.000 or 10.000 kilometres to live like this here. It is very expensive to come.”
I ask if he has a family, and whether he came alone. “Yes, I have family in Afghanistan, or at the moment I don’t know where they are. I just hope that they left the village in time.
It is a bad village, where the Taliban still try to rule and there’s constant violence. I hope that my mother and two little brothers left that village, and Afghanistan. When I came here, I left a letter to the social worker, who sent it to the Red Cross in Helsinki who sent it to Kabul, where somebody tried to nd my family, but they were not there. They couldn’t be found anywhere. And now I don’t know where they are. After my father… (pause) Who’s going to take care of them now?” I ask whether he thinks of his family a lot. “I always think of them. I’m a human. She’s my mother. I will never forget her.” Farzad says that it is not easy to worry about his family and then of his own life here. He tells that he doesn’t know if he would stay in Finland, because somebody has to take care of his mother, and his brothers are so young.
“My lawyer doesn’t want to talk to me anymore because I have asked her for so many times when the decision will come. I just worry about my life and future, and that’s why I ask her so often, maybe the others don’t so much. People are different. Why do we have to live like this? Are we not human? Why do we have to share the room with ve people and the toilets and showers and kitchen? You can put that in when you write.”
My interview with Farzad in September 2006 was in many ways a frustrating ex-perience for me. It made me question my skills and competence as an interviewer, the setting of my research and whether I was personally up to the task. It took me some time to grasp what had happened during our discussion; with all the emotions that were present and the relationship that evolved between us. Then something caught my eye. A minor sentence at the end of the interview, said in an emphatic tone: “you can put that in when you write”. This voice did not make any excuses, did not ask for pity or compassion. It was meant as a comment on my work and on the conditions the failed asylum seekers lived in. The claim for authority that Farzad presented was strong. It went beyond the body as simply an object of sov-ereign power and politics.
Failed asylum seekers claim political authority and their right to control their lives (see also Benhabib 2004: 49–69; Moulin & Nyers 2007; Squire 2009: cf.
Burke 2002; Bleiker & Kay 2007). Farzad’s interview, in fact, exposed the politi-cal in the body and opened a space for transformation. His voice was closely linked to the Finnish politics of asylum, but it did not acquiesce to it. The political became exposed through the restlessness that the status and constant uncertainty bore on his body. With questions like “why do we have to live like this” and “are we not human”, Farzad implicitly demanded breaking the securitising logic of lines so central in IR/ir (also Bigo 2001; Walker 1993).
Farzad disrupted the knowledge hierarchy between us and claimed that our ways of perceiving the topic of failed asylum were rather different. Yet, his lament concerning his body being placed beyond the possibility of pursuing a normal life – a life much like mine in its basic aspirations – illustrated that we were both
involved in the corporeal struggle of failed asylum. The political relationality that Farzad evoked could not be unambiguously categorised or contained. The more I talked with people and observed what was going on around me, the more this aspect started intriguing and interesting me. In the end, the interviews made it im-perative for me to re ect upon the space for politics and the possibilities of politi-cal life – possibilities that for some are self-evident and for others unattainable (cf.
Rajaram & Grundy-Warr 2004; Walters 2006).
The disparity between people’s possibilities of enacting themselves politically necessitates developing a theoretical stance that distances itself from the accounts of sovereignty and the sovereign subject. The logic that founds these concepts does not leave space to account for the multiple expressions of political existence that, for instance, failed asylum seekers enact.