Somewhat lost in the literature on affect, I decided to switch gear and try to grasp “affect” in free poetic writing. The idea was not to craft a high quality literary poem, but to allow a different register to guide me in the process of understanding affect. My departure point was to make affect the main character in the poem. The rest followed. Here it is.
~~~
Affect is
the voice that dares bring the illogical into the frame; that dares make claims
with no arguments.
Affect
tells the story of the unsaid and is there to contain.
Affect is a
space of silence ready—or unready—to open up.
Affect
knows the body just as well as it knows the interspace between bodies.
Affect
knows the guts; it knows blood pressure; it knows muscle tension, and the
nervous system.
Affect
knows the touch of a skin against another skin. It knows the release; it knows
the abandon—both may be confused but affect knows the difference.
Affect
knows when it knows, and affect lets go when it doesn’t.
Affect
colours the voice.
Affect
reads the ungraspable, and signals it knowing in return.
The best thing about receiving a prestigious
scholarship such as the Marie Sklodowska-Curie is without doubt the vitality
that comes from Virginia Woolf’s credo: “A woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write.”
ARoom of One’s Own was often on my mind in the past years, when I was meditating about my urge to write more, and my urge to be financially independent. I had decided to work less to be able to write. But working less meant earning less, and I experienced how quickly creative energy recedes when the space to write has no official space to be. I published articles, I published a book, but somehow, the joy that comes with writing kept escaping me. I felt like a fish out of water, gasping for air, trying to swim in an environment where swimming had been turned into springing. I was a resilient fish, I kept springing, but my goodness what was I tired.
Receiving this scholarship was the unexpected gift that
enabled me to re-unite writing with work. There was my water. I felt like a
whale finding its way back to the ocean, after having evaded the danger of the
shore nearby. I’m sure those around me could spot jets of joy escaping as I
rolled my senses in the comfort of my new habitat.
My own room is not a room set in stone. I’ve noticed
that I work best when being in transit—I might be a real fish in the end—sitting
at new places where nothing belongs to me, except for my writing gears: a
laptop, a notepad and a pen. Libraries, cafeterias, coffee houses of all sorts.
I do return to places I liked. Together, they form a network of power sockets
feeding my creative energy. They connect the different cities I live in
(Amsterdam, London, Paris), providing me with ephemeral anchors in the sea of
images and ideas that inhabit my inner life. The lack of belongings makes me
focus. I just sit, and let my senses submerge my thinking. My concentration
arises, my tong starts moving (I always mumble when writing), my fingers tingle
and press the keys. Images become words; words become images. In those moments,
I feel intensely connected.
The room of my own may be especially my own by the
fact that I’m not owning it. But the money makes more of a difference than I’d
perhaps like to admit. I’ve always told myself that living the bohemian life
had its benefit too. Knowing how to cook a delicious diner with just a couple
of ingredients found in the house that evening. Try the pasta with slowly
caramelized garlic and paprika, a couple of parmesan chips and some pepper.
It’s comfort food in disguise. But the lack of financial independence was a
constant reminder of those power relations through which women have been
belittled, infantilized, and kept in the custody of financial dependency. I was
earning the wage of an intern, working more than twice the number of hours for
which I was being paid.
I remember a conversation with a friend who asked me
what kept me from doing the things I dreamed of doing. I then realized that
being paid like an intern makes you feel like an intern, regardless of
education and experience. The lack of financial recognition made me feel numb.
It cut my wings down.
Don’t get me wrong, being an intern can be wonderful.
It can give you the space to discover and try things out. Acting like the
empresario you always wanted to become. Drafting your first contract while you
dream of becoming a legal expert. The thin paycheck that comes with it, can,
when well timed, make you feel like you are flying because you never
experienced earning your own money. I have experienced the joy of the intern,
but that was 15 years ago. Life moved on. I settled, had a child, earned a PhD,
published, organized conferences, taught for years, managed teams of lecturers,
bearing the responsibility to fix whatever had to be fixed. So, instead of
feeling my world expanding by means of sheer discovery, I now felt it shrinking
behind the wall of shame that came with the reality of not seeming to be able
to make a living out of my own skills.
Being financially safe—and to be safe, one must be independent—is a key to unlock spaces of creativity. When money is there, space can be created in whatever way suites. I feel the water around me, and my senses attune to the webs of connection I’m about to traverse. I do not know where this journey will end, but one thing I know for sure: the ocean has many stories to tell. I’m all ears, ready to catch them and offer them to you. Stay tuned.
It’s not hard to imagine why Jack Letts was eventually also deprived of his citizenship. The government had experienced pressure. They had to explain why they hadn’t yet deprived Letts had of his citizenship while Begum has lost her months ago, even though Begum had no other nationality, while Letts was a binational.
The juxtaposition of Shamima Begum’and Jack Letts’ case was one more example of the extent to which politics of citizenship are stained with racial power inequalities, where the white subject appears to have more rights than the non-white and non-Christians. The difference was just too blatant. Although the government had claimed that Begum’s deprivation of citizenship was legitimate because she could potentially acquire Bangladeshi nationality through her mother, the Bangladeshi Minister of Foreign Affair had been quick to comment that Begum was not welcome in Bangladesh and that there was no way she would acquire Bangladeshi nationality. De facto, Begum has thus become stateless with Sajid Javid’s decision to deprive her of her citizenship, making her deprivation of citizenship an illegitimate deed from the UK government.
In parallel, Jack Letts was known to have committed
the same crime—both Begum and Letts had joined ISIS—but Letts was not immediately
deprived of his citizenship, while he did have another nationality: he
was a Canadian British dual national.
For the UK government, the easiest way to make up for the unequal treatment was to repair the inequality by also depriving Letts of his citizenship. He had also joined ISIS. Had admitted that he had been an enemy of Britain. And there is this law, allowing the state to deprive a citizen of their citizenship when the state consider them a fundamental threat to the country. The rhetoric about foreign fighters is clear: all citizens who travelled to Syria are considered fundamental threats to the country. So, the government had all the tools to also deprive Letts of his citizenship.
That was the easiest way. But that shows what kind of
stamina the government is prepared to display. Don’t get me wrong. In this
case, the stamina is weak, very weak.
I can imagine the pressure experienced when faced with
the fact that one’s political play is stained by racism. This was not about
subtle power relations. This is in plane face. But does the government really
think that the racist stain on their politics of citizenship is by now
resolved?
I do believe they are cleverer than that. Perhaps, they believe that for some of their electorate, Letts’ deprivation of citizenship will resolve the anger and set the doubts at rest. Perhaps they even believe that Begum’s family will lose their appeal based on the ground of unequal treatment between their daughter, the girl from Bethnal Green, and the boy from Oxford.
But sooner or later, they will have to face the fact
that the very nature of a law such as the law allowing for citizenship
revocation is profoundly disturbing for our democratic lives.
When the state reserve themselves the right to deprive
a citizen of their citizenship based on claims of security and enmity, we
should not only be concerned about questions of statelessness. Statelessness is
a symptom of something way deeper. Something that I call, using Hannah Arendt’s
term, the totalitarian infection of our democracies.
Begum’s deprivation of citizenship is certainly doubly
disturbing because she has become de facto stateless. But Letts’ deprivation of
citizenship is disturbing too. Certainly, terrorism is a grave matter that
needs to be dealt with the greatest care. But everyone knows that depriving
citizens of their citizenship is not making the state safer, nor is it making
the social body friendlier.
To the contrary. Depriving citizens of their
citizenships makes it harder for the state to know where those potentially dangerous
citizens are, and to proceed against them. By revoking their citizenship, the
state also revokes itself the tools to bring those citizens in front of a
criminal justice court. In other words, the state dumps those citizens they say
are the most dangerous to the rest of the world. Since borders are not
hermetic, it could well be that those citizens will still reach home. It may—or
may not—have the gravest consequences for society.
That is one: the deprivation of citizenship makes
society, whether national or international, rather less safe than more
safe.
And then there is the co-lateral damage. It is
unquestionable that those institutional norms legitimizing acts of citizenship
revocation by state send a repressive message to social groups with dual
citizenship, and even more so to those with a non-white and non-Christian
background. For how can a teenager understand the state’s persistence to revoke
Begum’s citizenship, if not by concluding that the country they live in make
some citizens more vulnerable to the loss of citizenship than others? For
everyone with dual nationality or a non-white and non-Christian background, the
deprivation of citizenship becomes the token of a potential threat to their own
safety. Indeed, the deprivation of citizenship reveals that citizenship might
be a privilege more than it is a right. And that the contingency of the
privileged ones follows a spectrum of norms of oppression that we know all too
well.
I do understand that it requires tremendous stamina
for a state to reverse denaturalization laws so that it is no longer possible
for a state to deprive a citizen of their nationality once they have acquired
it. It requires admitting a certain number of faults: first of all, the fact
that the government made believe that the deprivation of citizenship would be
an effective security tool; second, the fact that the deprivation of
citizenship threatens fundamental human rights, such as the right to have a
nationality; third, the fact that the deprivation of citizenship also erodes
fundamental principles of the rule of law, starting with the principle of
equality before the law; and fourth, the fact that the deprivation of
citizenship is a symptom of the racist stain on our politics of citizenship. Now,
everyone knows that admitting one’s faults requires tremendous courage and
strength.
So, in a moment of pressure, where fatigue is lurking,
I can understand the choice for the government to cosmetically masking
inequality rather than to fundamentally question their doings. Many of us might
do the same in our daily lives. Who doesn’t take the painkiller if that may
delay the annoyingly difficult and fundamental examination of our body? The
decision to make oneself vulnerable, perfectly knowing the pain that one will
go through, and perhaps even knowing that the pain might become even greater
than one can imagine, is a difficult decision.
But if that pain could provide some relief for
ages-old pains of oppression, then it must be worth it. In the long run,
fostering belonging will always benefit the public good.
Surely, abolishing citizenship revocation laws would
be just the beginning. But at least it would be a beginning. And it can be
done. Others have done it. Canada is the most recent example that comes to
mind.
So, let us imagine. Instead of depriving Jack Letts of his citizenship, the UK government would have redressed Begum’s citizenship, and with hers, the citizenship of the more than 150 citizens who have been deprived of their citizenship in the past decade. And the government would have apologized to the communities who felt increasingly threatened of un-belonging. How much time would that take? Pragmatically, a couple of minutes, some hours at best.
It was an afternoon in early summer 2019, in Amsterdam. We were celebrating our teaching program’s fifth anniversary, just as much as I was saying goodbye to those colleagues who had been my community for the past four years. Sipping a beer and laughing at students’ jokes, I was chit chatting with a colleague who happen to be a judge at the Dutch supreme court—one never just happens to be a judge, but one happens to have a colleague who is a judge at the supreme court. My colleague judge was asking me about my new research project that had just started in London.
“I’m
writing about denaturalization law,” I answered.
I’ve
been writing about denaturalization law for years now, so that has become my
primary reflex answer. Judges do know what is at stake in denaturalization law—they
know the stakes of the principle of equality before the law; they know what is
at stake when depriving someone’s of their citizenship rights; they also know
that security is a tricky topic that can sometimes bring democratic ideals into
shaky grounds. I saw in his look that he was interested and that he understood
why such a topic was worth years of research. That look changed slightly when I
added: “But denaturalization is more a tool to write about something else. What
I really do is to show that law and politics are driven by affect and emotions.
And then I also want to make the argument of fiction as methods of inquiry and
communication within the academia…”
Where
most of my academic colleagues up to now had reacted positively intrigued—who
wouldn’t want to see creativity come back in an institution of knowledge and
education?—I sensed that my colleague judge had his doubts about it.
“Stories
are dangerous,” he said, pausing. “Stories are a huge problem in law, making it
very difficult for judges to know where to draw the line—a line that they do
have to draw.”
I agreed. Stories are dangerous. But the point is, stories are as old as human communication. So, I told my colleague judge that my starting point was precisely to see the dangerous potential of stories. In fact, it was when studying such a repressive measure as the deprivation of citizenship, studying the logics that has justified practices of denaturalization throughout history, that had made me realize the power of imagination when it becomes captured in language. Repression is indeed based on stories. Stories drive people to do the most horrific things imaginable. Wars; Slavery; Genocides. These are based on stories. Stories make people believe that some people are better than others. Worse, stories make people believe that some people are more human than others.
The
arguments in stories are no rational arguments. Instead, the arguments are
anecdotes, figurative language—metaphors in particular—framing…all ingredients
needed to make a good story.
Stories
are nothing new in law and politics. They’ve always been there. And yes, they
are dangerous.
So,
we better learn acknowledge their presence and learn to recognize them.
“You’re
very right,” said the judge.
I’m certainly not the first to claim that law and politics are intricately related to storytelling. For instance, Ronald Dworkin is famous for understanding the law by means of the chain novel metaphor. Central to his law philosophy, the chain novel metaphor represents law as literature, but then literature of a specific kind. It is a collective work, for which novelists write in chain, each continuing the chapter of the previous writer. This means that each writer must interpret the work of their predecessor, as well as add their perspective on the story unfolding. It is no free writing though: in Dworkin’s vision of law as a chain novel, each writer must respect the logic and the chronology of the work as a whole. No postmodern experiments, not poetical interludes—at least, not in the guidelines.
What
I like about Dworkin’s vision of the law as a chain novel is that it makes
salient how the law is “doing language,” to speak in Toni Morrison’s terms. “We
die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may the
be measure of our lives,” she reminds us in her Nobel Prize Speech. When seeing
the law as a chain novel, we must pay tribute to the work of interpretation
that goes hand in hand with working with the law. And we must acknowledge the
creativity involved for laws to be drafted in the first place.
Yet
there is another layer to acknowledging the stories that make our laws and drive
our politics. Uncovering stories is one thing, writing stories is another. But
they go hand in hand; they are the two sides of the same coin. If stories yield
power, they are also empowering, and perhaps even more so when they are stories
about power relations, of those power relations that require a story to uncover
them.
More than any academic text will ever be able to do, stories yields the potential for readers to relate to the complexity rooted in the politics of law, or in the law of politics. Elizabeth Dauphinee’s book The Politics of Exile is a wonderful example. Her “meditation on the aftermath of the war on Bosnia” does a tremendous job at plunging the reader into the context of the war and its atrocities. No academic text could have made us experience what is at stake in circumstances of life and death, such as when a man deserts an army. Dauphinee’s creative text does. It is a page turner in which the narrator makes us feel the soldier’s line of flight. But The Politics of Exile does more than that. It also makes us feel how complex it is to write on the aftermath of war in the first place. Because, how could one possibly write about the aftermath of war when not having experienced war in the first place? Can war be known to those who have not experienced it?
Dauphinee’s work makes us feel the existential negotiations of a writer who feels the urge to expose power in its most destructive form. Just as it makes us feel the writer’s anxiety when negotiating their ability and responsibility to find truth. The voice examining the aftermath of war necessarily needs to remain plural, and open for radical transformation. Creative writing is indeed a great tool to achieve such complexity without having to name it complex.
More than any juridical comment will ever be able to do so, stories allow for people like you and me to understand what is at stake in norms of belonging and repression. Stories empower the dispossessed to connect, to speak, to speak-back. Stories are paranoiac as much as they are reparative, to speak in Eve Sedgewick terms. They are paranoiac because they seek the (com)plot behind our governing norms. But a good story is always stronger than its plot, yielding layers of connective emotions that make us practice our job at being human. And that is what makes them reparative.
A
researcher and writer at the crossroads, I love to run the extra mile to uncover
the political stories of our pasts and futures.
I’ve
created this blog as a platform for crossing genres and languages. It is a space
to share the bits and pieces of research that often find no way out; the bits
and pieces that lead to the bigger story, whether mine, or yours.
The
blog is part of my research project titled “Mobilising Affects: Withdrawal of
Citizenship and Politics of Security” that has received funding from the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie
Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 839538. The project takes place at the School
of Politics and International Relation, Queen Mary University of London.
In
a nutshell, my research project focuses
on the mobilization of affects in politics of security and the withdrawal of
citizenship. I draw on historical cases as the basis for evaluating possible
consequences of intensified withdrawal practices for regimes of citizenship
today. I combine
archival research with working affect across the social sciences and art
practices.
