Tackling "Illegal" Migration in Literary Works
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.21036/LTPUB10756 (DOI) | |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
My main research question is actually a very simple one. What is migration? But I'm taking a particular look at this question, because the case of Mayotte is a very ambiguous case. Here we're speaking of an island,
00:21
which together with the other islands of Grand Comor, Moélie and Anjou, forms the Comoros Archipelago. But due to political configurations, Mayotte is officially French and part of the European Union. I'm asking the question, what is the border actually between so-called illegal migration
00:44
and internal movements? Because we're speaking of a case in which people leave Anjou to Mayotte, and these are just 70 kilometres. We're speaking about people who share historical ties. We're speaking about peoples who were divided because of political geography.
01:06
And this is what takes me to my authors. In this paper, I paid attention to how the authors address the situation. What kind of poetic, stylistic resources do they use to talk about this?
01:20
And what is, for example, the role of the French language in their writing? Because they are criticising the French hegemony on the island, but they stick to using French and actually even publishing in outlets which are situated in France, although the language of primary socialisations is not French.
01:44
Traditionally, we get to our topics by reading different genres, like plays, novels, short stories, reading newspapers, academic papers, book reviews and so on. But in this case, the idea of the paper was born out of my first trip
02:01
to Mayotte, and that was in 2015. While getting prepared to go to Mayotte, I was struck by two things. One, I wouldn't need a visa to try to fly to Mayotte, and second, the local currency is the euro. So I was completely puzzled by this state of affair.
02:21
Once on the ground, I got more scandalised by the reality. For example, the difference between petit-terre and grand-terre, meaning the place on the one side, you have the airport, the French army base, and on the other side, you have the majority of the people who will then be disconnected to the airport, for example, in case of social turmoil.
02:42
Since 2015, I've been going to Mayotte every year as a visiting lecturer, and beyond my classes, I took the time to listen to people, to learn from witnesses of this tragedy back to the traditional approach. Of course, I did literary analysis by using a method called close reading,
03:03
and what is particular, the added value of this paper, is that I did two things. One is that I combined to my literary analysis aspects of critical geography, and critical geography is essential in this case study. It's a discipline that highlights the connection between societies
03:23
and geographies by allowing to raise annoying questions such as, what happens when people's histories is falsified for political reasons? Second, I combined my literary analysis to field observation.
03:40
It was very enriching to spend time on the ground, listen to the people who have gone through this humiliating and painful experience. I have basically three key findings. The first key finding connected to the question, what is migration, what is migration within the Comoros archipelagos,
04:03
is that to both writers, there is no migration taking place within the Comoros archipelago. These are internal movements, and that's why in the title of the paper, I've put migration into brackets, because to them, if there's anything that is illegal on the island of Mayotte,
04:22
then it is the Bala Diu visa, and not the people coming from Anjouan, Morelii, and Grand Comoros. The second finding has got to do with the approach, the way the authors deal with the topic. On the one hand, we have Nasul Atoumani, who is Malurian and French, by the way,
04:43
who is just using satire to laugh about the whole situation, because to him, it's absurd to have to deal with a corpse, for example, and insisting on conducting an autopsy of the dead body in a Muslim context, whereas the person, the person who found the dead body,
05:02
you know, was already busy trying to organize the burial ceremony. On the other hand, we have Seif Ebadawi from the Grand Comoros, who is so angry with the situation that his approach is what I call angry but poetic writing, and there he's using the decree,
05:21
which is a Muslim prayer, an act of remembrance, that takes place 40 days after somebody has passed away. He's so angry with the situation that he even asks the questions whether the Almighty had been sleeping while this tragedy had been unfolding.
05:40
The third finding has got to do with the language, language and literary identity, because both authors are using French, although, as I said in the beginning, the languages of primary socializations on the islands are Shikumori, Shinzuale, and so on. So the intention behind is clearly to use the French language as a weapon
06:06
to fight against the very same French hegemony. This is an approach that even writers like the literary giants, Chinua Achebe from Nigeria and Amadu Kuruma from Ivory Coast have used before in saying that they will use the formal colonial languages
06:25
in their works, but they will do so in such a way that the formal colonizers will have hard times understanding their own languages. And Seif Ebadawi, the writer from the Grand Comoros, says this well by saying in an interview that he's bringing disorder
06:44
in the French language as a response to a disordered situation. My findings are relevant on three counts. First, this analysis brings a totally different perspective to migration studies.
07:02
I always have fun whenever I give a talk about Mayotte in Europe. I have fun asking my audience whether Mayotte sounds familiar to them. Many people so far have confessed not to have heard of Mayotte, and even those who did hear of Mayotte are surprised that Mayotte is part of the European Union.
07:22
So I always have fun at the end saying, welcome to Africa in Europe. The second point of relevance is that this paper shows that decolonization is still a work in progress, and it emphasizes the role that literature can play in this process.
07:41
This paper reminds of the fact that literature can be a good therapy, as this has been shown in many projects connected to the genocide in Rwanda, for example. The third point of relevance is that this paper has highlighted that literature is by nature encyclopedic.
08:02
It's a discipline where other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, history, political science, geography, etc., converge. So in a sense, Roland Barthes was right in saying that if you were to save only one discipline, it should be literature.
08:22
This paper was only the beginning of a broader project on which I will be working in the next couple of years. This will take place within the framework of the cluster of excellence
08:42
which was awarded to the Institute of African Studies of the University of Mayotte. Together with many colleagues from different disciplines, we'll be working on the broad topic, African Multiple Reconfiguring African Studies.
09:01
I'm currently trying to expand the corpus because I found that there are many more novels, a collection of short stories here and there, poems, video performances, many themes about the topic of migration to Mayotte. So I hope to do three things. One, an inventory of this broad corpus.
09:23
Two, a systematization of this corpus. And three, I hope to provide a transdisciplinary analysis of this variety of corpus. I hope to do this in a book form which will highlight the question of closeness between people of the Comoros archipelago
09:43
and by extension, interestingly, the connection between Africa and Europe.