Hands across the border
Suketu Mehta makes a passionate case for the immigrant’s right to free movement
There are moments in Suketu Mehta’s This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto that are cinematic in their retelling. The reader is actually a viewer, an eye-witness to grand movements by paperless people, a co-conspirator in crossing borders, often with tragic consequences. Mehta’s narrative is like a series of disjointed frames — heightened by anger, softened by nostalgia, tinged with grief — that conjoin to tell a compelling story.
In Tangier, for instance, which he visits in 2018, Mehta finds himself in the room of 26-year-old Khalil, who is from Conakry, the capital of Guinea. There are three other women in his room with its yellow walls and a naked bulb — his wife, and two other African women, whom he tells Mehta are his sister and his grandmother. Khalil’s wife has just given birth to a baby boy, Isaca. The family must wait until the baby is a month old, before they cross over into Spain.
Khalil and his wife have travelled from Guinea to Morocco in trucks, under constant threat of abandonment by mercenary drivers. They plan to buy a plastic boat with a powerful motor that will take them across the Mediterranean. “They know it’s dangerous, they know they might die making the crossing; but when you’ve come this far, when you’ve crossed deserts and mountains, this is the final bit. Because you can see Spain, you can see your destination,” writes Mehta, with an empathy that reverberates through all his dispatches.
In Tarifa, at the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula, Mehta meets 41-year-old Favoui, who is from Delta State in Nigeria. She began a perilous journey into Europe in 1999, and while she managed to cross over, she tells of those who couldn’t. Among them is the baby of a migrant woman she meets at a detention centre in Morocco. “It had been a dark night when she’d crossed,” Mehta writes. “She put her legs in the sea, holding her baby. A wave came.”
Apart from scenes of adventure and heroism (or recklessness, depending on which side of the fence you are on), there are moments of rushed love and tenderness strewn across the chronicles of immigrant lives. In Friendship Park, a patch of land located in the San Diego-tijuana region, along the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico, families on either side of the rusted mesh that separates the two countries exchange “pinkie kisses” — fingertips touching across the fencing. “‘Amargo y dulce’ is how the migrants describe the experience. Bittersweet,” Mehta reveals, and his narrative voice seems to crack, before he regains composure.
This Land is Our Land is a fervent declaration of the immigrant’s right to move across borders, a debunking of populist narratives that swirl around migration, a gaze at political and environmental traumas, in particular, colonialism, corporate colonialism, war and climate change. It is an enquiry of human movement and the reaction to it by rich nations — building walls, setting up industrial meshes to make borders impenetrable. “A wall will do nothing to stop them,” Mehta affirms. He moved from Mumbai (then Bombay) to the United States in 1977, when he was 14. He has been an American citizen for 30 years. At ease with that identity, he, nonetheless, recalls a time when his maternal grandfather, who had worked in Kenya but had retired in London, was questioned by an elderly
British man in a park in London in the 1980s.
“Why are you here?” the man asked. Mehta’s grandfather replied, “Because we are the creditors,” adding, “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.”
Mehta delineates with precision, the nature of this plunder: looting the treasuries of the local kings, imposing exorbitant taxes upon the subjects, forcing them to grow cotton that fed the mills in Manchester, recruiting colonial soldiers for their wars.
And when the immigrant arrives, finally, to collect his dues, he is feared. Mehta examines this fear, and its disastrous political consequences. He mentions the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who, in 2018, made a bid to close Central European University’s Budapest campus. The university, founded in 1991 by George Soros, the Hungarian-american philanthropist who survived the holocaust in Hungary, represents a pluralism and academic freedom that threaten Orbán’s farright politics. He refers to the Brexit vote as an expression of fear and anxiety over immigration. He describes the United States President Donald Trump as “…a leader who might end up being the most destructive in the country’s history”. His damning indictment is perhaps corroborated by Trump’s recent measures against legal migration: the suspension of new H-1B and L visas for technology professionals, at least until December this year.
The notion that immigrants leave a trail of crime, drugs, disease and illicit sex wherever they go is one that Mehta attempts to understand, through a variety of literature, before refuting it. He quotes the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-strauss, whose observations about Calcutta (now Kolkata) are in his 1955 travelogue Tristes Tropiques: “Filth, chaos, promiscuity, congestion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung, urine, pus, humours, secretions and running sores; all the things against which we expect urban life to give us organized protection, all the things we hate and guard against at such great cost, all these by-products of cohabitation do not set any limitation on it in India”.
Whether the immigrant is still perceived as someone characterised by Lévi-strauss in his list of disgust, Mehta clamours for, if not a welcome mat at the borders, then at least a deeper understanding for those who have to cross them.