1

Asylum Seeker Other

To Seek an Account of Sel
An-Other Account of Sel
An-Other Self
Ac-Count of Self
To Affect An-Other
An-Other Account of Asylum S
lum Seekers (Ac)Co
Get(ting) Asylum
An-Other Self Accou n
To Know Asylum Seeker
‘Getting to know Asylum Seekers’
Turning to Affectivity for a Self-Other Account

is a piece of ethnographic research

undertaken for
a Masters Thesis by
Kim Tsai

Email: kim@typischkim.nl

Masters Social Interventions

LESI (Landelijk Expertisecentrum Sociale Interventie)
p/a University of Utrecht
Postbus 80140
3508 TC Utrecht
The Netherlands

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Hugo Letiche, my wonderfully inspiring supervisor, for his
renowned sharpness and ever critical eye/i.
But especially for his trust.
And to all the
Asylum Seekers who participated in this project.
I am grateful.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of
this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or
send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San
Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
‘Getting to know Asylum Seekers’
Turning to Affectivity for a Self-Other Account
Contents
(Attempted) summary……………………………………………………… 8

Dedication…………………………………………………………………… 10

Introduction………………………………………………………………… 11

1. Is this the beginning?………………………………………………………… 13

2. New ethnography…………………………………………………………… 16

3. (Who are) “asylum seekers?”……………………………………………… 18

4. En-counters in the gap(s)…………………………………………………… 22

5. Places and s-paces…………………………………………………………… 25

6. Writing lives………………………………………………………………… 30

7. An ac-count of oneself……………………………………………………… 35

8. Please ac-count for your-self………………………………………………… 43

9. Touched by leyla……………………………………………………………… 50

10. The “camp” as “total institution”…………………………………………… 55

11. Rabbit in your headlights…………………………………………………… 64

12. Is this the end?……………………………………………………………… 71

Postscript…………………………………………………………………… 76

Bibliography………………………………………………………………… 80
 7

Interludes
A media interlude………………………………………………………… 21

On (living) space(s) and place(s) ………………………………………… 29

Which body counts?……………………………………………………… 34

An (objectional) interlude – objects of research please

object! ……………………………………………………………………… 40

An (normal) interlude – reflections on normality ………………… 49

Leyla’s interlude ………………………………………………………… 54

A caring interlude …………………………………………………………… 62

A musical interlude – rabbit in your headlights … 68

Tailor-made interlude ………………………………………………… 69

8

Getting to know Asylum Seekers

Turning to Affectivity for a Self-Other Account

(attempted)
summary
summary: n., pl. –maries. 1. a brief account giving the main points of something. ~adj. (usually
pronominal). 2. performed arbitrarily and quickly, without formality: a summary execution. 3.
(of legal proceedings) short and free from the complexities and delays of a full trial. 4. summary
jurisdiction. The right a court has to adjudicate immediately upon some matter arising during its
proceedings. 5. giving the gist or essence. [C15: from Latin summãrium, from summa SUM]

(Collins English Dictionary, 3rd ed)

summary n. (pl. –ies) a brief statement of the main points of something. adj. 1. dispensing with
needless details or formalities. 2. Law (of a judicial process) conducted without the customary
legal formalities. →(of a conviction) made by a judge or magistrate without a jury.

(Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th ed).

I could have given this piece of research one of many titles or names, like:
“Affect Matters / Matters Affect” - Self-Other Accounts of Asylum Seekers. Or:
“Who’s affecting Who?” – Getting to know Asylum Seekers.
Or even:
“Writing Self-Other Accounts of Asylum Seekers Affectively”….

Just a few of the names I pondered.

So why was it so difficult coming up with a name?

Difficult I guess because, in the words of Gary Rasberry,

it’s like “word shopping”.
Like “stumbling”, and falling, then recomposing (the words), negotiating the order of things,
creating new forms until we think we’ve found
the right one.

But it’s not that easy.

“Writing as-if we were

poets caught up in a poem
unending in which learning is
everything and we can’t imagine
it otherwise”
(Rasberry, 2001).

This research, aimed at getting to know asylum seekers, has felt like a process in which
“learning is everything”. The goal of finding out what a Self-Other account of asylum seekers
would look like if I tried to get to know them often left me confounded; confused to say the
least, about what is knowable to any one of us, and about the methodological means open to
me as a researcher to gather accounts of lives and to write those lives in any meaningful way.
Research is bedeviled with inconsistencies and ambiguities, just like life, just like the ac-
counts of asylum seekers, just like my own accounts. To impose closure or to try to formulate
accounts into neatly framed narratives could never do justice to the complexity of the (partial
accounts of the) lives I have written. To strive for completeness in the accounts, or to claim
absolute coherence would not only be a pretentious preclude to a totalisation of those I tried
 9

to get to know; but such blatant disregard for the limits of our knowing would also have pre-
supposed an injurious impingement on the asylum seekers who participated in this research
project (Butler, 2005). So that I did not do.

No, this research is a piece of ‘new ethnography’. An attempt to escape in some manner
the violence of reductionism and of totalizing the other. Of truth claims, and of knowledge
certainty. It is a (piece of) research that acknowledges that there are gaps in meanings and
that “things happen” (Stewart, ), things that are unanticipated, things which engender new
happenings, and which defy explanation, just because they are.

Essential (in this research) is the so-called “Turn to Affectivity”. Affect, as in the power to
affect and to be affected, demands an approach to research that takes embodiment seriously,
and that departs from, or at least admits that there is more than cognition, more than ration-
al explanations. Affects surge between bodies; they pulsate and reverberate our very beings,
sometimes without us knowing what is happening. Even in research this happens. I was many
a time thrown unknowingly and unwittingly into states of anger, sadness, pity, joy, happiness,
or compassion; shocked by the accounts I heard, or by my own naïve convictions or untimely
prejudices. And so beguiled by my research process and inspired by my informants, I chose
to fully embrace affectivity. And reflexivity. Because to turn to affect without reflecting on
what it meant to me as researcher, and to my informants, as informants, but also as humans
would not, I feel, have allowed me to acknowledge the many quandaries and conundrums I
faced throughout this research journey.

So what awaits the reader of this thesis? Accounts to be sure. Like that of Leyla, a single
mother of four from the Caucasus, whose beauty is touching, yet frail, and whose nerves
are shattered after painful run-ins with men, also asylum seekers, who couldn’t take no for
an answer. A failed suicide attempt meant that at last a long requested transfer to another
“camp” was conceded by the authorities. Or Liane who hid in the toilet every time she sus-
pected the alien police were around, “just in case” they came looking for her. And B. from
Iraq, a former Republican Guard, a man with status and a position envied by many, who in
his own words is “nothing” anymore. Who goes to bed asking why his dignity has abandoned
him, or indeed if it has been snatched away, and wakes up pondering the same question
every morning.

These are by all means accounts of lives, of living, of existing and of being an asylum seeker;
which is, after all, an externally-imposed category whose defining affects are anything but mi-
nor. But even more importantly….accounts of humanity and of self-other relations; relations
framed by bureaucratic categorization and procedures, as in the case of the government of-
ficial dealing with B’s file who barely apologized for the, in her terms, “miscommunication”
which delayed B’s second case hearing and left a gap of 275 days between interviews. 275
days during which he remained separated from his wife and two small children, dismissed
with a quick sorry before returning to business as usual. Or relations of shared affect, longing
and desire to “get out of the camp” and to become “human” again, and to have a “normal
life”, away from the control and all “encompassing tendencies” of the camp as “total institu-
tion” (Goffman, 1961).

Then there are the reflexive accounts which detail dilemma’s, like that of how to make a
meaningful contribution to the lives of those I researched, without becoming an “academic
pimp”, to quote Vessiere; someone whose career lives off the stories of the downtrodden,
and in my case one who collects accounts of asylum seekers for the sake of producing the
right research report which fits all the requirements of the academy. And so I reflect on this
and on my own relation with and to my informants, the camp, and the officials, and on my
writing.

Yet this thesis evades further typical summarization, and cringes at the thought of one trying
to extrapolate the “gist of things” or of reducing its “essence” to one or two pages. It would
just rather be read, experienced and felt. And thereafter reflected upon and critiqued. Es-
chewed or accepted for what it is, namely a Masters Research, a piece….

So that is what I invite you to do. •

10

Dedication
I/i dedicate this Masters research, this piece,
(for it is no more than that)
Fragmentary tellings of lives in becoming,
Stories and tales of things that happen,
Enigmatic encounters, and meaning[ful] / meaning[less] meanderings
Of worlding and affective attunements
Sensuous sentimentality and morbid memories
Wandering a path of unforgetting and remembering to remember
Or not
Gaps in spaces of alterity,
In which I have pondered endlessly to see if I could find sense
Or make sense where no sense appeared to live, or to be.
In the narrative ac-counts of how it was, how it is and how it might be. Should be.
Meetings of minds and bodies, whichbecameone and needed no words to feel
Or be affected, the one and the other, being-two
Besides, not above or below,
I/i dedicate this Masters research, this piece
To YOU

I/i dedicate this Masters research, this piece,

(for it is no more than that)
Of methodological mazes, of multiple paths to walk and to stray from
As I confronted epistemological challenges on what I can know about the world and those
who reside within its vulnerable borders, creating yet more borders between the one and the
other.
This wonderful search, (for that is what it was, wonder-full, amazing, distress-sing, frustrating
and mad-dening, but above all – touching) which led me to places, and people (but always
back to me), in the flesh or in words, to books and performances, artefacts and assemblages
of meaning and affect. And sometimes just plain advice.
Which I listened to and embraced. But not always.
This reading of Authors who rocked my ground and had me leaping in understanding or
sinking into incomprehension and doubt, disbelief at my (intellectual) immaturity, which
made me want more….
Music I could fly with, dream with. Music to compose my thoughts or engage with the com-
plexities of it all. Sensual collisions, tender elopements and a discovery
that to write is to play and learn at the same time. A discovery that I love (to write).
I/i dedicate this Masters research, this piece,
To YOU

For YOU have inspired me to write, to learn, to get up after each fall and try again, to be
enthralled by the tangle, to embrace the social imaginary of just talk and to walk within the
gaps in meanings. To fight against Bare Life and to allow myself to be undone by the Other.

I/i dedicate these Ac-counts to YOU. With My thanks. •

 11

Introduction
“Remember when a word was a breath, a song, a drink of cool water, a glint of silver in a rock,
a dance? Remember when learning and living in and around words were the delicious taste that
brought us eagerly to the pantry, the melody that lifted our feet, the play that brought us laughter,
tears, hope?”

(Lorri Neilson, 2001).

I contemplated my Masters research in the cold, freezing snows of January 2010, and again
in the hot, sultry evenings of late June. The overwhelming desire to engage in something
meaningful was just that, overwhelming. To make it mean something, to make it worthwhile.
Not only for me, but especially for those for whom I, in all my naivety, intended to “do it”;
the weak, the vulnerable, those without voice living in centres for asylum seekers in the
Netherlands. The subaltern if you like (Veissiere, 2010, Spivak, 1999).

How fine, had it been so easy, so simple to “represent” the other, to give them “voice”. To
remain in an idyllic state believing that I could somehow study my “object of research”, get
to “know” them and their world by conducting interviews, setting up focus groups, transcrib-
ing then analyzing my findings, and finally writing it all up in an academy-proof, fully coher-
ent research report. Complexities conveniently side-stepped by unwittingly essentialising my
“objects”, turning myself into the “expert”, capable of sweeping knowledge claims, all the
while remaining a distant observer, a collector of objective facts. Oh, how wrong I would
have been. And I hasten to add, what a tad boring my journey.

Instead, I faced epistemological conundrums, which compelled me to re-examine questions

of knowledge, of what I can know; as researcher, as Kim, as a human being. I met many
a quandary along the way; dilemmas of knowing, which threw me into new ways of look-
ing / wondering at the world and of writing it. I became obsessed by my attempts to see the
world from the position of an-other, to really try to understand what it could be like to be an
asylum seeker, far from home, lost, even bewildered, yet not without strength and influence.
Not entirely power-less.

I wanted to get into the worlds of asylum seekers, undertake qualitative research, do ethnog-
raphy, get it right. I was prepared to engage, ready for the journey, but as it turned out, not
entirely prepared for the “affective turn” (Clough, 2007) which my research would take. Not
ready for the spaces which would open up on “the side of the road,” the interstices of power
and surges in emotions, (Stewart, 1996), and certainly unawares of the complications of
“giving an account of oneself” (Butler, 2005). I discovered the joy of “writing lives” and the
magic of the “tangle”, which opened me further to the complexities of knowledge and par-
tiality, and of “not knowing that you know” (Rasberry, 2001). I attempted Agamben’s “bare
life” and I puzzled with the “state of exception”, with “zoe and bios”, and “the biopolitics
of modern totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism and consumerism” (Agamben,
1998). Taken aback by its conclusions and at times unbalanced by its implications, I failed to
acquire the necessary depth to do it justice in the space of this thesis. That intellectual chal-
lenge I shall wander on some future pathway.

Picture, however, a space of chance encounters, un-extraordinary instances, events unex-

plainable and unexplained, in which unforeseen occurrences emerge and reel us into new
realities, surge, force us to new affectations, dash our hopes, open up new potentialities or
quash our dreams. They just happen. During research, it happens too. And it happened. This
is a story of that “space on the side of the road” (Stewart, 1996). It is a narrative space of
cultural poetics, a local real occupied by “real” people, bound together in the “camps”, shar-
ing an existence yet each also living their own project, vying for their humanity. The problem
is as Stewart (1996) remarks: “..how to imagine this ‘space on the side of the road’ without
freezing its moves in a grand totalizing scheme of ‘objects’ and ‘gists’”. Indeed, how to resist
the temptation to tell the “truth”, to essentialise the lives of asylum seekers by bulk packag-
ing their stories, compacted, sorted, listed and sieved of the main matter to make them more
comprehensible, even more fitting with grand myths and more digestible for the system.
12

In researching asylum seekers’ lives I gave myself over to shock, interruptions, density,
tension, incoherence, doubt and the imaginary, casting off illusions that I could achieve
completeness, certainty and consistency. For the more I sought coherence and tried to free
my path of contradictions, the more winding it became and the more the gaps opened up to
reveal the localized tellings, the intensities of feelings, the luminosity of signs and the pal-
pability of desires. The research tells a “…story through interruptions, amassed densities of
description, evocations of voices and the conditions of their possibility, and lyrical, rumina-
tive aporias that give pause. It tries to dwell in and on the formed particularity of things and
the spaces of desire (and dread) they incite in the imagination” (Stewart, 1996).

Mine is not an attempt therefore to provide the “perfect text and the quick textual solution
in which the author attempts to cover all the bases with formal representations of self-reflex-
ivity, self-position, and dialogic exchange” (Stewart, 1996). Instead it has been a constant
searching of the self and a questioning of representation and its devices, a process of tellings
and rememberings and a tracking of sensibilities in narrative accounts and encounters and
an attempt to “grasp the changes that constitute the social and to explore them as changes
in ourselves, circulating in our bodies, our subjectivities, yet irreducible to the individual, the
personal or the psychological” (Ticineto Clough, 2007).

Like Stewart I want my reader to imagine this other “space” and to open up to the possibility
of getting lost in the gap. “We need to approach the clash of epistemologies – ours and theirs
– and to use that clash to repeatedly open a gap in the theory of culture itself so that we can
imagine culture as a process constituted in use and therefore likely to be tense, contradic-
tory, dialectical, dialogical, texted, textured, both practical and imaginary, and in-filled with
desire” (Stewart, 1996).

I leave it to you, my reader, to ascertain whether I have to some extent succeeded. •

 13

Is this the
beginning?
“Engulfing fog envelopes the machine, the contraption. There’s no escape. I am enclosed within
in, trapped, almost blind. A fog light appears ahead, speeds up, disappears. It offers fleeting hope
that I no longer have to grope; that there is a way through, a way out. A c l e a r- I n g. The fog
thins and I start to discern more life, movement, speeding at the side of me, ahead and behind.
I relax and breath at a steady pace, releasing my mad grip on the wheel. I increase the volume
of the radio once again, but no sooner do I let up, does the density grab a hold. And I am once
again plunged into a blanket of thick, deep, dark fog. My pulse races, my chest tightens and the
radio is deafening me. I lash out and hit the knob of the radio. I can’t bear the noise any more.
I must concentrate. Stillness. Silence. There’s no sound from the radio any more, but the air is
thick and choking. Heavy. My own breathing is heavy, wheezing. I am a child again. Unknowing,
dependent, lost. I slow down; speed is dangerous now. Standing still even more so. Will I get used
to this darkness, this thick, clammy fog? How long will it last before I become seasoned to its
density, accustomed to its guiles? I ask myself when I will become more articulate, more able to
maneuver in the darkness. I long for clarity, for an opening with more than just a chink of light.
Or for another up ahead whose light I can follow, whose steps I can sense as trodden ground.
Has this ground been trodden before?”

(Journal excerpt: 4th October 2010)

This story has no beginning and no end. It just starts because the lives which it narrates and
the accounts it tells cannot be neatly compartmentalized or made to fit into tidy formats, as
may be expected of a Masters thesis. It may jump back and forth between narratives, em-
bracing the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Or it may spew experi-
ence, exuding emotion and sensitivity, in the hope that my audience may also be affected by
that what has affected me over the past months. In the asylum centre, in the shops, sitting in
the library, talking at the gym, drinking coffee in the café, or just simply watching TV or driv-
ing my car. All have been scenes of contemplation and reflection and of intense and passion-
ate research; with others, and alone, in efforts to be “beside”, which “comprises a wide range
of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning,
twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations” (Ko-
sofsky Sedgwick, 2003).

This is a journey which has not yet finished, and one which has been many years in the mak-
ing. I cannot say when it began exactly. I only know that I have been oft times “engulfed”,
neither knowing in which direction to head nor able to see the light for the thick dense fog
encroaching on me, unsettling the epistemological bases on which I was working and chal-
lenging me to delve deeper into ontological issues of being, in relation to the other.

I thought I could get to “know” my research subjects/objects, by inciting them to reveal

memories, tell stories and describe and interpret their lives. However, my research became a
journey into complexity, and a vigorous encounter with the messiness of the “real” world; one
in which I have come to ponder that I may in fact know nothing, or I may in fact already know
all there is to know, what can be known, then, at that point in time. I am at times right in the
middle of that fog, experiencing its most deepest and densest capabilities, yet at other mo-
ments there is light, and I am overwhelmed by insights, ephemeral glimpses of hope and deep
understanding. During those moments new potentialities arise on the horizon. “Thangs hap-
pen ” (Stewart, 1996). We are flung into situations without prior awareness; the conversation
turns, swings back on itself, or takes new proportions. We hardly have time to assess what is
happening, yet we are in the midst of something new. Bang in the middle. And we perform it,

1.
til’ something else comes along, or until the calm returns, not knowing where we will end up.

Who, I wonder, does not have an opinion on asylum, integration and immigration? Who
has not read the endless stream of articles on asylum seekers and on refugees? On lengthy
procedures, fraudulent asylum claims, welfare cheats, traumatized victims and legal bat-
tles? Juridical and political discourse abounds, co-existing next to popularized accounts of
14

the plight of asylum seekers, or hyped up media reports highlighting a ‘them’ and ‘us’, failed
integration, and the multicultural drama. But how often do we try to get to know these
asylum seekers and to relate to them in ways other than through political, legal or juridical
frameworks. What would happen if I/i tried to get to know them and to go beyond what I
read in newspapers, or in political and juridical texts; further than bureaucratic categories
and categorizations?

Finding out what a self-other account of asylum seekers looks like if I try to get to know them
became the goal of my research.

I sought asylum seekers during my research looking for their “accounts of themselves”,
and ended up “giving an account” of myself (Butler, 2005). I learnt that “if I achieve (that)
self-sufficiency, my relation to the other is lost” and that the final aim is not to “achieve an
adequate narrative account of a life” but to stand in an ethical relation to the other, in full
acknowledgement of one’s opacity and partiality (Butler, 2005). Without this dependency of
one on the other, my research would not have been possible. Where I sought the “truth” I
found accounts, stories, fabulations, presence and power, and I discovered that to claim to
fully “know” the asylum seeker would be inevitably to fall into the trap of totalizing the other
in a manner that is unjustified and unjustifiable.

Even as I employ the term asylum seeker, relying as I do on this fabricated categorization
and on the routinized use of indexical expressions to describe my informants (Latimer,
2007), I am myself committing the totalizing error. Yet I do it. But with a conviction none-
theless to minimalize the violence of my “knowing” and to address those with whom I engage
as humans, not “objects”.

In attempting to know something of the life of asylum seekers I must recourse to English
and Dutch, whilst these are not the first language of my addressees. “The language of the
colonizer is still the normalized language of international knowledge production and the
Postcolonial theories of the West trump indigenous theories and colonized lived experi-
ence” (Diversi & Finley, 2010). Whilst there are many limitations to not speaking the same
language as my informants, I find the inherent power differential between them and me
more of a problem than the language barrier. This latter can be a hindrance in the search for
meaning and understanding, but I enjoy how we searched together or how we abandoned the
search, forgetting to look for meanings where none were forthcoming; content just to be, and
to feel the power of just being, together.

Veissiere advocates for a “critical engagement between academic ethnographers from the
North and……marginalized social actors” whilst simultaneously contemplating “the horror
of being an academic pimp who sustains a livelihood from exploiting human suffering and
violence” (2010).

Feeling guilty, I have also imagined myself as a “pimp of the suffering” (Veissiere, 2010), an
“academic pimp”, instrumentalising relationships with informants in order to gain greater
access to their worlds for the purpose of (my) ethnographic research; taking advantage of
every opportunity to glean information and new insights from the words of the asylum seek-
ers with whom I speak. Words which are not only words on paper, but which become repre-
sentations of their lives, their living.

“Lives strewn, pushed together, torn apart. Bodies, arms, legs, minds, heads. Eyes staring,
looking aimlessly at the floor, or hopefully up to heaven towards God or Allah, or just to the
sky. Events surge new meanings into lives, things happen. Chance occurrences lead………..
nowhere………somewhere. Impact – Big – minute. Policy documents and letters from authorities
are incomprehensible. Obfuscatory language, hidden meanings. Bluuurrrrrrr…… Where am I?
Wake me up from this nightmare. Is it a dream or is it real? What is reality anyway? Something I
feel, experience, “know”? What can I know anyway?

(Journal excerpt: 3rd October 2010)

I hope that my journey will provide not only inspiration to others setting out to research
vulnerable groups, like asylum seekers, but that it will also challenge them to explore new
ways of doing research and for narrativizing the accounts of others. Ways which allow room
 15

for self-doubt, and for getting entangled in the messiness of performative research and writ-
ing, and which confront the partiality in our knowing and being, embracing complexity and
ambiguity and realizing the insanity of consistency and the danger of definitive conclusions.
These are curious times, when grasping for certainty is second nature and the desire to
knowthingsforsure can be all encompassing. I hope we can liberate ourselves from some of
these desires, delving and dwelling in new spaces, exploring the gaps (in meaning), implicat-
ing ourselves in our writing and our researching, learning to wonder at lives in-becoming and
opening ourselves to the vulnerability which comes with affecting and being affected, touch-
ing and being touched. Only then can we meet others in their struggles and their humanity
and reduce the violent tendencies of much of our current ways of knowing. •

1. Stewart writes “thangs happen,” as this is the local way of saying “things happen”.
16

New Ethnography
“What do we know of the other? How to represent the other when the other has many fac-
ets, many faces? All contact, conversation is mediated by and through my own body, my own
mind. My thoughts, prejudices, ideas, culture, history form a skin through which my relations
are filtered, sorted out, categorized, re-worked and re-worded. It cannot be otherwise. What
are refugees, asylum seekers, if not categories we invent for ease of mind? Who are they?
Can we fit them neatly into categories, slot them into handy, understandable schema’s to suit
policy aims? How much do policy makers know of the subjects to which their policy attends?
How much can they know? What are their claims with regard to knowing?

Conversations take turns; turns we were not expecting. They twist and end up somewhere
else, challenging preconceived notions of knowledge and knowing. My notions. Actions are
incomprehensible, at least to our Western minds. To my Western mind. Putting ourselves
into the position of the other is not as easy as we think, or hope, or purport to be capable of.
Understanding or attempting to understand is one thing; knowing is something else. Like
Stewart points out, we are “thrown into things”. Something happens, somebody utters some-
thing we did not expect and the situation launches into the new, the unknown. Could that be
the reason we prefer to stick to the “known”? Or would “familiar” be a more appropriate
description?

Tales of bleached finger tops, fingers scrubbed raw or glued together to spoil compulsory fin-
gerprinting in countries en-route, mingle with tales of dangerous sea crossings and unscrupu-
lous traffickers who prey on the fear and angst of those escaping war and persecution in their
own countries. For them it’s business; for the asylum seeker it can be the difference between
life and death.

We imagine that asylum seekers must be overjoyed to reach the democratic and free West.
That they cannot wait to enjoy our freedoms. It seems unthinkable that this cannot be the
case. Are they not after all fleeing third world, undeveloped lands? How could they possibly
not embrace our democratic traditions with open arms?

We think we know what’s best for the other, the asylum seeker other. We totalize, assume,
presume, believe we know what we’re doing, that we know what moves the other, what his
motivations and drives are. That they are the same as ours. How little we really know. Yet
how quickly does the asylum seeker learn to name himself as “asylum seeker”? To go along
with their own indexation, compliant in his own mimicking of the representations we create?
Like a world turned upside down. Gone mad.

(Journal excerpt: 24th August 2010)

Kathleen Stewart talks of a “new ethnography” (Stewart, 1996), one that resists essentialism
and reductionism, in an effort to eschew fixing “a culture in place and time, to ‘picture’ it in
an overview, to name it ‘in a word’, or to reduce it to an allegory of anthropological theories”
(Stewart, 1996). According to Stewart, the meaning of new ethnography “would be to dis-
place not just the signs or products of essentialism (generalizations, reifications) but the very
desires that motivate academic essentialism itself – the desire for decontaminated ‘meaning’,
the need to require that visual and verbal constructs yield meaning down to their last detail,
the effort to get the gist, to gather objects of analysis into an order of things” (Stewart, 1996).

Representation is seen as problematic, given its focus on an “us” that has the capacity and
power to represent, and a “them” who can and are represented and whose lives are depicted
as an “absolute real” (Stewart, 1996). Yet there is an ‘other’ whose lives I endeavor to under-

2.
stand, without falling into the trap of ‘othering’ or relying on ‘master narratives’ to legitimize
my role as researcher. Whereas I eschew the semi-positivistic stance that I can produce knowl-
edge about the ‘other’ which is objective and neutral and can be given in a ‘coherent narrative’
(Sands & Krumer-Nevo, 2006), I opt instead for situated, local knowledge, which calls for
other forms of validating criteria: “reflexive, ironic, neopragmatic, rhizomatic and situated.
Each enacts a multivocaled, reflexive, open-ended, emotionally based text” (Lather, 1993).
 17

I opt for “new ethnography”; the ethnography of “ordinary affects” and “atmospheric at-
tunements” (Stewart, 2007, 2010). I attempt, like Stewart, to “perform the problematics” of
life as an asylum seeker, tracking not only the dread and suffering, but also the unfolding
intensities of inhabiting spaces of desire and imagination. These are spaces of alterity and
cultural poetics, of becoming and worlding, performance and passion (Stewart, 1996). I place
myself in the text, being at once subject and object and I call repeatedly on my own remem-
berings and retellings, reflections and representations, to illuminate my thoughts, and to
ponder my dilemmas; methodological, theoretical or ethical.

“Something nauseating looms here, and we are advised to beat a retreat to the unmentionable
world of active forgetting where, pressed into mighty service by society, the mimetic faculty carries
out its honest labor suturing nature to artifice and bringing sensuousness to sense by means of
what was once called sympathetic magic, granting the copy the character and power of the origi-
nal, the representation the power of the represented” (Taussig, 1993).

I have been visiting an asylum seekers centre in the North of the Netherlands, the AZC, to
use the term employed by my informants, since June 2010. My visits have averaged a day to
one and half days per week, 8 hours a day. The goal has been to “get to know” some asylum
seekers and to learn about their lives, in order to (re)present an-‘other’ text about asylum
seekers – a humanistic text – as opposed to the political, juridical texts to which we are ac-
customed.

My research has brought me to engage with different groups of asylum seekers, varying in
age, political status, religion, ethnicity and cultural background (some 15 persons). That said,
the majority of my time was spent with a smaller group of asylum seekers primarily from
Iraq, all at different phases in their asylum procedure, with B., being one of my main inform-
ants throughout the research process. Leyla, a single mother from the Caucacus has been a
major factor in this project, as well as Lianne, also from the same region.

Given the length of time spent at the centre, observing and conversing with asylum seek-
ers, not all conversations have been transcribed fully. I have transcribed some 10 interviews
completely and kept a detailed journal of the days spent at the AZC, of the happenings,
ruminations, personal experiences and ethical conundrums. I will refer to this latter on many
occasions in this thesis, particularly turning to pieces which demonstrate moments of critical
self-reflection as researcher and which highlight some of the dilemmas of doing this kind of
research, of engaging in “new ethnography”.
I ask what I can actually ‘know’ about asylum seekers – the ‘objects’ of this study – and I
engage with questions not only on knowledge production, but also on what such knowledge
should eventually look like. I draw on various theoretical frameworks, but principally on
affect theory as performed by Kathleen Stewart. My texts comprise (ethnographic) accounts
of asylum seekers and of life at the AZC, laced with theoretical analyses, methodological ru-
minations and (self-reflexive) interludes, which question theory and methodology alike and
which reflect my emotional and cognitive explorations whilst undertaking this research. •

2. My aim is to provoke the reader to engage with me on the issues raised.

3. Abu means “father of”. My Iraqi informants refer to one another as “father of…” followed by the name of the eldest
child. Young persons interviewed are referred to by the initial of their first name.
18

(Who are)
“asylum seekers?”
“Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It
takes everything we have”.

(Stewart, 2007).

Is becoming an asylum seeker to be avoided? In whose hands the Iraqi war or the ‘war on ter-
ror’? Could those whose lives achieved a semblance of the ‘good’ under Saddam Hussein have
imagined then that they would be cooped up in one room now? These former Ba’ath Party
members, sharing lives with victims of Ba’ath Party terror – Sunni and Shiite alike? Separated
from family members, enacting boredom, day in day out, thrown literally into small spaces,
living, enduring the multicultural reality of an asylum centre, day in day out; waiting for things
to happen? Day in day out. Something, anything.

Take B. A former Officer of the Republican Guard, the elite wing of Saddam’s fighting
machine. I visit his unit, which is the name given to the housing quarters at an AZC in the
Netherlands, on a regular basis. Most fitting, in fact, for a soldier used to barracks and camps;
used to separation and a life in-between. His story, like most, is told in jumps and bounds,
amid interruptions, passers-by who knock for a chat, his son who arrives home for lunch, a
news article, breaking news on the TV, prayer time or whatever. The mood surges, accord-
ing to the conversational turn, from light, to somber, to humoristic. One never knows. The
unpredictability of it all is unavoidable. And in a strange kind of way, predictable. We awaken
to the elements, are comforted by the stability of the ground beneath us, before being startled
by bursts of energy, flooded by the power of our affectations or illuminated by deep murmur-
ings of gloom shared, felt.

“The sensibility for the elements is not the passive recording of a multiplicity of elementary sense
data……Sensuality is not intentionality, is not a movement aiming at something exterior, trans-
cendent, a movement that objectifies; it is not identification of a diversity with an ideal identity
term; it is not imposition of form nor attribution of meaning. Sensuality is a movement of involu-
tion in a medium” (Lingis, 1998).

One time we sat around; I on the bed and he on the red plastic chair, standard issue. We were
discussing things, when Abu Z. interrupted. He gestured to the TV, talking in Arabic. The
conversation froze, and turned to a trial on the television. Abu J. joined us in the cramped
space. There were now two on one bed, me on the other and B. on the chair. I just sat there
whilst they stared intensely at the screen. Every now and then one would mutter something in
Arabic, or might say something which elicited a response from one of the others. Then they’d
turn back to the screen. Arabic TV, live from Iraq, I was told.

The air was charged, bodies tense, faces taut. I looked on, unknowing. It was a court scene;
the judge, a plump man, was questioning someone in the docks, talking excitedly, gesturing
continually with his hands. The man on trial sat with others, on wooden benches, one behind
the other, a wooden grille in front of them, separating them from each other. The accused
spoke but was constantly interrupted by the judge. They were former members of the Ba’ath
Party, of the Iraqi government. The judge was a former “terrorist” wanted by Saddam for
activities against the state in complot with the Iranian government. “Shiite”, I was told, by
the three Sunnites with whom I shared the room. “The former terrorist is now judging those
who once tried to track him down” Abu Z. noted sarcastically. “We know what will happen to
them all”, B. added making a throat-slitting gesture with his hand. “The outcome will not be a
surprise”. The mood was dim, an air of fatalism encroached on us and lingered. We felt tired.

3.
The gloom seeped through the walls, into our pores, sinking deeper through the layers of our
bodies. Sarcasm lost headway. All went quiet, for a time.

“Affects surged” (Stewart, 2007), the heaviness in the air was palpable. For a moment I was
but a bystander, my presence went almost unnoticed; they were transfixed by the scenes on
TV, their homeland, in the grip of change. A change which they were witnessing from afar,
 19

superimposed on the changes in their own lives which had catapulted them to this place, to
this room, with me, at that moment. Watching TV together. Then they acknowledged me once
again, accounting in some way for their lives; past, present and future. To me.

According to Butler (2005) accounting for oneself is only possible in the face of a relation
with the other. “The reason for this is that the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the
story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms”. Butler posits that accounting for
oneself is a question of moral philosophy “a question that has to do with conduct and, hence,
with doing, within a contemporary social frame”. Part of trying to know the other means try-
ing to get to know the other’s norms, yet as Butler points out we must question “…whether
the ‘I’ who must appropriate moral norms in a living way is not itself conditioned by norms,
norms that establish the viability of the subject” (2005).

I too, as viable subject, have appropriated certain sets of norms, “establishing a living relation
to them” (Butler, 2005). Norms operate at a fundamental level by constituting the subject, or
as Butler says “…in the stylization of its ontology and in the establishing of a legitimate site
within the realm of social ontology” (2005). Nonetheless, Butler considers that even as the
“I” is an “I” which is socially and morally embedded from the beginning, that same “I” “…is
not at one with moral norms” and “must deliberate upon these norms and that part of delib-
eration will entail a critical understanding of their social genesis and meaning” (2005).

For me as a researching subject, it means that I must possess a keen awareness not only of
my own norms, of those which I have appropriated; but also of how I live them, maybe even
impose them, on those who I ask to account for themselves. I must be a deliberative subject
because “ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique” (Butler, 2005).

Yet sitting there, in that room, I sometimes feel far removed from moments of deliberation
and critique. If by this one means deliberation and critique with the mind. Could it be that
at such times I “…intervene in the mind/body split”? (Pelias, 2007). I am moved, affected by
the happenings. My “…body becomes a troubling presence by acknowledging that all claims
are filtered, positioned, subjective, located in interaction, historical, cultural and so on”. It,
my body, “…is rendered as an affective presence” which “…speaks from and to the senses; it
speaks of passions and feelings; it speaks from the heart”, (Pelias, 2007). Indeed, in how far
can I be a deliberative ethical being, if I maintain the “split”, acknowledging the mind, but
thereby relegating my body, and its affects to second place?

It would seem to me that we need to open up new spaces of knowing; spaces which extend
beyond the body/mind split and which recognise the import of bodily affects and emotions in
and on our research. With regards to asylum seekers, or any research ‘object’ for that matter,
I would argue that contemporary ways of knowing and of representing the ‘other’ may even
be deemed violent. Stewart attempts to “…approach the clash of epistemologies and use that
clash to re-open a gap in the theory of culture…” (Stewart, 1996). For not to do so “…the
politics of ‘othering’ and the marking of difference remains subject to the old enclosures and
to perverse appropriations. The problem remains, then, how to imagine and re-present cul-
tural differences that make a difference in a way that might itself begin to make a difference?”
(Stewart, 1996).

Returning to the initial scene described above; three men, one woman, the researcher, sharing
moments of intensity, without I suggest being fully able to give meaning to it all. Claims may
ensue, a narrative may emerge and we may try to understand what it means, what it meant
for the other, but in these spaces gaps are opened up whereby it is difficult, if not impossible
to “…capture the “gist” of “things” (Stewart, 1996). This too is a place like the one Stewart
describes, “…a place that insists on the necessity of gaps in the meaning of signs and creates a
place for story – for narrativizing a local cultural real. Here a prolific narrative space inter-
rupts the search for the gist of things and the quick conclusion with a poetics of deferral and
displacement, a ruminative reentrenchment in the particularity of local forms and epistemolo-
gies, a dwelling in and on a cultural poetics contingent on a place and a time and in-filled with
palpable desire” (Stewart, 1996).

The desire is felt, even transmitted, but not in words. Like so many of the spaces which have
emerged in my encounters with asylum seekers over the past months, this impromptu in-
terstice impacted upon us and inaugurated processes of rememberings and unforgettings,
incitations of the imagination and nervous evocations of a life lived in the past, but still very
present. The trial continued for some time as we sat around in silence, then no sooner did
20

the advertisements appear, did the mood change, and was the story interrupted, at least for a
while.

B. changed the channel to an Iraqi game show, with a Tommy Cooper style host, wearing a
fez and a dishdasha, typical ankle length garb for Arab men. There was lots of laughing and
fun, a dancing host and swirling women. Scantily clad for non-westerners. B. smiles and
comments that although all those on TV are Iraqi’s, they live in Sweden, or in other Euro-
pean lands, and the programmes are all made outside of Iraq. “To see this, you think there’s
nothing wrong in Iraq. We must laugh and make jokes, we dance and sing…”. The pre-
senter had an air of Derek Trotter about him. He had the same stature, and the same grin. I
imagined the famous Trotter three-wheeler parked outside, with an Arab version of Rodney
waiting in it for Del Boy. Up to their usual tricks again. The voices soften, the TV evokes
laughter and the gloom lies awake in the shadows and “fashions itself as a tension between
the interpretation and the evocation” (Stewart, 1996).

Yesterday (17th August 2010) 61 people were blasted away by a suicide bomber in Baghdad.
120 more injured. The bloodiest day so far this year. Perhaps watching the Iraqi equivalent of
Tommy Cooper serves to soften the blow somewhat of the devastating war on terror. Humor
can ease the pain, if only fleetingly, of separation from loved ones, of images of one’s home-
land in the throws of a war, imposed and unwanted by those I share a room with now, of the
dread of what is to come. My complicity in these cultural productions incites my imagination,
and like Stewart “missing pieces and unknown meanings taught me to listen not just more
intently, but differently – a listening in order to retell” (Stewart, 1996).

This narrative is inevitably a retelling; of stories told, of experiences lived, of associations

entered into and of truths and confessions amassed here and there, in snippets and conversa-
tions, formally and informally, doing research, living and performing it as best we know how,
as best as our bodies and minds allow us. Unawares half the time that I was “listening in
order to retell” or reading in order to recount. And writing in order to learn and to reflect on
the question I posed at the beginning: “(who are) asylum seekers”?

“When I talk to COA they say ‘you are an asylum seeker now, you are an asylum seeker now,
you are an asylum seeker now’. I hate myself. I have to live here. I’d rather be alive than
dead. But I’m also a human being. Just like you”
(T. 24 years, from Iraq) •

4. A character in a very popular British soap series entitled “Only Fools and Horses” Derek is a wheeler and a dealer
whose aim is to become a millionaire.

5. COA – Centraal Opvang Asielzoekers – the Dutch organisation for the reception of asylum seekers . I will use the
Dutch abbreviation COA throughout.
 21

Interlude
Army recruits targeted in Iraq suicide bomber attack, leaving 61 dead. (Source: The Inde-
pendent)

Bodies of men, some still clutching job applications in their hands, were found

By Kim Sengupta, Defence Correspondent, Wednesday, 18 August 2010

“A suicide bomber blew himself up in Baghdad yesterday killing 61 people who had
queued for hours to join the Iraqi army just two weeks before American forces prepare
to pull out of the country. Some of the thousand men who had queued from dawn for a
chance to get a job in the military were so desperate for work that they returned to the line
after being treated at hospitals for their wounds. Despite the risks, many Iraqis are lured by
the prospect of steady wages with few jobs available after years of war.
The attack and the start of an assassination campaign on judges by another insurgent
group amounted to the deadliest series of attacks in several months. In Baghdad and
Diyala province, the insurgents attacked eight judges, killing two of them.
A Justice Ministry spokesman said: "These attacks are well orchestrated. They are targeting
the entire judicial system of the country."
The bomber simply walked up and joined the applicants and set off the explosives. Bodies
of men, some still clutching job applications in their hands, were scattered on the ground
outside the military headquarters.
"Severed hands and legs were falling over me. I was soaked with blood from the body
parts, and wounded and dead people falling over and beside me," said Yasir Ali, who had
been waiting outside the headquarters since 4 am.
Saleh Aziz said: "We were lined in a long queue. There were also officers and soldiers.
Suddenly an explosion happened. Thank Allah only my hand was injured."
July has been the bloodiest month since May 2008, with more than 500 killed.
In another attack last month, a suicide bomber ripped through a line of anti-al-Qa'ida
Sunni fighters waiting to collect their pay near an Iraqi army base, killing 45 people in the
mostly Sunni district of Radwaniya, south-west of Baghdad.” •
22

En-count-ers in the gap(s)

“The sky overhead unites all who breathe under its seamless space, uniting us to all who are born
and shall be born under the sky…”

(Lingis, 2004)

It’s a warm sunny day, a bit overcast, and I’ve agreed to meet B. at 09.30 at home. His home,
the AZC on the outskirts of a small town, where he’s been living for some 11 months. I
drive around there – they’re building right next door – looks like some new office complex
although I can’t be sure. As I drive up I see that on the cafeteria building there’s a huge
orange flag “HOLLAND” draped over the side of the building. I think: football. On parking
my car, I see B. is already waiting. I park outside, in a designated visitors’ space, greet B. and
we walk to the reception where I have to check in. The security guard behind the reception
looks up and says hello. He asks for my identification papers and mutters, “it’s room 606
isn’t it”? B. nods. I’m in. We go outside and walk past the main cafeteria, which is closed,
past the children’s play area, which is empty, to B.’s block. I could not sense at this time how
much I would come to dread the ritual of registering with the guards, how much this practice
would “affect” me mentally and physically for the force of its repetitive character and its
almost criminalizing potentialities.

They call this place a “camp”. When I ask why, the answer is, “that’s what we call it, that’s
what everybody calls it. I don’t know why”. We go up the stairs, and the main door to B.’s
unit is open. He unlocks his own door. The room is big enough to hold 2 beds, one small
wardrobe, one cupboard, and a table. The TV is on, Al Jazaeery the Arabian TV sender. B.
points to the bed, and I sit there. He goes out to make coffee. A friend walks past and sticks
his head around the door. He introduces himself and comes to sit down to talk. We can call
him Abu Z.

Like all those I meet at the camp , Abu Z. clammers for news, for information, any piece of
information which might make his situation clearer, more understandable, possibly more
acceptable even. “It’s the waiting”, he tells me, “we are suffering from the waste of time,
waiting, waiting, waiting”. “We can’t do anything, only wait”. Abu Z. launches into a tale of
new procedures, of the latest news which “they” (the asylum seekers) have heard, of govern-
mental instructions which are to be introduced on 1st July, in Ter Apel, Schiphol and in Den
Bosch. Relevant only for refugees who arrive after 1st July. So not for them, but nevertheless
interesting.

I ask what it is that they’ve been told and by whom and I find myself becoming entangled in
a story which is but half a story; partial and fragmentary, riddled with inconsistencies and
ambivalences which distort my understanding, and eschew schematization and classification.
“All new refugees will get told after 7 days whether or not they can go to an asylum centre
or not or whether they will be “fired”. This means put on the street, or sent to a prison to be
returned home. Everyone who gets accepted in an asylum centre will get news within 4 to
6 months of arrival at the centre if they can stay or not” according to Abu Z. “That’s what
we’ve heard”, he repeats. I ask what will happen in those 7 days that such a decision can be
made. “The investigator will do many interviews in those first days, sometimes for 8 hours,
and if the story is confused, or he doesn’t believe the story, the person will be fired”. “He
[the investigator] will guess if this man is lying or not. They want evidence for the story – pic-
tures, papers, photos – that kind of thing. If you don’t have evidence, the story will be weak”.
I am assured that the investigator will be a very skilled person who knows what he/she is
doing and who is capable of making such an important judgement. “Maybe, we don’t know,
maybe it will mean better things for us, so we don’t have to wait so long. Those investigators
get too much power, they need to be controlled, otherwise it’s just one person deciding about
us. But I’ve heard they have to know what they’re doing in the new system”.

4.
Abu Z. is fired up. His story is an attempt to make something of his situation and to fill in
the gaps (in his knowledge). His is “the space of the gap in which signs grow luminous in the
search for their illusive yet palpable meanings” (Stewart, 1996). The story of the “camp” is
pieced together in these rooms, here and now; fragmentary specimens of imaginary tales,
shifting ruminations and wild goose chases, with an occasional spattering of what may be
 23

called truth in the telling. “In the daily practices of textualising “thangs that happen,” a local
cultural real emerges in a precise mimetic tracking of events and grows dense with cultural
tensions and desires. Local voices are launched from within a space of contingency, and the
“truth” of things is lodged in the concrete yet shifting life of signs – a network of telling and
retellings, displacements and re-memberings” (Stewart, 1996).

B.’s friend talks with a lot of people. He is interested in politics and tells me of a meeting he
went to last year with Albayrak, the then Dutch Minister for integration. He wants to know
why Dutch policy towards refugees has changed in the last years. “Is it economics first, or
politics?” he asks. He’s heard many stories about how easy it is in Belgium for Iraqi’s to get
a permit to stay. “If you compare it with the Belgians, then it’s very easy there from 2008 to
now”. He knows because he has friends there who got permission to stay almost immediate-
ly. “You can compare the difficult procedures in the Netherlands, with the easy procedures in
Belgium” he assures me. Yet I bring to mind what B. told me of an acquaintance who asked
for asylum in Belgium “they have no space for them there at the AZC, so he had to live on
the streets, with his wife and baby. In cardboard boxes, in the freezing cold”. B. has offered
to take me there if I want. “In the end he went crazy. He’s young, 34, but now he’s tired and
confused. He went to stay with his sister in the Netherlands and got picked up there. They
found out he had been fingerprinted in Belgium, so they have to send him back there. But at
least he has a roof over his head now, and will only get sent back once they have a space at
the AZC for him in Belgium”. That’s what B. told me. But Abu Z. insists it’s much better in
Belgium for Iraqi’s than here.

My senses attune to a palpable laboring for information, a desire for clarity, for being told
what is what, and for an order which harbors predictability amidst this chaos of meanings
and manifest obscurity. Information is seemingly gathered all over, from friends in and out-
side the Netherlands, in Europe, in Iraq, in the camp itself. My informants follow what they
can in Dutch news, but that’s hard when one doesn’t speak the language. They rely mainly
on each other and on news programmes from their home countries. Nearly everybody I meet
has a satellite dish protruding from the Dutch soil at the back of their unit. Some names
of some politicians are known, by some, but not many, and I dabble with the idea that this
falling over of oneself for news is what keeps them alive, gives them hope, fires them up in
an instance only to kick back their ideals, seducing them into frenzy, fury or both, or winding
their paths towards deep states of withdrawal, hopelessness and depression. I can feel their
“restlessness and rumination”, their “poetics of encounter, sheer action and intensity, its ab-
jection, its states of exile and dreams of return, its spectacles of impact, and its experimental
activities of foolin’ with things”. Together we “trace the negative, reversible logic of hope or
faith arising out of the signs of a world gone down” (Stewart, 1996).

They question me all the time on “what I know” and I am forced to interrogate my position
as researcher, as supposed “expert”. I can only tell that what I have heard or read myself,
which rarely provides solace. Like many of those I meet in the “camp”, I also find many insti-
tutional decisions baffling and unfathomable. I am clueless as to the fuzzy dynamics at work
in governmental bureaucracies. B. however wants to protect me from the reactions of others
to my answers, and informs me that in my absence he only attributes good news to me, leav-
ing vague who his informant is when it comes to news which stifles hope and encouragement.
“We don’t like the one who only talks bad, negative”, I am reminded. A message I cannot
square with another favourite of his: “We don’t like to tell too many good things, because
the one who is listening may get jealous and give us the ‘evil eye’”. I wonder whether it’s the
time of day that makes the difference as B. also reminds me that “everybody here gets nerv-
ous and depressed around this time [early evening], when it starts to get dark”. This is part
of the “Other” story; one whose twists and turns leave meanings opaque and whose inces-
sant incoherence takes hold of me, making me scream out for clarity and transparency. The
compulsion towards a consistent storyline, the covering over of cleavages and contradictions
and the drive for a smooth narrative is illusive, but attractive nonetheless.

I find my own solace in Stewart commenting on “Ordinary Affects” being “committed not to
the demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but
rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete, it tries to provoke attention to the forces
that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact. Something throws itself together
in a moment as an event and a sensation; a something both animated and inhabitable”
(Stewart, 2007).
24

Doing research with asylum seekers I am reminded that much of what I see, hear, feel and
experience is emergent in the practices of everyday life. Control is illusory, information is par-
tial, trust waivers and relations weave in and out of one another as “things happen”, or as the
search goes on to make sense of the situation, to plot a course which cannot be mapped out
in advance no matter how hard one might try. It is a writing of lives, sometimes “just talk”,
sometimes vibrant re-tellings, and an unfolding of words, of worlds and the unforgetting of
memories, long buried in the soil of a bygone time which many would rather forget, but can-
not. Or are not allowed to as they must account for themselves and their lives.

Making sense drives the senses but fails to produce finality in meanings, where meanings are
inscribed in a temporal bed of meaning-making. I surmise that to pin things down to a central
theme or “gist” would be meaning-less, as multiplicity in voices and meanings reigns. In one
moment this version is found to be acceptable, and at yet another that same “truth” is inap-
propriate, un-fitting, flying in the face of the mood, side-stepped and disregarded as non-sense.
Tomorrow the world will look different yet again.

“This is where you are now. Then you turn your head away and you are somewhere else. The only
truth is that there is none: it moves when we blink. The trick of seeing is not seeing everything. If you
see everything and feel all you see, you unravel the wrinkles of your brain like a ball of kite string.
You drift off and disappear. It is easier to be blind if the choice is between blindness and madness.
Learn to see with one eye or both eyes half-closed” (Connelly, 1993) •

6. Room numbers are fictitious.

7. I use the same words as my informants, and will call this place either the AZC or the camp like they do.
 25

Places and S-paces

“We listen hard, try to pay attention to the moments that unfold, try to capture the words that
connect the lines and lives”

(Rasberry, 2001)

There are 8 people in this one particular apartment, or should I say “unit”. Apartment
makes it sound so middle-class suburban, even classy. One main area with a small table and a
kitchen area, one stove, one fridge, one open cupboard, 30cm x 40cm, for food items. Plates,
pots and pans are stacked up around the walls, the personal property of the asylum seekers
who live there. As I walk into the common area I notice that the other doors are all closed,
and the small portable TV is on. There’s nobody else in the room, but the TV throws out
its noise and plays incessantly. Nobody pays any attention to it. It’s just noise, background
sound. Perhaps serving to break up the silence, relieve the boredom. Or just plain habit.
There’s one toilet per unit, a shower room with a washing machine and a dryer. I didn’t ask
how they arrange the cleaning here, or how busy it is in the morning to get into the bath-
room. These seem too personal for a first visit. Lights burn in the rooms and I discern a smell
of stale urine, which brings back the memory of passing by public lavatories in England.

We walk around the buildings, and B. first takes me to the perimeter fence. He’s shakes the
railing, saying “you see this, it’s like a prison here”. At the back of the block there are many
different shapes and sizes of satellite dishes, protruding from wires of all shapes and sizes
dangling out of people’s windows, some held fast in the ground. I wonder which senders
people listen to, if this is how they hang on to some of their old identity.

We walk around the front. A man and woman come down the stairs. “Armenians”. They smile
and walk on. Further up a man sits outside on a chair talking to two other men, and a small
group are gathered outside a door. “Africans” B. says, not specifying further. Two women sit
at a table outside one unit, they talk and look up and greet us as we walk past. Just past their
block are the blocks reserved for the AMA’s , the juveniles who came here alone. They have
their own blocks and their own group of case managers and contact people from the COA,
housed separately from the other professionals.

I see a couple of young guys talking to one another, but it is quiet further. There’s little
noise, far less than I had expected. Why did I expect a hubbub or the place to be heaving
with bodies, chatting, conversing, doing chores, together? We move onto the right. A man is
standing outside a door with two other men, fixing bicycles. B., explains that he works for the
COA mending bikes. He smiles and tells me that this man earns ‘much money’ every week
for his work. “12 euros” a week, I’m told. B. smiles sarcastically. A case manager approaches
us. She wants to talk to B. about his son’s file. They exchange a few words. B. explains that
he’s waiting for her invitation for a meeting; she says there’s been a misunderstanding and
that he’ll get an invitation soon. She asks him if he’ll be around during the summer, “are you
around here in the summer”? she repeats several times. I wonder if asylum seekers often go
away on holiday in the summer. “What a stupid question” I think to myself, smiling politely
at her. She hurries away, paper in hand. B. explains that she works for the MOA and she’s
been waiting since their arrival to get the medical file belonging to B,’s son sent here from
the first AZC they lived in some years earlier. He comments that he believes she must have it
by now; that’s probably why she wants an appointment. But he doesn’t know for sure.
She doesn’t explain either. He doesn’t ask further.

We walk later on to the MOA together. There’s a notice on the door in bad English, saying
that due to aggressive behavior, and the downloading of porno, the computer room has been
temporarily closed. The computer room is to be reached via the entrance to the medical
services, and is a place where asylum seekers can sit down and use a computer free of charge.

5.
B. informs me that the notice is old, it’s no longer applicable “they forgot to take it down” he
says. We take a quick look in the computer room. There’s a handful of people in there, and
one supervisor, a young kid I estimate in his early 20’s. Looks Dutch, but I guess he can’t be.
Again B. jokes that “much money” can be made by volunteering in the computer room as
supervisor. This time it’s “4 Euros” a week. He smiles.
26

There’s more movement now outside. A mother cycles home with her children, a father too.
School is out, children start to arrive home. There is what looks to be an older brother play-
ing with a younger brother – kicking a ball around – whilst mum watches. Somalians I think.
A woman passes us with a baby in a buggy, she has a long-sleeved thick cotton jacket on, a
long skirt and a headscarve. She nods and smiles. Another woman leaves on a bicycle, with
a thick padded jacket on, with a baby on the back of her bicycle. I look at my bare arms, it’s
hot, and wonder how hot it must be in her home country.

B. wants to show me the whole place, so we walk outside the formal entrance and round the
back. That’s where VWN have their offices. They are formally “out” of the boundaries, al-
though I believe their offices are joined on the inside to the offices of the COA. For the refu-
gees however, they have to go “out”, in order to get access to the services of VWN, as they
are known. B. doesn’t know what it stands for though, he only knows that they are “good”
and many of the COA people are “bad”. The office of VWN is closed, however.

The cafeteria was also closed, locked up, the activity rooms were locked and the offices of
the case managers are also locked after 11.30 hours. From 09.30 to 11.30 it’s possible to walk
in if one has questions. After that time, it’s more or less appointment only. The windows
have stickers on them “Holland House” they say. The block is painted orange after all. The
housing blocks are all green, they remind B. of army barracks he says. Another case manager
walks past us. I am standing talking to B. she nods at us. Out the corner of my eye I observe
her as she walks up towards where the cars are parked on the outside of the building. She
disappears momentarily out of sight and then reappears, and walks back up towards us. B.
has his back to her. I see her look around, uneasily, make a swift movement with her hand
and as she walks past the bushes she throws some rubbish into them and moves quickly on.
She stops around the corner next to the reception, where there’s a table with an ashtray on it
and she lights up. I realize that she’s just unwrapped a new packet of cigarettes and thrown
the cellophane onto the ground outside. She didn’t notice that I had seen her do it. She
smokes, glances over at us every now and then, and we move on. I remember the notice at
the reception desk, warning asylum seekers to keep the place tidy and to dispose of their rub-
bish in the bins provided.

We sit outside the cafeteria on the broken picnic bench. B. informs me who the people are
who go past us. “He’s Armenian, that family’s from Afghanistan, that’s a young pharmacist
from Iraq, that’s an AMA”. I hear the story of an Iraqi who finally got permission to stay a
month ago. “He’s been here for 2 years” B. tells me. “He’s been going all that time to the
MOA and they always treated him, you know, well, normal”. He goes on “but since he got
his status , they treat him differently. They say ‘you’re like us now, you’re a Dutch man, now
you have to behave like this, you’re different now”. “It’s very different once you get your
status”, B. says, “then you are normal again, you can start to make your life”. “Before then
you are nothing, no I don’t like the word nothing even though that’s what they make you feel
like. No, you are lower than them”.

“Instead of deducing the definition of the camp from the events that took place there, we will ask:
What is a camp, what is its juridico-political structure, that such events could take place there?
This will lead us to regard the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past
(even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in
which we are still living” (Agamben, 1998).

Suddenly I am thrown into a new story, an emergent account of a young Iraqi who has con-
verted to Christianity. B. finds it strange that the man in question and five others who also
became Christians, got “status”. They were, or so the story goes, approached by people from
a church and told that if they became Christians, they would be helped to get permits to stay
in the Netherlands. Apparently they converted, and miraculously shortly thereafter, their ap-
plications to reside in the Netherlands were accepted. “It just shows” says B. “how far people
will go to stay here”. B. has even got a video as proof, which I also get to view. Where and
how B. got his hands on it, I haven’t a clue. It is part of the stock of artifacts that make up
the days and occupy the dreary nights at the “camp”. Strange fabulations of events imagined,
yet truly lived and experienced in all their fullness “produce scenes of a world saturated by
jumpy attunements” (Stewart, 2007). I listen incredulously to this account, trying to place
myself in the position of one maybe so lost, so disoriented, that any thread is grasped to
make sense of this situation, to answer questions of “why them and not me?”, to fabricate
justifications and to confound legitimacies and my …“attention shifts from a search for the
truth or for an authentic, original version, to a more intricate, silent tracking of the mean-
 27

ing of voice, tone and style. Language becomes neither transparent reflection of events nor
container for ideas but a performative utterance” (Volosinov, 1986).

B. takes me back to his block and loads up the video on the computer. I see a woman,
dressed in white, a microphone being held in front of her. She is explaining that God is good.
God is not a punishing God, he is a God of peace and love. She has been sick for years, but
now she sees that this was necessary, because it has lead her to where she is today. B. skips
over this bit and winds forward to the moment where the six Iraqi’s are brought forward to
pledge their conversion to Christianity. B. sits on the edge of the bed, all the while turning
to me and nodding as if to confirm what he has told me is true. His eyes plead with me for
recognition of his story. I can but nod and watch. All dressed in white, the six line up, and
an Iraqi Christian pastor interviews them in Arabic. A woman translates into Dutch. “From
Lebanon” B. announces, as if significant. One after one they proclaim their faith; some speak
openly about Islam being a religion of violence and death, another says that he was in the
“darkness” before finding Christianity, and all express how happy they are to be in the Chris-
tian brotherhood. One after one, they are baptized in a deep pool of water. B. switches off,
as if he’s had enough of this show of proselytizing. Looking out the window he repeats “you
see how far people go”. His eyes are sunken. It’s more than disbelief. It’s disbelief tinged
with sadness and regret at man sunk so low. Or at conditions which engender hopelessness
and which render the human spirit weak and vulnerable. Vulnerable enough to convert from
Islam to Christianity. The fiery mood which minutes ago had B. excited, tensed up at the
edge of his bed, potent with a desire to demonstrate that this was really how things were,
dissolved. Quickly, but painfully. Into one of contemplation, reasoning, not quite gloom, yet
bordering thereon. It was not the time to enter into discussions on religion, or truth, or to
ask B. whether renouncing Islam is really as terrible as he would have me believe. Not then.
There would be other, more amenable moments for that confrontation and for confounding
one another.

“Imagine a place grown intensely local in the face of loss, displacement, exile and a perpetually
deferred desire to return to what was already lost or still ahead, just beyond reach. Picture how
a home place long threatening to dissolve into the sheer shiftiness of history might grow in-filled
with an intense synesthesia of person, sociality, and landscape, how a haunted cultural landscape
becomes a dizzying, overcrowded presence” (Stewart 1996).

Imagine such a space for just one minute, please.

Picture the spaces from which the asylum seekers have come, and the places they inhabit
now. Can I say one is more hospitable than the other, one is less bare, more safe, more
homely? Despite complaints of this sort or that, B. is grateful, so is Lianne, so is Leyla. Li-
anne said “anything is better than there. Even if it’s dirty and unclean, and even if the COA
are not always nice, if they treat you badly, I always say thank you that I can be here. That my
children don’t have to see what they saw there. That they are safe”. B. says too “I am thank-
ful, I say thank you to the Dutch government because I am here, that I can live in this place.
Whatever happens, I just say thank you for this place”.

I have looked on in disbelief with Lianne at the rawness of the place she was given, at its
filth and emptiness. I wondered how anyone could make that space into a home. “This is
not as bad as the other places” she let on. “Once I used so much bleach to get the place
clean I fainted, and they had to call the doctor. No this is bad, but it’s not the worst”. There
was still half a loaf of white bread on the side, still soft, pack opened, and a tin of unopened
beans. It had been vacated in a hurry the staff member told us “probably somebody who got
deported and just had a couple of hours to clean everything out”. The cooker was stained
with grease and smeared with food particles; the fridge still dripping, though empty, the plug
duly unplugged and hung over an open door. The cupboards were grimy, full of crumbs and
remains, and the one under the sink was scattered with that yellow stuff used for insulating
pipes and the like. The toilet was disgusting; so much so that any wait seemed better than
going there. An old toilet brush was flung in the corner, with pieces of toilet paper, and the
tap looked strangely disfigured, turned outwards, so that if water did come out it would drip
onto the toilet floor and not in the sink. The main “living” area had only bare walls, stained
linoleum on the floor, a square formica table and 7 red plastic chairs. The curtains hung, or
rather feigned a desperate hanging, and a white piece of cloth was taped over the glass in
the door. The bedroom had two beds, with mattresses and pillow cases. Two metal cabinets,
exactly the same as in B’s room, and a broken mirror. Lianne’s worldly belongings were piled
on one of the beds, the floor too dirty even for plastic bags. And I shuddered at the thought
28

of the elbow grease which would be needed to get this place anywhere near clean.
I commented that I found this place “rather disgusting”, “no warm heating, dirty and cold,
pipes frozen and two small children, one of whom was on antibiotics for a bout of bronchi-
tis”. “Don’t you have another place where they can stay”? I inquired. The staff member hur-
ried from one corner to the next, inspecting, touching, feeling, prodding and poking. He ran
the taps and did his best to activate the central heating, then he called the engineer to come
and help. But he had no luck either. “Wait here” he said, “I’ll see what I can do, I don’t think
she can stay here tonight, but we’re so full, with so many new arrivals”. I looked into his eyes,
and exchanged a pleading glance with him. He left us in that place for a while, and all the
time he was gone we stood in the middle of the room, not venturing to it’s outward borders,
not wanting to dirty our hands on the edges of its filth, nor even to skirt past the walls, as if
contaminated.

When he returned he gave Lianne two new keys. “Load everything back into the car”, he
gestured to Lianne’s possessions, “I’ve found her somewhere else, just for now, while we get
this place cleaned up”. Lianne’s eyes brightened, she shuddered with astonishment, and for
a tiny moment forgot this predicament she was in. The immediate present of two small chil-
dren, needing a place to sleep for the night, that was her worry now. “I’ve been in five camps,
and the COA have not once cleaned my room for me”. She almost squealed with delight.
We moved the bags out one by one; she had four plastic bags and two small overnight bags,
plus an electronic piano wrapped in two grey rubbish bags and bound together with cello-
tape in the middle. “Usually I have to carry all this myself, backwards and forwards to the
bus stop. Nobody helps. I can’t do without my piano. It’s the only thing that keeps me from
going mad”. She continued, needing no prompting “when I lived in that other place I used
to stay the whole time in my room. I’d get up and then bring the children to school. When
I came back I’d lock myself in the room, in case the police or anyone came looking for me,
and I’d just play my piano the whole day long. I never went out, only to get the children or go
shopping. I stayed the whole day in that one small space. But my neighbor said whenever he
heard me play, he couldn’t believe it was me. He said he always thought it was the television,
because it was so beautiful. I don’t really know. I only play for myself. I can’t tell. Only that
I can’t do without my piano. I take it everywhere”. Lianne enfolded her arms around the
dustbin liners which ensured her sanity, and took it to the car.

Just through the gates we stopped outside another block. Room 46 with a ramp outside the
door. One of the special units for the sick or physically disabled. She could stay here for the
weekend we were told. The door opened, and we were introduced to “granny”. A small old
black woman sat at the table eating, accompanied by a somewhat younger, not young, black
female. Did they both live here, were they related, or was the younger the helper, daughter,
or just friend? The warmth embraced our cold bodies and made a pledge that Lianne would
be safe here tonight. We had left that despondent bareness, that expanse of emptiness, to be
offered a new space, albeit temporarily, which provoked a reverberation of happiness around
Lianne. The children ran out into the snow and started playing and I felt I could now leave.
The tears you initially cried had dissipated and you said “I am not afraid now, this place feels
alright”.

“There are spaces in which we cannot envision or formulate objectives or grasp onto any-
thing usable but which we embrace with a tender, incredulous or awestruck gaze. Nothing
meaningful we can say can connect with his suffering, but our hand reaches out to stroke the
arm of the dying stranger” (Lingis, 2007) •

8. AMA refers to Alleenstaande Minderjarige Asielzoekers, or in English: Unaccompanied Minor Asylum Seekers.
I shall use the Dutch abbreviation AMA when relevant.

9. MOA stands for Medische Opvang Asielzoekers or Medical Services Asylum Seekers. When referred to I shall
use the Dutch abbreviation known by asylum seekers – MOA.

10. VWN stands for Vluchtelingen Werk Nederland ,which is the Dutch Refugee Council, who are always on-site by
an AZC. When referred to I shall use the Dutch abbreviation known by asylum seekers – VWN – although many do
not themselves know what the abbreviation stands for.
 29

Interlude
On (living) Space(s) and Place(s)

“In fact you were born by chance, and all the decisive turns in your life – that you were
born in a suburb in the richest country of the world or in a hovel in the vast outer zone,
that you had a normal human body or a genetic defect, that you had the brains to get
through school and perhaps the university, that you happened to meet someone you fell in
love with, that you are of an expansive happy disposition or melancholic, that you some-
how were free to release your superabundant energies or were constricted fearfully to your
needs and wants – all that was each time a matter of good or bad luck”

(Lingis, 2007).

Lived-in space or a space to live (in)

“Space” to live in
Live in space
A-live in space. Livin’-in (a) space. Is that livin’?

Which spaces or places are yours, to be called homely?

Space(s) of life // Space(s) in life // Space(s) for life

or lives whose place is a meandering place, an uncertain place, a waiting place?

“We shudder, rock, sway, swing, pump, prance and gesticulate”

(Lingis, 2007)

Quickquick S L O W S L O W S L O W S L O WER
Speed up – you have to GET OUT. You have two hours to clear OUT, pack UP this space,
Vacate this space, Occupy a new space, elsewhere in space…
This space is temporal, a place for now. A waiting place. A space to wait. A space to
exist in.

For now for I have NO clue where I may go tomorrow.

Which place, which space will I have then? Where will it be?
I need not worry about attachments to
places and spaces; I have no choice. I know I will have to move once again into a new
space, in a new place. I have to.

My heartbeat ticks in this space. “Surges of superabundant energy become vibrant and
intensify in exhilaration, then subside”

(Lingis, 2007)

Where is the limit between what (space) is mine and what (space)
is yours? Can’t we share this space?

Some spaces remind me of home, but not this space. Warm spaces in-filled with
dreams and “thangs that happen”. Desires. “Thangs” happen here too. Desires have
their place.
But this space is NOT (www.)myspace.com •
30

Writing lives
“Our knowing and our meaning making – made possible through our relationship with and
through words – are influenced by our work and play with text. The “simple” act of moving words
around the page alters the way we (get to) know text, the ways we get to know knowing”

(Rasberry, 2001)

The very act of researching is one of learning and listening, and of trying to capture the lives
of those we are researching so that we can, in some way, [make] sense [of] what we are see-
ing and of the multiplicity of what we are simultaneously experiencing. But to capture is to
fix and to fix is to claim that what we are writing is the truth, or at least one version of it. In
this sense ‘capture’ is not the write/right word. Perhaps I should use the term “make vis-
ible” or “make seen”. But I can surely not write outside the paradigms of my own language,
or outside my own eye/i , inventing new truths which escape dominant discourses on what
good research is or is not. Can I? The “truth regime” of which I am part extends so far as
to provide me with a framework within which “recognition [of the other] takes place”, and
“a regime of truth offers the terms that make self-recognition possible” (Butler, discussing
Foucaultian Subjects, 2005). Yet according to Krieger: “The challenge lies in what each of us
chooses to do when we represent our experiences. Whose rules do we follow? Will we make
our own? Do we….have the guts to say, ‘You may not like it, but here I am’” (Krieger, 1991:
244).

I have longed in this quest for a way to reflect the complexity which I have encountered on
this research, researching journey, and to open up new spaces of thought and writing which
resist closure or final conclusions. For there are no final conclusions, only words and texts,
and performance and poetics. A gathering of experiences and thoughts, reflections, moods,
swings, sways, attunements, surges, renderings and ruminations, traces and entanglements,
engagements and flurries in spaces, cultural, political; social and psychological, individual
and collective.

Oft times lost, confused, obsessed, disheartened even mad, furious, hardened, yet also glad-
dened, joyous, happy, curious, inquisitive and fragile. I am both subject and object, insider
and outsider, teacher and learner, all together, in simultaneity and separately. Inspired by
Veissiere I feel “…invited to regain the courage to speak in the name of humanity, the possi-
bility of a human essence, and the necessity of a collective human project” (Veissiere, 2010).
I have implicated myself in my research, rejecting positivistic calls for purity and objectivity,
which I feel to be deeply flawed, if not impossible. Yet implication brings ethical dilemmas,
conundrums of affectivity and dangers of excess and blindness.

“Everyday, I unlearn what I’ve learnt the day before, and find out how fragile, how partial
and how temporary things are, and, painfully, how vulnerable and naïve I am”, (Veissiere,
2010).

The pull or urge to re-present the Other, the asylum seeker, in bounded analytical frame-
works is palpable, tempting. To conform, and to work inside the conventions of coherence
and certainty, to say I know what I am doing. Would that be more comfortable, more amena-
ble to those who must judge this work? Perhaps.

Yet I fear I must admit partiality, and leave rough edges which shun the carpenter’s plane,
live with the inconsistencies and occasionally reel in self-doubt. I cannot erase uncertainties,
and choose to position myself, my “i” in the tensions, in the interstices of complex human
existence, in the “gaps” and “…in the nervous, shifting, hard-to-follow trajectories of desire
and [a cultural system] in-filled with all the confusion and aggravation of desire itself”
(Stewart, 1996). Stewart invites us to “imagine a world that dwells in the space of the gap,

6.
in a logic of negation, surprise, contingency, roadblock and perpetual incompletion. Picture
how it oscillates wildly between its dreams of order and its prolific excesses, how it drifts in
the flux of desire and condenses under its weight and force” (Stewart, 1996). With the same
token, I invite you to open your imaginings to this world and to heighten your senses and
sensibilities so that they may attune and occasionally collide with this exploration of affectiv-
ity and affectations.
 31

It feels as though my whole being is saturated from head to toe with my research. I’m
drenched by it; soaked through and through. I am constantly reflecting on asylum seekers, on
the “camps”, on those who work with asylum seekers, on my role as researcher, or “academic
pimp” (Veissiere, 2010), on my writing, on interviews, stories, narratives and poetics and
on the politics of asylum. Moral dilemmas, practical questions, theoretical deliberations,
methodology. Have I read enough? Where to begin? How to do justice to the stories I have
heard? This last question bothers me most. I keep repeating it over and over. Will my re-
search be traced back to those who have acted as informant? How do these fears guide what
I decide to write about and what not? What is the COA capable of? How far will they go in
their policies of discouragement? Will I jeopardize the position, or chances of those asylum
seekers who have helped me in my endeavors? Even though they are anonymous, I still have
to register every time I visit them, which means there are traces of our meetings. Traces of
where I have been and those with whom I have spoken. I start to think that I’m becoming
completely paranoid. Feeling guilty about things I cannot influence, wondering if I am doing
enough to “help”, questioning whether I should even be trying to “help” at all. Is this what
“critical engagement” is? And am I capable as Veissiere attempts of “refraining from facile,
depoliticized celebrations of grassroots “critical” anthropology and other fantasies about
empowering the subaltern”? (Veissiere, 2010)

Yes, I too fantasize about empowering the subaltern. Of adopting a methodology that ac-
cords them “voice” and that recognizes their plight. That makes visible the “reality” of being
in exile, of dependence, of changing identities, clinging on to the past whilst masquerading
in a future that is not yet here. Waiting, waiting, for something to happen. “Reflexivity about
one’s social location and issues of representation keeps us honest about what we claim to
know, what we cannot apprehend, and the limits of our disciplinary practices that rely on
highly stylized discursive practices” (Hinson Shope, 2006). So too the limits of that which I
can comprehend keep me on the edge, alert to new insights, carrying me from one imaginary
location to the next, creating revelatory junctures and forcing me to re-consider trusted epis-
temological assumptions. I may be startled, embarrassed, ashamed, fearful, glad and ener-
getic, or completely worn out as a day of researching progresses. At times I don’t know how
to maintain vigor. I feel like I am in a swamp, slowly sinking, imbued by sensate experiences,
bungled encounters and vivid entanglements. Then as I glint a new telling, or am swept up
by a traumatic re-imagining of events, or an explosion of words and expression, feelings and
affects, which thrust me forward, thrust us forward collectively, I clamber out of the swamp,
re-invigorated and continue.

I remember once, rethinking parts of a meeting with G. and her family at the “camp”, I ad-
mitted to B. that I had been shocked by the behavior of G’s two year old son. I deliberated at
first whether I should even talk to B. of this encounter, wondering whether it was ethical and
responsible of me to do so. Yet I had been left baffled once again, stunned even, and needed
an outlet to discuss my experience and the emotions it had engendered. G. comes from Syria
and has been living in the Netherlands for the past 6 years almost. Their applications have
been successively refused, yet the family is still here, waiting for the result of their latest ap-
peal. Son D. is two and has three older sisters. On this one particular occasion I was invited
over to talk with G., who had been introduced to me by B. and who willingly agreed to take
part in my research.

Son D. was being helped on the toilet when I arrived. Toilet door open, he sat staring directly
towards the front door where I came in. I was hit by the noise on entering – TV blasting,
computer on, music playing. Clothes strewn over the sofas, shoes piled up in the hallway,
coat rack bulging with garments and outdoor garb. The table was cluttered with plates full
of leftovers, croissants, drinks, sandwiches, not yet consumed, not yet cleared. The chaos in
house vibrated in my being and made me restless, uneasy, even agitated. Were these condi-
tions conducive to a good talk I mused? Would my recordings not be spoiled by all the back-
ground noise? Couldn’t we somehow slow down, turn off, fade out and above all get rid of
the kids? I felt exhausted and hadn’t even started. It was like being in an alien environment,
“lacking intersensorial consistency”; a place “where the levels come apart” (Lingis, 1998).

We talked as was best possible, with noise ramming my senses from all corners, the inces-
sant interruptions, the interceptions of D. prancing around toy gun in hand trying to ram the
barrel down the throat of his sister and pretending to pull the trigger. Mother uttered her
son’s name every now and then, occasionally rising to the lift the child off his sister’s chair
and to remove his spare hand from the girl’s plait. He held on firm, gripping her hair so as
not to lose balance. The other hand, armed, was engaged in mortal combat. The girl, play-
32

ing, or rather trying to play, at the computer, was for the main part undeterred. Even with a
toy gun rammed in her mouth. Every now and then she let out a squeal of protest, looking
at her mother, enticing her to stand up and once again lift D. down to the ground. It seemed
like a ritual. D’s actions, his mechanical aggression towards his sister, his mimetic gestures of
execution, shocked nobody, but me.

It was this I discussed with B., assuming on reflection some kind of moral high ground when
trying to explain my distaste at this scene. Why wasn’t mother bothered? Why did she let
this boy get away with such things? Didn’t they care in “their” countries about the effects of
violence on children? Why did they have the television on so much with violent programmes,
scenes of death, blood and horror? I cringe now to think how I implied stupidity on her part.
On their part. The Arabs. The Muslims. I accused, implied, pressed my point, impressed
my point, questioned and ranted and raved, an unsuspecting B. He commented that when I
get angry or wound up something “funny happens with your nose”. He could not exactly say
what, just “your nose turns up. I can see it in your face, I can feel it”. He laughed. Did he
find my concerns ridiculous, strange, plain stupid? He looked at me and told a story, a hor-
ror story. One which shook even more the foundations of my cultural certainties, and which
intensified my feelings of inadequacy at viewing the world from my comfortable Euro-centric
armchair.

Picture bodies strewn on the street, some with heads, some without. Or a head outside
the front door, staring up, body-less, bloody, severed. Bodies of men, women, sometimes
children, riddled with bullets, bound, lying all dignity lost, there, in the street, outside your
house. Imagine how you would want to protect your children from such scenes, usher them
quickly away, make up some story, in the beginning at least, but how it may come to be nor-
mal after a while. If that’s possible. How may one become accustomed to death? To displays
of mutilation, inhumanity, defacing of the human spirit, tyranny and war? Imagine all this in
the sweltering heat of a summer’s day in Iraq. A country so prolific in oil that oil spurts from
cracks in the pavement, also outside your house. Tend for one minute to the thought of that
moment of prayer when you leave your house, mutterings to Allah, asking to be guided on
your journey, and to be brought back home in safety. Not knowing, not daring to even think
that the next car you inadvertently pass may explode in an instant. Shredding your being in
pieces, ripping limbs from body, at best maimed, head from torso, or just plain dead. Your
bits strewn across the road, or those of your wife, husband, children, mother, father, friend.
How would you cope with the uncertainty of death hiding in wait around the corner, linger-
ing in the shadows? On every corner, every car a potential death trap, every being a potential
suicide bomber. “This is how it is for us, every day” B. stated calmly. “Why should we worry
about TV programmes when our life, reality is far worse”?

I asked B. for an account of himself. And in response, B. caught “on to the urgent, the fran-
tic, the panicking, the exultant, the astonished tone” (Lingis, 1998), and flung open the door
to an alternative narrativization of the social. One I was not expecting.

“They come and take away the bodies on the streets, maybe after one or two days, when we call
the police” he explained. “My children see this. Sure I don’t accept this, but what I can do? And
they ask too many questions. Why this happened? Now this man is dead, where is his head? Yes.
This is normal for us. Not normal for you. You think you are afraid of this? If I see this everyday
for one month, or three weeks, after this time this is normal for me. I can look at this. After this
time everything is normal and because it is my job too. I am not the same as other people.” He
continued “I have a friend, he is a neighbor, he lives close to my home. Some group kidnapped
him, and after ten days they called his family and they say, “until now you haven’t been to the…”
how do they call this place where you go when you die? Ah, yes the mortuary. And they say this to
his family. Yes, when we go they called and said “til now you didn’t go to collect your brother? We
killed him”. And I went with his brother and other family members to the mortuary. When I went
inside, you cannot believe what I saw. I cannot describe it. First, he said “which one is for you”?
“Which body is for you”? We could not look at them all. Somebody without this (gestures to
head), somebody without this (gestures to genitals), half a head, somebody because he stayed in
that place so long completely blown up. Swollen. They gave us a book with pictures. They take a
picture of all the dead bodies that come into the mortuary, because we cannot search through all
of them. Too many, too many. We don’t have a cold place for all of them. The floor is full of peo-
ple, outside is full of people, bodies are stacked up high. We need only two days to start stinking. I
think if they have a place, a freezer, they keep the body longer. If not, I think they wait maybe ten
days and they take the bodies away to be buried. And really we looked at the pictures. We were
not sure if he was there or not. We did not know his clothes. But if there is no head then we have
 33

to look at the clothes, maybe at the underwear, if he has documents on him. But for my friend
we looked for him in the pictures. We looked at one picture but we were not sure if it was him or
not because on the photo he had a beard, but when they took him he didn’t have a beard. When
we looked at the picture, we weren’t sure. And he looked skinnier, and he had red and blue on
his body, bruises. We said maybe this could be him, but he had gunshot wounds in his head. One
here and one here. Mainly they shoot them, but after one day maybe they start to hit them, they
want information. He was Sunni and he was at the Mosque. They think all Sunni’s who go to the
Mosque are terrorists. The man in the mortuary said OK I go to look for this body. It wasn’t the
first body, there were maybe five bodies on top of him. He made this for all people (makes ges-
tures as if pulling something), and he pulled out the body. The rest just fall on the floor. “Look
at him” he said “is this the man?”. I said I don’t know. His brother said “I want to be sure about
his underwear” and after this he said “this is my brother”. And we took him. In a coffin. We had
this, sure we must have this. We brought this coffin, and we put him in this and we took him. The
Ministry of Health is two kilometers from this place, and when you are there you cannot breath.
You can smell this place, because we are without electricity, there are too many dead bodies. And
this oil, or water from the body goes out. When you walk in there, you go “slush” “slush”, with the
blood, and the fluids. Your shoes get soaked. “Why should we worry about TV programmes when
our life, reality is far worse”?

I was flung, stupefied, though illuminated, and “this first-glimpsed space of alterity was more
haunting and sublime than monstrous, more thickly imagined than unimaginable” (Stewart,
1996). The intensity of B.’s account (of himself) was compelling; though arguably it was also
an attempt to account for others like him. He offered a justification of sorts; a response to
what I had asked. “Whatever we say we put forth for her assent, her sanction; her interpre-
tation, her judgement. To agree to speak, already to answer his greeting is to have already
accepted the other as our judge” (Lingis, 1998). His calm recollection of memories and his
dense description caused my breath to quicken, as I occasionally let out a gasp of horror, or
disgust. Perhaps also sadness. “I remember the desire to abandon myself to the surround-
ing texture and density” (Stewart, 1996) and a feeling of stupidity encroached on a deep-felt
gratitude of being here and not there. Anywhere but there. I was reminded that “…their
myriad experiences could not be squeezed into a procrustean bed of Western concepts with-
out distorting the complexity of their lives” (Hinson Shope, 2006).

Critical ethnography, new ethnography (Stewart, 1996) implies an opening up of the self to
new worlds and more importantly to the world of the other. Needed is a willingness to enter
into a meaningful dialogue; one which recognises the tensions implicit in the relationship
between researcher and researched. One must embrace the exposure of the limits of ones
epistemological frontiers, in an awareness of how easily one can slip into the trap of “read-
ing” the experiences of the other into one’s own “master narrative…..without contextualizing
it culturally or historically” (Hinson Shope, 2006).

I had exposed my thoughts and expressed my opinions and the critique I got in return re-
vealed the flaws in my position, and questioned my moral imperatives. This type of “shock”
would be one of many to come (Sands & Krumer-Nevo, 2006), which would lead to charged
exchanges of knowledge, a disturbance in roles and a disruption in the ‘normal’ order of play
between researcher and informant. It was an engagement in “dialogic anthropology” which
according to Dwyer (1977) “..means accepting the possibility of failure in the fieldwork en-
counter; it demands that the anthropologist’s talk draws on his own experience; and that the
field engagement allows for the other to talk back; crudely, the anthropologist continues to
‘fish for data’ while remaining open, herself, to be fished” (Collins & Gallinat, 2010). In fact
“to deny the self as a resource in conducting fieldwork would be to deny the centrality of dia-
logue in human sociality, and thereby to deny the humanity of those among whom we live in
the field” (Collins & Gallinat, 2010). In short, to deny the humanity of the asylum seekers. •
34

Interlude
“I asked myself what does a human-istic text of asylum seekers look like? What does an
asylum seeker look like? What does an asylum seeker (look) like? What does a human
look like? Can I know the other? Can i know? The other. Know the other. Can i? Like the
path of / to know-ledge is winding; itself a ledge off which i may fall at any moment, my
knowledge of the path with its turns and bends, bends and twists, twists and turns, turns,
and when i think i know something, i turn another bend and realize i know very little. How
to conduct and write research that maintains the complexities and the conundrums and
the uncertainties of conducting and writing research? Re-search. It is a continual quest,
a re-search, to find forms, the right (write) forms for writing and expressing the lives i am
re-searching. i stare at the screen; fingers posed on keys, waiting to write the right words,
in the manner i have been taught – asdf gh jkl; - often with the ring finger lifted, waiting,
unawares, unconscious, above the i / I.

An i which must look at itself, which has looked at itself during the research process and
which has faced dilemma’s. Some resolved, some NOT. “Giving an Account of Oneself”.
Facing the “Other”. Facing away from the “Other” or looking into a mirror only to have
one’s prejudices, insistent and stealthy prejudices, reflect right back on You. No. Not You.
Me. And despite my best efforts at evading Them, at reason-ing with them, using reason;
they creep up on Me when i am. Least expecting Them. In the sports club, shopping,
dreaming, hoping, or just plain meandering. Listening in on the conversations of Others.
Re-searching. Researching. Learning. Isn’t it the same thing anyway? Can’t seem
to Shake Them Off. Perhaps i don’t TRY HARD. Enough. ENOUGH.

i am a product of my own up-bringing. i was brought-up-this-way so i-can’t-help-it. Can i?

i can. TRY. Like the asylum seekers i am trying to understand. Is “it” culture, or religion,
or tradition, or mentality, or ideology, or personality, or upbringing, or What? Is “it”? Or
all of the above. Please tick whichever box is most relevant to You. Only one tick allowed.
To tick more than one willonlyconfusethematter. The matter. What is? The matter?

Bodies are matter. They matter. Why do bodies that are matter matter? Does some mat-
ter matter more than other matter? It would seem that not all things matter to the same
degree. There are degrees of mattering.

Can I
as researcher
decide
what
or
who
matters?”

Decide which body matters?

Which body counts?

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13…..........................................................................107,708
documented civilian deaths from violence since 2003

www.iraqbodycount.org
(Journal excerpt, 31st October, 2010) •
 35

An Ac-count of Oneself
“Giving an account of oneself comes at a price not only because the “I” that I present cannot
present many of the conditions of its own formation but because the “I” that yields to narration
cannot comprise many dimensions of itself: the social parameters of address, the norms through
which the “I” becomes intelligible, the non-narratable or even unspeakable dimensions of the
unconscious that persist as an enabling foreignness at the heart of my desire”

(Butler, 2005)

The very first time I spoke to a member of personnel working at an asylum centre, the
worker in question did not know that I was undertaking research on asylum seekers. Would
she have talked otherwise had she known? Or would she have attempted to present things,
or herself, in a more positive light? Would she have described her own work, her thoughts
and feelings differently?

In my reflections on that meeting I used the words: “sickening, awakening, frightening,

revealing, misguided liberalism”. I was shocked and dismayed, but at the same time bound
by a fascination to hear more and more. She told many stories. Stories of volunteers being
sacked if they get involved with asylum seekers. “Involved”, “relations” were the words she
used. I thought I knew what she meant. She meant sex of course, physical ties, falling in love
or pure lust. I was wrong. She explained that just having tea together was a step too far. Not
allowed. Otherwise one might become too close, friends or even lobbyists interfering with
procedures, helping the asylum seekers. Not allowed. A step too far. “A realistic approach”
she called it. “Letting them know what it’s really like, even if they get a permit to stay in
the country”. She boasted how she told one youngster - “imagine if your mother was on her
last legs, dying at home. What’s more important now? You being here and waiting for your
procedure, or spending time with your dying mother? And what if you do get a permit. Don’t
imagine that you’ll be studying and looking forward to a good job. The Dutch will look down
on you” – she made a gesture - turning up her nose and sweeping her head forwards. “You’ll
be sweeping the streets. That’s what life is really like, even if you get a permit. That’s not fun.
Wouldn’t you rather be with your mother”?

At her centre, “camp”, they offer no activities; only programmes for those you have agreed
to return home voluntarily and preparatory programmes for those with a residence per-
mit. Independence, dignity, privacy – words I heard over and over in her story. Not treat-
ing the asylum seekers as children. Letting them make their own choices, not choosing for
them. Going to the doctor, like any other Dutch person. No separate corridors for men and
women; after all this is the Netherlands and it’s just like living in a normal Dutch neighbour-
hood. Safety – this is not a concern here. No separation in living quarters. Why other centres
insist on separation for safety reasons – absurd she laughed. Everyone has to do their own
talking, make their own doctor’s appointments. No holding people by the hand, even if they
do have trauma’s and personal problems. The best way is to look forward, get on with life,
do things for yourself. Take responsibility for your own children, find things out for yourself,
respect one another’s privacy. Get on with it. You’re in the Netherlands now. It’s the same as
living in a normal Dutch neighbourhood, she repeated. Multicultural, no separation. Asylum
seekers are clients. You have to let your wishes be known, the COA won’t offer things on a
plate. It’s your own responsibility. Making them stand on their own two feet from the begin-
ning is the best way to respect their dignity. No, not speaking the language is not a problem.
Pampering is out; independence is in. That is, once you get “in”.

I wondered if she really believed it all, whether she had in fact ever spoken to an asylum
seeker for longer than the time it takes to show them to their room and to give them their
key. She knew some of the children by name though. That surprised me. She showed me
the corridors, the classes, explained policy, took me to the common room. It was bare. No

7.
coffee and tea machine, that was their own responsibility. COA didn’t organize things which
weren’t specifically asked for by the asylum seekers themselves. How would they know what
they could ask for, I commented. Not our problem she mused. What about finding your way
about in this complex society, arranging schools for children, hospital appointments, ap-
pointments with teachers, registering at the sports club, dealing with post, being pregnant in
a new country, understanding the system? “They are all adults”, she replied and “they can
36

always ask the Refugee Council”. That’s not her work. She explained with a certain degree
of skepticism that her own working hours were undergoing changes - shift-work, also in the
evenings, would mean less security guards. A “governmental money-saving scheme”, which
wouldn’t enhance the quality of the work carried out, she noted. “We need our rest too”.
Could it get any worse, I thought? Then she added, “no flags, no explicitly nationalistic sym-
bols, no activities for specific cultural or religious groups. No need to provoke one another
by demonstrating one’s own cultural identity. No flags on the windows”. Nothing of the kind
allowed in this camp. Bare.

I concluded that she really believed what she said. That she truly imagined that the intense
impact of leaving one’s home, one’s old way of life, even one’s families, could be gotten over,
stepped over like a bump in the road. Like the bodies strewn on streets, rolled over by army
trucks, by mistake. These were temporary glitches hindering the formation of a new, Dutch
identity. That is, if one ever gets the chance to become “Dutch” in the first place. And of
course, who could argue with grand words like dignity, respect, independence and privacy?
I pondered how much abuse has been clothed in such worthy causes in the past, and how
much is going on now in the name of such ideals? It seemed she had lost sight of the human
face behind her grand narrative, of the stories which were being lived, there and then, and
that the way in which she spewed these terms masked a more sinister reality. An explicit
“policy of discouragement”, to use the words of another COA actor and centre worker. “We
are not allowed to do anything which would encourage the asylum seekers to feel at home, or
to encourage them to want to stay” she had informed me.

This meant leaving people to their own devices, to fend for themselves as it were, in this new
world of opportunities. No Dutch lessons for those not yet granted residency, no work, and
very little financial support. Each adult asylum seeker currently gets around forty five Euro’s
per week for basic subsistence costs; housing, gas, electricity is provided. The allowance per
child is around thirty five euro’s per week, and children are eligible for a small contribution
to go towards the costs of sport activities. Better than nothing, evidently. At least they get a
roof over their heads, which is more than happens in some other countries. And health care.
But one can question whether this is the kind of sustenance which is really needed at this
most vulnerable time in one’s life.

According to A., a 27 year old Turkmen from Iraq who has been in the Netherlands around
two and half years, waiting, “life is difficult in the camp”. His tells of his pain at not being
able to study, or to work, at not being able to use his degree in electronics, at not knowing
what will happen to him; of the lack of privacy, the difficulty of sharing with people from all
different cultural backgrounds, religions, with different habits “sometimes I want to sleep
early, but I can’t, if my roommate likes to stay up late, or if he smokes”, of not being able
to trust anybody, of having too few friends, of sharing a gas stove with 7 other people, and
a shower and a toilet, at being looked down upon by Dutch people “outside”, at having no
choice on who he shares a room with, or even in which camp he must live, of his anguish at
being dependent on the COA, on the refugee council, on the government, on everybody,
anybody - for information, news, assistance, and of dirty facilities, people who eat too much
garlic and don’t clean up after themselves, of separation, of small rooms, of skin problems,
lousy treatment by officials, arguments and fights, and how he longs to get a residency per-
mit, to get “outside”, to “become a person” once again, and to “meet humanity”. After all “I
am also human” he counters.

A’s account is typical of most accounts I hear. Accounts from asylum seekers desperate to be
seen, to be recognized as human beings, with thoughts, feelings, pain, joy; as humans who
have needs and desires, their ups and downs, who are happy and sad, resilient and vulner-
able, complex and changeable. This and many more things, but most of all people, humans,
like you and me. With their good and bad bits.

Imagine the scene of me accompanying A. to visit the camp’s doctor. A. wanted me to go with
him “to see what it’s like”. We walked over there and entered the waiting room. It was bare.
2 wooden benches, a broken leaflet dispenser with no leaflets to dispense, bare walls apart
from one poster “Must Haves @ home” showing a packet of paracetemol, a thermometer,
plasters, a bottle of disinfectant and a bandage”. There was a glass window protruding from a
wall, closed shut, with a sign indicating the opening times. No staff were present. On the floor
an old tissue, and a couple of pieces of paper. No dustbin in sight. It was 13.00 hours and A’s
appointment was at 13.05 hours. We waited and waited. No sign of life. At 13.39 hours a tall
man, the doctor, appeared and called us into the adjacent corridor. No apology.
 37

I introduced myself as an acquaintance and explained that A. had asked me to accompany

him. We were ushered into a small room where the doctor took up his position behind the
desk. He looked at me, then turned to A. I was pleasantly surprised that he addressed A.
directly, which had not been the case at a previous visit with G. Then, the assistant, know-
ing that I could talk better Dutch than G. had insisted on addressing me alone, even when
G. talked or asked a question. Leaving me with an enormous feeling of discomfort and even
anger at the time. But anyhow, this was better. A. explained that his skin complaint was not
better. That he would like to bring forward his appointment with the hospital as it seemed
his skin was getting worse. His appointment was in a month’s time and given the precarious
and uncertain position of A. he wanted to be seen earlier in case he would be given notice
to leave the country before that time. Or in case he would be forcibly deported. A. is in the
unfortunate situation that his application has been refused twice by the IND, despite a posi-
tive decision from the High Court. He can’t fathom how this can be possible, and nobody
has managed to give him an adequate explanation of his situation, or at least one he is able
to grasp with any degree of understanding. He has been awaiting notice to leave the Nether-
lands since the last negative decision, some 4 months previous and realizes that his days are
numbered. Like others in the same situation, A. could get a letter any day giving him 28 days
warning to get out. Then the choice is deportation or illegality. What he doesn’t understand
is why some get the letter immediately after their appeal has been refused, and why he is
still waiting. And although dreading the day the letter arrives, at least it would bring some
semblance of clarity. Only the letter has not yet arrived and once it does, A. knows what he
must do. A life in illegality seems far from appealing, but returning “home” is even less so.
Illegality entails even greater uncertainty but also no access to health care, except in life and
death situations. His skin problem does not fall into this last category but is enough to cause
him great worry and anguish, now.

The doctor looked on, listening. Even nodding his head when I put A.’s case for him. When
we asked once again if he could intervene to try to change the appointment for A. with the
specialist at the hospital, he said wryly “Sorry I can’t do anything about it. The hospital has
its own agenda, they make their own decisions, I can’t change that”. I noted that all hospital
have a margin for special cases, or for emergencies and that his willingness to contact the
specialist on behalf of A. would be greatly appreciated. He repeated “sorry, I can’t do that”.
“Can’t or won’t” I retorted, breath quickening, heart pacing, aware of my position, and not
wanting to embarrass A. “Can’t, won’t, it doesn’t matter, I’m not going to do that. I never do
such things for anyone, it’s against the rules”, he maintained. Ordinarily I would reply with
a stream of arguments, maybe even raising my voice, but I was all too aware of A.’s vulner-
ability in this, so I kept quiet. Until we were ushered out when I remarked “We would have
appreciated a word of apology too at having to wait almost three quarters of an hour”. But
the doctor already had his back to us and was entering into his room. He muttered how busy
he was and closed the door. Not looking back. We left. I despondent; A. resigned. This was
nothing which he hadn’t experienced many times before.

A’s account was refused, unheard, disregarded. Could it be classed as “violent”? According
to Butler “Adorno uses the term violence in relation to ethics in the context of claims about
universality”. Quoting Adorno: “the social problem of the divergence between the univer-
sal interest and the particular interest, the interest of particular individuals, is what goes to
make up the problem of morality” (Adorno, 2001). Was there here a universal principle of
following the rules which meant that the particularities of A’s case no longer counted? For
Butler “….the problem is not with universality as such but with an operation of universality
that fails to be responsive to cultural particularity and fails to undergo a reformulation of it-
self in response to the social and cultural conditions it includes within its scope of applicabil-
ity” (Butler, 2005). The doctor in question was unwilling to reassess his response in the light
of A’s account and in the light of his evident worry that final notification to leave the Nether-
lands could be imminent, and should it arrive before his hospital appointment, A. would no
longer be eligible for treatment, leaving him with a potentially irritating, if not damaging skin
condition.

Despite our efforts at getting the doctor to account for himself, we failed. The doctor was
not prompted by the kind of fear which Nietzsche considers essential to giving an account.
“For Nietzsche, accountability follows only upon an accusation or, minimally, an allegation,
one made by someone in a position to deal out punishment if causality be established……
Indeed, we become morally accountable as a consequence of fear and terror” (Butler, 2005).
Butler argues that self-narration is only possible in the “face of a “you” who asks me to
give an account”, whereby being in a relation to the other is a sina qua non of the process
38

of accounting for oneself. In fact “…the kind of narrative required in an account we give of
ourselves accepts the presumption that the self has a causal relation to the suffering of others
(and eventually, through bad conscience, to oneself)” (Butler, 2005).

Interestingly enough “The narrative does not emerge after the fact of causal agency but con-
stitutes the prerequisite condition for any account of moral agency we might give” (Butler,
2005).

This suggests that moral agency and the ability to account of oneself as a moral being,
depends on our acceptance of ourselves as humans with causal agency. Our behavior, acts
and thoughts can, and do effect others; they engender affects, desired and undesired. And
as researcher I am also liable to account for myself as a moral agent, and to stand in a moral
relation to those I am researching, as “a subject of conscience and, hence, a subject who re-
flects upon herself in some way” (Butler, 2005). Motivated less than “by a terrorized fear of
punishment and its injurious effects” as Nietzsche claimed, I experience my moral reflexivity
as a struggle; a struggle to “craft the self” and a struggle “or primary dilemma to be pro-
duced by a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way” (Butler, 2005).

I call upon asylum seekers in my research to provide accounts of themselves, yet must first
deliberate my own account and craft a response to “practices of the self” that inaugurate my
own reflexivity. I am free in this struggle, yet not entirely free. In the same way I recognise
myself as subject, I am compelled to “acknowledge the limits of self-knowledge” (Butler,
2005). Butler posits a explanation of the formation of an ethical self which is grounded in the
opacity of the subject; a subject which is nevertheless “formed in the context of relations that
become partially irrecoverable to us” (Butler, 2005). Butler argues that our relations to oth-
ers are the mainstay of our responsibility for the other as ethical beings, and that accounts of
oneself given to others are necessarily social, even though our narratives may be singular.

This begs the question of the type of relation to the other which may be necessary in order
to be(come) an ethical subject. Is it one of fear and terror as Nietzsche would suggest, which
leads to an “internalization of morality” (Butler, on Nietzsche, 2005), or is the ethical subject
formed in relations of unknowingness, and opacity, as Butler would suggest? I would tend to
argue that the Nietzschean perspective can lead to great cynicism and prefer personally to
believe that morality is not founded on the basis of aggression, terror and punishment alone.
If one’s capacity as an ethical subject is relational, then recognition is an important aspect of
that relation and the delineation between those who qualify as a subject and those who do
not is, according to Foucault, constrained by the “regime of truth” in which we operate.

The implication here is that my relation to myself is simultaneously also a relation to the
truth regime, since the truth regime “governs subjectivation” (Butler, 2005). So “to call into
question a regime of truth….is to call into question the truth of myself and, indeed, to ques-
tion my ability to tell the truth about myself, to give an account of myself” (Butler, 2005).
Butler raises a number of important questions regarding who is and who is not a recogniz-
able subject according to the norms installed in the truth regime and secondly “where and
who is this other, and can the notion of the other comprise the frame of reference and
normative horizon that hold and confer my potential for becoming a recognizable subject?”
(Butler, 2005). The “camp” appears to comprise its own “truth regime”; a regime wherein
some members count more than others, in which some are more subject than others, some
more recognized and recognizable than others.

Butler (2005) reminds us that:

“Not every condition of the subject is open to revision, since the conditions of formation are not
always recuperable and knowable, even as they live on, enigmatically, in the impulses that are our
own. Whether as a deliberately reflexive attitude toward the self or as a mode of living what can
never be fully known, the subject becomes a problem for moral philosophy precisely because it
shows us how the human is constituted and deconstituted, the modes of its agentic self-making as
well as its ways of living on. When we come up against the limits of any epistemological horizon
and realize that the question is not simply whether I can or will know you, or whether I can be
known, we are compelled to realize as well that ‘you’ qualify in the scheme of the human within
which I operate, and that no “I” can begin to tell it’s story without asking: “Who are you?” “Who
speaks to me?” “To whom do I speak when I speak to you?” The mode of address conditions and
structures the way in which moral questions emerge”.
 39

How many times was I told “I am only human”, “I just want to be normal”, “It’s different
when you get ‘outside’”, “when you get your status they [personnel] treat you differently,
like one of them”, “I am not an object”, “I’m only an asylum seeker, that’s what they tell us”,
“don’t expect too much, you’re an asylum seeker”, “they don’t ask us anything, we are noth-
ing til we get our residency”, “the IND is like God”, “when I get out I’ll become a person
again”, “they say this is not possible, that is not possible, you’re here as an asylum seeker,
you’re not on holiday”, “we are like animals, waiting…to be slaughtered”,….. “I don’t feel
human any more, I hate myself”.

To be “undone” by the other is a “primal necessity” (Butler, 2005), but if I am not willing
to be “undone” by the other, then what chance for my research to be illuminated by the
sensibilities of humanity, or for it to fight in any way possible against the re-“incarnation of
homo sacer” (Agamben, 1998). What “mode of address” would I then use should I doubt
that asylum seekers were constituted as human beings? Lingis writes that “to approach you
with respect is to expose my seriousness of purpose to the flash fires of your laughter, expose
my cheerfulness to the darkness of your grief, let you put your blessing on my discomfiture
and suffering, expose myself to the shock waves of your curses. It is to expose myself to you –
expose myself to being violated, outraged, wounded by you” (Lingis, 2007) •
40

An (objectional)
interlude
Objects of research Please OBJECT!

I contemplate regularly how I address you, my informants in the field. As asylum

seekers? As fellow human beings? How did you view my requests to talk, my attempts
to get your accounts, my presence, observing, watching, listening, spying, gleaning,
prying? It felt like instrumentalisation. It was instrumentalisation. Setting you up to
be used, at every possible moment waiting to pounce on “interesting” stories, to dig
deeper, go further, uncover, discover, chipping away to reveal gold, silver, anything
that might be precious enough to include in my research. Was respect enough? Did I
respect you?

B., you questioned my motives on occasions, asking why I wanted to know certain
things, why I wanted to write everything down about your days, your life, your sleep-
ing arrangements, eating habits, desires and fears and emotions, your culture and
your religion? Why must I “write lives” and who is it good for? For me as researcher?
An Academic Pimp living off the pain and misery of the subaltern (Veissiere, 2010,
Diversi & Finley, 2009), in guise as a friend, a helper, with noble ideals of empower-
ment, working for the cause. F…ck empowerment. Stuff the cause. I want data, infor-
mation, stories, narratives. Interesting stuff that I can analyze and write up. Don’t I?

I shared my unease with you B. and with others. Indeed, some of you even comment-
ed that you felt like “objects”. I framed you in a discourse as asylum seekers, and I see
you as such. Am I capable of seeing you as “humans”, as you put it B., or do I look on
you purely as this political category of the other – the asylum seeker? It’s true that at
every encounter, be it in the “camp”, at the sports club, in the shop, I am eager, ready
and waiting for news. I feel at times not capable of having a normal conversation. My
listening has changed, my observational skills have sharpened.

You reassure me B. that I have gained the trust of many. And it certainly feels that
way. But it remains difficult. I feel a certain sense of shame at just being at the camp,
never mind at scrutinizing your moves, listening to your every word, and making men-
tal notes of your actions. B. and Leyla and Lianne, you look to the long term. You say
you no longer think any more that I am there for research, it’s more like a friendship.
Do you wonder whether I might “abandon” you once my research is done? That will
not be the case. But how to live up to the expectations of being more than just a re-
searcher?

I have asked you how to make sure that my research is shared with those who have
helped to make it come about. There are no easy answers, as a number of you are, to
be honest not really interested in my work. All this talk of research, of academics goes
beyond you. You are willing to co-operate but fail to ascertain what the long-term
benefits might be. Will there indeed be any long-term benefit I wonder? Who’ll read
this stuff anyway? Most of you are so caught up in the everyday ordinariness of living,
to dare to hope that this research will make a difference.

To some of you I feel I can offer consolation, solace or just plain information. “But I
can’t help a lot” I remark. “We don’t need big help, we only need someone who can
listen. Someone to phone if there is something we don’t understand. We know you
cannot give us a status. We do not need this from you. But we need someone like you
who can be there, who is interested in us. Big things we don’t need”. I feel somewhat
reassured.

I have an urge to convince you that my motives are honest? And what to do with feel-
ings of guilt, or even anger when I hear from one that the other is “bad”, a “liar”, “no
 41

good”. How am I affected by these tales and how do they affect the quality of my nar-
rating, or re-telling? S. gives me the creeps with his piercing eyes, and his continual
hounding of Leyla for a relationship leaves me feeling anything but sympathetic with
his plight. Yet, what of his account? Who am I to doubt his sincerity? There is a power
differential between us. We are different. But why don’t you OBJECT more?

My armchair feels quite comfortable. If I like I could sit and ask you questions, refer-
ring to my topic list and awaiting your response. I would listen attentively and make
notes, trying to be as objective as possible. A tape recorder is handy, ensuring that
I hear every sigh, every hesitation, allowing me to concentrate on your body move-
ments, to record all that I see and hear. I may repeat some questions, following one
line of thought then another, to reveal deeper insights, or provide thicker meanings.
I would try to make you feel at ease by nodding and making gentle sounds in affirma-
tion, leaning closer, tilting my head and gesturing you to go on with your story. When
I thought I had enough information, I’d thank you for your time, close my notepad,
switch off the recorder, shake hands and leave you to it. Pleased with myself. A suc-
cessful interview. I managed to ask everything I wanted to and you replied to all my
questions. At worst I may have to return once more to clarify a few things, but hope-
fully not.

You are B. From Iraq. Before you were an Officer in the Republican Guard. A man
with status, power. You had a good life, you said. Before the invasion. Your wife is a
pharmacist and together you ran a couple of pharmacies. You were in charge of an in-
fantry battalion. You were “someone” you said, but now you’re here. Alone, with your
oldest son. Your wife and two small daughters are still in Baghdad, alone. It’s not safe
there and you worry a lot about them. You worry about your son too. About whether
he can grow up to be a good Muslim here. You share a room at the camp, which can
only just accommodate the two single beds that line the walls. It’s not what you are
accustomed to. I come to visit every week. I sit on your bed and worry whether it’s
acceptable to sit on the prayer mat, or even to touch it. And I drink lukewarm coffee
and we talk. You look searchingly at me and address me with “what do you think it is
like, can you imagine, that I was an Officer there? I had status, a job, I was important,
I was somebody. And here I am nobody. When I go to bed at night, I sleep a whole
night and I still wake up in the morning with nothing, I am still nobody. Do you know
what it feels like to lose your dignity?” You do not expect me to know, or to have an
answer, so I just listen as you explain what it feels like.

You do, I believe, trust me. Yet for me this trust is not a “‘Trojan horse’ to get behind
defense walls of the interview subjects, laying their private lives open and disclosing
information to a stranger, which they may later regret” (Kvale, 2006). Although it
could be. My moral and ethical predicaments are real. The “privilege differential” is
real (Diversi & Finley, 2010). I wish you would object more. It might make me feel
better.

“Is there, in the end, anything that we, the privileged, can say or do about the downtrod-
den, or our vision of the downtrodden, without it being condescending at best, and ex-
ploitative at worst”?
(Veissiere, 2010).

We stand in a relation to one another, an ethical relation. I ask you “who are you”?
but do not expect a “full or final answer”. For once I say “Oh now I know who you
are”: at this moment I cease to address you, or to be addressed by you” (Butler, 2005).
I must accept that my curiosity will never be fully satisfied and I have to acknowledge
the limits of my knowing. Your objections sustain me – the disorientation I undergo
when you address me for an account of myself dispossesses me of my authority as
expert and exposes the incoherence in my own narrative. In our quest to know each
other, we nevertheless have learned to suspend “the demand for self-identity or more
particularly, for complete coherence”, which counters “a certain ethical violence,
which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require
that others do the same. For subjects who invariably live within a temporal horizon,
this is a difficult, if not impossible, norm to satisfy” (Butler, 2005).
42

We cannot, and do not want to satisfy this norm.

Our opacity is revealed and instead of lamenting our lack of transparency, we forego
mastery over our relation of dependency, and over each other, objecting every now
and then, and proceed with an “acceptance of the limits of knowability in oneself and
others” (Butler, 2005) •
 43

Please Ac-count for

your-self
“To respect you is to recognize and acknowledge the one you are, the one you affirm yourself to
be. In practice to respect a child, a foreigner, a street person, a delinquent is to listen to him or her
tell his or her story”

(Lingis, 2007)

I saw the official from the Ministry interviewing B. behind her computer. Tick, tick tick, tap,
tap, tap, went the keyboard. Itch, itch, as an arm disappeared under her woolen sweater, as
she conversed with B. without actually addressing him. Talking as she was to the translator.
I contemplated how she could possibly know him enough to make a decision on his case, as
she apologized that he had had to wait unnecessarily for 9 months for his second interview
because of a “miscommunication”, a “mix up with his file”. 9 months long, 9 months extra
living in the camp, separated from his wife and daughters. But not to worry, she explained,
the authorities were now back on track. How much longer their investigation would take,
she couldn’t say. It was wise though for him to have more of his documents translated into
Dutch, as “they all look the same to me”, she said, flicking through the papers in her massive
grey file. And even though “we are good at the IND, we can’t do everything”. Sniff, sniff,
sniff; tissue to her nose, nose blown, tissue bundled back in the arm of her sleeve.

B. had a meeting in Den Bosch, to do the second part of his first interview. That first in-
terview had taken place some 9 months earlier, but due to the “mix-up” there had been no
progress since. I drove him there. Some 2 hours in the car, saving him a 4 hour journey on
public transport which would have had to begin a 4.30 am had he used the day ticket provid-
ed by the COA. “Sorry, we can’t allow you to stay overnight at an AZC close to Den Bosch
because you can get there and back in one day on public transport” the official had told B.
B. had argued that this was an important meeting – one in which he’d have to recount the
details once again of his coming to the Netherlands. It would last the whole day, so surely the
official could understand he needed to be rested, and getting up before 4 am would hardly be
conducive to that. “No, we can’t do that, because then you’d also need two day-tickets and
the rules say that if you can get public transport there and back on the same day, we can only
give you a one day-ticket”. End of argument. So that’s how I’d come to offer B. a lift. Two
day-tickets was not reasonable according to the official in charge.

“The reimbursement of eligible costs will be judged reasonably according to the degree of neces-
sity with which they are borne. What is deemed reasonable may differ per individual or per situ-
ation…..[under reasonable] are meant costs which are essential for the asylum seeker” (COA,
Instructions Reimbursement of Extraordinary Costs, Article 17 Rule Allowances for Asylum
Seekers – Rva 2005)

It was early nonetheless, there was a great deal of mist in the morning, so the first hour we
trailed slowly, following the mist lamps of the cars ahead. “We like the fog” in Iraq, B. laughed.
“We never get it there, so we like it a lot”. The radio played low and our conversation turned
from one telling to another, from one subject to the other. From the weather to the impending
interview, to the hope and longing of wanting to be united with one’s family, to despair at end-
less waiting and uncertainty. Religion reared its head in talks of freedom and rights, gays and
lesbians, and I felt the urge swell in me to defend democracy and liberalism, above all else. Es-
pecially when talk turned to conspiracy theories on 9/11, and got intensely heated, charged and
exciting. “Where were all the Jews on that day, why didn’t they die?” he asked. “And why do
you think the Americans invaded us? It was for the oil all along. They knew we had no weap-
ons of mass destruction, no Al-Qaeda on our soil”. Was I just as brainwashed as B., just as

8.
much intent on consolidating my own grand narrative as he was? I listened on, then changed
the subject to women, Muslim women in fact and to oppression, and to domination by Muslim
men, to corporal punishment, stoning, physical punishment, honor killings and the rest. Trying,
dying to illicit a response. Even the score. It was a “relation of forces between bodies, and a
dynamic capacity of affecting and being affected” (Parisi & Terranova, 2007).
44

The fog cleared, so I could take my eyes off the road, and I glimpsed sideways every now
and then at B. to observe his facial reactions, his gestures, to spy any discomfort he might
manifest. What was I doing, calling him to account for a whole history of abuse, trying to get
him to admit a causal relation between being a Muslim and violence against women? Why?
Annoyance, tiredness, confusion or just plain enjoyment of the confrontation? He saw no re-
lation to his religion, condemning the interpretation of Islam, my interpretation, and the fail-
ure of the educational system at the hands of dictators disseminating terror and fear, leading
to extremism. And what of the Danish cartoonist B. questioned? A subject we had discussed
many a time. “Is it so vital in the name of freedom to offend others?” he repeated. “To which
end?” We couldn’t reach agreement; we didn’t need to reach agreement. The exchange
induced a nervous tension, confounded by mismatched expectations and a clash of worlds
and of meanings. As Denzin argues “..humans live in a secondhand world of meanings. They
have no direct access to reality. Reality as it is known is mediated by symbolic representation,
by narrative texts and by cinematic and televisual structures that stand between the person
and the so-called real world” (Denzin, 1997). Our texts were “messy” (Denzin, 1997), elabo-
rations of what we “knew” or had heard, or in some way have experienced.

Intense fabulations of our own realities, which made us “vital” and “alive”, receptive to the
“felt aliveness given in the preindividual bodily capacities to act, engage and connect – to
affect and be affected” (Clough, 2007). We affected one another, and put at stake our own
emergence as “subjects of conscience and hence, a subject who reflects upon herself in some
way” (Butler, 2005). Was this interlocutory scene also injurious? Was this “scene of address”
accusatory or “…minimally, an allegation?” (Butler, 2005). Our desire was not to accuse one
another, more “..a desire to know and understand…..a desire to explain and narrate that is
not prompted by a terror of punishment” (Butler, 2005). Our journey continued thereafter
uneventful.

We entered the IND building together. I could not help but feel tremors when approach-
ing the desk, anticipating a question to reveal my identity, state the reason of my presence
and to be ushered away into some back room to wait. B. announced himself. By coincidence
the interpreter entered at the same time. It was the same person as in B.’s first interview.
B. uttered something about me being with him and asked whether it would be possible for
me to attend the meeting. We had spoken of this possibility in the car. B. wanted me “to see
what it’s like in an interview” as it would “be useful for my research”. However, fearful that
our “relationship” might be used by the authorities in a sinister way, to somehow prevent his
wife and children from joining him in the future, (“they will think we have a relationship //
that must be avoided // why would you otherwise bring me so early // we must tell them that
you were coming here for your work today, no that your husband was coming here and he
dropped us off // we must say I am a friend of your husband’s, not you // they check every-
thing and want to use every excuse so that I can’t bring my wife here”) B. had fabricated a
story of how I came to be there. I refused to go along, however. “OK, OK, no problem, we
won’t say anything”. The interpreter as it turned out had no problem with me attending the
interview. Now it was down to the official.

She was short, around thirty, impish face, brown hair dyed blond, but which had turned
a slightly unfortunate orange colour. Grey and white striped woolen sweater, black tight
trousers made of stretch polyester clinging far too tightly to her pear-shaped hips. Miniscule
feet, of the kind in ancient China – bound to retain their tininess – wearing black leather
boots. Indiscernible and made to look even smaller under her floppy black trousers. She was
slightly taken aback by the prospect of an(other) onlooker, but agreed to it as long as “you
don’t speak”. I assured her that I was only there for moral support and that I would keep
quiet. She agreed. We were first ushered to the waiting room, whilst she conferred with the
interpreter.

Picture a waiting room at an international airport somewhere. Anywhere. The noise, the
smells, children running around, the play area, food being eaten, drinks being drunk, the
machine dispensing coca cola, TV’s, tables, chairs, lounge stools, a guard watching incon-
spicuously in the corner seemingly minding his own business, people talking, some quietly
contemplating, others head in arms, waiting. Colourful clothing, garb from diverse conti-
nents, women in headscarves, men in flip flops, even a tall what looks like Somali man with
pink crocs adorning his feet. A mish mash of bodies. Waiting. But this is no airport and
those here are not waiting to be flown to some exotic holiday destination or to return to
their home shores after a continental get away or business flurry. They are all waiting for an
interview of some sort with an official to tell their stories, to hopefully booster their asylum
 45

requests so that they can eventually stay in the Netherlands. Around forty of them today. We
take our places, me and B. in the midst of them all. Chitter chatter, chitter chatter, rhythmi-
cally following the pattern of the two year old who pulls a broken lorry on a rope incessantly
round and round in a circle. In one door, out through the other, time and time again. In a
circle, going round in circles, repeatedly, time after time after time. Like, I guess, many of
those here feel.

“I feel like we are animals, herded in here to be called one by one to the
slaughter”

B. comments.

“At times like this, I hate myself, I can hate myself. I feel I must BEG and say
PLEASE, can I stay here?
I have nothing.
I must depend on the IND for everything. I am like a
Criminal
in the Police Station.
It’s like interrogation.
They constantly ask you things,
to try to catch you out,
to check if you are telling the

truth.

They don’t trust us anyway”.

“The awareness of inferiority means that one is unable to keep out of consciousness the formula-
tion of some chronic feeling of the worst sort of insecurity, and this means that one suffers anxiety
and perhaps even something worse, if jealousy is really worse than anxiety. The fear that others
can disrespect a person because of something he shows means that he is always insecure in his
contact with other people; and this insecurity arises, not from mysterious and somewhat disguised
sources, as a great deal of our anxiety does, but from something which he knows he cannot fit.
Now that represents an almost fatal deficiency of the self-system, since the self is unable to dis-
guise or exclude a definite formulation that reads, ‘I am inferior. Therefore people will dislike me
and I cannot be secure with them’”
(Perry, Gawel & Gibbon, 1956)

The official calls us in.

Wonder…. wondering what might happen. Heart beating fast. Look of anticipation on B’s
face. Clutching my bag, armed with recorder which would remain OFF during the meeting.
What if? What if they would search me? Why had I brought the stupid thing anyway? I knew
I wouldn’t use it. Itwasjustathoughtatthetime. I felt as though every single eye in the room
could see through my bag, assessing its contents, piercing its leather exterior, prying inside.
Opening the box in which my secret machine was housed. Maybe. They knew.

Composure… “…the relationship between an emotionally competent stimulus and the feeling
that may emerge is not linear. The process encounters numerous types of interference. For
instance, the physiological response of the body is not only a reaction to the stimulus but can
also be informed by memories of the stimulus and prior reactions to it by oneself and others”
(Ducey, 2007). It felt like each time I pass the reception at the camp; the control post. STOP.
Who walks there? I stood up, tried to walk calmly, head high, notwantingtoattractanykindofat-
tentiontomyself. I looked to B., the official and the interpreter. Searching for clues that they
might know; a nod of the head, a glance downwards, an utterance, slowing down, hesitations,
anything. Two levels of play were at work: “..that of intensity, a state of suspense, of poten-
tial disruption; and that of semantics and semiotics, of language, narrative and expectations.
These two levels resonate with one another; their vibrations are sometimes dissonant and at
other times harmonious. Affect is ‘their point of emergence’ and their ‘vanishing point’ where
the vibrations between the levels either emerge as something actual or fade into the virtual.
Affect therefore shadows every event. It is the source of the unexpected, of the unmotivated,
of surprise” (Ducey, 2007). I conceded to being shadowed and followed them painstakingly to
the “interrogation” room, only feeling safe once we were in and the door was closed behind us.
Guards, police, receptionists left downstairs to control the real problems; the asylum seekers.
46

The rhythmic ticking and tapping at the typewriting machine began. Only stopping when the
official lowered the screen to peer at me and to ask me my name for the file. She sat almost
opposite me, with two desks pushed together in between us. The interpreter sat at her left
hand side; B. sat next to me, diagonally from the official. She pushed the screen higher when
I said “Kim Tsai”, and from that point on I could only see her face when she leaned slightly
to the left towards the interpreter. She addressed B. via the interpreter, scarcely looking
at him, all the while staring at the screen or looking at the interpreter, a burly, heavy- set
man from Syria. From time to time she looked at B.; usually in moments of pause when the
question had to be repeated and when she could lift her fingers from the keyboard. In mo-
ments of hesitation, gaps in the conversation, when uncertainty prevailed or when clarity was
sought. For the report. For the official account.

First an insignificant apology for the wait. B. later said “I have to wait almost one year be-
tween interviews because of a miscommunication and she is sorry”. Then a going over of the
account which B. had given 275 days earlier. 275 days of separation from his family in Iraq.
275 days of waiting, somewhat unnecessarily. Discounted with a quick “sorry” uttered in a
moment of….guilt….or necessity….for the report, for the official account maybe?

The report of the hearing in December 2009 started with the standard questions in the
beginning: “can you understand the interpreter?”, “did you get the brochure – ‘your asylum
request’?”, “did you understand the brochure?”, “are there medical reasons why we can-
not proceed?”, “are you physically and mentally able to proceed with the hearing?”, “if you
have difficulty with any questions during the hearing, will you please make your difficulties
known?”, “if you would like a pause during the hearing, will you please say so?”, “any ques-
tions so far?”. Then a request for additional information regarding B’s first official asylum
request in 2007. “Why did you not inform us that you were an Officer during your initial
asylum request in 2007?”, “when to when did you complete your study at the military acad-
emy?”, “what is the name of the military academy where you did your study?”, “on which
date did you get your diploma?”, “what did you learn during your study?”, “did you do an
internship during your training?”, “what kind of practical training did you do?”, “what were
the names of your teachers?”, “when did you become a member of the Ba’ath party?”, “how
was your career in the Ba’ath party?”, “how was the selection process for the Republican
Guards?”, “on which date did you hear that you were selected for the Republican Guards?”,
“did you have to have a medical examination then?”, “did you have to have a screening to
be admitted?”, “did you have to prove loyalty to the Republican Guards?”, “did you have to
carry out certain activities to prove your loyalty?”, “how did you have to show that you were
loyal to the regime?”, “when exactly did you join the Republican Guards, which date?”, “did
you do a basic training to get into the Republican Guards?”, “until when exactly were you a
member of the Republic Guards?”, “what was your rank?”, “why did you get promotion to
another rank?”, “which regiment did you belong to?”, “who was your commander?”, “who
was the commander of the sport activities?”, “where did you work and can you describe your
activities in an exact manner?”, “did you train people?”, “which training did you give?”,
“where were your headquarters?”, “which commander transferred you to the Al-Nida divi-
sion, what was his name?”, “what were your tasks in the Al-Nida division?”, “who was your
commander in the Al-Nida division?”. Question followed question, requesting B. to account
for each move, each action, each switch, as accurately as possible, with names, exact dates,
precise locations. A detailed account of his whereabouts, motivations, movements was re-
quired. For the report, for the official account.

Then the report shifts to the reason for B.’s asylum request now. “you get the possibility to
now tell me in your own words why you left your country on 20th August 2009. I request you
to tell me as much as possible in strict chronological order, including names, places and exact
dates”. The report states: “B. declared the following:” and then goes on, in a one and half
page account, to summarize B’s motivation for leaving Iraq. Before 2009 B. had already been
in the Netherlands in September 2007, with his whole family and they had then requested
asylum. Due to the fact that they had been fingerprinted in Greece, their request was turned
down and they were forced to return to Iraq. B’s wife returned first with their daughters,
following what B. called “considerable pressure from officials”. Medical help was withdrawn
from his wife, who also had psychological problems at that time due to the stress. B’s later
return to Iraq with his son was a conscious decision, due to the kidnapping of his brother. B.
paid the ransom, but his brother was executed and found later in a mortuary in the city. Af-
ter some months trying to make a new life in Iraq, the fear of being liquidated by militia, the
stress of constantly moving around to avoid being located, the anxiety of his brother’s death,
and the arbitrary killings of former officers, culminated in the kidnapping of his son. The boy
 47

was held for a few days before being released on the payment of a large ransom sum, and B.
returned with his son to the Netherlands, leaving mother and the two young daughters alone
in Iraq.

The first part of the official account concluded with:

“Have you said everything of importance for your asylum request?”

The (first) meeting was ended at 16.00 hours due to a lack of time (to continue).

“Are you pleased with the way this meeting has gone?”
“Do you have further comments about this meeting?”
“Do you want to say anything about me or the interpreter?”
“Did you understand the interpreter?”
“Do you have any reason for not wanting me to conduct the following hearing?” she asked
on 9 December 2009. The hearing resumed on 275 days later on 10 September 2010. I was
present then. What of an account of the 275 days lost, I pondered, knowing that there would
be no answer forthcoming.

The rhythmic ticking and tapping at the typewriting machine began again, as she got ready
for the final part of the first hearing.

Note in the report: “Mrs Kim Tsai is present at the hearing. Concerned has asked if she may
be present during the meeting”. Followed by: “I would like to apologize for the procedure.
Due to a miscommunication your file has been at the 1F unit and it has recently been sent
back to our office in Den Bosch. Once again my apologies. Today we are going to finish the
first hearing which we began on 9th December 2009”. The date today is 10th September 2010.

The rhythmic ticking and tapping at the typewriting machine continued as the official posed
the first set of standard questions; a repetition of the questions on 9th December 2009. “Are
there medical reasons why we cannot proceed?”, “are you physically and mentally able to
proceed with the hearing?”, “if you have difficulty with any questions during the hearing, will
you please make your difficulties known?”, “if you would like a pause during the hearing, will
you please say so?”, “any questions so far?”. The interview continued. I looked on, observing
the rhythmic ticking and tapping at the typewriting machine, the regular itching under the
collar, on the shoulder, under the sleeve clamped tight at the wrist. Tick, tick tick, tap, tap,
tap, went the keyboard. Itch, itch, as an arm disappeared under her woolen sweater, as she
conversed with B. without actually addressing him, without looking up.

Touch came to mind. The touch of her fingers against the keyboard. The touch of her fingers,
her hand against her skin as they glided up and down her arm, her shoulder, her back. In
and out, up and down. Soft caresses or rough scratching? Sniff, sniff, sniff; tissue to her nose,
nose blown, tissue bundled back in the arm of her sleeve. But was she “touched” by the
experience, was the experience “touching” her in other ways. I sensed none of the blurring
of boundaries between self and other. Touch was here not “the experience par excellence” in
which transformation was possible by an “evocation of close relationality” as Puig de la Bel-
lacasa would have it (2009).

Puig de la Bellacasa invites us to re-explore what touch means. Touch in its literal and figural
sense – as “an invitation to re-think relationality and its corporeal character, as well as a
desire for concrete, tangible, engagement with worldly transformation” (Puig de la Bellacasa,
2009). In fact, I could not help but notice the distance between B. and the official, despite
their relative close proximity to one another in the physical sense. The clinical setting, the
legalized discourse of the “hearing”, the reading out of statements as one might expect in
a court of law, the mechanistic accounting of oneself and the rhythmical movements of the
official’s body as she registered the account, combined with the formalized intermediation of
an interpreter who reduced the need to even look at the interviewee, or dare I say “defend-
ant”, to practically nil and the lack of “engagement” on anything other than a technical level
with B.’s story.

I detected no move towards relationality; just an expectance of narrative completeness and

coherence, conspiring with a desire to capture the essence of the account and to achieve clo-
sure at the end of it. But coherence is suspect, as Butler (2005) points out. It has a way of im-
posing itself on narratives, thereby “foreclosing an ethical resource – namely an acceptance
48

of the limits of knowability of oneself and others. To hold a person accountable for his or her
life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life in order to satisfy the
criterion of a certain kind of ethics, one that tends to break with relationality”.
Was it desirable in these circumstances to “think with touch”, to open up the “potential to
inspire a sense of connectedness that can further problematize abstractions and disengage-
ments of (epistemological) distances – between subjects and objects, knowledge and the
world, affects and facts, politics and science?” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009). I was confused. I
am confused. I hear calls for “distance”, for “objectivity”, for “less authority of lone offi-
cials”, for “better adherence to rules and procedures” from asylum seekers themselves; calls
which ring alongside and inhabit the same spaces as pleas for “more humanity”, “less space
between us and them”, “reducing the gap”, “treat us like humans not numbers”. From the
same asylum seekers.

The “lure of touch” is appealing (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009). It is seductive in its opening up
of new possibilities for looking at relationality, and for addressing questions of affect, feeling
and knowing. Was the absence of touch here indicative of “untouchability”, or a “shielding”
of the senses by the official? Or was it a lack of “trust”, this latter being “the unavoidable
condition to allow openness to touching, to relation and corporeal immanent risk?” (Puig de
la Bellacasa, 2009). Is there such a thing as being too “touched?” Did I need to take more
distance from my informants, or was it a question of an “erotic oscillation” as described
by Marks “in which the desire of banishing distances is in tension with the letting go of the
other?” (Marks, 2002). I could hardly sense a being touched, or a being which was touched,
in the interview room, during the interrogation. The practice of the official appeared barely
embodied; it was bare, matter of factual, a rational accounting of the Other void of self-
questioning, in which there seemed to be no room “to risk ourselves precisely at moments of
unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness
to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human” (Butler,
2005).

The rhythmic ticking and tapping at the typewriting machine droned on, as she asked the
next set of standard questions. Tick, tick tick, tap, tap, tap, went the keyboard. Itch, itch, as
an arm disappeared under her woolen sweater, as she conversed with B. without actually ad-
dressing him, without looking at him.

Abu Z. says “we cannot understand the authority of the investigator. They can do anything
with us. The problem is that they do not look at us as people, as humans. They put a dis-
tance, levels between us and them, so they don’t need to see us as human beings. We are
numbers, files. Time is not the same for them. They don’t know what it is to be separated
from your family all this time. We’re just numbers on paper, not real people, with real fami-
lies and feelings. The distance makes it easier for them to treat us like that. It’s not fair”.

17.30 hours, the end of the interview. 275 days after the first interview had taken place. The
result: a several page account of B. As Butler succinctly puts it: “The relationship between
the interlocutors is established as one between a judge who reviews evidence and a suppli-
cant trying to measure up to an indecipherable burden of proof”. Was this normal I asked
myself? To “(violently) require that another do a certain violence to herself, and do it in
front of us by offering a narrative account or issuing a confession”? •
 49

An (normal)
interlude
Reflections on NORMality

My sense of norm-ality is jammed up.

What is Normal anyway?
“you think other, and
we think other” B. says

“We cannot think like

YOU” “I think You are not Normal”

The taken-for-grantedness of it all is challenged by

the CONFRONTATION with a new sense
of normality. One in which
normal-ity needs
Reconfiguring

down,

Back to front, and

to back
inside out
out -side
in

Whose normal is normal anyway?

“The immediate presence of normals is likely to reinforce this split between self-de-
mands and self, but in fact self-hate and self-derogation can also occur when only he
and a mirror are about” (Goffman, 1963)

Old certainties crumble when we

must face the ‘Other’ when
we look him in the eye and see an i which is
Other than i

Then B turned to me and said .. “people don’t like to go out very much. When you
have something not normal in your life, you like to stay quiet. You think about these
things. You do not like to talk all the time with others”.

Reflections, 29th October 2010 •

50

Touched by Leyla
A poem written by Leyla on 9 december 2010

Медленно бьется сердце мое, бездна боли в душе.

Жизнь по сути мука, смерть и потеря везде.
Мир так велик, но тесно в нем,не дышится мне. Он без любви, он полон крови и лжи.
Теряем родных, любовь, надежду и веру в себя.
Слезы рекой по щеке, уста застывают в мольбе.
В душе пустота, она блуждает во тьме.
Невыносимая боль, прошлое следом во сне.
Разве это жизнь? Это ад на земле.

Mijn hart klopt langzaam, de ziel een afgrond van pijn.

Het leven is in wezen een marteling - dood en verlies zijn overal.
De wereld is groot, maar hij lijkt klein. Ik kan niet ademen, voel me benauwd.
Hij is zonder liefde, vol van bloed en leugens.
We verliezen verwanten, liefde, hoop en vertrouwen in onszelf.
De tranen als rivieren op de wangen, de lippen verstijfd in een smeekbede.
In de ziel is leegte, zij zwerft in de duisternis.
Een onverdraaglijke pijn, verleden achtervolgt in dromen.
Is het een leven? Dit is een hel op aarde.

My heart beats slowly, the soul a painful abyss.

Life is torture in essence – death and loss are everywhere.
The world is big, but it seems small. I cannot breath, I feel oppressed.
It is without love, full of blood and lies.
We lose loved ones, love, hope and trust in ourselves.
Tears are like a river on the cheeks, lips numb from begging for help.
Emptiness fills the soul, wandering in obscurity.
An unbearable pain, a past that catches up in dreams.
Is this living? This is hell on earth.

“To perceive the importance of things that have to be protected, nurtured or rescued is to perceive
what has to be done. What has to be done becomes what I have to do, when what has to be done
is urgent and I am the one who is there and has the resources” (Lingis, 2007)

An engagement with Leyla is to be touched by a “recognition of vulnerability” (Puig de la

Bellacasa, 2009). It is an encounter of hope, sadness, courage and vitality, in a bedding of
apathetic twists of fate that enable a “vision of non-separation between knowing and being-
relating, such an account of the closeness of touch stands for a conception in which ‘know-
ing does not come from standing at a distance and representing the world but rather from a
direct material engagement with the world’”(Barad, 2007). It is an effacement of the divide
between touching and observing; one in which readily conceived assumptions are challenged
by the blurring of borders between subject and object, whereby worlds are “done and undone
through encounters, which are not always those we might expect” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009).

I had heard about Leyla from B. and from some others. A lone mother from the Caucuses,
with four children. Nobody really knew much about her background, only that when she first
came she was modest in her dress, wearing a headscarf and long clothing. Now she had be-
come somewhat more modern, and had dumped the headscarf. She supposedly hung around
with Armenians (the thieves as I had been told by the Iraqi’s), sharing as they did a common
language, Russian and a common enemy, the Russians. I would have had no opportunity to
really talk to Leyla had I not spotted her on a regular basis when collecting one of my own

9.
children from Tae Kwondo lessons. I took the chance to talk to her whilst peering through
the glass window at my son, at our children, at the sports school. She invited me to visit her
and we took it from there.

What struck me at first was her beauty, and the sadness which pervaded her whole being.
Her mid-length jet-black hair contrasts with grey-green powdery eyes, and pale skin.
 51

Images of Snow White spring to mind, of black hair and ebony skin, a wicked stepmother
and a magic mirror. Leyla is only thirty one years of age, but married at fourteen, and had
her first child at around sixteen. A daughter. Three more children followed, with a gap of
some years in between, and now she is alone with a fifteen year old daughter, two sons of
eight and seven and a daughter of six. She worries about her eldest daughter especially.
There could be no sharper contrast between a splendid mother and a somewhat plain,
ordinary daughter, who gets pestered at school for having “rabbit teeth”, and a rather spotty
exterior. In the lowest level of Dutch education, Leyla’s daughter is also not the brightest
and would seem to be lacking even the slightest iota of critical self-reflection. On occasions I
have had to chat with her daughter, primarily about school, the problems with school and her
part in those problems, her descriptive vocabulary extends no more than to a description of
school as “boring”; she can in no way imagine that her own aggression and fast-paced chat-
tering, which makes her barely understandable, make her an easy target to be pestered; and
she seems unawares of the consequences of her own behavior, for school mates, teachers and
her mother.

Leyla has deep-seated psychological problems and receives treatment in a psychiatric unit
far from the “camp”. This causes additional stress, as the train journey to and fro takes a
whole day; a day on which all children are kept home from school, taken care of by the eldest
daughter. She receives no reimbursement of train fares, and has to pay the costs out of her
meager allowance from the government. The COA refuse to pay on the grounds that she
should look for a doctor who is closer by, but Leyla refuses as she feels “comfortable” with
this doctor who, on Leyla’s own account, helps her “maintain her sanity”. Her face is marred
by past experiences, etched deep into her expressions. A child bride, snatched from the street
at the age of fourteen, by an unknown future husband from “the mountains”, who lay in wait
for her as she walked home unawares of her fate one day from the local shops. Within two
weeks virginity lost, married and disowned by her own family, although mother was to come
round later and maintain contact. Contact with father, whose pride was seized that day, was
never regained.

I heard the word “snatched” several times before it registered. I let it pass by, not know-
ing what to make of it, thinking it may be a metaphorical description used in those parts,
but it kept recurring in conversation, until I asked Leyla for an explanation. Her tone had
been so matter of fact, with an occasional giggle, just like the time she laughed hysterically
on recounting the very first time her husband had hit her. “He was jealous, and grabbed me
by the throat with his left hand and tried to strangle me. He couldn’t use his right hand”
she gestured, “as that was injured in the war”. “He grabbed me so tight that I kicked him as
hard as I could and fled into the bathroom. He came after me, but I had no voice anymore.
I couldn’t talk. He thought I was joking”. She laughed and laughed on recounting this story,
with her daughter looking on, grinning. “Yes, there’s a lot of violence against women, a lot
of hitting. But he only hit me six or seven times in nine years” she said, like it was the most
normal thing in the world.

My comprehension of the situation felt flawed at that moment. I had some faint recollection
of a documentary I had once seen on the practice of bride kidnapping, marriage by abduc-
tion or marriage by capture, as it is known, a widespread tradition in some countries of the
Caucasus including Leyla’s. According to recent articles (October 2010), the tradition is still
going strong with up to one in four brides starting married life after having been kidnapped.
Recent developments in the law have increased the fine to some $35,000, but critics and
women’s rights activists remain adamant that the practice is still rife. I was, however, not
primed at that moment to zoom in, or ask the right questions. I listened and took note, made
recordings and only when I heard the term a few times did I question the concept more. I
learnt and must re-learn in a process of “learning and forgetting”; a process involving the
“eliciting of local concepts” in which I was obliged to accept fluidity in terms of analysis and
the richness of polysemy, (Feuchtwang, 2010).

Leyla felt a compulsion to show me photographs, stashed under the sofa in her front room.
A room which was, by the way, spotless. Almost melting in the warmth of her unit which was
heated to around 25 degrees, I removed layer after layer until I sat, bare armed, looking at
her photos, side by side, partaking in “oohs” and “aaghs” at the sight of stocky women, burly
men, all of whom looked morbidly like the archetypical Caucasus male and of Leyla herself
feigning a Russian peasant woman in the countryside, anno 1918, approximately. She re-
called memories of nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins, her mother, her children and her husband,
showing photo after photo, at home, in the city, in the hills. Father was noticeably absent.
52

Talk of local food, corn, lamb, potatoes, of men eating separately from women, women doing
typical women’s work in the house “cooking, cleaning and looking after the children”, the
man taking care of “money for the family”, interspersed with the story of being “snatched”,
of “troubles” after the death of her husband, a man who was “twelve years older” and not
particularly handsome, a “commander”, and of differences in mentality between “city and
mountains”, religion and tradition, dreams and a failed suicide attempt. No order, no logic,
just fragment after fragment, pouring out, in a long sprawl of merging textual realities. It was
messy, at times epiphanic, evocative and poetic; at others grim, counterintuitive, panicky and
outrageous. This was “the poesis of the ordinary” which “draws attention and becomes ha-
bitual because things don’t just add up. Something throws itself together and then floats past
or sticks for some reason. Some such things have meaning per se; most have force in some
other form” (Stewart, 2008, italics in original).

Stories are thrown at me, expulsed, spewed out like vomit that cannot be held back for fear
of gagging. Like vomit. Chewed up, digested, coughed up tiny fragments, bits and pieces,
barely recognizable, apart from the odd lump or two which somehow manage to remain
whole, maintaining their former identity, or some semblance of it. Sometimes I heave on
hearing stories of despair, feel sick, reel at their stench and wish I could clear up the mess.
Yet knowing that the whole is constantly in transformation, or may in fact never even exist, I
get dizzy at the fragmentation, curious at how the parts fit together, trying to make sense of it
all. I endeavor to create some form of narrative, some way of retelling the stories I hear, the
situations I experience. That is my work as researcher “..like the historian, the biographer,
or the novelist – to shape individual and collective action, character and motive (Atkinson,
1990, in Atkinson, 1992). As Atkinson writes, transformation is part and parcel of the eth-
nographic writing process. Be it by the use of metaphors which “can encapsulate a vast array
of instances, types and categories” (Atkinson, 1992) or by the inescapable use of reflexivity
to recontextualise and delineate the social phenomenon in question, “the textual devices of
ethnographic writing portray readable worlds not through the literal but through the figura-
tive uses of language” (Atkinson, 1992).
I even feel some weird sense of guilt, vulnerability. I have been privileged enough to listen
to the personal accounts of all of these people, whilst who am I in fact to them? A student,
a researcher, a well of information, a helping hand, a spy? What if none of those to whom I
speak get happy endings? What if they, and their families all get refused? Kicked out, sent
back, put in detention centres, on the streets? No reunification, no hope, no happy end-
ings. Will they see it as coincidence, or complot? Will they think they’ve fed me too much
information, that I’ve somehow handed it out to the authorities, that I’m on the other side?
It’s disturbing for me. Sickening for them. The myriad ways in which I could produce a text
of the lives I have heard, the illusion of perfect re-construction, and academic pressures to
hand over a “readerly” text, fill me with apprehension. Will I be able to comply when I con-
template “the poetic thrust of our work together acts simultaneously to alert us both to the
relative inability of words to carry the true fullness of experience as well as to the absolute
richness of language and the almost inescapable desire inherent in wordmaking which com-
pels us to try to word our own worlds anyway” (Rasberry, 2001). And I may add, the complex
worlds of our research.

I oft times feel frustrated for my informants, and disturbed, experiencing pangs of guilt at
letting them, encouraging them, to talk to me. What if there’s a jinx on those who are com-
plicit in this research project? Bizarre and ridiculous as it may sound, but I can’t help myself,
can’t quite convince myself of the absurdity of my own thoughts. Governmental policy and
how it is implemented sickens me at times. Reels me to the point of disbelief and conster-
nation. It doesn’t make sense, yet it makes perfect sense and I even recognise many of the
dilemma’s of open borders, of marginalization and the drama of a multicultural dream gone
wrong.

“Why do they let us in?” A. asks. “If there’s a possibility to come, then the asylum seeker
will come. But then we come and [claps in his hands] the answer is no. Go back home. We
wait and wait and wait. I can’t say whether my future will be good. It’s not in my hands. It’s
not so easy”.

But what do I know of their lives before now? I can only guess how bad it must have been to
want to come here, how bad must it get before you go back, knowing everything has changed
in between? Does living in a garage for months with four children count as “bad enough?”
That’s what happened to Leyla. How do we judge which bad is bad enough to count? What
kind of proof is necessary anyway? And what becomes of those who are deported? What of
 53

their transformation, and that of their children? Is anything retrievable, even if you wanted
it to be? It’s like puzzle pieces which no longer fit together, which have been shattered and
torn apart, but which nonetheless find ways to reform, reshape, into who you are now, an
asylum seeker, a father, a mother, son, daughter, patient, ex-something or another, student,
friend, carer, confused and frustrated client of the system, actor, victim. The puzzle pieces
are disoriented for a while, but move and become new puzzles, adopting new forms, new
identities. You are there, you exist, in a multitude of ways, and your stories will comprise
different versions of the same tellings, (Denzin, 2009), “threads that we trace but never to
conclusion” (Marshall, in Schaafsma, 1996).

Various authors point out the tension between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text (At-
kinson, 1992, Rasberry, 2001). “The readable narratives and recognizable metaphors neces-
sarily reduce and subsume the complexities and indeterminacies of social life. The standard
literary forms of academic monographs (chapters, sub-headings, titles, indexes etc.) are also
arbitrary forms of classification and codification” (Atkinson, 1992). Which begs the question
how to textualise the field without “reducing the complexity of social life” and “imposing an
unwarranted degree of analytical closure?” (Atkinson, 1992). I engage with the words I write
and am compelled to consider time and again the appropriateness of what eventually reaches
the paper. The words open up new worlds of “listening, describing, wondering, interrogat-
ing – our own living, our own wording of our worlds – pedagogically, poetically” (Rasberry,
2001).

Leyla’s account screams out at me to be told. Non-violently, for she has suffered violence
enough. Her beauty screams out to be seen, yet it remains partially hidden, behind shadows
of painful memories and unborn hopes. It is too soon to hope. She is wooed and admired,
with brief flirtatious messages written on cards sent with bunches of flowers costing twenty
five Euros, or the equivalent of half a week’s allowance for an asylum seeker. Contrast this to
how Leyla is vilified with words, graffiti spouted for all to see next to the dustbins proclaim-
ing “Leyla bitch f…cks everything”. “Our writing, even if it is writing we sometimes choose
to name as poetry, is not simply about becoming poets. The “voice”……needs to be not only
“artistic and aimed at naming yourself [but also] political and focused on naming the world”
(Lensmire 1994a).

Words name things, they have impact, they explode lives or induce calm, incite passion or
thrust us into fits of giggles, making us laugh and cry together. “What is happening here?”
(Rasberry, 2001). To leave out Leyla’s wor(l)ds of despair and desperation would be to vio-
late her trust, yet they are not the whole story. The (w)hole can never be known anyway. But
I can try to make visible the partiality of this account, the disjunctures and the gaps, for even
though “words, I am beginning to think, are the specific barrier against seeing things clearly”,
they are “at the same time, the only specific tool I have for penetrating the barrier. Perhaps
this is the writer’s curse” (Jerome, 1989). Perhaps this is also the researcher’s curse. •

12. Leyla has a love of writing, and asked if she could write a poem for my research. She sent it to me by SMS on 9th
December 2010 and it was translated by a friend, a Russian-speaking refugee from Kazakhstan.
54

Leyla’s
interlude
An Account of Leyla
Imagine a beautiful woman. Imagine Leyla.
Eyes, piercing, yet tinged with the sadness of loss. OF i-dentity, of home, family
OF knowing old certainties

Think of eyes/i’s filled with pain, deep

Etched into one’s very being

Of experiences, remembered, un-forgetting and

of doubt, in-filled with a tenacious courage of Must Be OR Else.

Eyes, deep pools of remembrance, of happy times, joyous, how long

before that time

Re-turns? (Re) turns.

Life turns, turns of life. When will life re-turn to normal? For Leyla? For her family?

Time turns. The clock turns. Hands turn of the clock.

Clock hands. Your hands. Twisting and turning – one in the other – grinding and turn-
ing. Cracking and pulling of fingers. C r a c k.

Heads turn. Your head. C r a c k. Turns in your hand.

Firstthisway, thenthenext. A head Turns. C r a c k. Broken.

Jaw drops. Your draw drops. Heads turn as you walk by. Jaws drop down at your
beauty.

S. sends flowers to tempt you. You refuse. He tries

AGAIN. In-sis-tent
despite having nothing here and a wife and several children back home. In Iraq.

You can become the second wife.

“The women don’t like it, but they must accept it”, says Abu Z. It’s our
tradition. It’s Islam.

But you want PEACE. No more pestering. No more graffiti,

s m e a r campaigns; walls with L. likes to F….ck everyone written on them or
people laughing as you pass. A transfer elsewhere? How bad here? NO they
said. WHY would WE move YOU?

A handful of tablets, 23 sleeping pills, seemed the only way

OUT! It worked you got your transfer without problem the day you came
OUT! Of the hospital. The problems re-main, though. Which way is OUT? •
 55

The “camp” as
“total institution”
“The remarkable efficiency with which a mental-hospital ward can adjust to a daily shift in num-
ber of resident patients is related to the fact that the comers and leavers do not come or leave with
any properties but themselves and do not have any right to choose where they will be located”

(Goffman, 1961)

Each time I approach the “camp” my stomach turns, sinks and its contents fumble around in-
side as if fleeing some impending collision, churning like butter, round and round, disrupted,
clumpy and thick. There is nothing of the light featheriness of butterflies, which I associate
with pleasurable anticipations or new awakenings, precipitating a tender encounter or a
sensuous meeting between new lovers. The physicality of this experience is one of a dense
expectancy impinging on my body from the weight of dread of an exterior gaze. It cannot be
halted by rational thought or logical reasoning. It is a feeling that has grown steadily with
each visit to the camp. It came upon me, slowly pervading my body, engendering a feeling
of guilt with each encroachment; a notion of figures in the shadows, big brother watching
over me – an all-present drone to which one never quite becomes acclimatized. It is the
“chronic anxiety” described by Goffman (1961) at the thought of breaking the rules and the
consequences that rule-breaking brings with it. A humiliation of the stigmatized, and the
self-imposed adoption of an identity discredited by its categorization as asylum seeker and a
temporal living “within the world of one’s stigmatized connections” (Goffman, 1963).

The asylum centres are often situated on the outskirts, or on the edge of towns and cities.
Separate, somewhat isolated encampments, marginalized from what may be deemed “nor-
mality”. Coming from the dual carriageway I need to go across two roundabouts passing a
local firm which arranges subsidized work for the unemployed who can’t find regular jobs,
and then the road turns off to the camp. Both these buildings house the marginalized, the
excluded, those who society would rather not see. My discomfort grows the closer I get to the
camp. First I must park, and then report to the reception, where the guard sits waiting, look-
ing. I don’t understand why I feel like this.

The idea that one must register, sign in, hand over one’s passport or identity papers, or driv-
ing license, for everything to be carefully noted down, alongside the name of the person you
are visiting and his/her room number, I find despicable. I understand the reasoning, but I
still can’t help but loath its “encompassing tendencies” (Goffman, 1961) and loath the feel-
ing I get every time I go in and out. I skulk along the pavement, sometimes trying to avoid
being seen because B. finds it a hassle and waves his hand discouragingly when I suggest I
sign in. “Why” he always asks. “It’s not necessary”. Perhaps this is a form of defiance against
the authorities, or perhaps a form of self-protection. He has told me many a time that the
COA register everything the asylum seeker does, they keep account of everything “to use the
information against us in the future”. If they see me as a possible girlfriend, then it is true,
it could be damaging to his future request for his family to be reunited with him. And so my
presence conjures a feeling of guilt at the idea that I could be harming his case in some way.
But I do not know.

“Whether an individual’s biographical life line is sustained in the minds of his intimates or in
the personnel files of an organization, and whether the documentation of his personal identity
is carried on his person or stored in files, he is an entity about which a record can be built up
– a copybook has been made ready for him to blot. He is anchored as an object for biography”
(Goffman, 1963).

10.
I detest the idea that I have to register as if I am a criminal myself. The guards are more or
less pleasant. They just ask for your documents, write it all down, ask where you’re going, say
“are you visiting”? and then continue to register everything. I sometimes get the feeling that
their eyes are staring right through me; I wonder what they are thinking. One guy recognizes
me; the rest I don’t know. I wonder if they are keeping an eye out, if they will come running
after me when I pass over the “border” from inside and outside without first calling in to
56

their office. The barriers, automatic beams and high fences, signs asking all visitors to first
report to the reception, symbols of what Goffman calls “the barrier to social intercourse with
the outside” (Goffman, 1961). But it hasn’t happened yet. At times I just think the guards
probably don’t give a damn; why should they be looking at what I’m doing? But I can never
be sure. I have been infected by all the horror stories I hear at that place that I start to get
suspicious myself. I stick out, don’t I? At least that’s what I’ve been told. I look different to
the average asylum seeker. Is it my hair, my clothes, my handbag, the colours I wear, the
way I walk? I do after all have dark brown hair and off-white skin. I could pass for an asylum
seeker I think, but everything about me tells me there’s a difference, just a difference. A dis-
cernable, if not an “easyputintowordsdifference”. Perhaps there’s an air of certainty around
me, one which the asylum seekers don’t possess. I must remember to ask B. what it is that
makes me recognizable as not being one of them. Or maybe it’s pure invention, a fabulation
of sorts.

Whatever, I feel deeply uncomfortable every time I pass the control post. I feel ashamed;
as if I have got something to hide, as if I need to have a good story, a better story than the
one I’ve already got. Like passing through customs at the airport. You’ve got nothing you
shouldn’t have in your suitcases, but all the same you almost break out into a sweat at want-
ing to avoid the eyes of the officers. You don’t quite dare look them in the eye, but suspect
that looking at the floor is also not the best strategy. So too when I walk into the AZC. Every
time the fear, the awkwardness, the anticipation. It’s as though I have to make excuses for
being there. I know there’s no reason to feel this way. Yet I can’t avoid it. The dread. I sense
what Goffman refers to as a “breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating the three
spheres of life”, namely our sleeping, playing and working arrangements (Goffman, 1961).
Here in the camp there is no separation, as the three spheres become all meaningful or all
meaning-less.

“How hard and humiliating it is to bear the name of an [asylum seeker ]. When I go out, I cast
down my eyes because I feel myself wholly inferior. When I go along the street, it seems to me
that I can’t be compared with an average citizen, that everybody is pointing at me with his finger.
I instinctively avoid meeting any one. Former acquaintances and friends of better times are no
longer so cordial. They greet me indifferently when we meet. They no longer offer me a cigarette
and their eyes seem to say, ‘You are not worth it, you don’t work’” (Goffman, 1963).

Compare Goffman’s words with A. who told me:

“yes, I would like contact with Dutch people, but I don’t dare. They don’t want to have anything
to do with asylum seekers, they think asylum seekers are not good, that AZC people are thieves,
that we are bad, a different culture. Girls don’t want relations with us, because they think we
won’t be here long enough anyway. But when I get my status……I can meet other people, and I
can get along good with others, but not now. When you live in the AZC people think you’re not
good”.

or the time when T’s mother told me that her daughter never gets invited to other children’s
homes to play because “Dutch families don’t like it, they are maybe afraid of asylum seek-
ers”.

And

“when I ask women to come here to see me, Iraqi women with status, they always say ‘no, no, I
can’t’. They don’t want to come to the AZC. I don’t know why, it’s not dangerous here. When we
get our status, we can start a new life. It will be different then”.

Blocks or units are managed and coordinated, kept under surveillance and controlled.
Mediators act as watchdogs, to ensure officials are not “swamped”, appointment times and
contact moments are regimented, divided into manageable slots and accountable hours,
neatly arranged for the sake of routine and order. “We can be sick between these hours” I
am told, “otherwise we have to take a paracetemol, go for a walk, or come back tomorrow”.
“Two different social and cultural worlds develop, jogging alongside each other with points
of official contact but little mutual penetration” (Goffman, 1961).

Nobody of the asylum seekers I have met works “outside”, although under specific circum-
stances some asylum seekers are able by law to engage in paid labour several months per
year. Those I know who have tried are either not eligible and do not fit into the system’s
 57

strict conditions, or have been too overwhelmed by the rules and the paperwork, to continue
their pursuit. Work then is no longer a daily occupation for the majority of asylum seekers.
“Whether there is too much work or too little, the individual who was work-oriented on the
outside tends to become demoralized by the work system of the total institution” (Goffman,
1961). Opportunities exist to work for pocket money, doing jobs around the camp, such as
collecting rubbish, supervising in the computer room, assisting in the technical division or
helping to mend bicycles. B. however finds this work in part de-meaning, in part meaning-
less. And for women, like Leyla or G. the chances are often slimmer, bound as they are to
their household chores and children.

Goffman’s “disculturation” (1961) describes a process of unlearning that what has been
learnt on the outside; one in which the “inmate” or in this the case asylum seeker is rendered
“temporarily incapable of managing certain features of daily life on the outside, if and when
he gets back to it”. A culture of dependency is an emergent factor of life inside. Actor-ship
is contested, as asylum seekers waiver in their attempts to uphold their own dignity despite
repeated de-stablisation, and demands for deference to authority, to know one’s place.

“The authorities say you are only an asylum seeker. You came here as an asylum seeker, not for a
holiday. My heart is breaking, but what can I do” (T. 23 years).

“You are an asylum seeker, you are any asylum seeker, you are an asylum seeker.
I hate myself” (A. 27 years).

Waiting, waiting, waiting, un-knowing, in the dark, groping for information, reliance on the
outside to offer comfort, solace, hope; anything which can be grasped as a sign that there is
more to this life than the uncertainty of the camp.

The camp as total institution “disrupts or defiles precisely those actions that in civil society
have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his presence that he has some command
over his world – that he is a person with ‘adult’ self-determination, autonomy, and freedom
of action. A failure to retain this kind of adult executive competency, or at least symbols of it,
can produce in the inmate the terror of feeling radically demoted in the age-grading system”
(Goffman, 1961).

I recall how B. tells me about when he was an Officer in the Republican Guard. Then he was
“somebody, because we all want to be somebody. That’s our mentality”. The way he stated
“before I was there” gesturing upwards with his hands, “and now I am here, I have nothing”,
lowering the position of his arms, crossing them steadily one over the other. Or Leyla, who
in her own country had little but the practical knowledge of how things worked, of what was
expected of her. Here, she is overwhelmed by systems, procedures, rules and regulations.
Letters from bailiffs threatening to dispossess her of the little which she has because she
inadvertently forgot to cancel her subscription at the sport school; a paper pushed into her
hands by a hospital nurse, but left unexplained, warning that she, Leyla, has been reported
to the local child protection agency after an incidence in which her daughter took some
sleeping pills, appointments with schools to discuss the progress or not of her children, and
the general maneuvering in an unknown world, largely unaided by officials in the name of
privacy and independence.

“A margin of self-selected expressive behavior – whether of antagonism, affection, or uncon-

cern – is one symbol of self-determination” (Goffman, 1961). Could the blankness of Leyla’s
gaze be significant, in that it symbolizes her evident loss of self-determination? By which I
certainly would not want to suggest that I do not occasionally see a fire in those eyes, and
humor and a passion for life; ephemeral, in transition or lying in wait for a momentary out-
burst, of “collective affectivity” or a passionate encounter with the other (Manning, 2010).
But (so) much of that passion seems to have dissipated in her long, exhausting struggle for
a life. “I never had these psychiatric problems before. The only way was forward then. You
don’t even think if you are brave or strong. You have to move. For your children. But now I
am tired. Tired of all the waiting. I couldn’t do it again”.

What amazes me though, is the uncanny way in which B. and Leyla “read” me. Language
appears as a superfluous appendage, unnecessary to sense moods and track affectations.
Sharply developed sensibilities signal a force of the sensate, in which words are secondary
ways of “knowing”. “You are sad today” B. said. “You have been crying”. Or “don’t worry
too much” and “I can feel that you are very happy. What has happened to you?”
58

The lack of competence is nowhere more evident than in the loss of one’s language skills, in
the linguistic inability to comprehend the world around for lack of the right vocabulary. Not
being able to share in a common way of expressing ideas and thoughts about the world is for
most a daunting prospect. Interpreters help, but they are still mediators, a recurring re-
minder to reinforce the discourse of “lack” which already surrounds asylum seekers. Letiche
refers to the “model of the lack” in healthcare (Letiche, 2008), whilst the same can easily
be said of the situation of asylum seekers. There is a focus on what is “missing” and on loss,
in terms of language skills, identity, knowledge, social support networks and trust. This loss
symbolizes fragmentation, but does not necessarily infer a longing for (w)holism on my part.
Rather I refer to the way in which “lack” dominates a common discourse on asylum seekers,
reinforced by feelings of incompetence by asylum seekers themselves and by the dependency
engendered by systems, routines, practices and regulations.

Asylum seekers’ own notions of lack are reinforced by the uncertainty of existence in an
asylum centre. The basic non-referential character of being, of living out daily routines whilst
one’s fate lies very much elsewhere. Having given an “account”, the other “plays God” as
G. has put it. Whilst loss of self-determination is not “ceremonialised” to the extent it was
in the concentration camps (Goffman, 1961), “less ceremonialised but just as extreme, is
the embarrassment to one’s autonomy that comes from ….” (Goffman, 1961) not knowing
whether you may be ordered to leave one camp for another at the drop of a hat, not being
consulted about who you will share intimate spaces with and who not, at being fingerprinted
on a weekly (sometimes even daily) basis and dreading the sight of the words “Go to….”
from the automated fingerprint kiosk, for fear of what awaits. Not forgetting “the practice of
mixing age, ethnic and racial groups in [prisons and mental hospitals]…which…can lead an
inmate to feel he is being contaminated by contact with undesirable fellow inmates” (Goff-
man, 1961).

The decision to pack up one’s belongings, move out, find new schools for your children, re-
make contacts, and develop new social ties, is not a choice most make lightly. When made
for you, without consultation, it is mortifying to say the least. As one asylum seeker put it
“we get no help because they say we came with only a suitcase, so if they want us to move we
have to take our stuff in the suitcases we carried in here. The rest we have to throw out or
give away. We get a day card for public transport and a few hours notice and then we have
to go”. Indeed, I have seen asylum seekers leaving, suitcases and plastic bags in one hand,
and with a train ticket in the other, and on asking they invariably confirm that they have most
recently received notice to vacate their rooms and to go to another camp. The question of
why is often left unanswered.

A. got a similar shock one evening. When he left the camp early afternoon he had a two per-
son room to himself. On returning he noticed a light was on and on entering his bedroom he
was greeted by the newest arrival, an asylum seeker from Lebanon. The man, who had been
living the other side of the Netherlands, had been told at 10 that morning that he had to be
out by one. He had packed up most things, some stuff he had left behind and given away,
other items had been dumped. As Goffman writes “characteristically, the inmate is excluded
from knowledge of the decisions taken regarding his fate. Whether the official grounds are
military, as in concealing travel destination from enlisted men…such exclusion gives staff a
special basis of distance from and control over inmates” (Goffman, 1961). Without excep-
tion all asylum seekers I have spoken to have invariably been moved from unit to unit, having
to change rooms unexpectedly, and all have been “inmates” at different centres throughout
the country, some willingly, most not. As Goffman also writes: “Inmates may be required to
change their cells once a year so as not to become attached to them” (1961).

Total institutions impact the lives of those who live within their borders in ways which chal-
lenge their status as civilians, or even as human beings. Many of the rights accorded to “nor-
mal” citizens are revoked. Inmates are required to conform to a new regime, with its own
particular rules and regulations, stripped of the dignity of self-determination and constantly
aware of the possibility of sanctions if they fail to comply. The disciplining gaze is omnipres-
ent, most vividly in the deferential positioning of asylum seekers in face to face encounters
with representatives of the authorities and in their placid compliance with that which is
imposed upon them. B. was not the only one who said on many occasions “we cannot do
anything. We are like animals going to the slaughter. I cannot make a fuss. If I do it might
affect my asylum procedure. I am nothing here, only an asylum seeker, and they make sure
we know that”.
 59

Asylum seekers are not forced to stay within the camp’s boundaries, except in those camps
designated specifically as detention centres or so-called “limited freedom facilities”, or
during the initial procedures on arrival in the Netherlands. They are, however, obliged to
undergo fingerprinting on a weekly or daily basis, as part of the mechanistic ritual of control
and disciplining that comes with being an asylum seeker. Fingerprinting occupies a rigid
time slot, and failure to appear leads to sanctions and withdrawal of (part of) the financial
allowance which one receives weekly. This is a prime example of how the asylum seeker
is “shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of
the establishment, to be worked on smoothly by routine operations” (Goffman, 1961). The
systematic taking of fingerprints in the camp I visited was fully automated, eliminating the
need to engage in face to fact contact with asylum seekers, except when the Red Cross “X”
appears on the kiosk screen, next to the dreaded words “Go to…”. Then an encounter with
the authorities is not only inevitable, but compulsory. This “digitalization of processes is part
of working rationally” according to the 2009 COA Annual Report, and is part of an ongoing
goal to optimize “resident related administration processes”.

These “touching technologies” disengage human contact yet the sensorial experience can be
compelling, producing powerful imagery and engendering unpredictable courses of action.
Sometimes, as I was told by B. and others, unfortunate asylum seekers on facing the instruc-
tion to “Go to…” take to their heels and flee, not waiting to find out why they have been
summoned in the first place. Their fear is too great to allow a rationalised response to the
words on the screen. As Lianne told me, “My hands are trembling all the time, I feel a knot
in my stomach and I keep looking at the floor. I cannot control the fear, as I don’t know what
they might do to me. I am alone with my children and I don’t know the rules. They could do
anything with me they wanted”.

At B’s interview with the IND to which I was privy, I recall the feeling of staring in the face
of absolute power sitting on the other side of the table. Think of B’s apprehension at stat-
ing that I was just a friend who offered him a lift because of the unfortunate time of day
which he would have otherwise had to leave were he to take the bus and the train to get to
his appointment on time. “They keep records of everything, so that everything can be used
against you in the future” I was told. I had to make sure that it could not seem that I was his
girlfriend, or some floozy with whom he was having a loose relationship in the absence of his
wife and family, as that might be reason enough to refuse their repatriation request, if and
ever it gets that far. B. invented elaborate stories about why I might be driving him to Den
Bosch. But they didn’t make sense and were in any case blatant lies. He reasoned that the
authorities would ask why else would I bother to drive him such a long way if there was not
an illicit relationship going on? After refusing all the scenario’s and telling B. I would not lie
if anybody asked, he seemed resigned to the fact that the IND would find out anyway and
keep records of my accompanying him on this journey.

It seemed ridiculous to me, but from many accounts I have heard since, from those still
within the system and those who have long had resident status, all confer that “personal files
are kept on everything you do and say”, including “they confirmed to me later when I got out
that they keep records on you and on your family and they use it against you if necessary”, or
“you can’t trust them [the COA, IND], they take notes, write it all down, keep big files on us
and try to catch us out all the time”. The idea alone leads to the fabrication of stories which
may even appear ludicrous and insane, because the truth of the matter may be too simple, or
too unconvincing, too remote or not filled enough with intrigue and wanderings of the mind.
Like “I just got a lift from a friend, nothing more, nothing less”. I almost became part of
the fabulation of a new complot, a new story, one which seemed appealing at the time, and
which served to dampen an in-felt desire for safety and for reducing the risk of being caught
out. Yet, being caught out for what? The same guilt, the same illogical reasoning as when I
affront the gate posts of the camp and walk in assuming a posture of someone with some-
thing to hide when, in fact, I’ve nothing to hide. B. neither.

My orientation is at such moments dis-oriented and I no longer walk in step with myself
or with my environs. I feel disconnected from the “levels”, an alien lacking “intersensorial
consistency” (Lingis, 1998). “The outlying regions of the alien are expanses where the levels
come apart” (Lingis, 1998). Lingis contrasts the “intimate” with the “alien”, noting that
“the particulars we see, hear, touch, smell and taste are salients, contours, contrasts, incep-
tions and terminations that take form on the levels” (Lingis, 1998). We adjust to the levels in
orienting ourselves, our sensorial perceptions, in so-called “conducted moves” in which we
achieve consistency and coherence in the intimate spaces of co-existence whereby “from the
60

first we find ourselves accompanied, in our movements down the levels of the field, by other
sensibilities, other sentient bodies” (Lingis, 1998).

But “the levels have a way of separating” and “the intense cold settled on the plains separate
us from the level of the vision extending paths where things are to be seen” (Lingis, 1998).
This research, these vivid encounters with alterity, with the “alien” has exerted its seductive
powers, exuding a rich vibrancy and an invitation to “follow the ways the patterns emerge
and dissolve”, leading “onward to the outer regions of the alien” (Lingis, 1998). Regions
where vision is blurred, auditory capabilities are fuzzy, smell is disrupted and voice reveals
dis(cords) of uncertainty and a faltering capacity to produce meaningful sounds. The tangi-
ble smoothness of contours once known, are replaced by rocky reliefs and sharp cliffs jutting
out on a wild ocean, the depths of which are murky and dark. At such moments there is no
coherence and focus may be lost. Several paths open out, but there is no time to survey the
route before plunging into deep waters. Which story to tell, which truth counts, which ver-
sion is the least damaging and who is the judge? Whose ac(count) counts?

The total institution has a way of unsettling the levels, and of unsettling the “home base”
which once was a “pole of repose and departure. The zone of the intimate is a pole of
warmth and tranquility that we keep sight of as we advance into the stretches of the alien and
that our nomadic wanderings gravitate back to” (Lingis, 1998). But where then is this “home
base” for asylum seekers? And are we always attuning to levels even when in total discord
with our surroundings? Does the discord itself provoke a form of attunement to the levels of
that moment, even if they do not appear to make sense at the time? Perhaps we can talk here
of “atmospheric attunements” as described by Stewart (2010). Yet I cannot help thinking
that “attunement” does not capture “deference patterns” or “looping effects” as engendered
in total institutions (Goffman, 1961).

As Goffman explains “in civil society, when an individual must accept circumstances and
commands that affront his conception of self, he is allowed a margin of face-saving reactive
expression – sullenness, failure to offer usual signs of deference, sotto voce profaning asides,
or fugitive expressions of contempt, irony, and derision. Compliance, then, is likely to be as-
sociated with an expressed attitude to it that is not itself subject to the same degree of pres-
sure for compliance” (1961). In the setting of a total institution, let’s say an asylum centre,
the asylum seekers may risk further sanctions, or punishment in the form of written notes
in one’s file which “may be used against [us] if we don’t do what they ask,” if their attitude
to what is requested of them is less than compliant. “The protective response [of the asylum
seeker] to an assault upon self is collapsed into the situation; he cannot defend himself in
the usual way by establishing distance between the mortifying situation and himself” (Goff-
man, 1961). I recall A. at the health centre, G.’s description of the IND doctor as “God”, B’s
searching for a “good story, so as not to displease the officials”, Lianne’s fear of what might
happen to her facing a forced repatriation procedure alone, A’s resignation at having his
requests to move unit being turned down several times and Leyla’s despair at having to defer
time again to the unwillingness of the authorities to take her stories of feeling threatened by
other inmates seriously, and their refusal to transfer her to another camp, until she eventu-
ally did protest with a suicide attempt.

I felt what I imagine to be a similar form of helplessness at being informed by the official half
way through B’s interview that the new interpreter “does not want you to be present during
the meeting”. The interpreter had the power in this case to decide whether or not I should
be allowed to be present to give B. moral support, as B. put it himself. On lightly prodding
the official I was informed that “it is not usually normal to have somebody else listening and
if you insist we will have to cancel the rest of the interview today and Mr B. will have to make
a new appointment to finish his interview at another time. I cannot say when that will be”.
Having made clear several times that I was not really interested in what was “normal”, but
rather wanted to know what B’s rights were in such a case, I eventually gave up for fear of
upsetting the official. She does after all play a decisive role in the handling of his asylum re-
quest. I had no recourse to my usual arsenal of knowledge, which would allow me to employ
diverse strategies for achieving my goals; in fact I reduced my resistance to a level of zero, as
did B. and went along with it for B’s sake.

“In total institutions spheres of life are desegregated, so that an inmate’s conduct in one
scene of activity is thrown up to him by staff as a comment and check upon his conduct in an-
other context” (Goffman, 1961). I did not want to risk appearing as a trouble maker, by riling
the official, and thereby opening up the possibility that she would make a mental or physical
 61

note of dissatisfaction with the proceedings which may, in turn, have negative effects on B’s
procedures. Whether this made any sense at all, or happened to be “true” was of no conse-
quence whatsoever; it was perceived as a threat and neither myself nor B. wanted to take a
risk at the time. As Goffman puts it “each specification robs the individual [asylum seeker] of
an opportunity to balance his needs and objectives in a personally efficient way and opens up
his line of actions to sanctions. The autonomy of the act itself is violated” (1961). So we sub-
mitted to the authority of the official in disidentifying ourselves from our intrinsic reaction to
fight back, demand respect and claim dignity.

Dialogue or narrative exchange was absent in this evident “power disequilibrium” (Letiche,
2008). “One side has and the other side wants”, to put it bluntly, so we enacted the roles
expected of us in a simulacra of consensus which to all intent and purposes was an “imposed
‘consensus’” and not a “genuinely validated consensus” (Letiche, 2008). Is there “truth to
the care” in the setting of a total institution and its apparatus of appendages and working
officials? Or are they beyond caring? •

13. Goffman’s text reads “unemployed man” where I have used “asylum seeker”.
62

A caring interlude
Do I care…..for you? My research (object)?
Do those with a duty of care CARE for you?
When I think of care I imagine “circumstantial sensitivity”, in a
“nonappropriative logic”,
for there can be no “singletruthtoevents”.

Is “being-two” care? Do we derive our “humaneness” from

“the ability to exchange gazes”, the “existential plenitude of relationship and ….the
lack of self without
the Other”?

Research implies relationship, I believe. “Relationship demands difference or being-

two”.

Or is care a question of
“Effectiveness and Efficiency”?

neatly embedded into a “Management discourse”?

“But (such) industrialization denies the specific, individual, and multifaceted quality
of……” [being an asylum seeker].

I do agree that “only by embracing critical though and respect for difference and by
realizing that ….[I]….must not avoid responsibility, unicity and relationship…..can
good [research]
prevail”.

The care dilemma is unavoidable. I cannot but Care can I? Otherwise I would not
have taken on this challenge
→ to learn, to dialogue, to construct together, to reject myself as the “Expert”.

For “discussion could allow each [asylum seeker’s] unique claims, symptoms, demands
and desires to surface. In such a dialogical or polyphonic system, all the issues of dif-
ference would be free to emerge”.

I cannot see myself as the “Expert”. I prefer to relinquish my “knowledge power” in

favor of a more “discursive [research model]”. Can I refer to research as “intertextual”?

As “laying emphasis on how every text or act of speech relates to prior models and
other speech and implicitly can only exist thanks to unmentioned associations and as-
sumptions”?

Which “texts” are familiar, known, accepted, established, legitimate

when it comes to asylum seekers?

“Social, political, juridical, economical?” And the humanistic text?

And if a humanistic text “requires that [researcher and informant] really communicate
about what is happening then intertextuality is essential”. Looking for the “hidden
intertext” and making it
Visible.

“The power of the [researcher] is grounded in their gaze; they see, diagnose and
know. Knowledgeable [informants, asylum seekers] look at the [researcher] with the
intent of judging their actions, instead of the other way around”.
 63

YES because

“If [research] was dialogical, there would be no disciplining (Foucaultian) gaze for the
[researcher] to lose, but there would be a
Mutually Concerned Episteme of Involvement”

BECAUSE

“If the gaze was ethically humanist, it would involve the discovery of humanity in [re-
search] and in involvement by attending to the
Other
via the subject’s responsibility and quality of concern.
Quality of CARE.

We cannot avoid “issues of relationship” in research, or in caring for the Asylum Seeker.
How does COA manage to avoid “issues of relationship”, or the “responsibility to
communicate as fully as they can”. NO “things are not necessarily as Simple As That”.

In the “management of [asylum]” “what is the relationship between the current [asy-
lum] reality and the normative situation that is desired”?

WHO asks thess questions? We cannot surely expect “more equality in [asylum] rela-
tions”? Can we expect the asylum seeker to “speak up for her or himself, influencing
the course of their [asylum procedure]”? “Is narrative competence in listening and
speaking a prerequisite to care”?

Can researchers “engage in dialogue in an environment where they trust each

other enough to be prepared to approach the edge of chaos to reflect upon themselves
and their situations and to embark on uncertain adventures with each other”? Which
“entails exploring new concepts and experimenting with unusual courses of action”?
Can I open up “spaces of creativity where emergence can take place [in my research]?
Can those in the system of “caring” for asylum seekers do the same?

In the name of CARE? In the name of HUMANITY?

Who CARES?

(all texts in quotation marks derive from “Making Healthcare Care”, Letiche, 2008) •
64

Rabbit in your headlights

“It has been noted that the juridical basis for internment was not common law but Schutzhaft
(literally, protective custody), a juridical institution of Prussian origin that the Nazi jurors some-
times classified as a preventative policy measure insofar as it allowed individuals to be “take into
custody” independently of any criminal behavior, solely to avoid danger to the security of the state”

(Agamben, 1998)

The image of a rabbit in the headlights came to me when I met Lianne for the first time. A
frightened creature, an animal running in flight, not knowing which way to turn, trembling,
facing the spotlight, being hit, bashed, rammed, but getting up time and again only to carry on
running, fleeing from some force known or unknown, experiences past, a future dreaded, as
yet no hope in sight. One could describe you as a confrontation of sensibilities whose “rhythms
of life are interrupted by experiences” (Lingis, 2007). But what of those experiences? They
have indeed been “marked by astonishment, outbursts of joy, fear, anger and woe” (Lingis,
2007) and in your case also by panic, nervous depression, uncontrollable anxiety and suicidal
tendencies which impinge on your being and occupy “the whole of consciousness” (Lingis,
2007).

A letter addressed to you from the COA states:

“We have been informed by the IND that your departure deadline has expired. With the negative
result pertaining to your asylum request, your right to shelter is also legally terminated and now that
your departure deadline has expired, you are now liable to being cleared out.

It continues:

“We assume that you are aware of the consequences of the termination of shelter. We have in-
formed the police that they may proceed with the clearing of your living space”.

You received this letter just a few days ago, from your case manager, who did his best to get
you to comply with rule article 56 of the Alien Law 2000. In another letter you received on the
same day, you were informed:

“Measure ex Article 56 of the Alien Law 2000: Measure of determination of free movement as
meant in Article 56, first paragraph of the Alien Law 2000.

In the framework of this Measure I order the party involved to reside in the local district of Vlagt-
wedde from 26-11-2010.

The interest of public order require the imposition of this Measure ex Article 56 Alien Law 2000.

X You have not complied with the Legal requirement to leave the Netherlands of your own free will.
X You have neither a fixed address nor sufficient financial resources to cover your living expenses,
whereby there is a real danger that the party involved will try to escape [forced] repatriation.

If the party involved does not adhere to this Measure, on the basis of Art. 108, first paragraph of the
Alien Law 2000, he is liable to prosecution / punishable by law”.

You, being “the party involved”, fled before the police had a chance to forcibly remove you
to a camp with limited freedom of movement, fearful that should you comply, the authorities
may try to deport you under duress. You said “I will not leave here alive, as there’s no way I’m
going back”.

11.
Reports from the psychiatrist and therapist you have been seeing for some time note that
you have severe psychiatric problems, and that you suffer from panic attacks and obsessive-
compulsive disorders. You are prone to depression, have serious suicidal tendencies and have
difficulty controlling your emotions. You are overly possessive of the children, and worry all
the time about their wellbeing and safety. You are only 27 years old. And your children are
four and five years respectively.
 65

When you talk to me your hands wring together and when the intertwined fingers release
their grip on one another and you hold out your hand to pass me your letters, I see them
shaking lightly. You hold the plastic folder with its compartments tightly on your lap, as if it
contains your whole life within it, and it probably does. And when I am finished, you arrange
your documents neatly, leaning on the edge of the seat as you tell me (part of) your story.
Your command of the Dutch language is broken, so you have difficulty finding the right
words, and every now and then you glance sideways to Leyla appealing to her for support.
Your account has me transfixed, focused on your voice, the rise and fall in its tonality and the
quivering in your recollections. “The “voice” that rings in [the room] needs to be not only
“artistic and aimed at naming yourself [but also] political and focused on naming the world”
(Lensmire, 1994a).

Your voice is gentle, it names, it describes, it re-lives what is past, it cries in its pain and
anguish at the present situation, at the hopelessness of it all; it affects. You affect. Me. I
wonder how amidst despair you somehow managed to get here, to leave an abusive relation-
ship in your homeland, to flee to the West, to survive the last three years of uncertainty and I
wonder even more how you will manage to face the coming winter. I did not ask the ins and
outs of why you fled and you have not told that story yet. You received a letter a few days ago
stating that you have become eligible for “clearing” by the alien police and that you should
report to a location where your freedom will be limited, a so-called “limited freedom loca-
tion”. You couldn’t take the risk of being forcibly deported, so you fled in the night, freezing
temperatures with your two children and came here, to Leyla’s place. With your papers and a
small sports bag. The rest you left behind.

Leyla is a friend who you met three years ago when you both arrived for the first time in
the Netherlands. Two young single mothers, whose paths crossed, intertwined, then spread
out, separated, removed, moved on to different camps. Physically apart, but not bodily, not
in affect. And now? Nobody knows which course of action you should take. I contemplate
the enormous strength you must have inside, the courage and the resilience to have made it
this far, and yet now I see only confusion, trembling, angst and exhaustion. I consider who
you are and how you negotiate all those identities within one body; this small, frail, female
frame? But what lies hidden, inside, what I cannot see, but sense in an “affective welling – of
a life’s transductive potential?” (Manning, 2010)

“A sense of self-identity does not really have a fixed location inside the body of the individual
but, rather, is ambiguously located amid the human subject’s perceived and interpreted rela-
tions in the world….a sense of self or communal identity is not stable, continuous or fixed.
Identity cannot be contained within immutable categories” (Sumara, Luce- Kapler, 1996).
We are then “tangled” and “the tangle then, becomes a place of crisis for the negotiation of
identity” (Rasberry, 2001).

My curiosity is charged, as I become ever more tangled in your telling. I am mindful of the
“need to honor the complexity and the difficulty and the ambiguity of “making pathways
through [the] world”” (Greene, 1995) and in particular of sharing at this moment your
“pathway through [the] world”, however full of pitfalls and obstacles that may be. Your
narrative is compelling, but there is more. There is the body – “…how bodies are always
thoroughly entangled processes, and importantly defined by their capacities to affect and be
affected” (Blackman & Venn, 2010). I experience a sunken feeling in my stomach as I watch
you close your eyes every now and then whilst recounting how you used to hide in the shower
at the sight of the alien police at the camp; how you run and hide now if there’s a knock on
the door, just in case. And every time we perceive the cough of a small child emanating from
the already overcrowded bedroom, how your eyes flinch at the noise. Your words cannot
adequately express the emotions I sense, as “affect is invoked to gesture towards something
that perhaps escapes or remains in excess of the practices of the ‘speaking subject’” (Black-
man & Venn, 2010).

I observe Leyla who sits rocking gently on the coffee table, occasionally shifting position to
the floor. Watching, listening, adding a word here and there every now and then, trying to
lighten the atmosphere with a joke, a suggestion, banter. It works momentarily. We escape
for a second the gravity of it all, as the shower episodes are almost made to look hilarious,
then the sobriety returns as Leyla says “we laugh about it now, but at the time you only feel
like crying, you can’t move from fear”. “Affect is collective” (Manning, 2010). Human life
is “more-than” …. “where the body is but one verging surface on the field of experience,
where the body is always more than One” (Manning, 2010). For Manning affect resides in its
66

collective nature, and drawing on Simondon he shows the body’s livingness across lives; “not
the body after the subject…but the body before the subject, in advance and toward subjectiv-
ity, the body as the complexity of imminent collectivity, the body as resonant materiality, the
body as the metastable field before the taking-form of this or that” (Manning, 2010).

At that moment we are bodies “alive across lives” (Manning, 2010), we are in the actual and
“there is no going beyond actual occasions to find something more real” (Whitehead, 1978).
I sense a deep attunement of the levels, a “zone of intimacy” or a “style of synergic mobiliza-
tion of sensibility that is induced from the styles of the visible, the tangible and the sonorous”
(Lingis, 1998). Your story is performed like a tragedy of sorts. A young orphan, brought
up by neighbors then enlisted to marry the neighbor’s only son; an abusive alcoholic whose
violence reaches beyond you to your small children. No homeland, moved around between
different countries, and few rights as an ethnic Armenian who has never known Armenia,
never trodden its soil. Yet the countries where you have lived fail to recognize your person-
hood, your civility, and you grow up with few official rights and no documentation. This all is
confounded by step-parents, parents-in-law who keep you largely confined to the household,
which means you have no work experience and spent your days going to and from school to
home, and back again. Once the children arrived, you were even more housebound, only this
time also having to deal with drunken bouts of violence from an aggressive, addicted spouse.

You play the piano beautifully, having had several years of lessons from someone who came
home to teach you, and you alone. You laugh that you play only for yourself, and could never
teach anybody else. “What would you have liked to do, to be, to become” I ask? Then realize
that my Western notions of accounting for oneself in terms of ones occupation, is akin to dis-
missing your value as a mother. Is it not enough these days to be a [good] mother or carer? I
can barely escape these deeply embedded assumptions of what a worthy life is, and falter in
my words. You look knowingly at me and reply that of course you would have liked to study,
but fate would have it that you were born there and me here. Your step-parents did teach
you your own language though, Armenian, and you would like to learn many other languages
if you get the chance. I summon Letiche’s words “life is full of coincidence, absurdity and ac-
cident. Affectivity just occurs – it just is. Affectivity requires no explanation” (Letiche, 2009).

Driving home an intense sadness grips hold of my body as I consider the absurdity of it all.
The seemingly arbitrary nature of the system. Why are some asylum seekers whose files are
closed nevertheless still provided with shelter, a weekly allowance and some (tiny) semblance
of security and others, like you, are summoned, ordered, accused of being a threat to public
order, and carted off to (semi) closed camps, or at worst driven into a life on the streets, into
illegality? A’s file has been closed for months, but he hasn’t yet received notice to quit the
camp, to leave the Netherlands; he’s not yet been singled out for “clearing” like you have.
Others I have spoken to have been waiting for years for the post to arrive, and live, or rather
exist in a state of limbo, in-between. What is worst? I only know that in your case the thought
of forced deportation is too much to bear, as you repeat that you won’t leave this place alive.

To what end my research? “Affectivity is intersubjective. Social relationship and the intersec-
tion of ideas, thoughts and possibilities all depend on it. Affectivity occurs in the buzz and
hum of circumstance; it makes the interanimation of culture and thought possible” (Letiche,
2009). One of the challenges I face is to avoid the treachery of representation (Letiche,
2009). But how? “The being of being-together cannot be objectified without destroying its
process in nature” because “objectification endangers living relationship, which can only ex-
ist outside of objectification’s ‘truth’” (Letiche, 2009). I do my best to avoid this objectifica-
tion, to shun instrumentalisation and to connect, in the only way I know how. In relationship,
as one human being to another, in affectivity. Mistakes are perhaps inevitable, but in reflex-
ivity I explore the complexity inherent in my research project, in the art of “relatedness”, and
in trying producing a text which “implicitly develops an ethics of affectivity…..wherein the
unique otherness of the other is made present” (Letiche, 2009).

In my encounter with Lianne’s otherness, with her alterity, with her uniqueness, I am
compelled to account for my work as researcher, and for my own singularity. “I am not at a
distance from my trembling, recoiling, tightening body, my blushes, my sobbing; I am com-
pletely in my rage, my jealousy, my astonishment” and in my compassion (Lingis, 2007). My
I, “the I, singularized and brought to a peak of concentration and intensity, is I am thrilled,
I am delighted, I am enraged, I am terrified” (Lingis, 2007); it is an I that is connected,
touched and affected. In this “compositional present” of attending to your story, I am part
of the trajectory of “accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences,
 67

losses and proliferating possibilities” (Stewart, 2010). I see your face, I hear your voice, I
sense your trying to make “something of things”, and I feel the quickening and slowing of
your breath as you recount the past and imagine a future better than this one. We share this
space of “worlding” of a life attuned to all your laboring and visceral motions; a weighted
life, densely textured and exposed, at times waning and frail, but one that nonetheless fights
on, seeking out potentiality, new rhythms and possibilities.

You still remind me of a rabbit in the headlights; at risk of being subsumed by the reductive
essentialisation and the violence inherent in the practices of knowing which I would argue
masquerade in official discourses of professionalism under “liberal aesthetic guise” (Ko-
sofsky Sedgwick, 2003). Theirs is not a world of “beside” as Kosofsky Sedgwick propounds,
but one very much of “the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking” (Kosofsky Sedgwick,
2003). Yet desperate as your situation is, I sense a courage and a strength of being in you; a
capacity for mobilization or in the words of Lingis (2007) “impassioned energies”. You are
not yet ready to give-up, to sell-out; your life is too far removed from comfort to stall the
fight for justice (Lingis, 2004). No, your “courageous body is a body attuned to chance, to
hope and terror” (Lingis, 2004). Yet this body must be trusted in order to trust, and more
importantly, in order to trust itself “to be able to deal with the unknown when it shows itself”
(Lingis, 2004).

“Trust is a break, a cut made in the extending map of certainties and probabilities. The force that
breaks with the cohesion of doubts and deliberations is an upsurge, a birth, a commencement.
It has its own momentum, and builds on itself. How one feels this force! Before these strangers
in whom one’s suspicious and anxious mind elaborates so many scheming motivations, abruptly
one fixes on this one, at random, and one feels trust, like a river released from a lock, swelling
one’s mind and launching one on the way”
(Lingis, 2004, italics added).

A letter addressed to you from the COA states:

“We have been informed by the IND that your departure deadline has expired. With the negative
result pertaining to your asylum request, your right to shelter is also legally terminated and now
that your departure deadline has expired, you are now liable to being cleared out.

It continues:

“We assume that you are aware of the consequences of the termination of shelter. We have in-
formed the police that them may proceed with the clearing of your living space”.

You received this letter just a few days ago, from your case manager, who did his best to get
you to comply with rule article 56 of the Alien Law 2000. In another letter you received on
the same day, you were informed:

“Measure ex Article 56 of the Alien Law 2000: Measure of determination of free movement as
meant in Article 56, first paragraph of the Alien Law 2000.

In the framework of this Measure I order the party involved to reside in the local district of Vlagt-
wedde from 26-11-2010.

The interest of public order require the imposition of this Measure ex Article 56 Alien Law 2000.

X You have not complied with the Legal requirement to leave the Netherlands of your own free
will.
X You have neither a fixed address nor sufficient financial resources to cover your living expenses,
whereby there is a real danger that the party involved will try to escape [forced] deportation.

If the party involved does not adhere to this Measure, on the basis of Art. 108, first paragraph of
the Alien Law 2000, he is liable to prosecution / punishable by law”. •
68

A musical
interlude
Rabbit in your headlights

Thom Yorke - Radiohead:

I'm a rabbit in your headlights

Scared of the spotlight
You don't come to visit
I'm stuck in this bed

Thin rubber gloves

She laughs when she's crying
She cries when she's laughing

Fat bloody fingers are sucking your soul away...

(Away....away....away....)

I'm a rabbit in your headlights

Christian suburbanite
Washed down the toilet
Money to burn

Fat bloody fingers are sucking your soul away...

Sample from movie Jacob's Ladder :

If you're frightened of dyin' and you're holding on...
You'll see devils tearing your life away.
But...if you've made your peace,
Then the devils are really angels
Freeing you from the earth.....from the earth....from the earth

White worms on the underground

Caught between stations
Butterfingers
I'm losing my patience

I'm a rabbit in your headlights

Christian suburbanite
You got money to burn....

Fat bloody fingers are sucking your soul away.....

Away, away, away,
Away, away, away •
 69

(A) tailor-made
interlude
Tailor made: adj. 1 (of clothes) made by a tailor for a particular customer. 2 made or
adapted for a particular purpose or person. (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th ed)

Tailor made: adj. 1. Made by a tailor to fit exactly: a tailor-made suit. 2. Perfectly meeting a
particular purpose: a girl tailor-made for him. ~ n. 3. A tailor-made garment. 4. Slang. A
cigarette made in a factory rather than rolled by hand. (Collins English Dictionary, 3rd ed)

Tailor made services – based upon needs – made to measure – quality – excellent customer
service – just tell us what you’d like and we’d be more than happy to provide it – we know
the language, so we will pay special attention to your special requests – services that make
a difference – the freedom to specify your own dimensions – if you see something you like
and it’s not available in your favorite color, we can still make it for you – we can provide for
your specific needs……(Google: type in “tailor made services”)

Annual Report COA, 2009, “I let them know what life is really like
in the Netherlands if they get a resident
English version, entitled permit. They can forget about education,
as they’ll more than likely be cleaning
“Tailor Made”: streets” (COA employee)

Vision
“For Dutch society, we are the reception
organization that ensures the smooth recep-
tion of aliens. We do this by providing safe
accommodation, a means of existence and
tailored programmes”.
Mission
“Nobody listens, nobody cares” (mother
asylum seeker from Syria)
“I waited 4 weeks to get antibiotics for
my children. By the time I got them they
were so sick they could hardly stand”
(single mother asylum seeker from
Chechnya)

“We ensure in a professional manner that

people in a vulnerable position are accom-
modated and supported in a safe and live-
able environment, in order for the reception
of aliens to remain manageable and justifi-
able for politicians and society at large”.
“We get a bed and an allowance, but they
don’t want to listen to our stories, to our
concerns” (single mother asylum seeker
from Armenia)

“We take care of the reception of asylum

seekers during the entire asylum proce-
dure”.
“We have an active policy of discourage-
“COA employees have been given the ment” (COA employee)
important task of educating asylum seekers
in how health care in the Netherlands is
organized”.
“The COA is afraid of getting involved
“Our employees act as guides to the world with us” (male asylum seeker from Iraq
of health care and offer a helping hand, if
the resident has any questions about the
organization of health care”.
70
“Our employees also detect social-medical
problems due to the great deal of contact
they have with the residents”.
“….we also delivered tailor-made solutions
in 2009. That is what COA stands for:
made to measure solutions”.
“We accomplish this by offering our resi-
dents a home away from home”.
“Due to our professionalism, we feel it is
obvious to provide tailor-made solutions”.
“We are veterans and we know how to give
shape to the business of reception”.
“We add meaning and significance to our
work with our mission, vision and ambi-
tion to be the reception organization of the
Netherlands. In this way, we also provided
tailor-made solutions in 2009”.
“Across the alien chain, COA shows what
the alternatives are, what the best option is
on an economic and financial level and in
implementation”.
“The reception of asylum seekers goes
beyond offering a bed, bread and a bath.
COA provides a liveable, safe and control-
lable living environment where residents
can manage by themselves”.
“Our employees paint a picture of partici-
pating in society in the training “Knowledge
of Dutch Society (KNS)””
“In all stages of the asylum procedure our
employees have conversations with the asy-
lum seekers, ranging from individual sup-
port to informative talks about important
issues about the asylum seekers’ centre”.
“Expert made-to-measure service”
“The essential key to success is to keep
delivering tailor-made solutions”.
“Heart for employees”.
“They have to take care of themselves
and their children. We don’t pamper
them anymore” (COA employee)
“They say you’re an asylum seeker, you
didn’t come here for a holiday” (young
male asylum seeker from Iraq)
“We can only be sick at certain times of
day when the office is open. Otherwise
we just have to wait until the next day”.
(male asylum seeker from Iraq)
“I wanted to do a language course, but
the waiting list is too long, we have to
wait months”
(male asylum seeker from Iraq)
“I don’t think they see us as human be-
ings” (young woman asylum seeker from
Armenia)
“They didn’t listen when I told them I
was being pestered and wanted a trans-
fer. It was only when I tried to commit
suicide that I got the transfer I request-
ed” (young single mother asylum seeker)
“We don’t allow them to show signs from
their home countries, like flags, it only
leads to problems”. (COA employee)
“The work has been going on outside for
weeks, and the noise is unbearable, but
nobody tells us anything. They don’t
apologize for the inconvenience. We are
only asylum seekers” (adult male asylum
seeker from Syria) •
 71

Is this the END?

“Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really
made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically cor-
rect, socially created, and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act
as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real and that all around the ground lay firm.
That is what the public secret, the facticity of the social fact, being a social being is all about. No
matter how sophisticated we may be as to the constructed and arbitrary character of our practices
of representation, our practice of practices is one of actively forgetting such mischief each time
we open our mouths to ask for something or to make a statement. Try to imagine what would
happen if we didn’t in daily practices thus conspire to actively forget what Saussure called the
“arbitrariness of the sign”? Or try the opposite experiment. Try to imagine living in a world whose
signs were indeed “natural””

(Taussig, 1993)

As I write, I reflect. And on reflection I am obliged to consider which accounts to include

and which accounts to leave out (of my account). To cram all accounts into one would be
murderous, like laying a claim to an imaginary wholeness. Seductive, but misinformed. Yet
to pick out bits here and there to illustrate some well-conceived point of mine, exudes an
unease pertaining to an essentialisation of my objects, or a petrification of moments in time
of my choosing. I do not know the way out of this conundrum, of this methodological maze.

My authorial “i” / eye is an “i” that is present, ready and willing to account for itself. Not to
do so would feel dishonest, given that my research requires the accounts of others. These
accounts are not meant to cause harm, nor are they simple records of human experience.
Rather “this tale is a means of experience for the reader. It is a vehicle for readers to dis-
cover moral truths about themselves. More deeply, the ethnographic tale is a utopian tale of
self and social redemption, a tale that brings a moral compass back into the readers (and the
writer’s) life” (Denzin, 1997).

This work is a (re)construction which has been crafted, care-fully, with care and attention. I
do not lay claim to a “factual exploration of the social or natural world” which is why, per-
haps, I eschew a radical distinction between “two opposed clusters of values: at one extreme,
‘facts’, ‘objectivity’, ‘science’, ‘measurement’, ‘exactitude’, and at the other ‘art’, ‘subjectivity’,
‘discursive’, ‘aesthetic’” ( Atkinson, 1990). Atkinson calls such duality a “gross over-simplifi-
cation”, arguing that sociology and anthropology alike are rhetorical and moral disciplines,
“predicated upon the texts of everyday life”. Poetics is part and parcel of these life-world
texts and if we do not intend to “lapse into meaningless solipsism and a ‘private language’”
then we “must engage in communicative acts with hearers or readers” (Atkinson, 1990).

These texts, these accounts which are presented in this discursive exploration of moments
of attunement, of affectivity and worlding, attempt to be “neither so ‘novel’ as to be outré,
nor so familiar as to seem hackneyed” (Atkinson, 1990). I espouse to arrange their empiri-
cal reality in an “eventful” way; one which is “richly endowed with ‘concrete interactional
events, incidents, occurrences, episodes, scenes and happenings someplace in the real world”
(Lofland, 1974).

The complex interaction of implicit and explicit analysis finds itself interwoven in argu-
mentative arrangements, persuasive devices and contrasting rhetorics; but I purposefully
shun “sequences of cause and effect” which Anderson (1978) would argue are necessary to
“construct plausible accounts”, and argue instead that affective exchanges “begin and end in
the space of a gap between events and their meanings” and then “fasten onto the meaning-
fulness of graphic images of composition and decomposition” (Stewart, 1996). As Stewart

12.
argues, images “just come”, and the “result is an interpretive space in-filled not only with the
dialogics of different voices but with the very act of unforgetting the tenuous hold of concept
on event” (1996).

The attribution of cause and effect would arrest images in their tracks, reducing events in the
“space of the gap” to logical occurrences and objective tellings. “Thangs happen” in these
72

spaces of alterity; things which textualize the world in unpredictable ways, ways which leave
“analysis and description caught in the space of alterity itself where the other remains exorbi-
tant – an irreducible enigma that “refuses to be tamed or domesticated by a theme” (Levinas,
1981) and opens into tensions, latent possibilities and states of desire” (Stewart, 1996).

One day I ran into B. cycling back from the bank. The money machine wasn’t working he
said. I had just been to see G. and was just about to leave, but B. invited me to go and have
a coffee. Abu Z. arrived on his bike too, clad in a thick woolen hat to protect him from the
biting wind. I got a comment on my jeans – did I just come from a disco he laughed. It was
true that I usually dressed more soberly, but it was Sunday after all. A group of lads played
basketball outside. Africans and Arabs it seemed. There was someone from Mongolia play-
ing too, B. said and he pointed out their Libyan roommate; the same guy who had been on
the lookout for a fight two nights ago, in a drunken stupor, was now bouncing the ball up and
down and running madly across the court. A. was outside in his flip flops. “Do you think it’s
summer” I laughed. Looking around I noticed a Somali man in typical attire – a coloured
cloth wrapped around him, also with flip flops on. It was freezing.

“Everybody is happy now” B remarked. “I don’t know why, but people say a Dutch politi-
cian from the UN had a problem in Iraq, with a bomb in Baghdad. That’s important for us”.
“How” I asked, curiously. “Don’t know, just what people say, everybody says it. That’s why
they say that all Iraqi’s will get 6 months now to stay and won’t get sent back til it gets better
in Iraq”. “Abu T got sent back here. He has to wait now” I was told. B. made coffee and we
sat around, him, me and Abu Z. They produced papers from the internet on the worsening
security situation in Iraq and on the forced deportation of Iraqi refugees. I asked what it
meant. “We don’t know. The situation is not good there. We hear things about the UN, and
the European Commission. Maybe they will stop the deportations. We heard there will be a
new report on Iraq, but we don’t know when. Nothing’s better since the elections in March”.
Abu Z. mentioned WikiLeaks stating “that’s got to make a difference to us. They asked
me about these things in my first interview and I told them about these problems, that the
government was killing people, that I was in danger. I told them this. The IND had informa-
tion from the internet during my interview. So they should look again at the internet, at the
WikiLeaks, don’t you think? This is fair. If they don’t, it won’t be justice”, he commented.

We exchanged WikiLeaks stories, about the founder “Lassange”, whose name they didn’t
know, the accusations, about hate campaigns, about slander, trust, news, good news, the in-
ternet, government policy and the “evil eye”. The eye that protects, which is something which
many Muslims wear, but which is “not Muslim, not good” according to B, as “only Allah can
protect us”. Despite my best attempts to know the source of the Iraqi optimism, B. and the
others tried to make something of the stories, inserting gaps in the meanings, with “memory
and relating taking on the full weight of unforgetting” (Stewart, 1996). There was no “final-
izing cause and effect and encompassing explanation” (Stewart, 1996), only “we are all happy
now, all Iraqi’s are happy now”. The gaps in the meanings left spaces for exploration, mind-
ful meanderings and associative ponderings where one never truly arrives at the sense of it
all. The unknown cannot be captured, and indeed there is no need felt to rob the allegorical
of its magical depths. At least not now, when everybody is happy anyway.

This space is a cultural space, an ethnographic space, one given to fecund imagination and a
proliferation of stories. Social life is textualised and “it becomes a space in which people lit-
erally “find themselves” caught in space and time and watching to see what happens, and yet
it also makes them irreducible subjects encountering a world” (Stewart, 1996). Imagine the
circulation of stories, points of view, fabulations of some desired cultural and political real;
narratives which are constructed, imagined, told and re-told, spiraling into lyrical tellings
which are soaked up, ordered and re-ordered, only to implode in on themselves when a new,
more plausible story emerges.

Sitting in Leyla’s living room she started on about her procedures, recalling her first time in
the Netherlands three years ago. Turning time back on itself she remembered what she may
ordinarily have wanted to forget, linking times, with places, and people with actions and in-
actions, where that which had happened just did. And she couldn’t do anything about it. At
the time not, and now not.

Leyla:
I had one negative the first time, then I went to the court and the court gave me a positive
answer. But the lawyer didn’t do things right the first time, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent
 73

us back to Poland. When I came back the second time and I saw the people from the Refu-
gee Council, they asked how it happened that we got sent back to Poland, because the court
had given us a positive decision. I said it was the lawyer, but I don’t know. I just think he
didn’t do his work good enough.

Leyla’s daughter:
I think they just don’t like us here in the Netherlands. The last time I went to see the doctor
he was really rude. I got so mad I just slammed the door and left. They don’t have a heart for
children in the Netherlands.

Leyla:
I will get a definite answer on 8th November, that’s what they told me. I think the whole time
about the 8th, so much I have to take sleeping tablet so I can sleep at night. I asked for a
transfer but I think it’s difficult. The last times I wanted a transfer, I always got refused. They
don’t like to give transfers I think. That’s what everybody says. We don’t know why they are so
difficult. When I lived there [she mentions the place name], I said to COA give me a transfer.
I can’t live here. Those men from Afghanistan were pestering me. My contact person said
this is not our problem. We just have to give you errr good housing. You can’t got to another
AZC, you have Dublin, you have to live here. I say OK, I want to live here if I can live peace-
fully. Four, five months and then one family from Armenia got a transfer, and then it was
peaceful for a couple of weeks. But then the troubles with the Afghans started again.

Then Leyla conjured up images of that place, and of the nightmarish scenes of profanity and
inhospitality, lack of care and loneliness. She recalled the feelings, using words like “aay aay
mama”, and “oh yo yo” and “ooooh aaayhhh mama”. And she ranted about what they [the
Afghans] wrote about her for the whole AZC to see, the shame, the anger, but above all, the
fear. “Leyla bitch f…cks everything”, the broken windows, bruised skin, damaged arms, the
tablets, medicine, the sleep, waking in a hospital and moving out the next day to a new AZC.
Transfer accomplished. But not after a near-death encounter. “aaay aaay mama”. Lianne’s
associations with that place drew us into scenes of anger, interspersed with contempt for
those men who do “those things” to women. Vivid memories of her own husband’s harsh
treatment of her, his alcoholism, his violence, her pain at her “robot-like existence” and at
“never having anybody to care for me”, reinforcing her disgust at “those men” in “that place”
and the staff who “don’t listen to us”. But there were stories which dwelled on happy times,
of two friends sharing worlds, and supporting one another. Of another “kind man” who
helped, who was an “artist” and who was sweet to the children. Only the time was not right
for anything more, but he “got moved” anyway. “Uncertainty and challenge, painful memory
and self-parody, eccentric characters and unearthly voices all point to a world in which there
is more to things than what meets the eye and people are marked by events and drawn out of
themselves” (Stewart, 1996).

I have used the term “new ethnography” to describe my methodological machinations

and drawing again on Stewart who uses a term originally coined by Eve Sedgwick in 1997,
I would like to add “weak theory” (Stewart, 2008) to the picture. It is “theory that comes
unstuck from its own line of thought to follow the objects it encounters, or becomes undone
by its attention to things that don’t just add up but take on a life of their own as problems
for thought. She [Eve Sedgwick] calls this “reparative” theory – a good thing – in contrast
to a “paranoid” or “strong” theory that defends itself against the puncturing of a dream of a
perfect parallelism between the analytic subject, her concept, and the world – a kind of razed
earth for academic conversation”.

Stories will get tangled, emotions fraught, associations embedded, then dis-embedded, lived
and relived, meanings acquired then questioned, understood, maintained or cast aside.
Ordinary life is complex. We are complex. Difference is. Difference is complex. According
to Stewart “there are countless such moments in which something throws itself together –
moments that require a kind of weak theory or a space in which attending to such things is
made habitual. Not an innocent or uniform space, but one that takes place in the course of
historical forces such as the collective saturation of the senses, the voracious productivity of
the marketing industry, the hard-edged, caste-like quality of relations of race and class, the
seamless sprawl of the built environment, the chronotypical changes in times and space, and
all the things that happen to the status of the event itself” (Stewart, 2008).

This “throwing together” of encounters which share a space and then form a composition of
“lived collective fictions composed of diacritical relations, differences, affinities, affects, and
74

trajectories” (Stewart, 2008), seems to characterize my research project. One in which the
senses, my senses, have been truly soaked, overwhelmed, and “touched” in ways which have
problematized my epistemological foundations and confounded my sensorial universe (Puig
de la Bellacasa, 2009). Reminding me of Genesis by Serres (1995) – a noisy journey into
poesis – probing “the relations between order, disorder, knowledge, anxiety and violence”.

I thought I would make an attempt at a polyphonic text, but feel I have failed therein, if I am
to judge my thesis on the grounds laid out by Letiche in his article “Polyphony and its Other”
(Letiche, 2010). Similarly, though, it raises questions as to whether I really do, or did, want
to create a text in which a “polyphonic discourse” takes place; one in which “dialogical rather
than monological authorship” dominates (Letiche, 2010).

Did I ever intend to take a less “authoritative role”? Do I want to provide a space for “multi-
ple voices which remain distinct but nonetheless form the unity of an event” (Letiche, 2010).
I certainly wanted to explore voice in this thesis, in full awareness that my ideological endeav-
our to in some way contribute to giving a voice to the disempowered, may be nothing more
than a misguided misappropriation of their voices to serve my own naïve goals. But can I
truthfully say that I wanted to layer my text with the voices of the authorities; letting them en-
gage with those whose voices are historically silenced “as equals and engage in dialogue that is
in principle unfinalizable”? (Morson and Emerson, 1990). This when I am not yet able to say
whether I do justice, or some semblance of it to the asylum seekers whose accounts are told
in this thesis? Whilst I seriously reflect on whether or not I “steal the other’s voice”, the voice
of the asylum seeker, and impose my point of view (Letiche, 2010), I harbor a slight hope that
my attempt to embrace the complexity of this research project has not been in vain.

According to Lincoln (1995), voice concerns the question “who speaks for those who do not
have access to the corridors of knowledge or the venues of the academic disciplines?” It is
a concept intricately bound up with empowerment, representation, identity, inclusion and
exclusion. Repression, suppression, oppression and silence consequently imply deprivation
and lack of voice.

Voice is politicized. It raises problems for researchers intent on challenging exclusory

practices, for those with social ideals pertaining to justice and equality. I am such a re-
searcher which means that the careless bandying of terms like voice without reflecting on its
implications, is to be avoided. And as Wray-Bliss points out “who defines ‘the silenced’ as
silenced?”. Or LeCompte – “by the very act of engaging in critical, emancipatory, empower-
ing research, researchers take a particular ethical stance toward their informants, defining
them as disempowered or oppressed, regardless of how the informants define themselves”
(1993).

As I stated when I started writing this thesis, my research has no beginning and no end. I set
out to do something meaningful and ended up here. Epistemological foundations rocked
and ontological certainties confounded by a project of surging affectations, impassioned
attunements, dizzy encounters with the Other, enraging flirtations with hopeless-ness and
powerless-ness, and a textualising of the social and the individual, in multi-layered engage-
ments with alterity. In the gap of a social imaginary, of spaces of desire and becoming.
These accounts are narrativizations of the complex lives of asylum seekers and are partial in
their tellings. Indeed, as human beings we are partial, ambiguous and hybrid, multiple and
complex (Latimer, 2008) and the nature of our complexity is nowhere more clearly expressed
than in our relationality.

“Since everything is relative to everything else, nothing is complete in itself but is part of the
continuous movement and interaction between things. The so-called individual can only be
defined by what he or she is not. You are you because you are not me. Today is today because
it is not yesterday or tomorrow”, (Robert Cooper, 2005).

My relation to the asylum seekers is an ethical one, which demands a suspension of the
[academic] expectation of coherence and a full or final answer (Butler, 2005). As it has never
been my goal to construct a text which imposes a theoretical framework on the world or
which seeks to reduce complexity and achieve closure, I have chosen to embrace uncertainty
and ambiguity, “critical exploration and continued performance…[and]…the potential to
lead to an endless exploration of possibilities, instead of the dull and dangerous moment of
final conclusions” (Schaafsma, 1996).
 75

Writing this thesis has been a delight, a true (re) discovery of the joys of writing (people’s
lives) where “our knowing and our meaning making – made possible through our relation-
ship with and through words – are influenced by our work and play with text. The “simple”
act of moving words around the page alters the ways we (get to) know text, the ways we get
to know knowing” (Rasberry, 2001).

But there is still much more I would like to do. Things which I have chosen to leave out in
the space of this thesis. Things like a more in-depth reading of Agamben. To try to under-
stand why “there is no return from the camps to classical politics”. And why “in the camps,
city and house became indistinguishable, and the possibility of differentiating between our
biological body and our political body - between what is incommunicable and mute and what
is communicable and sayable – was taken from us forever” (Agamben, 1998).

I will carry on my research with asylum seekers, and may explore polyphony in greater depth,
especially if my request to research “the other side”, by which I mean the side of the institu-
tions, the organizing bodies, is granted in the future.

And now that a passion to write has been awakened, it must be allowed to develop its own
path, and to meander a journey of “knowing and now knowing enacted. Through writing”
(Rasberry, 2001).

And I will leave you, my reader, to ponder over the words of Butler (2005):

“When we claim to know and to present ourselves, we will fail in some ways that are nevertheless
essential to who we are. We cannot reasonably expect anything different from others in return. To
acknowledge one’s opacity or that of another does not transform opacity into transparency. To
know the limits of acknowledgement is to know even this fact in a limited way; as a result, it is to
experience the very limits of knowing. This can, by the way, constitute a disposition of humility
and generosity alike: I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot have fully known, and I will be
under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others, who are also constituted in partial opac-
ity to themselves.

If the identity we say we are cannot possibly capture us and marks immediately an excess and
opacity that falls outside the categories of identity, then any effort “to give an account of oneself”
will have to fail in order to approach being true. As we ask to know the other, or ask that the other
say, finally or definitively, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that will
ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question remain open, even enduring,
we let the other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account
we may try to give of it. If letting the other live is part of any ethical definition of recognition, then
this version of recognition will be based less on knowledge than on an apprehension of epistemic
limits”.

I embrace this version of recognition. •

76

Postscript –
an En-trance(ment)
“And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.

And he answered, saying:

Your hearts know in silence the streets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.

The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your know-ledge with staff or sounding line.

For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my
path.”
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.”

(Khalil Gibran, The Prophet)

I recognise that this thesis opens more doors than it closes, serving as an en-trance to a jour-
ney of entrancement, on which I am now starting to embark. A journey whose exploratory
potential as yet is unknown, as there are countless roads which could be followed. The first
steps I have trodden have lead me to the enchanting world of social poetics and to realize
the significance of (our) texts in how we (re)produce knowledge and (re)present the world
around us; how we “write lives”.

Atkinson (1990) calls on researchers, and particularly on social ethnographers, to be critical

of the “rhetorical, textual devices” they employ, arguing that “if we comprehend how our
understandings of the world are fashioned and conveyed, then we need not fear that self-
understanding. Rather than detracting from our scholarly endeavours, an understanding of
our textual practices can only strengthen the critical reflection of a mature discipline”.

My research now and in the future will engage in this “fascination” with my own writing and
“the writing of others” (Atkinson, 1990) and I encourage others to enter this entrancing
arena of research, ethnography and social poetics with me. An arena wherein “the fully ma-
ture ethnography requires a reflexive awareness of its own writing, the possibilities and limits
of its own language, and a principled exploration of its modes of representation. Not only do
we need to cultivate a self-conscious construction of ethnographic texts, but also a readiness
to read texts from a more ‘literary-critical’ perspective” (Atkinson, 1990). The demands on
rigor will undoubtedly increase as our engagement with reflexivity and complexity increases.
But our journey will never be dull.
 77

I hope that in some way my research has achieved my initial goal of

“Finding out what a self-other account of asylum seekers looks like if I try to get to know them.”

And that this piece will make/makes a meaningful contribution to an understanding of the
lives of those I have written (about), and the complex dynamics involved in the (extra)ordi-
nary practice of day-to-day living in an asylum centre. Where I also sought to add something
to the debate on researcher reflexivity and to stimulate other scholars to delve deeper into
methodological questions on how to research and how to write affectively; I ended up, in the
words of Rasberry (2001), “forgetting” who I was, in order to “remember myself differently”.
Perhaps this risk of “unknowingness” was what entranced me to “become undone” in my
relations (with asylum seekers) and it may arguably be the only path which really “constitutes
our chance of becoming human” (Butler, 2005) •
78
79
80

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Internet sites
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Chechnya/2197575.html (October 2010)
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