Hospitality – Borderlands

I left EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin with burning eyes and ringing ears. The museum is located in Dublin’s docklands, in the vaults of an industrial building dating back to 1820, initially used as a bonded customs warehouse for tobacco and wine. It now houses a shopping mall. The museum underneath strikes me as a souped-up version of the corridor displays sometimes seen in airports that serve as a taster of the country you are about to enter – generally, exercises in banality. EPIC is dedicated to histories of the Irish diaspora and emigration from Ireland – clearly a fascinating subject. Unfortunately, it primarily consists of soundbytes and rapidly moving, ruthlessly edited film clips: sound and image bleeding and morphing in an infuriating fashion. Throughout the galleries, mawkish and pointless ‘interactivity’ (Guess the Outlaw!) is liberally scattered. It seems to have been designed for people with a concentration span of about three seconds and the ability to read no more than two sentences at a time. A whole room of fake ‘olde worlde’ book spines with titles by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora is par for the course.

*Bookshelves of fake books with titles of books by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora.*
*EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin.*

One ‘byte’ that caught me was a snippet of a sentence from the writer Edna O’Brien: ‘There must be something secretly catastrophic about a country from which so many people go, escape…’ Manifestations of this sense of catastrophe is very evident on the streets of Dublin where, around every corner, there is a plaque or monument to fallen heroes, victims, martyrs, to those massacred or starved, impoverished, imprisoned, locked out, removed, shamed or otherwise driven from homes, workplaces or homelands. It is reminiscent of Freud’s image of the unconscious, in Civilization and its Discontents, as a Rome ‘in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones’.

Outside EPIC there is a memorial to the Great Irish Famine (1845- 1849), which commemorates the forced emigration of 1,490 tenants from Strokestown Park estate in Co. Roscommon (now the site of the National Famine Museum) during the summer of 1847. The tenants were forced to walk the 167km route along the Royal Canal to Dublin, where they boarded the open deck of a packet steamer to Liverpool. From there, they travelled on some of the worst of what became known as ‘coffin ships’. One of them was the Naomi, on which 196 out of 421 passengers died on the voyage from Liverpool to Quebec.

A pair of children’s shoes: detail from the Famine Memorial in Custom House Quay, Dublin. Commemorates the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849). Artist: Rowan Gillespie.

Children’s shoes found in a famine graveyard near the Erne Hospital in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. On display at the Cavan County Museum, Ballyjamesduff.

Reversing the course of this 1847 eviction, since 2017 a hotel in the remote town of Ballaghaderreen in Co. Roscommon gave asylum to around 334 Syrians fleeing war-stricken homelands (though the contract with the former Abbyfield Hotel expires in December 2019). This accommodation was one of a number of Emergency Reception and Orientation Centres (EROC) across Ireland providing sanctuary during the height of the recent mass migration of people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe.

Latter day ‘coffin ships’, particularly those crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa, are well documented. Since 1993, a group called United for Intercultural Action has been compiling a list of ‘documented deaths of refugees and migrants due to the restrictive policies of “Fortress Europe” ‘ (here), which numbered 36,570 as of 1 April 2019 (though there would be many more undocumented). Earlier this week there were reports of migrants jumping off an overcrowded Spanish rescue ship and trying to swim to Lampedusa. By that stage, the Proactiva Open Arms ship had been refused entry by Italy for over three weeks since far right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has taken a hard line on migration and is attempting to close Lampedusa to migrant rescue ships.

Meanwhile back in the province of Ulster, following the revelations of the leaked ‘Yellowhammer’ report, a suspected bomb was reported near the border of Co. Fermanagh and Co. Cavan close to the Cavan to Clones road. When PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) officers attended the scene, a bomb exploded nearby, leading police to believe that they had been lured to the spot by dissidents attempting to murder PSNI officers. I overheard someone in Cavan say: ‘Any excuse, they’ll come out of the woodwork’. It is a common sentiment amongst borderland locals fearful of renewed sectarian violence if the border is fortified following Brexit. (Undoubtedly, the incident would have brought unpleasant memories to many older locals of the bombing in the border town Belturbet in Co. Cavan on 28 December 1972. Two teenagers, Geraldine O’Reilly (aged 15) and Paddy Stanley (aged 16) lost their lives. Eight others were seriously injured. Both of the youngsters were on Christmas holidays from school. Geraldine was waiting for her order in a local chip shop when the bomb hit. Paddy was calling his parents from a public phone box when he lost his life. Across the border in Co. Monaghan, another bomb had been detonated earlier in the day, seriously injuring two men. A third bomb exploded outside a pub at Mullnagoad, near Pettigo, in Co. Donegal. Nobody claimed responsibility for the Belturbet attack, but it was thought to be the work of loyalist paramilitaries.)

These are just two recent examples that suggest how ‘border thinking’ (Walter Mignolo) tempers the way the contemporary world is perceived, performed and produced. The complex interplay between borders, as well as frontiers like the Mediterranean, represent multiple ranges of register: bridge – dividing line, porous – watertight, soft – hard, unauthorised – authorised, invisible – visible, no-man’s land – demarcation zone, etc. Rather than being marginal, borders are increasingly key nodes for understanding the contemporary political landscape. According to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their book Border as Method, ‘borders play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space for contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism’.

For some years, I have been thinking about how concepts linked to hospitality may be a useful way of thinking through such negotiable and contested spaces. The point of departure was Jacques Derrida’s political analyses, in a sequence of seminars from the late 1990s,[1] in which he reads ‘hospitality’ as an aporetic space between the principles of unconditional or absolute hospitality – the principle of allowing whomever or whatever enters one’s domain without reservations or calculations – and conditional hospitality – the laws required to control and protect ‘home.’ Rather than setting these principles of hospitality as mutually exclusive forces, Derrida argues for an irreducible relation between the two.

Derrida understood ‘hospitality’ as an interrogative term to consider both public space as a bounded zone, in which the stranger/foreigner (étranger) is subject to the codes, rules and regulations of its host (home, city or state), and the common right of any stranger to any space; that is, the ethical imperative that the host receives whatever and whomever enters its domain. The radical basis of Derrida’s interpretation calls for the hyperbolic, unlimited ethics of (unconditional) hospitality to orient the (conditional) realm of legislation operating between hosts and guests, challenging the more conventional situation in which the unconditional is contained or guarded by the precepts of conditional hospitality. Radically re-orienting the conditional identity of hospitality, which Derrida summarises as the requirements for ‘a police inquisition, a registration of information, or a straightforward frontier control,’ invokes threshold politics as an ‘unstable place of strategy and decision.’ This, Derrida writes, is ‘[a] difference both subtle and fundamental, a question that arises on the threshold of “home,” and on the threshold between two inflections.’ For Derrida, this is an absolute principle: ‘An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it.’[2]

[1] Key publications related to this topic include: Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Adieu to Emmanual Levinas, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999); On Cosmopolitanism and Foregiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000).

[2] Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Hospitality,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 66-7.

Flor Kent, Für das Kind/Pro Dítê [For the Child] – Displaced, 2003, Liverpool Street Station, London.

During the last week of January, this sculpture tucked against a wall inside Liverpool Street Station crowded my peripheral vision. When I stopped to take a photo, the couple of people leaning against the plinth, attending to their phone screens, looked a bit taken aback – they, too, hadn’t noticed it was there. This blinkered ambivalence echoes the oft-quoted line from writer, peace activist and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” My attention was drawn to the modest Kindertransport memorial by a knot of co-incidences: the passing of Boris Johnson’s “Brexit Bill” [the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act] on 22 January 2020, Holocaust Memorial Day on the 27th of the month, and the “departure” of Britain from the EU on the 31st.

Für das Kind, by the scuptor Flor Kent, is part of a series of similarly named sculptures linking London to Hlavní Nídraží Station in Prague and Vienna’s Westbahnhof Station. The series both memorialises some 10,000 children who arrived in the UK around 1938-39 to escape Nazi persecution and also pays tribute to those private individuals and charities, acting without state funding, who lobbied the British government to initiate a visa waiver system for unaccompanied minors fleeing persecution and helped facilitate the transport. Many of these children disembarked at Liverpool Street Station in London. Among these was six-year-old Alf Dubs – one of the 669 children transported from Prague in March 1939. After 48 hours on the train, Alf was met by his father, Hubert, who had previously managed to flee Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. His mother, Frida, originally from Austria, was also able to escape shortly afterwards on 31 August, immediately before war broke out on 1 September. Hubert died not long after that, and Frida was left with nothing. Despite these tragic circumstances, the Dubs family was able to stay in the UK. Many others in similar circumstances were unable to turn their temporary entry permits into more permanent visas since Jewish refugees were not considered particularly desirable, displaying an attitude that glimmers of today’s “hostile environment” for immigration. (Indeed, Becky Taylor and Kate Ferguson, the authors of “Refugee History: The 1930s crisis and today” – a report by historians from the University of East Anglia for an All-Party Parliamentary Group – have commented that the word “undesirable” cropped up frequently in the archives related to wartime and post-war immigration, particularly in relation to policymakers keen to curb state support for refugees.)

Little Alf later became a Labour activist and MP, and was eventually given a peerage in 1994. In April 2016, at the height of the recent migrant crisis and at a moment when the Vote Leave campaigners were cynically stirring up xenophobic sentiment to secure the populist vote, Lord Dubs successfully petitioned an amendment to the Immigration Act, offering protection to 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children travelling to Britain from other parts of Europe. Despite his efforts, in the first two years of the scheme, just 220 children were able to benefit from the legislation (based on the Dublin Regulation) as it was promptly submerged by Teresa May’s “hostile environment” for immigration – a strategy for the continuance of state racism that has been exposed during the (ongoing) Windrush scandal.

While the Dubs amendment was written into May’s EU withdrawal bill, it was removed after the election of Boris Johnson’s government, blocking the legal right to family reunion for lone children, many stranded in refugee camps in Calais, Greece and elsewhere. On 22 January 2020, Boris Johnson’s “Brexit bill” passed through parliament after the government overturned five House of Lords amendments, including one tabled by Lord Dubs that aimed to restore the right of unaccompanied child refugees to be reunited with their families in the UK after Brexit. This amendment, which was rejected by Conservative MPs by an 88-vote majority, sought to reinstate a previous version of the Brexit bill that required the government to coordinate with the EU to ensure that unaccompanied minors could continue to join relatives in the UK. Yet Boris Johnson happily made political capital on Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, despite his government’s thumping refusal to assist asylum for children currently adrift from their families and barely surviving in unimaginable conditions. Five days later, Britain had “left” the EU (although, despite rumours, that doesn’t mean Brexit “got done”).

Críosog Bridghe: St. Brigid’s Cross woven from straw rushes, associated with Brigid of Kildare, one of the patron saints of Ireland. Traditionally, these crosses are made in Ireland to commemorate St. Brigid’s feast day on 1 February, which also marks the pagan festival Imbolc, celebrating the beginning of Spring.

On Friday 31 January 2020, a message appeared on the Tyrone GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) Facebook page:

Anocht is Uaigneach Tír Eoghain … Tonight Tyrone is Lonely.

The post’s author also cited the Irish saying Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine, which translates as something like: “It is in each other’s shadow that we flourish,” encompassing the wider implications of mutual support and shelter, hospitality, community and empathy. By contrast, Tyrone (NI) was “lonely” that dark night at the end of January in anticipation of its removal from the EU and its guarantee of a continuing mutual interdependence promised to this particular Ulster sports’ association. The poster continued: “It’s a bit perverse that this happens on St Brigid’s Eve, when the welcoming of strangers into the house is a central part of the St Brigid’s Cross-Making tradition.” St. Brigid’s Eve marks the last day of winter and the transition to spring on 1 February. The commemoration derives from Imbolc: one of the four festivals (Celtic quarter days) marking seasonal transitions in pre-Christian Ireland. St. Brigid is a Christian version (or appropriation) of an ancient nature goddess – the Celtic goddess Bríd. Traditionally, crosses woven out of rushes were (are) hung over doors or in rafters as a sign of welcome and an invocation to St. Brigid to watch over the forthcoming lambing and calving season. Crosses hung in stables invited the saint to bless animals and ameliorate birth – ‘Imbolc’ translates as “in the belly” and is associated with parturition. Lore suggests that Brigid also protected cows, their calves and also their milk. In some places, poorer neighbours were offered gifts of milk and butter. St. Brigid is also associated with generosity towards the poor and ill, and the welfare of children and young adults.

Faced with the impression that the veneration of Brigid offers of an ideal symbiosis between communities and natural resources based on empathy and mutual sustenance, it seems little wonder that the good people of the Tyrone GAA felt somewhat bleak over the imminent reconstitution of the border with their neighbours at the end of their lane in Donegal. A few days later, former European Council president Donald Tusk, speaking to Andrew Marr (Andrew Marr Show, BBC, 2 February 2020) pointedly explained:

“Brexit is not about frictionless trade but about friction-more trade […] Brexit is about borders […] the synonym of Brexit is the re-establishment of borders.”

Still, the return of the light and new hope, signified by Brigid, may beckon renewed calls for the promise (or risk, some might say) of the reunification of Ireland, which was underscored a week or so after St. Brigid’s Day when Sinn Féin won 37 seats in the Irish General Election. In that battle, it was housing and welfare – “home” even more than “homeland” – that seemed to have been the key issues. Maybe this is what Bríd/Brigid had in mind for 2020.

Elsewhere:

Category: Hospitality

Famine shoes

Für das Kind – the “undesirables”