The Suffering of the Immigrant

"When you are not at home, memories vanish. Absence leads to ignorance. Milan Kundera’s book Ignorance is about exactly this. This ignorance causes exclusion. I think it’s also very important to link the absence to Eva Hoffman’s book. The absence is linguistic, too. For myself I lack words. I lack vocabularies for vegetables, insects… I don’t know the words in Persian. I don’t know them in Swedish. I don’t know them in English. They are lost somewhere, absence everywhere. His perspective is not from the host country, looking at people coming in. Usually in migration studies we reduce migration to immigration. They come here. Sayad links immigration with emigration and why people migrate. The causes of migration are very important for knowing about the consequences of migration. To know why integration fails or succeeds you should look at why people move, which is not usual. “‘Refugeeness’ is sometimes viewed like an illness. Today, people coming from Libya are treated like sick people.” He believes that immigration cannot be separated from emigration. Through looking at the causes of migration in the home country he comes to something interesting, which is often overlooked, namely, colonialism and the role of colonialism in international migration. He was Algerian himself, and he writes about Algerian immigrants in France. He tells how a traditional system of production and how infrastructure back in his homeland was destroyed by the colonial power. Immigration became the only way for people to survive. He himself was an immigrant from Algeria to France. This distinction between researcher or writer and people he writes about is not clear. He is one of them. There is no distinction between anthropologist and informants, between scholar/researcher and the object of the study. This makes it more interesting. You can feel that solidarity because he sees himself as one of those he studies. He writes about himself in some ways. He writes about his own experience of being an immigrant in Europe. He gives a human face to people not regarded as humans. Usually they are regarded as refugees or undocumented immigrants. So he gives this background through looking at colonialism, history, and why these people were forced to leave their country. He goes beyond all these policies, laws, legislations, formal documentation and looks at individuals – people – behind all these categorisations and terminologies and theories. It links to the previous question about solidarity. Sayad reminds me of Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks , especially in Sayad’s last chapter. It’s brilliant, how he writes about colonialism and racism and how people suffer from this."