Silence

This blog begins with silence. Firstly because it has been too long coming. Calais and its surrounding stories give a lot to talk about, yet the experience of being there is so difficult to communicate through words. Of course, even when we stand among the tents and spend time with those living in them, understanding each individual’s experiences, ideas and feelings is impossible. Documenting this can feel just as difficult; how do you create a balance between facts and statistics, and personal, human experience; how do you represent events as part of larger phenomena, while conveying that these are happening to individual, living, feeling humans?

At the beginning of this week Abdul Rahman Haroun ‘appeared’ at Canterbury Crown Court, charged under the Malicious Damage Act, a law concerning “Malicious Injuries to Property”. On the 4th of August Abdul arrived on UK soil after walking over thirty miles through the Channel Tunnel between France and England. He had somehow negotiated multiple, high, barb-wire-topped fences, crews of security guards, and four-hundred odd security cameras. He was stopped and arrested just steps away from the Folkestone exit (see, for example, The Guardian or Nord Littoral). A couple of days later, an Ethiopian friend at the Jungle questioned me on the rumours he’d heard; “Did this Sudanese man really walk all this way? And the police, they stopped him in England? But… how? How do you do that?” It wasn’t totally clear whether his disbelief was more in reaction to the walker’s feat of courage and determination, or to the authorities’ audacity in arresting and detaining him. Individuals have different needs, skills and connections, and don’t all seek the same goal; for my Ethiopian friend, who has been in Calais for several months, England was not worth the danger of this walk. On Monday, Abdul Rahman Haroun ‘appeared’ in court visually, rather than physically, over a video link from Elmley prison. According to members of Kent Refugee Help, as reported by Passeurs d’hospitalités, no available interpreter spoke Haroun’s own language. He therefore communicated in Arabic, via an interpreter who struggled so much with understanding the detainee’s accent that they later apologised for not having been capable of competent work. Despite the volumes that Haroun’s actions speak, despite the clear sense of need and determination that must have driven him as he scaled barbed-wire and avoided hurtling trains, his arrest and court case appear less to be a ‘hearing’ and more a reduction to silence.

On the 20th of August, four days before this court meeting, (UK Home Secretary) Theresa May and Bernard Cazeneuve (Ministre de l’Intérieur, May’s French counterpart) met in Calais to discuss “Managing Migratory Flows in Calais”. While their concluding ‘Declaration’ (here, ou ici) talks of dissuading “criminal gangs exploiting migrants”, its primary focus appears to be on protecting the borders, rather than on protecting those compelled to cross them illegally; security will be increased around the Calisien port: more fences, CCTV, infrared detection and flood-lighting, security guards, drafting of British and French special police forces, and freight search teams to search out would-be stowaways… In some ways this is a reaction to the recent noise that has been made, notably by a media frenzy on the topic, spurring commentary and action from a larger public. Yet these measures also silence; as those who own the land either side of the borders protect their own, those who are denied the crossing, those like Abdul Rahman Haroun, are muted, their stories left unheard, their expressions and aims simply quashed. Rather than discouraging human trafficking, as claimed, these Franco-British measures promote illegal, clandestine movement. More patrols and risk of arrest, and more barbed wire, dogs and danger, mean the actions needed to cross the border must be more discreet, more risky, more silent. This week’s headline discoveries are testimony to this: at least seventy-one rotting corpses, presumed Syrian refugees, in an abandoned lorry in Austria, and around two-hundred bodies found floating in the sea near Zuwara, western Lybia – the bodies of sub-Saharan Africans, Pakistanis, Syrians, Moroccans and Bangladeshis who left on an overcrowded boat from an area known for people smuggling. When voices are silenced and barriers are built, those in need may have no choice but to take enormous risks.

In the same week as Haroun’s walk through the tunnel, on Saturday the 8th of August, a demonstration and memorial service was held in Calais. Beginning at the entrance to the main ‘Jungle’ camp, a crowd of perhaps two or three hundred (comprised of people currently living in the Jungle, others who had joined to support and help organise, and a number of journalists) marched together under a blazing sun: along the bleak industrial estate lanes leading to and from the camp, in front of the ferry port fences, and to the sunbather-filled beach, where the protest crammed onto the wooden pier. Sound and silence mixed; the chants of a collective voice calling for attention, understanding and cooperation met with a minute of silence, initiated by a Jungle resident midway through the march, while the demonstration, gathered on the pier, closed with solemn focus, growing quiet to hear the names read out of the twelve individuals who are known to have died this year while attempting the passage through Calais.

This week, as Abdul Rahman Haroun ‘appeared’ in court, Raoul Haspel topped Austrian download charts with ‘Schweigeminute’, or ‘minute of silence‘. The profits from these sales contribute to providing aid to those at Austria’s main refugee camp, Traiskirchen, condemned by the UN refugee agency and by Amnesty International as “inhumane” and a “heavy human rights violation”. While John Cage’s four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence (‘ 4’33” ‘) was a controversial and innovative musical experiment in the late forties, Haspel’s ‘Schweigeminute’ is a silent protest song of a different nature.

Sometimes silence should be broken: the silence derived from an incapacity to communicate what seems too difficult to express; the silence of those who are denied a speaking voice, and whose actions, full of meaning, are too readily ignored; the imposed silence of those who take risky, clandestine measures, discreet and undocumented (sometimes forever, sometimes until it is too late) because there is no way to make themselves heard, and therefore, they feel, no other way to progress from an unbearable situation. This silence is self-perpetuating, resulting in a never-ending cycle of illegitimacy and danger, of conflict and pain. This silence needs to be broken. Sometimes silence should reign, sometimes silence should be heard: the personal silence needed to deal with and digest these situations, overwhelming scenes and stories; the reflective silence and the silence taken to consider what might be done next; the silence of remembrance and respect. Sometimes silence speaks volumes.

Sound and silence are powerful, evocative, and emotional communicative tools. Music is (usually) made of sound and silence, both as important as each other (“It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play”, Miles Davis apparently said). Together, sound and silence combine to form patterns of meaning, whether explicit and intentional, or subconscious and discreet. Whatever my experience of Calais and my relationship with those who live or have lived there, I am not an authority (I’m not sure anyone is). A blog run by a ‘full UK citizen’ cannot represent the voice of those more profoundly involved. But I hope that this project can contribute to communicating and expressing what is so difficult to do, and to a balance of breaking and of respecting silence.

#Calais #Silence #AbdulRahmanHaroun #ChannelTunnel #Music #Noise