Backpack
Rodolfo R. Suárez Molnar & Giulia Palladini
Listen to voiceover
Author: Rodolfo Suárez
Translation, edition and voice: Giulia Palladini
Incitement I:
Pack and repack and repack and repack and…
It has happened to you, or so I suppose. In fact, I imagine it happens to you every time. Not only to you, but also to you; and to me, to us. Perhaps to all of us, because sometimes things just happen, and they are the way they are, no matter to whom they happen. And so, this happens, not only to you, but also to you.
At last, the suitcase rests on the bed. This is always its first stop. So far it has remained empty, surrounded by clothes, small things and a beauty case, while you kept running around, trying to guess the future that lays ahead: long or short? This I don’t know. You read forecasts, calculate, adjust the things that shortly could be indispensable. A forecast of rain, then another imagined setback produces the last rearranging. The suitcase is closed, finally. You run to the airport or not, it depends on the week, the day, the hours before the moment in which the door closes. Eventually you arrive, and so you go through the security points, through the fear controls, in fact. One, two, three. Maybe there is still time to buy a little something before boarding, maybe not. Now it is you the one who rests. Perhaps a doubt, a memory, a farewell are haunting you while the fuel is being loaded. You forgot the toothpaste, you think to yourself, while listening to the security instructions: “in case of emergency, leave your belongings behind…”. You know. We both know it would then be a matter of life or death, but you still can’t avoid this disassociation, this stupid necessity to save something. Then the indispensable is no longer the same, it cannot be.
You re-pack, mentally, but only your carry-on luggage: the rest will be lost, hopelessly. You start taking out some things, almost everything in fact, in order to make room for the forgotten things that only a second before were not such: the old photograph you only now realize it was indispensable, that pen you are so afraid of losing and which you will end up letting go of, if you don’t return, perhaps the jumper eaten away by time, the one you have been unable to get rid of because something binds the two of you, something ineffable, standing somehow beyond that jumper and yourself: time, time itself. Yes: I know that. I know that in the space between life and death all this is nonsense, but even so you cannot avoid it. Maybe if the emergency would happen for real, but as long as it remains unreal, it is hard to conjure enough detachment to run away solely with the clothes one is wearing. In that instant, in the fiction propelled by the mere possibility of death, refusing to abandon everything is still a way of clinging to life.
Stop. Rewind.
This is not your journey. And this is probably not the life you’ve had either. How many times have you been promised that life? How many times have you been told that these little pleasures are also your right? Countless times. And as many times plus one, this one, you kept answering and answering and answering that those rights that cannot be exercised are useless, that any possibility remaining only such will end up in nothing. Promises, on the other hand, are worth little more. And that is why this time it is different, this time is not just an answer: it is a response.
But this is not the moment for these digressions. In fact, it never was, and now even less so. The suitcase is there. It rests, but on different bed: a dilapidated bed. You still don’t know, but you’re just about to find out why they call it “back-pack”. For now, it’s just a sack, with an open zip: jaws giving the impression that they’re about to devour something. What? The essential? Precisely like that other person, the one who had to suddenly ask themselves what is essential, now you find yourself facing that same question, but a different kind of death. Different not only because the journey is riskier, and the death is more likely, but also because returning is another way to die, only slower than it would be if the plane had crashed. So, what to bring with you in what will be your only home for some time? For a long or a short time? This I don’t know. The memories are many and very heavy, but you are still willing to carry them. You pack a few: the obvious ones. Soon the suitcase is almost full and soon you will discover that you must make room for some hope. No matter how little, you’re going to need it. When you are in the middle of the mud or the jungle, in the middle of the river, the sea or the desert, only this breath of the past that projects itself beyond yourself will help you move forward. The rest is worse than dead weight: a ruin, a trace, an anchor. You take something out to put in a yearning and a spare pair of shoes. You accept it, holding back tears as you tell yourself that forgetfulness is lighter after all… until you remember it. I wish it would end here. Impossible.
Amid the back-and-forth between memories and dreams, life in its most insipid form takes over: that of the necessities, the same which are forcing you to leave. Now next to the shoes lie two or three changes of clothes, a hat, a deodorant, and a single soap. Then ropes, a rosary, an account number, and a bible. This time, the photograph dwelling at its core will remain there for several years, perhaps all of them. Your eyes tear up, you recalculate your hunger, you leave a few more banknotes on the table for the family, just in case it takes longer that the coyote “te enganche” (hook you up with someone who can give you work). You get blessed, you kiss and get kissed goodbye, you swear you will come back someday and promise to send something as soon as you can. I’m going to miss you; all say to one other.
Pause.
Maybe it is, in fact, your journey.
Incitement II:
From nowhere to somewhere
“We are all migrants, Africa is the mother-country of us all’. This is not the first time you read this. Yes, you saw that sentence before, you recognise it. The idea is clear, as much clear as the fact that a common origin is not enough to sustain the equality it claims, and that class, gender, and race impose themselves before that generic, quasi-originary equality. This is not only because these and other categories have become for some the basis of violence, but because they are also part of the differences you want to defend and legitimise. Because what is at stake is not an equality between equals, but an equality between different ones,‘a world where all possible worlds fit’, as the Zapatista motto has it.
You read again: “we are all migrants” This is not even entirely true, even if it is, in fact, true. The common origin is so far away that these journeys, hunger, cold, deportations and imprisonment do not fit in. Death fits even less. The entirity of history, you think, is a race to see who gets to hell first, but even that does not make us identical, because everyone has their own hell and their own way of getting there. Before returning to the sentence, two facts cross your mind, literally: they cross and overalap. One government has invested something to ameliorate the causes of migration, and that something is exactly the same amount that another state has invested to restore an archive that survived a fire. The archive is worth saving, you think to yourself. Maybe we are too, you then reply.
Maybe, maybe if instead of saving us they would just stop exploiting us, maybe we would then save ourselves… maybe. Now you’re back to the phrase.‘We are all…’ Now it’s clear, it’s clear that we don’t all fit in there, that at least a part of us lives a particular condition. There are not so many of us either, you say to yourself. Perhaps 281 million, barely 3.6% of the world’s population. Enough to fill seven and a half times the size of Tokyo, but we are still few compared to those who live in poverty or suffer from other forms of violence. So it is no coincidence, but neither it is mere statistics that most of us are also poor, women, children. You are convinced. You read again: ‘… migrants…’ and the ‘all’ becomes insufficient again to grasp the ‘…we are…’ which in this common origin is blurred to you. No, we are not all migrants, even if we have been nomads one day. No. Nomadism is something else because the nomad leaves nothing behind in transit. The whole earth is their territory and that’s why they have none.
They carry their house on their back but not their home, because their home is also nomadic, because if they have one, it is in the fire where they once learned to cook. Nor is their identity altered, because their memory is rooted only for some time, and rests nowhere. The nomad affirms themselves in transit and we have to do so despite of change and movement. This is the only journey for all of us, even if we can’t quite call it like that: journey.
Yes, it’s true. But migrating is something else. It may be not the first neither the last, but it is no doubt the definitive journey. The uncertain departure, the road that is almost a beyond, the pure transit and the sad hope that the reunion will not happen soon, like the return you promise without knowing if you will make it home again. It’s not a lie, it is hope: hopefully the absence will be long enough to at least allow for this future, this televised dream in which you believe more than in God, because of the few stories of those who have once returned. Those who do not return, instead, should be as well off as you imagine you will be, as well off as to at least be still alive. The entirety of history, you repeat to yourself, is a race to see who gets to hell first.
So, could migration be the right word to name the transit and settlement of those who flee a homeland which deny them even the smallest of futures? A homeland like mine, throwing migrants into a hopelessness germinating in shameful conditions, so much so that gambling until losing it all, and yet keeping trying, is perfectly thinkable. Is migration broad enough a word to encompass the story of José Manuel Mateo illustrated by Javier Martínez Pedro?1 A literary story, yes, but corroborated millions of times by the millions who, like José, risk a little of their life, a life in which days and years pass in exchange for a grafted dream. Will at least the voices that make up Chaz Bojórquez’s Word that cut (1991)2 fit in that word,‘migration’? Or could it be that all is blurred in the polysemy of a term that encompasses the transfer of birds and fish, of software, archives, data and even substances?
No, migrating is not just being in transit; it is not even leaving. It is uprooting oneself as one uproots weeds, then hiding during the journey and also at the destination. It is camouflaging oneself in a seat3, almost as the air filling a tire, becoming for a while the tassel of a mattress and, once “on the other side”, preserving the same invisibility. It is that same invisibility, after all, that you will get used to, once you will start wearing that inanimate skin, that Disney costume which already awaits you on the other side, and to which you will end up giving a breath of life against a portion of the minimum wage. Yes, migrating is jumping the walls of all frontiers separating us from some kind of fantasy life. It is crossing the desert and becoming a piece of night behind a bush. Holding one’s breath under the river, and learning to hold back, in the face of mistreatment and subordination; it is becoming nothing among lettuce and strawberries, disappearing behind the toiletries or the dishwasher. Then nothing, or something like that.
Ceasing to be and becoming mere transit, but now a kind of transit inside yourself. It matters little if you stay somewhere for a while. Wherever it is that you don’t end up settling in. Wherever you are, you blur. At least for a while. Because if you were anything at all, you ceased to be that when you became a migrant: because the word is substantive despite the dictionary. Hardly anything. Hardly anything because whatever you have been and whatever you will be must remain on the margins of the invisible. Hardly anything because everything is in suspense. Someday maybe you’ll be something again, but whatever it is, it won’t be the same. What? The possibilities are not limited to pochos4 and pachucos5. Between these extremes there is a range that go back and forth between loss of all heritage, self-affirmation and exasperated pride. The characters of César Martínez, like Margaret García’s portraits, reveal the complexity that weaves between the Americanized compatriot, the fervent Mexican nationalist and what is left of the zoot suit riots: so, there is no mystery, indeed, hidden in the Spanglish one hundred por ciento [percent] Chicano. Whatever it really is, it is only the effect of being, and not being, neither here nor there:
pollos [chickens]6, braceros7, wetbacks, undocumented, cholos, chicanos, pachucos, jainas are only some of the countless transmutations of those who cross to the “yunites”. None of them fit, without some sort of amputation, into the adjectivization of the verb migrate. Even less so in the subjectivation. Not even when the image is closer to the persecution illustrated in Frank Romero’s diptych (The Arrest of the Paleteros), in the execution captured by John Valadez in Getting Them out of the Car or in the violent confrontation between rival gangs, which perpetuate since 1943, as we can guess from the almost commemorative tone evoked by the ribbon waving at the bottom of Vincent Valdez’s Kill the Pachuco Bastard. All this is true, but it falls short of the truth. Whether out of fear or out of exhaustion, out of this form of ceasing to be, the sweat is the real thing. The skin cries, the earth cries: first and last frontiers.
Stop…pause…return.
Incitement III: Unpack
The backpack is still there. So the bed, but now it is already any bed. No. Not any bed. Yours. On the left something that will take you somewhere that paradoxically (or maybe not so much) we call destination: almost as if a destiny, indeed, was awaiting you there. A ticket, a pair of shoes, it doesn’t matter. On the right, a silence different from all silences you have known so far: the one produced by our footsteps when they advance to where we are going, the one of our shadow inhabiting the future. That’s why when we arrive something in us will feel as if it had arrived there before; not as in a déjà vu, but as a literal projection of ourselves.
That is why the shadows, and that is also why the immediate confusion of here and there, constantly changing places: in a second, here is there and there is here, no matter where we really are. The times, above all the rhythms, become confused by the strangeness and the estrangement, until in the end it is you who no longer fit in, the other, the slow one whom the city runs over in its haste, the one hurried by an anxiety, or an anguish, just when the others only want to rest. Disorientation is the name of this feeling, because you have literally lost that: the east, the beginning and the end of the brief and automatic route: that of the passing of days. Yes, you have become the strange one, first to others and then to yourself, the moment when you discover that the tastes, and even the sounds that you used to deeply hate, just a little while ago, have now become your small refrains, your tiny refuges. The smell that was once infectious has become the soup that comforts the sick, the neighbour’s idiotic laughter is the doorbell that announces your return home.
One day, you will long for the holiday you never wanted to go to, and you will long for the person you were when you hated that same holiday.
Yes, this is your journey and this is your identity: the to-and-fro between the other and the self that you have become. The bed, the suitcase, the ticket, the shoes, the steps, the shadow, the silence… you will leave everything that doesn’t fit in that bag, everything except one thing: a farewell letter that at that moment was still non-existent, impossible.
Invitación I: reloaded
Backpack is a text-action that unfolds through different formats, phases and authors, and is part of the artistic actions/interventions that the project Fronteras. is carrying out around migration and exile: a festival and artistic interventions, an artistic toolkit for migration, literary workshops for writing goodbye letters, refuge houses for artists at risk.
So this is just an invitation to participate in this collective exercise that seeks to apprehend, in a device curated by Giulia Palladini and Rodolfo Suárez, the idea of migration that we will construct together. All the people who participate will be its authors; even those who prefer some form of silence.
The exercise is about writing the farewell letter you didn’t write (or maybe to send the one you didn’t send). It can be in any format and digital or physical support, addressed to whoever you want (real or imaginary): a person, a territory, an object, a custom, a word, a feeling, a something that repeats itself or has ceased to do so…
If you decide to accept this invitation, you are also welcome to decide the future of that letter: to share it with us or not, to publish it on your own or in the framework of the project, to send it to someone or ask us to do so, to keep it somehow in some form of secrecy or in some kind of eternity.
Send it to us with instructions (telling us what we can or should do with your letter), or just tell us how you have decided to participate in the exercise, at the following address: [email protected] In return, we will send you a link to a digital and printable version of a toolkit developed specifically for this project: a minimal and incomplete anthology, a children’s board game, a playlist and a photograph.
The leitmotif of the exercise is to explore the possibility of linking migration (as an affective event) to absence and estrangement. In this endeavor, we shall assume from the outset the impossibility of filling this void, even at the level of the very definition of migration. But we also assume that the fundamental presence of this absence is not very different from those affective events in which, fortunately or unfortunately, forgetting prevails over memory. The nostalgia of a non-place, the hope of reaching a future that just existed in past images that will gradually fall into oblivion, are just some of the elements that make up the displacement that migration entails: the uprooting and the settling in a place as natural and as artificial as a museum or a train station. This does not mean disregarding the political, economic or social dimensions of migration. On the contrary, the point is to draw on them in order to explore a possible aesthetic dimension, metaphorically situated next to that of unrooting a bunch of grass and flowers and putting them in a vase.
Perhaps the moment to write it has come, perhaps not. Also time and its arrival is a form of that irremediable and necessary absence.
“Il passo e l’incanto” by Gianmaria Testa.
Notes and References
1. http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/?p=3424
2. https://www.artnet.com/artists/chaz-bojorquez/words-that-cut-wVDbXU5_Gjvg7RGWlJ3syw2
3. http://dccd.cua.uam.mx/libros/investigacion/investigacion_pdf.php?url=matarosas-migracion
4. Pocho is the name given in Spanish to the person who emigrates to the United States and then presumes to be American, forgetting his origins and even despising them.
5. The term pachuco refers to a counterculture that emerged on the US-Mexico border in the 1930s, where young people of Mexican origin expressed their way of life and their tastes, with a desire to stand out from the marginalisation they suffered in the United States. They are well known for their slang [Spanglish], their Zoot suit style of dress, and a very particular nationalistic pride. Octavio Paz wrote one of the best essays on this culture in El laberinto de la soledad (1950).
6. Name given to migrants by human traffickers (Polleros).
7. The bracero was a person, usually Mexican, who worked in agricultural labour in the USA. Between 1942 and 1964, Mexico signed the bracero programme with the USA, an important precedent in the migration of Mexican workers to the United States, which consisted of a binational agreement for Mexican workers to legally enter the USA temporarily to carry out certain tasks, mostly agricultural work.
8. Cholo is the name of those who are part of a counterculture of Mexican migrants in the USA. The way they dress characterises them, taking traits mainly from the pachucos, as well as the cultural manifestations expressed in graffiti.
9. It is derived from the word ‘hani’ and the Spanish slang for a young woman. It is one of the many words inherited from the Pachucos, the first Mexican urban culture to cross borders, the first to be persecuted and stigmatised by the conservative society of the USA.
10. From “United”, slang name for USA
11. https://digital-collections.csun.edu/digital/collection/univ-art-coll/id/129/
12. https://lib.utsa.edu/artcollection/collection/artists/john-valadez
13. https://lib.utsa.edu/artcollection/collection/artists/vincent-valdez