In mid-July 2022, a group of fifteen creative writing students were invited to join a three-day workshop entitled “On the Run” that was held at the Jesuit Worldwide Learning (JWL) Centre in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya's northwestern Turkana County. Since 1992, Kakuma has housed refugees from across East Africa and the Horn, including from South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Burundi, Eritrea, and Rwanda. The camp has expanded rapidly over the past three decades and today hosts around 200,000 people who have fled wars, disasters, and conflicts near and far (Grayson 2017; Jansen 2018; Teferra 2022). Out of necessity they have made Kenya their makeshift “home.” The workshop was co-organized by the authors, one of whom (Kodi Arnu Ngutulu) is an educator, poet, and writer who has lived as a refugee in Kakuma camp for 17 years, and the other (Hanno Brankamp) a UK-based academic who has done research on displacement in Kenya for the last nine years.
The workshop's aim was twofold: first, to explore how the concept of “fugitivity,” through its various iterations of being on the run, may resonate with the participants’ own theorizations of forced migration, escape, running (away or toward), evasion, as well as their own life- and freedom-seeking. Here the focus was, as Yousif Qasmiyeh poignantly puts it, “to embroider the voice with its own needle” (Qasmiyeh 2019; see also Anzaldúa 1987) and contribute to our existing interest in ways of “feeling the refugee camp” (Brankamp 2021). Second, in line with existing scholarly debates (see Badr 2020; Deandra 2018; Paiva 2020; Reale 2014), we wanted to further the use of poetry as a literary research method and source of theoretical knowledge in the study of “refugeehood” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020; Qasmiyeh 2021). Inviting young poets in Kakuma was therefore key to entering into conversation with (and learning from) them as theorists of their own experience. Most of these poets had familial links to South Sudan but were either born in Kenya or had lived in the country since their earliest childhood. Coming of age in a place of precarious belonging like Kakuma, many were used to speaking Kiswahili (one of Kenya's two national languages) to one another while conversing in their respective “mother tongues” with family at home. Five participants subsequently offered their poems to be included in this issue: Joh Magok Kuerang (“Unrelenting Pursuit”), Chol Reech (“Planted Thorns”), Atem D. Alaak (“Away from Home”), Mary Aluel (“Empty Pockets”), and Mamer Amou (“Escaping My Identity”). Through their poetry, they ponder questions of escape, belonging, immobility, and ultimately redefine what it may mean to be perpetually “on the run.”
The notion of fugitivity framed the workshop thematically. Building on a long line of Black scholarship and lived experiences of struggle against systems of capture and unfreedom past and present, “fugitivity” offers a unique analytic through which to poetically make sense of contemporary displacements. In her magisterial book on US slavery, Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman (1997: 65–66) describes fugitivity as the cumulative acts of “stealing away” that are made possible and material through “appropriation of space and the expropriation of the object of property,” namely the unauthorized mobility of slaves themselves. For Hartman (1997: 66), “it encompasses an assortment of popular illegalities focused on contesting the authority of the slave-owning class and contravening the status of the enslaved as possession.” Fugitivity is thus an embodied political act of refusal and evasion, a practical poetics of self-created freedom. In refugee camps like Kakuma, temporary fugitive acts of flight, truancy, and escape often constitute the bedrock of a lived everyday abolitionism (Brankamp 2022). And yet at their core, fugitive acts always contain a simmering tension between lines of flight that are inherent to a life “on the run” and the creative practices, clandestine networks, and rejuvenating alter-solidarities that accrete during the course of this flight (see Campt 2014). Scholar/poet Keguro Macharia (2013) equates fugitive life, therefore, with “sneak[ing] in and around, about and away, to crevice and burrow: to jump under fences” but identifies in this not only the furtive action of running away but also the more constructive “world-making” that fugitive struggles share with poetic endeavors. Without flattening the differences between the historical plight of slaves and the perilous journeys of refugees today, both these racialized “figures” of forced passage essentially seek or sought to “escape to a place of perceived freedom” (Stierl 2020: 456; see Sharma 2020). Dénètem Touam Bona (Bona 2022: 43) recently theorized what he terms “the art of fugue” as a transhistorical counterpoint to global carceral apparatuses that can be punctured by the “creative indocility” and embodied knowledges that help refugees, slaves, and other “forced travellers” to plot and pursue their respective lines of flight. During the workshop, the notion of fugitivity had almost immediate resonance with life in and outside the camp. Participants discussed the difficulties of leaving Kakuma, of routine police checks, lack of documentation, systemic discrimination, and stuckness alongside their adolescent struggles of not-quite-belonging, growing up poor, falling in and out of love, and generally “staying out of trouble.”
What best articulated these multifaceted meanings of their being on the run, both from and toward something, was the Kiswahili phrase kutafuta maisha, which literally translates as “seeking life” and implies moving away from the troubles, deprivations, and hopelessness of a past life while taking a chance to pursue something better, wherever that may be. Ultimately, the poems that our contributors created traced their personal transitions and quests from “home” to “exile,” from the refugee camp to its outside, and the rocky path from adolescence to adulthood. By way of this courageous, tender, and vulnerable process of lyrical storytelling, they not only opened up space to reflect on their past, present, and future struggles as a series of interlocked displacements but were able to write, craft, etch, compose, and foretell—through pen on paper—literal lines of flight.
The Geopoetics of Migration
There has been a notable surge in academic work exploring poetry as a method for qualitative research. From the outset, this journal has championed poetry as a form of knowledge to be reckoned with (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Berg 2018; Qasmiyeh 2018). At times maligned as by definition local, inward-looking, insular, unitary, or monologic, poetry has indeed always been a world-making device, a way of piecing together fragments of the local as they are folded into the planetary, and a stepping stone toward creating a “transnational poetics” (Ramazani 2009). French-Martinican cultural theorist Édouard Glissant once charted what he termed a “poetics of relation” as a way of writing counter-cartographies that defy the horrors of colonial mappings and articulate self-defined futures in which “the totality” of the world is “put in touch and told” (Glissant 1997: 28). Poetry is in this sense both a disobedient cry for vengeance and a means for sculpting new earthly relations that reimagine the world.
Poetic inquiry has been especially fruitful for shining light on migratory experiences that traverse both physical and imaginative geographies. Edward Said (2001) once voiced his bewilderment that “exile” constitutes not only “a condition of terminal loss” but was, at the same time, easily transformed “into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture.” Indeed, poetry of displacement has become a significant subgenre in the humanities that harnesses this productive tension of exilic geographies (Badr 2020; Bakara 2020; Byrne and Doja 2019; Vecchione and Raymond 2019), often brought to the fore by prominent poets/writers of displacement, detention, and encampment like Behrooz Boochani (2018) or Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (2021). Anna Bernard (2019) notes that this refugee writing, like any writing, contains a multitude of “genres” that are simultaneously “literary and extraliterary, fictional and non-fictional, single-authored and collaborative.” However, poetry has a special place in this motley literary landscape for her because it can be composed and circulated at minimal cost and artfully combines the lyricism of introspection with the publicness of its performance. Mostafa Hosseini and Elisabeth Punzi (2022), for example, employ poetry as a tool to examine how young, resettled Afghans cope with the vagaries of personal injustice, mourning, and a new Swedish “home” to which they do not yet fully belong. Lynn Norton and Yvonne Sliep (2019) mobilize a poetic inquiry for participatory action research (PAR) with refugee youth in Durban, South Africa, whose despair becomes a source of solidarity based on their individual “speaking out” and their finding kindred spirits to “speak with.” While oral testimony and narratives are vital for refugees and asylum seekers to make themselves known, understood, and legible to border guards, UN officials, aid workers and state bureaucrats who they need to convince of their “deservingness,” their assumed role as “asylum speakers” (Shemak 2010) can also be seen as a creative subversion of those same bureaucratic procedures and the death-dealing logics of bordering.
In fact, lyrical writing has been said to be able to forge new terrains on which social inquiries, geopolitical critique, and philosophical undertakings can embrace the poetic in what some call “geopoetics” (Leeuw and Magrane 2019b; Magrane et al. 2020; Nassar 2021; White 1992). It begins from the conviction that as long as “we” earth dwellers are divided among ourselves, and alienated from our planetary home, there is little hope for building more equitable and just futures. Ideally, geopoetics can open avenues for poetic voices to express the inexpressible, speak the unspeakable, or think the unthinkable which may subsequently inform and recalibrate our geographical theory. Poetry, when done well, is not beholden to conventions of academic writing but instead aims “to provoke a reader and reach for the gut, the stomach, the skin, as well as the mind” (Magrane 2015: 90). It makes palpable the imaginative geography that weaves through global asymmetries of power, knowledge, identity, resources, and acts as “a linguistic means to express geopolitics” (Madge 2014: 181). A geopoetics of migration, as we understand it, offers an expressive frame through which to read and interpret contemporary predicaments of borders, non/belonging, citizenship, displacement, transit, aid, and life-seeking. Through words, rhymes, and imagination, it lights a way through seemingly turbulent seas, blistering deserts, impassable forests, or untrodden mountain ranges that are at once corridors, cemeteries, meeting points, living memorials, and sanctuaries at the edges of the world. It is the lyrical archive of the global politics of migration. In presenting us with their own ways of kutafuta maisha or seeking life, our contributors enrich this growing archive and guide us through paths long closed-off, while envisioning others yet-to-come.
The Contributions
Our contributors offer a rich tapestry of emotions, memories, and theories about what it might mean to “be on the run.” Their syllabic heartbeats haunt us, challenge us, and hold us closer with every stanza. The stories they tell, to invoke Katherine McKittrick (2021: 53, 63, 148), are “beautiful and sad and awful” in that they represent portraits of contemporary “black life and livingness” as it exists on the move. In “Unrelenting Pursuit,” Joh Magok Kuerang gives us a glimpse of his undying longing for “home,” the violent shadows this home casts over his life and upbringing in exile, and the trauma of war that has been passed from one generation to the next. His poem conjures the growing betrayal felt after the moment of flight turned into protracted encampment through which his forced Kenyan home quickly “sheds its fragrance.” In “Planted Thorns,” Chol Reech describes the obstacles that refugees encounter when trying to leave the camp, which requires permits not everyone can easily obtain. His poem evokes the sensory experience and intimacy of such troubled journeys, with bodies huddled together in minibuses, ready to face the “planted thorns” operated by Kenyan police officers who have become experts at “picking daily sweats” from refugee travelers. In “Away from Home,” Atem D. Alaak presents us with a deeply personal account of his alienation and fragile belonging in Kenya. His poem is imbued with all kinds of vulnerabilities and feelings of anger, bitterness, embarrassment but also flashes of hope. Trying to find a way out of the indignity and unfreedom that displacement begets, he longingly asks “where on earth do strangers walk freely?” In “Empty Pockets,” Mary Aluel draws our attention to the broken promises and cynical fictions that litter humanitarian spaces. Expressing her disillusionment, she takes aim at the lack of opportunities and the “futility of life” for herself and those like her, dismissing optimistic narratives of “greener pastures” that are touted by nonprofit agencies desperately trying “to help.” Finally, in “Escaping My Identity,” Mamer Amou brings our creative encounters to a close with her tender but haunting reflections on the carceral nature of citizenship and ethno-racial identity in a bordered world. She expresses her urge to break free from the “bondage” of her given identity which unfairly structures her life chances and keeps both her body and mind perennially “captive.” Her poem is an analysis of borders as etched into bodies and the youthful psyche, leaving few avenues for escape but to ask “how do I change my identity?”
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our deepest gratitude not only to our contributors but to all workshop participants for teaching us how inspiring and enjoyable such creative collaborations can be. We are in awe of their openness, courage, and laughter during and after the workshop itself. Furthermore, we thank Oxford's John Fell Fund for generously providing funds through their pump-priming scheme, which made this project possible in the first place. Jesuit Worldwide Learning (JWL) kindly supported the workshop by providing the venue.
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