O
n 3rd August 2004 Abdi’s life was to take a turn for the better; he had reached Fin-land. The trip had lasted a month. His pregnant wife and children were left behind in Mogadishu. His asylum application signalled a possibility for the whole family – a new life in Finland. However, some nine months later, 9th May 2005, Abdi’s dreams were crushed as he received a temporary residence permit with no prospectives of family reuni cation.Instead, receiving the permit brought about a sense of his subjectivity to deportation. The irony is that at the time Abdi arrived, the B permit did not exist. It was introduced later in 2004, and he was among the rst to receive it.
Abdi looks older than his age, with heavy shades of grey in his hair and beard. He left Somalia to escape the civil war, but after that he was left in limbo. According to him “the B is not a life; not a good life”. For him, the change of life has been total as back home Abdi was an educated man with a house of his own and a good job.
Since his arrival in Finland, he has lived in a reception centre. There Abdi also began to suffer from insomnia, depression and other stress-related illnesses. The scars on his legs and stomach reminded him of Somalia, of the beatings that he suffered from early 91 till the late 90s. They also reminded him of the situation in which he left his family. All this exacerbated his mental condition and he was prescribed anti-depressants and sleeping pills to cope with his pain. As the medication did not seem to help, he started to consume alcohol in rather large quantities. Then Abdi got bad news from his family. His eldest son had been killed as the result of a shooting, his daughter had been raped and was pregnant with an
‘illegitimate’ child and the family had lost their house and been forced to ee the city.
After his son’s death and the loss of their home in Mogadishu, Abdi’s family needed money and was counting on Abdi sending it to them. He had been sending monthly all he could afford from his social allowance, but this time the sum was too big. Consequently, Abdi had to resort to the Somali community in Finland to lend him a couple of hundred Euros. Abdi’s pride was hurt when he had to rely on his countrymen to help his family; a duty that he considered his own, but one he could not ful l. This made him feel that he can never return to his family.
As Abdi’s situation with his B status and his complaint to the administrative court dragged on, he started losing even that little hope he had left. The uncertainty, prolonged
waiting and his perceived shameful situation in relation to his family and their expectations of him, which he could not meet had all begun to weigh on him heavily. His permit was about to expire in a few months’ time, and nobody knew what was going to happen after that. Would he be deported? Would he receive yet another B? The future seemed to disap-pear from his grasp. So, Abdi took a handful of pills and ushed them down with alcohol, gathered all the blankets and textiles from his room into one big pile and set it on re.
He was saved at the last minute.
(Interviews with Abdi, August 2006)
The interviews and eldwork that lie behind Abdi’s story made me realise that in many cases the price of survival was shame (also Bohmer & Shuman 2007:
625). Along with other distressing factors, negative emotions and affects, the shame that Abdi experienced led him to resort to self-harm and to attempt suicide.
When I rst started my ethnographic exploration, I was not prepared for the asy-lum seeking body in its corporeal and carnal politics to come so close to mine.
It seemed too harsh and unbearable for me to think and write about stories such as Abdi’s. For a long time, I did not think I could personally face and cope with the amount of pain and suffering that had begun to surface. Furthermore, I felt that writing about these vulnerabilities might easily cite the failed asylum seek-ers as mere victims of sovereign politics and reify their trauma and suffering.
In the bus I continue reading Caroline Moorehead’s book Human Cargo. The chapter is about the Australian policy of mandatory detention and the conditions that asylum seekers live in. It tells about their anxieties and behaviour caused by mental distress and trauma. I read about self-in icted violence and pain. I think about the couple sewing their lips together in the centre, the abuse of medicine, the suicide attempts, and Soran burning the back of his hand with a cigarette. He did this not long before he was deter-mined to leave Finland (see Piece III: section 3.4.1.). When I asked why he had done such a thing, his simple answer was “because I felt like it”. I read on, feeling nauseous.
The feeling of emptiness that has accompanied me in the eld comes back to haunt me.
Moorehead’s book tells about a person who has similarly burnt his hand with a lighted cigarette. His answer to the question “why” had been “because I can’t feel anything”.
(Research diary, 31st January 2007) In time I realised that I had to nd a way to relate to acts of self-harm, because they clearly were part of the everyday experience of being a failed asylum seeker.
But how was I to make sense of the scars and of the immense emotional distress I had come to witness? How to approach the stories of self-harm and suffering?
The books and articles I read related self-harm, pain and suffering with the release of pain from within. In this literature self-harm was explained through medicine or psychology, but its embeddedness in political conditions was not
systemati-cally explored (see Grimwood 2004: 67, 69; cf Pugliese 2002, 2004). A press-ing question started hauntpress-ing me: Could the failed asylum seekers’ scars, wounds, emotional suffering and the various practices of self-harm be concieved without endorsing the narratives of victimization and without adopting a foundationalist politics (cf. White 2007)?
When I started to go through my notes, after several months of not being able to read, reminisce or consciously ponder the interviews, certain events, notes and sub-tones caught my attention. I realised that self-harm and the apparent lack of agency could perhaps meet most forcefully the philosophical challenge the failed asylum seeker was representing. Could self-in icted violence and emotional dis-tress be indicative of the Nancian body politic and of ‘being-with’ as our shared ontological condition? Could acts of self-harm evoke the sense that we compear?
Ultimately, stories such as Abdi’s that addressed extreme vulnerability and dis-tress made me want to move beyond the label. It became imperative to explore further what the limits of ‘the political’ were as well as to stretch my own under-standing of political expression and engagement. Therefore the subsequent, and last, thematic Piece became my attempt to conceive of the Nancian idea of ‘togeth-erness’ as something that cannot be named or made present through words.