Walking along the beach I saw boat, upside down on the sand.
There was something underneath the boat.
So I looked, because I thought maybe someone was just hiding from the sun under the boat.
I don’t really like too much sun myself. I grew up in a hot country and sitting in the direct sun is not special or pleasant.
The figure I saw was shaped like a person. It was wrapped in white cloth, lying very still.
I was eating ice cream, holding my daughter’s hand.
It was hard to understand what I was looking at.
All of a sudden I could not breathe.
Its something I find impossible to speak about.
It happened four years ago.
We ate ice cream and walked along the beach.
I said to my daughter, look.
Is that a person, she replied.
We stopped.
Then we kept on walking.
There are bodies washing up on the beaches of Europe.
The tourist economies of the Mediterranean cannot afford to have black bodies and tourists openly occupying the same spaces. So those bodies have to be stacked somewhere and then disposed of.
There is a dangerous distinction being made between good and bad immigrants, good and bad refugees.
Good migrants come already educated, which has much to do to with the class they belong to. The receiving country does not have to invest in these people. I wonder why they don’t invest in the large pool of second and third generation migrants they already have, instead of skimming the brains from poorer countries.
Good refugees come from war zones, bad refugees come from murderously poor contexts.
This is a game.
Economic migrants, people who came to Germany/Europe not because they wanted to leave home but because home had become impossible.
Justice would allow them a voice, to be seen as full human beings instead of instruments to enrich countries like Germany which are already obscenely rich, but where people are obscenely insecure. They try to ensure a total security for themselves, at the cost of everyone outside their borders. So at the moment the EU border agency is using funds from the development aid budget to train border guards in third countries to imprison and prevent refugees from arriving in Europe in any way possible. Those people are being kept in inhumane, degrading conditions and subjected to violence. In the name of Security for wealthy, mainly white states. This has to end.
By Clementine Ewokolo Burnley
Clementine will be moderating a panel at our conference ALS ICH NACH DEUTSCHLAND KAM | WHEN I CAME TO GERMANY on 29th October.
IW*S
International Women* Space is a feminist, anti-racist political group in Berlin with refugee and migrant women* and non-migrant women* as members.