The Wherewithal of Life
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
The Wherewithal of Life
ETHICS, MIGRATION, AND THE QUESTION
OF WELL-BEING
Michael Jackson
In conversation with Emmanuel Mulamila,
Roberto M. Franco, and Ibrahim Ouédraogo
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEYLOS ANGELESLONDON
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, Michael, 1940–
The wherewithal of life : ethics, migration, and the question of well-being / Michael Jackson in conversation with Emmanuel Mulamila, Roberto M. Franco, and Ibrahim Ouédraogo.
pagescm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-27670-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-520-27672-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
eISBN 978-0-520-95681-0
1. Anthropology—Philosophy. 2. Ethics—Anthropological aspects. 3. Well-being. 4. Immigrants—Cross-cultural studies. I. Title.
GN33.J34 2013
301.01—dc232013008535
Manufactured in the United States of America
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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event, and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.
PAUL AUSTER, City of Glass
CONTENTS
Preamble
Emmanuel
Roberto
Ibrahim
Postscript
Appendix: Existential Mobility
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Preamble
IN THE SUMMER OF 2005, en route from Denmark to the United States to take up yet another visiting academic position, I decided to break my journey in London to look up Sierra Leonean friends and document some of their experiences of living betwixt and between. One cloudless morning, I accompanied Sewa Koroma on a circuitous tour of the West End, revisiting the sites of critical events during his first year in the city. At one point, we stopped on Westminster Bridge to take in the view. Tourist boats were moving up and down the river, whose muddy banks had been exposed by the ebbing tide. Ahead of us lay County Hall, where I had been interviewed for a job as a welfare worker with the homeless in the winter of 1963—a lifetime ago, it seemed, before the London Eye, the Gherkin, and Millennium Bridge were built, before Sewa was born. Suddenly, as if he were also struggling with similar anachronisms, Sewa exclaimed, “You know, Mr. Mike, I am thinking that right now my brothers and cousins are all working on their farms back home in Kondembaia, working hard, but I am here in London, walking these streets, living this life, this different life.” When I pressed Sewa to spell out the difference between life in his natal village and life in London, he explained that, although the menial jobs he did in the United Kingdom were very poorly paid, they were preferable to farming. While farming involved a repetition of age-old patterns, London offered perennial possibilities of something different, something new. Yet the life he had left behind haunted him. He was often “seized” by homesickness. It “took hold” of him and would not let him go. He would wake at night to dreams of fraternal infighting, and even though he learned to assuage them by praying to Allah in the way his father had taught him, he struggled to reconcile family obligations with personal ambitions and often felt “small,” “stared at,” and “stressed,” as if his gains were a sordid boon that could never compensate for what he had given up by leaving his homeland.
That Sewa’s ambivalent relationship with both Sierra Leone and Britain should move me so deeply reflected my own transient biography and explains why, after settling in the United States, I continued to explore the origins and repercussions of migration1—during return visits to London,2 in the course of fieldwork with Sewa in northern Sierra Leone in 2008,3 and finally in the conversations that compose this book.
THE JOURNEYING SELF
In the well-known opening lines of The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus asserts that “the fundamental question of philosophy” is “judging whether life is or is not worth living.”4 Although Camus explored suicide as a response to a life that has become insufferable or meaningless, he failed to consider migration as a “way out” or address the dilemma of every migrant for whom life in his or her home place is a kind of social death, yet for whom rebirth in a foreign land may prove illusory. Yet this existential dilemma was anticipated in a letter he wrote to his best friend when he was nineteen. Describing the sea, sun, sand, geraniums, and olive and eucalyptus trees of his natal city, he concluded, “I could never live anywhere but Algiers, although I will travel because I want to know the world, but I’m sure that anywhere else, I’d always feel in exile.”5
This book is empirically grounded in the experiences of three men whose journeys from the global South to Europe and the United States dramatize, in often harrowing detail, a number of ethical and existential issues that will be familiar to most readers, if for no other reason than that the vicissitudes of attachment, separation, loss, and renewal are unavoidable aspects of every human life. Our lives oscillate between transitive and intransitive extremes. Whether planned or accidental, desired or dreaded, the passage from one place to another, one life stage to another, or one state or status to another often figures centrally in the stories we tell about our lives and who we are. Though we may hanker after hard and fast differences between self and other, human and animal, man and machine, male and female, these boundaries get blurred, transgressed, and redrawn. We morph and migrate, in and out of our bodies, in reality and in our imaginations.6 Our moments of rest are soon enough disrupted, our settled states disturbed, our minds distracted.
Moveo ergo sum. Along with all living things, we move