The illusion called home

She was married on August 7, 2015, beaten two days later, and was brought to our home a fortnight later. Fifteen days after her wedding, with a broken finger, she had ended up working for us. An unusually smart young lady of 19, she seemed efficient and used to do routine work. I am not surprised. She started work when she was eight, "playing" friends with her employer's children of her age. The second house help is also a classic case of a survivor. She has just returned from Dubai and claims that in spite of obtaining a valid "house visa", she did not feel "at home" there and thus returned. A feisty, talkative old woman, she often narrates sad tales of her ambitious, overseas trips. Both of them, ironically, have left their own homes and travelled for a safe refuge . . . to ours.

Recently, lists of names often pop up in dailies which contain names of the dead, who have perished in either sea or land, while undertaking the perilous journeys. The names often remain relatively unknown. But numbers matter. These men, women and children are mostly starved, often restrained, beaten, and sexually violated, which goes to prove that migration is a complex movement where refugees, and the stateless end up being most uncertain as voyagers.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the scale of the movement has tripled since 2012. Now, why is the number of Bangladeshi migrants going up? Why do we find more and more people leaving home? Are they all economic migrants? Or is it something beyond economy? At a recent investment summit in Singapore, your columnist met a number of non-resident Bangladeshis who have been in that foreign space for over 25 years. Most have invested in real estate, a few in restaurants, and a few even import clothing from Bangladesh. At the end of the summit, a couple of them were given awards and certificates and a few of them happily took pictures, along with their family members, with chief guest, Kofi Annan, the ex Secretary General of the United Nations. By the end of the event, I sensed a sense of innocent pride in them that left me baffled. And I wondered, why is it that we always fail to bring our own ones back home, especially when most of them are just happy with as little as a small photo opportunity?

As much as we take pride in our remittance figures, we also perhaps need to realise that this is earned at the cost of their lives. While our workers sail out to unfamiliar territories and face subhuman working conditions, the foreign lands are, in reality, never home for them. Their identities there are mostly performed and contested. Whether it's a Bangladeshi doctor in Libya, a construction worker in Jeddah, a house maid in Dubai, a flower vendor in Rome, or a business tycoon in Canada, most of them suffer the pangs of hybridity. More and more of us have begun to live in what Edward Said called "a generalised condition of homelessness," in a world where identities are increasingly coming to be differently territorialised. Refugees, migrants, displaced and stateless people are perhaps the first to live out and suffer these realities.

We have inherited these unfortunate realities as a result of many multinational corporations steadily exploiting raw materials, primary goods, and cheap labour of the independent nation-states of the postcolonial "Third World." Laws of the market have historically encouraged the international flow of capital while on the other hand, national immigration policies have ensured that there should be no free (meaning "anarchic", or "disruptive") flow of labour to the high-wage nations belonging to the capitalist core. In case these "rules" are ever violated, the outcome ends up being a case of a binary opposition of oppressor and oppressed, male and female, master and victim. As a result of which, our men and women live unversed in their new homes, suffering interstices of foreign spaces. 

Results have been horrific. The last ten days have surfaced with tragic figures of the death toll of Bangladeshi migrants. twenty four were killed while a boats capsized off the Libyan coast en route to Italy; around 78 Bangladeshis were in the two boats that sank with 500 would-be migrants in Mediterranean Sea near Libyan coastal town of Zuwara where the boats had disembarked; Bangladeshi corpses were even found in a parked truck in Austria; liquid from the decomposed bodies was spotted seeping from the vehicle. 

Reality is that more of our own people are living outside their place of birth in spite of the share of international migrants in the world population remaining at around a steady 3 percent every year. More than 300,000 people have risked being drowned or suffocated trying to cross the Mediterranean this year in order to find their illusion of a home. 107,500 migrants risked perilous transits in search of a home, and reached EU borders in July. More than 170,000 migrants arrived in Italy in 2014, which was considered to be the largest influx into one country in EU history. 88,000 people crossed the Bay of Bengal since 2014, and 25,000 since 2015. Out of them, according to IOM, excluding the recent incidents, an estimated 2,373 people have died so far this year while trying to reach Europe by sea, and 3,573 in the past 12 months. 

Trapped in holds, and dying of asphyxiation, seems to be a new and altered reality for the aspiring migrants. Whether it is Bangladeshis fleeing from Libya after the country's descent into chaos since 2012, whether it's the disastrous political reality of Syria that forces people to escape, whether it's a desperate journey of the sole bread earner in the family to land up in Australia through Malayasia or Indonesia, or whether it's only to go to Malaysia through Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea… all of them risk death. 

In spite of all this, stakeholders and member states of EU are reacting differently. A few countries like Hungary is building a new fence along its border with Serbia to control migration; Germany is expecting 800,000 asylum applications this year; Berlin, backed by Austria, wants a new state of mandatory quotas for refugees while UNHCR is expecting 3,000 people a day to enter Macedonia from Greece until at least the end of the year.

Many of us hop into airplanes and have the privilege of crossing skies with ease; many of us undertake cruises and enter foreign lands with prestige. But at the other end of the tunnel, there are millions who come dangerously close to the smell of death while trying to leave their native lands, in quest of a new identity in a new nation-space. These are the same people who experience a profound sense of a loss of territorial roots, and an erosion of the cultural distinctiveness. While Radcliffe drew the line with a 2HB pencil and partitioned us in 1947, he also gave birth to thousands of people seeking to reconcile with a treacherous in-between-homelessness. And while many academically refer to the pulverised space of postmodernity and contest geographical lines, the image of Felani pinned on a barbed wire fence is still hauntingly fresh in our memories. Many of us have been on the run for far too long. Since fences kill and borders eliminate, maybe now is the time to come home. 

The writer is Managing Director, Mohammadi Group.