A
hmed is a tall young man wearing an army cap and trousers, a grey t-shirt and a heavy gun-shaped pendant around his neck. He speaks through clenched lips. Ahmed was detained thirteen days ago. He tells that he will soon be deported to Norway, but at the same time he has the chance to appeal here in Finland. This makes no sense to him. He has applied for asylum in Norway as well and received several negative decisions. There the process took ve years and after reaching its completion Ahmed was ordered to leave the country. So he came to Finland for the second time. In 2006 he spent three months near Vaasa, in Oravainen [he uses the Swedish name Oravais], in the reception centre. Ahmed tells that he didn’t know anybody from Finland when he came, but then he made new friends in Oravais. He protests against the Norwegian and Finnish policies of not accepting refugees and giving protection: “I have travelled all over Norway and I saw with my own eyes that the earth is empty. And Finland is empty, too. I saw that too. Why don’t they give people who come a place to live? You see people killed, but then you tell that they cannot stay. I came trough Ivalo, Tornio, all the way to Oravais, and I saw an empty earth. There is nothing but trees. Why are you sending people away?” Ahmed explains that he would understand, if there was nothing but houses everywhere, that there would be no space. But there is space, he says.Ahmed tells about having lost his brother, friends and some family members in the ghting in Somalia. He says that he was very small when his brother died, but that he still remembers him being taken from home: “when I think about that, I can still remember the faces of the people who took him”. After his brother was killed, Ahmed and his mother ran to Yemen. It was the rst time he was in exile. Ahmed claims that growing up in a place where one sees dead people is different. However, he thinks that people who haven’t personally witnessed violence and war still cannot claim to be ignorant of them; nowa-days with the TV, news and the Internet, people all over the world know what is going on. “People can see, listen and understand what other people are going through. Then, of course, they can act as if they don’t. If you just close your eyes and feel and imagine how it would feel to lose a brother, sister, mother or family and then escape your home, not know-ing what will happen or has happened, then you would get your answers.”
When Ahmed was seventeen years old, his mother decided to send him away so that he
wouldn’t grow up seeing killing, violence and getting into trouble. She paid someone to travel with him to Norway. Now Ahmed has not heard or been able to contact his family in ve years – since he left. He tells that many people leave. Some go to Australia, some to Europe, some get killed on the way. Before Ahmed left Somalia, his mother used to sit and talk with him for ve hours every day. “Five hours every day,” repeats Ahmed. “She told me: trust yourself, don’t do bad things, try to be friendly with everybody, to respect everybody, to do right things, to treat everybody in the best way, to help others who have problems and whose problems are even bigger than your own and don’t give up till you die.” He pauses for a while after each one of his mother’s points making sure that I have enough time to write it down. Ahmed says that his mother told him about things that would happen to him, and that life wouldn’t be easy after leaving. He confesses that then he didn’t believe all that his mother told him, but later these things happened, and he now notes that she was right.
Now Ahmed would just like to nd a place in any country that would protect him. He states that “if you have peace, we can live there. We’re all human beings.”
(Interview with Ahmed, May 2007)
Ahmed’s story could be broken down into a number of different aspects within international relations. It would be possible to talk about the con ict in Somalia and the failure of the international community to establish peace and rebuild this
‘failed’ state. Examining the impact of refugee ‘ ows’ on Somalia’s neighbouring countries would be an equally possible alternative, and a third option would be dis-cussing the European asylum system and its role in constructing the phenomenon of ‘illegal’ and ‘undesirable’ migration. Yet another aspect opens through explor-ing various transnational networks and the rampant business of human traf ckexplor-ing.
Each of these approaches, however, splits the moving body into segments. As a consequence, “the turbulence of migration” (Papastergiadis 2000) and those ways in which its different dimensions come together in and are sensed by the body are easily omitted.
Ahmed’s story promotes an understanding of the international as multiple rela-tional bodily practices, that are constantly made, unmade, remade and negotiated in various corporeal conjunctures. This relational negotiation of space is a political event – an event in the political that resists the atomisation of the body. Ahmed’s trajectories and movement expose one possible expression of political life within the international that cannot totally escape, but that yet withdraws from a linear and bounded conception of space-time proposed by the logic of sovereignty (cf.
Manning 2007: 59). By moving around Finland and Norway Ahmed has come to notice that just like the world and the international, space and place are not synony-mous concepts. During his travels him coming out with “the empty earth” serves to illustrate that albeit there is space, there is no place, which could accommodate
his body. This perceived contradiction makes Ahmed profoundly unhappy and dis-satis ed, but it does not completely dampen his will to move on as he, while being detained, claims always to be thinking “about the life and what’s the next step”.
Inspired and informed by Ahmed’s views, the following Piece seeks to think political space and spatiality, not as objective and measurable, but in terms of ex-teriority and ‘extension’. This change of focus rearticulates space as a sphere in which dualisms such as mind/body and sensible/intelligible cannot operate. Space transforms into a temporal unfolding, in which the singular-plural bodies mutu-ally expose themselves and negotiate their being in the world. (See James 2002:
136–137; also Manning 2007: 128.) This means that instead of resorting to any of the analytical perspectives listed above, the failed asylum seekers’ fragmentary political agency requires a different category of analysis: movement. With move-ment I do not intend massive ows, but the moves and even minute gestures that the failed asylum seekers’ singular plural body takes on and performs.